This course package includes the following:

• Online Coaching Principles course
• Successful Coaching, Fifth Edition, ebook
• Online worksheets
• Online coaching forms
• Online Coaching Principles certification test
• Online CIF certification test

View a demo of the Coaching Principles course!

As a scholastic coach, you’ll likely face pressure from many directions. School administrators, parents, athletes, and entire communities have high expectations for their sports programs, with “success” often measured by wins and losses. Good intentions are not enough; you need all the knowledge you can get. Most veteran coaches have learned through trial and error. Coaching Principles, Fifth Edition, Online Course helps new and inexperienced coaches shorten the learning process—and reduce painful errors—by teaching the principles of coaching rooted in the sport sciences and sharing the experience and wisdom of successful coaches.

The content in Coaching Principles is drawn from one of the most authoritative guides ever written on coaching, Successful Coaching, Fifth Edition. Each course part corresponds with one of the five book parts.

Part I challenges you to determine your motivation for being a coach. Introspective exercises ask you to develop a coaching philosophy, coaching objectives, and leadership style that will ultimately drive your every coaching decision and help you stay the course in a high-stakes, hypercompetitive environment.

Part II focuses on understanding and managing athletes’ behavior. Successful coaches are master psychologists. Knowing how to communicate with, motivate, discipline, and reward athletes is essential for helping your athletes reach their full potential as well as manage their response to pressure situations that can lead to anxiety and burnout.

Being an effective coach means being an effective teacher. Part III provides instruction for teaching technical and tactical skills, developing sport-smart athletes, planning and conducting practices, and implementing the games approach in coaching.

Part IV addresses the coach’s role in training athletes to meet the physical demands of sport and achieve peak performance. The course has been updated with the latest scientific research on physical training and nutrition.

Successful coaches are effective administrators, managers, and communicators. Part V covers the team management, relationship management, and risk management skills you’ll need to run sport programs that are efficient, cohesive, and safe.

Each unit begins with an animated overview of the key concepts to be covered and a reading assignment from Successful Coaching, Fifth Edition. The course then presents several interactive coaching scenarios that depict real-life situations you’re likely to face. Choices and consequences are provided for each, compelling you to weigh potential responses and anticipate outcomes of your choices. A video with Brian Gearity summarizes key takeaways for each scenario. Rounding out the units are a quiz to check understanding and reiterate the main points as well as a coaching development activity, in which you’re encouraged to record your takeaways in a comprehensive portfolio for future reference and reflection.

The course concludes with a 50-question test. A minimum score of 80 percent is required for certification, at which point your name will be added to the National Coaches Registry, an online listing of coaches who have completed Human Kinetics Coach Education courses and used by athletic administrators to verify coaching credentials. To document your achievement, you can print or save a certificate of course completion from the website.

The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) also requires coaches to complete a state-specific bylaws exam for certification. This test is included with the CIF Coaching Principles, Fifth Edition Online Course.

Audience

Coaches of athletes primarily between 12 and 20 years old (middle and high school) in need of coaching certification.

Part I. Foundational Skills for Coaches
Unit 1. Developing Your Coaching Philosophy
Unit 2. Determining Your Coaching Objectives
Unit 3. Providing Effective Leadership
Unit 4. Coaching Diverse Athletes

Part II. Understanding and Managing Athletes’ Behavior
Unit 5. Communicating With Your Athletes
Unit 6. Motivating Your Athletes
Unit 7. Using Discipline and Rewards With Athletes
Unit 8. Coaching for Character

Part III. Being a Great Teacher
Unit 9. The Games Approach
Unit 10. Teaching Technical Skills
Unit 11. Teaching Tactical Skills
Unit 12. Planning for Teaching

Part IV. Physical Training and Nutrition
Unit 13. Training Basics
Unit 14. Energy Fitness Training
Unit 15. Muscular Fitness Training
Unit 16. Fueling Your Athletes
Unit 17. Drugs in Sport

Part V. Management Skills for Coaches
Unit 18. Managing Your Team
Unit 19. Managing Relationships
Unit 20. Managing Risk

Established in 1981 and rooted in an athlete-centered philosophy that places the developmental needs of athletes ahead of winning at all costs, Human Kinetics Coach Education courses and resources are widely used by youth sport organizations, state high school associations, school districts, state departments of education, colleges and universities, and national governing bodies of Olympic sports to teach, train, and certify coaches.

A who’s who of leading coach educators contributed to this revised and updated fifth edition. Successful Coaching, Fifth Edition, author Rainer Martens is a distinguished sport psychologist and the founder of Human Kinetics, and coauthor Robin Vealey is an internationally known researcher on the psychological aspects of youth sport and coaching effectiveness as well as a professor in the department of sport leadership and management at Miami University in Ohio. World-renowned coach educator and author Wade Gilbert, professor of kinesiology at Fresno State University, served as the course developer. Brian Gearity, director and assistant professor of the sport coaching master’s program at the University of Denver, appears in short video clips at the end of each unit.