coaching handbook and the Sports toolkit

Background

The Skills Builder Partnership and Harlequins Foundation have been working together to transform how essential skills are developed through sport.

Accompanying the Sports Toolkit, this Coaching Handbook offers practical guidance for coaches to support learners of all ages in developing essential skills across a range of sporting and physical activity contexts.

During the first phase of research, a series of two roundtables were held in London, including 25 representatives from across the sports sector. We found that all eight essential skills were applicable to a degree in the broad context of sports, although certain steps of some skills may be less well-represented across some sports settings.

The Coaching Handbook specifically focuses on building the steps identified as being universally present in practical sports coaching programmes, e.g. Speaking steps 0-9. Pioneered in partnership with a group of sports experts, these activities are a starting point to help embed explicit skills-building in sports - one step at a time. These ideas can be incorporated directly into sessions or adapted to specific sports and contexts.

Coaching Handbook key:

Groupings:

Individual

Pairs

Groups

Activity type:

Active

Discussion

Written

How to use the Coaching Handbook

The Coaching Handbook covers the steps in the getting started and intermediate development stages for each essential skill. Following the structure of a lesson, it contains useful pedagogical information for each skill step and recommended activities.

The handbook is designed to be flexible and is a great tool to use as:

A whole lesson on developing a skill step
Incorporated into part of a pre-existing session
Ideas for sports-related skill-based activities
A way to identify and monitor learner’s progression across the skills
A prompt for skills reflection and discussion

Progression takes time but it's also important to select the most appropriate skill and step for your learners. The initial handbook page for each skill outlines the steps from the Universal Framework with links to take you to each of the step pages. At the bottom of each step page you are able to navigate between, either going back to a previous step, forward to the next or move through to another skill.

We would encourage you to develop as many steps in a skill as appropriate for your learners before moving on. That might mean providing multiple opportunities to develop one step to consolidate their understanding.

Each step page contains learner outcomes, introductory and key teaching content as well as opportunities for reflection and assessment. There are two suggested activities to support with the development of that skill step, a suggested warm up and main task. These vary in type, length and groupings so can be incorporated based on the aims of your session.