The Metro Boston Coaches
Academy, a subsidiary of the non-profit Institute for Sport Coaching, assists metro Boston youth and interscholastic sports organizations with the development of their coaches. We are the fastest growing sport coaching education provider in New England with over 600 coaches trained since mid-2007. The Academy provides sport coaches with the tools and skills to be the best possible coaches and mentors for youth through our workshops. Our workshops, developed to meet the National Standards for Sport Coaches, are delivered in locations in your city, town or neighborhood.
Dedicated to improving youth sports experience in metro Boston, we develop quality trained sport coaches by providing them with the educational experiences and leadership tools they need to be successful. Why train your sport coaches? Quality trained coaches benefit metro Boston communities in many ways:
- Get more youth to stay with sports, and improve their self-esteem.
- Increase the number of people attracted to coaching and improve coach retention rates.
- Deliver positive and safe sports experiences toyouth.
- Reduce potential legal liabilities associated with youth sport.
Academy workshops, developed by coaches for coaches, are tailored to adult learning styles, and feature interactive learning and networking opportunities. We guarantee there will be practical coaching skills and tips you can immediately use in your coaching practice.
Our workshops are divided into five series:
- Start Your Coaching
- Improve Your Coaching
- Develop Your Sport Psychology Skills
- Build Your Professional Leadership Skills
- Team Development
1. Start Your Coaching
A series of workshops designed for people who have an interest in, or have limited coaching experience and want to know more about hat good, safe and effective coaching is. The length of these workshops is three to four hours which can be presented at one time or over several sessions.
- Successful Youth Coaching Level 1 Workshop — This workshop is aimed at coaches with limited coaching experience. It provides the practical skills and knowledge required to coach a youth sports team. Topics covered include: developing a coaching philosophy, developing season and practice plans, teaching sport skills, communication techniques, introductions to youth physical & emotional development and risk management.
- Successful Youth Coaching Level 2 Workshop — This workshop is for coaches seeking more information to improve their knowledge and ability to coach youth sports. It introduces the art and science basics associated with coaching and sports performance. Topics covered include: sports nutrition, principles of training, risk management, coaching leadership styles, and communicating with parents.
2. Improve Your Coaching
These workshops are for experienced coaches who desire to further develop their coaching skills and knowledge to provide high quality coaching to their athletes.
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Evaluating Your Coaching Effectiveness; A Path to Self Improvement
— How does one become a better sport coach? Most coaches work hard to improve their team’s performance, but do they make the same commitment to further developing their coaching skills? Coaching is both an art and a science which requires extensive knowledge, skills and experiences to help athletes develop their potential physically, mentally as well as technically. In order to become a more effective coach, a coach must decide where they are, where they want to end up, and how they are going to achieve that personal self-development goal. This workshop will discuss the various means a coach can develop a process for analyzing and improving their coaching. Length is approximately 2 hours.
3. Develop Your Sport Psychology Skills
Created to provide practical sport psychology tools and techniques to sport coaches, these workshops can be combined or delivered separately depending on your needs.
- Setting Achievable Goals — This workshop focuses on how to create outcome, performance and process goals as part of a team’s or individual athletes planning for an upcoming season. The use of these three types of goals allows athletes to continue progressing in their sport while dealing with the pressure of “winning or losing.” Length is approximately 45 minutes long.
- Unleashing the Power of Your Imagination; The Power of Visualization — This workshop will teach coaches and athletes how to use visualization as a powerful tool in learning new sport skills and how to perform in competitions. Participants will also learn the means to relax in high-stress situations. Length is approximately 45 minutes long.
- Focus & Concentration; How to Block Distractions —This workshop will instruct coaches and athletes on how to incorporate focus drills to further develop the power of concentration. In addition, strategies on how athletes can set up themselves for success with pre-competition routines will be discussed. Length is approximately 45 minutes long.
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Mental Toughness — This three-hour workshop for interscholastic sport coaches focuses on the psychological training skills needed by athletes to enhance their performance. Through this workshop,
coaches will learn a variety of strategies and techniques designed to build confidence, improve focus, decrease performance anxiety, enhance motivation, cope with adversity, maintain emotions and composure, and prepare/evaluate practices and competitions. The workshop format combines lecture, discussion, and practical activities/exercises designed to educate coaches on how to integrate mental training skills with the current physical and technical training kills their athletes are practicing. This workshop will be facilitated by Dr. Grayson Kimball, a practicing sport psychologist.
