Xavier Roy

The coach’s compass: a seasonal framework for holistic athlete development

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With summer just around the corner, many youth athletes will engage in team sports to be with their friends, be physically active, and learn new skills. In an ideal setting, an experienced coach would oversee the physical, technical, tactical and psychological development of these youth athletes by creating an environment that is both fun and challenging. However, such responsibilities often fall on the shoulders of parents or volunteer coaches who, despite their best intentions, may not have the necessary knowledge and/or skillset. In addition, coaching today requires more than a strong technical knowledge or prior playing experience.

As a sports mom or sports dad or even a recent graduate from a sports coaching undergraduate program at the university, starting out as a coach means learning how to support athlete development over time, not just about X’s and O’s and preparing your team for the next game. Using Wade Gilbert’s concept of the four seasons within a competitive year, this article aims to offer volunteer and early-career coaches a practical framework to help them better understand their role and responsibilities as they navigate the complexity of a being a coach.

The common trap: coaching athletes the way we were coached

A number of years ago, journalist Kieran Shannon from the Irish Examiner wrote a very interesting piece about the state of youth sports in which he interviewed coaching educator Wayne Goldsmith. At the time (and it might still be true today!), the video game Fortnite was very popular, and Goldsmith argued that such video games are able to create engaging experiences that attracts players and keeps them coming back, which can be the exact opposite when coaches recreate what they experienced as athletes. Extensive focus on isolated drills, similar training methods based on repetitions. Add in differences in generational expectations, increasingly diverse athlete profiles across genders, personalities, and motivations, as well as the growing participation of young women, and the gap between the initial intentions of the coach and how they are perceived widens.

Being an effective coach today requires intentional adaptation, not replication. Methods that worked ten or twenty years ago may not align with the realities of today’s youth athletes. In fact, I would argue that how we coach matters just as much if not more than what we coach.

Coaching is more than teaching plays

Coaching is so much more than drills, playbooks, or systems. An effective coach is first and foremost an educator who operates in an environment that is dynamic, complex and often times chaotic, as outlined by Bowes & Jones.

From the sideline or from the stands, success is not always visible, and performance should not be confused with trophies. Thus, one should be quite prudent when evaluating the effectiveness of a coach to operate within a particular coaching context given the fact that there are many unknown factors (cultural, political, etc.) that may be at work and may influence the behaviours and actions of the coach.

Nonetheless, to assess the effectiveness of a coach, Jean Côté and Wade Gilbert’s definition of coaching effectiveness is very useful. The authors define coaching effectiveness as the integrated application of three forms of knowledge:

  • professional knowledge such as the technical skills or tactics as well as scientific domains like exercise physiology or psychology,
  • interpersonal knowledge or the ability to communicate and connect with people, and
  • intrapersonal knowledge, which is related to self-awareness, the ability to reflect on one’s coaching and to identify performance gaps to keep learning and improving as a coach.

These forms of knowledge should ultimately result in athletes developing what the authors call the four Cs, which are:

  • Competence
  • Confidence
  • Connection, and
  • Character.

Therefore, bad results are not synonymous with poor coaching. In fact, despite a poor win-loss record, an athlete or a team can have improved a lot in some of these four Cs over the course of a competitive season.

This framework reminds us that winning is not the sole marker of effectiveness—and often not even the best one. The primary goal of the coach is to help athletes reach their highest potential through a long-term, development-focused process, rather than short-term results alone, as oultined by Morency and Bordeleau.

The preseason: imagining what is possible

Each season brings distinct priorities and responsibilities for the coach who, over the course of a competitive year, will wear multiple hats: teacher, pedagogue, leader, manager, psychologist, physiologist, sometimes even athletic director.

A useful way to think about coaching is to view the year as a cycle with four interconnected phases or seasons as portrayed by Wade Gilbert in his book Coaching Better Every Season, starting with the preseason.

I like to see the preseason as a period where the coach imagines what can be possible for an athlete or a team and begins to map out how to get there. Not only from a physical preparation standpoint, but in terms of goals and processes to reach those goals. Much like University of Windsor women’s basketball coach Chantal Vallée outlined in her book Dare to Win when she used the symbolic metaphor of climbing Mount Everest to prepare her team for its journey of winning a national championship.

At this point of the competitive year, it’s not only the destination that matters, but the route, the resources, and the contingencies along the way. Collectively, coaches, athletes and support staff can discuss openly about what performance could look like, how the group might progress or what resources and constraints can either help or hinder the process of reaching the group’s goal.

