What knowledge do coaches need?
It goes without saying that you must have a deep and detailed underpinning knowledge of your sport. However, just an in-depth understanding of a particular sport (technical skills and tactical awareness) is insufficient to guarantee success.
Turn on the TV on any given day and you are likely to hear pundits speak with great understanding of their respective sports, but few would be able to operationalise these views with a practice session or coaching programme. The reason why knowledgeable TV pundits and armchair critics may not be effective coaches is that you don’t coach sports, you coach people.
A coach needs to be responsive to the needs of the people they are coaching. As everyone is different and all their needs are unique, you need to draw on different areas of knowledge and experience to best support the individual in front of you.
For example, if a participant lacks confidence, you need to employ your knowledge of motivational psychology. Where a participant lacks fitness, you need to be able to advise on strength and conditioning. Where a participant has a technical deficiency, biomechanical analysis and skill coaching may be required. Finally, if a participant has suffered a bereavement, none of the things that you know may matter as much as your presence, caring and support.
Abraham Maslow’s law of the hammer states that ‘if the only tool you have is a hammer, you might treat everything as if it were a nail.’ Applying this directly to coaching, there are a limited number of coaching problems that can be solved by the ability to explain the merits of ‘playing a 4-5-1 formation versus a 4-4-2’.
As such, coaches clearly have a responsibility to acquire and develop as many tools as possible to be able to support participants' diverse needs. This is the foundation of interdisciplinary thinking, which avoids applying the most familiar lens to the problem (often technical and tactical), but instead asks: ‘What is the best tool for the job?’