4. Build Your Professional Leadership Skills
Leadership is one of the primary skills needed by any sport coach. The following workshops are unique opportunities to enhance your leadership capabilities to ensure your assistant coaches and athletes are truly successful.
- Avoiding Burnout; Every Sport Coach’s Challenge — The profession of sport coaching, with its emphasis on performance, recognition and achievement, provides a fertile environment for “burn-out” to negatively affect coaches. Work-related burnout can cause a coach to experience mental, emotional and physical exhaustion which impacts work and family. Such exhaustion can result in negative attitudes towards sport, work and family and are obviously counter-productive. This presentation will address how coaches can spot the signs of burnout and take corrective action before exhaustion sets in. Also, ideas on how to create a work-life balance that effectively keeps burnout at bay will be discussed. Length is approximately 60 minutes.
- Recruiting & Retaining Sport Coaches: A Means to Survive Generational Changes — Sport administrators, like many other professions, are facing the loss of large numbers of Baby Boomers from their workforces in the next few years. Compounding this loss is the fact the following generation (X Generation) is not as large thus creating a shortage of replacements to coach the relatively large Generation Y. This presentation will offer ideas on how to expand the pool of coaching candidates by developing a holistic approach that will recruit, train and retain sport coaches for any sport organization. Length is approximately 45 minutes.
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Learn to Be a Sport Coach Mentor — This workshop focuses on how you can utilize mentoring as a means to aid the development of quality sport coaches. Mentoring is a powerful tool in the education and development of sports coaches at all levels. This workshop will help you as a mentor to support coaches’ learning and focus on how learning occurs. Participants by the end of this workshop should be able to:
- Identify your role as a mentor & how it fits into a coach’s professional development plan
- Increase the effectiveness of your mentoring relationships by developing practical mentoring skills
- Design a mentoring program that best suits the needs of your sport and the level of coaching
Length is approximately 90 minutes.
5. Team Development
These workshops are designed to educate an athlete in order for them to obtain optimum athletic potential, however; the benefits will be felt off the field as well as on. These programs can help reduce injury, allow for quicker recovery, better muscle development, gained training effect; in brief, produce better athletes, better performances thus better teams. Off the field benefits would include improvements academically, a decrease in disciplinary problems, criminal matters, accidents, deaths while simultaneously developing good will within the community as well as a positive public image at large. These workshops are facilitated by Mr. Antonio Arrendel, Executive Director of Metanoia Community Change, and the Academy’s senior consultant.
- Diversity Awareness & Conflict Resolution — This workshop opens with increasing one’s awareness of diversity, the many shapes and forms diversity takes, and how we can be cognizant of the advantages diversity brings to a team. The second half of the workshop provides insight into how ignorance of diversity can cause tension and conflict, and then leads the participants through a number of practical ways to deal with conflict. Length is approximately two hours long.
- Chemical Health — This workshop can be delivered with a number of different chemical health topics including alcohol and drug abuse, the threat from smoking, and the debate over energy drinks. This workshop illustrates the negative physical, psychological and physiological effects of drugs and alcohol on the athlete. This is successful because the presentation is designed to tap into not only the individual’s athletic motivation but also address the concept of team and collective responsibility. By showing scientific research done exclusively on top athletes and presented by people who have competed at the highest levels of sport, the impact is significant. Length can vary from one to two hours long depending on topics presented.
- Fueling the Right Way; Proper Sports Nutrition — This workshop provides an overview regarding the right way to eat to fuel and improve an athlete’s performance and training. Information on how much carbohydrate, protein and fat you should eat, and how you can enjoy a wide range of tasty nutrient-rich foods is provided to educate the coach and athlete the right way to gain a winning edge. Length is approximately 1.5 hours long.
Contact the Academy’s Executive Director, Christopher Hickey, to set up a workshop for your coaches at 978-201-1024 or via email at .