The Coach’s Lighthouse

Let’s be realistic and up front about one thing. During the competitive year, not everything is going to go according to the initial plan. When confronted with difficult decisions, a coach will benefit from having a clear « lighthouse ».

First, define your Why, your coaching purpose. Second, identify your core values or your « non-negotiables » such as integrity, hard work or humility and how to enact them daily through your actions and behaviours. Third, outline how you will implement your coaching purpose and core values both on and off the field.

This coaching philosophy should be flexible, athlete- and context-dependent, as Tom Young described in his book The Making of a Leader. Your coaching purpose and core values, on the other hand, should be relatively fixed and deeply connected to who you are as an individual, as outlined by Van Mullem and Brunner.

Leadership and team culture

Akin to a maestro, a coach instigates, plans, organizes, monitors and responds to evolving circumstances within a performance environment, in close partnership with athletes, assistant coaches and support staff. The demands of the job put the coach in a position of leadership. But what does a coach’s leadership look like?

Pop culture often portrays leadership in extremes. Think of Robin Williams’ portrait of M. Keating, the English teacher in the movie Dead Poets Society versus J.K. Simmons’ character of Terence Fletcher in Whiplash. Democratic versus authoritarian. Transformational versus transactional. Athlete-centered versus coach-centered.

In reality, leadership is contextual. A coach should adapt his/her leadership based on whether he/she works in a participation or performance setting. The training age or skill level of the athletes they work with. With young or inexperienced athletes, the coach can assert more control because emphasis is placed on teaching skills, safety & security, procedures and routines. With older and more experienced athletes or teams, power is progressively shared before athletes and teams are more empowered and held accountable for many decisions regarding the coaching/training process as described in Lyle’s framework.

Despite their leadership role, one truth remains: coaches have limited direct control over culture. What a coach controls is the environment—the behaviors they want athletes and other members of the organization to model, the standards they reinforce, and the values that must be lived daily. From the top down.

But strong team cultures do not emerge from slogans painted on the wall of training facilities and cannot be enforced by a single individual like the coach. Strong team cultures grow organically with the right people, with the right mindset, the right focus and when consistent behaviors are aligned with shared values. They are athlete-centered from the bottom up.

As author Jon Gordon and coach Mike Smith describe in their book You Win in the Locker Room First, culture shows up in habits long before it shows up in results.

Planning training: blending science and experience

The symbolic metaphor of the road map is very useful when planning the training process. In simple terms, it is a way to organize the work (physical, technical, tactical and psychological) that must be done to prepare an athlete or a team to compete. As scientific as many try to make this sound, the planning of training sits at the intersection of evidence-based principles and lived coaching experience as I’ve written about previously.

Practically, when planning the training that must be done, coaches should start off by working backward from competition calendars. How many days between important games or competitions? How many weeks or months of preparation does an athlete or team have to get ready for the competitive season? What are some key objectives that must be met between now and that moment in time? What are some obstacles along the way? Once the coach has an idea of the destination and how to get there (the road map), he/she can then design short-term sessions that build toward these long-term goals.

Keep in mind that some sessions will put a larger emphasis on the physical component of performance (i.e. overload the body, allow it to recover and adaptation will/should occur) while other sessions will emphasize skill development through variability, exploration and specificity of training. Dan Cleather’s new book The Practice of Change outlines this brilliantly.

Yogi Berra once joked: « It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. » From a planning standpoint, this is a good reminder that the coach must accept to make adjustment to the training.  This is entirely possible when the coach as a monitoring system in place ad is informed by observation and honest feedback from the athletes.

In-season: learning through the game

Going back to this article from journalist Kieran Shannon in which he interviewed coaching educator Wayne Goldsmith, if coaches cannot create an environment where kids have fun and want to keep coming back for more, participation rates in youth sports will keep declining.

With traditional, drill-based approaches, you will see athletes dribble around cones, execute drills or run clean patterns that make practice look organized and efficient. Yet, such approaches often fail to promote decision-making, perception-action coupling, and transfer to the field, court or rink. While this approach prioritizes repetition, control, and error minimization, training tasks do not reflect the messiness of competition.

On the other side, game-based approaches embrace variability, decision-making, and error as essential components of learning. The physical, technical, tactical and psychological determinants of performance are seen as integrated rather than isolated. Applying principles from constraints-led pedagogy and skill acquisition can promote player freedom and creativity while encouraging strong communication between players as they explore and figure out how they want to play the game.

The goal is not to declare one approach superior to the other, but to understand their trade-offs and the contexts of their application.

Designing Better Sessions

The RAMPAGE framework is very useful for coaches who want to integrate both the more traditional and more contemporary approaches to athlete long-term development.

This framework provides coaches with information on what can be planned and delivered from a physical, technical, tactical or psychological standpoint and when within a session. For example, the warm-up or RAMP can address the physical goals of the session by incorporating sprints, jumps, various locomotor patterns and resistance training. Once the warm-up is completed, the coach moves to the main focus of the session, which can be a fundamental movement skill or a sport-specific skill. Here, a more traditional approach to coaching that emphasizes repetition and cueing from the coach can be indicated. However, in the follow-up module of the session, the coach needs to integrate the skill performed earlier in the session into a game scenario. Small-sided games, conditioned games or many activities inspired from physical education lessons can be designed to achieve the desired metabolic and skill acquisition effect. Lastly, to end the session, coaches and athletes are encouraged to devote time to evaluate the session, perhaps during the cool-down, not only to make any adjustments ahead of the next session but also to facilitate learning.

The post-season and off-season: not just learning more, but learning better

With the competitive season behind them, now is the best time for coaches to evaluate each aspect of the program. Beyond results, coaches should evaluate the players, their staff, the processes in place, but also their own coaching. This means evaluating the relevance of training tasks that were designed to prepare the athlete or the team for the demands of competition. Evaluating the athlete’s progression from a physical, technical, tactical and/or psychological standpoint. This evaluation process entails gathering data from multiple sources using a diversity of tools and to communicate the findings in a constructive manner.

Following the evaluation phase is the adjustment phase, which is more than simply making the data that was collected actionable. In fact, this can be where learning starts to occur because coaches, like in many other professions, do not simply learn from experience but by reflecting on experience. From a coaching perspective, reflection can occur at three levels:

  1. Technical – Were my drills effective to reach a specific goal for this session?
  2. Practical – Did theory translate to practice?
  3. Critical – Were my actions ethical and athlete-centered?

Reflection can also occur at different moments, such as during the activity itself (reflection-in-action), shortly after the conclusion of an activity or event (reflection-on-action) and later when a coach tried to identify and solve a performance gap (retrospective reflection-on-action). Tools such as reflective journals, reflective cards, guided debriefs and reflective conversations with a mentor can support long-term growth.

When it comes to coach development, the idea of accumulating more knowledge resonates strongly. Formal learning situations such as university degrees, certifications offered by National Governing Bodies, clinics or coaches’ conference are abundant. With many coaches being avid readers and knowledge seekers, they can go down the rabbit hole when access to books and other online resources is freely accessible. However, learning is not about accumulating more information, but about reorganizing existing knowledge into more effective mental models. This is where social learning and being an active member of a community of practice play a central role as a third learning situation available to coaches. In fact, coaches consistently report learning the most through interaction with peers who face similar challenges.

The post-season and off-season may invite learning, but more information is not always the answer.

Final thoughts

Coaching is nothing but linear although it involves a cyclical process of (a) planning, (b) intervention, (c) evaluation and (d) adjustment where perfection can be seen as the end goal when rather it should be progression. Starting out as a coach can thus be both exciting and daunting. But when coaches commit to long-term development, to using sound judgment and purposeful leadership and to life-long learning, they do more than build better athletes—they help shape better people.

Additional Resources

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  • Cleather, D. (2025). The Practice of Change?: The Art and Science of Training. Prague, Czech Republic: KMA Press.
  • Cooper, D., & Allen, J. B. (2018). The coaching process of the expert coach: a coach led approach. Sports Coaching Review, 7(2), 142–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/21640629.2017.1361168
  • Côté, J., & Gilbert, W. (2009). An Integrative Definition of Coaching Effectiveness and Expertise. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching, 4(3), 307–323. https://doi.org/10.1260/174795409789623892
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  • Gilbert, W. (2017). Coaching Better Every Season?: A Year-Round System for Athlete Development and Program Success. Windsor, Ontario: Human Kinetics.
  • Gilbert, W., & Trudel, P. (2013). The Role of Deliberate Practice in Becoming an Expert Coach?: Part 3- Creating Optimal Settings. Olympic Coach Magazine, 24(2), 15–28.
  • Gordon, J., & Smith, M. (2015). You win in the locker room first?: The 7 C’s to build a winning team in business, sports, and life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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