definition of coaching

Evaluating Community College Coaches

Coaches at Division I programs in the National Collegiate Athletic Association are judged not only by their players' performance on the field but also by the players' performance in the classroom. A win-loss record is an easy enough gauge of the former. To judge a coach’s effectiveness in encouraging the latter, presidents and athletic directors turn to the Academic Progress Rate , an NCAA-developed score that shows how a team's athletes are faring with regard to academic eligibility to play and progress toward graduation. Though it is rarely the sole reason for a coach's dismissal, a poor APR is becoming a factor in many institutions' hiring and firing decisions.

Community college administrators have no such formal metric to judge a coach's effectiveness on the academic side. In fact, because governing bodies like the National Junior College Athletic Association do not require their member colleges to track detailed data on their athletes, as the NCAA does for its members, very little is known about how community college athletes perform academically. Convinced that it can do more to track the academic progress of its athletes, Seminole State College, a two-year institution in Oklahoma, is testing a data-driven “accountability index” to gauge the job performance of its athletics coaches — one that objectively grades them on a scale from 1 to 10.

Thomas Mills, director of athletics and head men’s basketball coach at Seminole State, said he developed his “accountability index” about three years ago, when he was getting ready to evaluate his coaches at the end of the academic year. Since he had only just then been promoted to director of athletics, Mills said he “wanted to have an objective way of starting the [evaluation] process so that everything didn’t come out to be [his] subjective opinion.” He added that he was influenced at least in part by the NCAA’s development of the APR and its other relatively recent academic reform efforts. Still, he bemoaned that there was no such help or movement at the community college level.

Articles Insight | A Definition Of Coaching

Essentially it is about helping you to reach self-actualisation - a point at which you not only truly know yourself but within this knowledge possess a feeling of comfort with and understanding of the person you discover.

Your coach engages in a collaborative alliance with you to establish and clarify purpose and goals and to develop a plan of action to achieve those goals. They will establish an understanding of what is really important to you in life and subsequently enable you to take charge of your life; to construct and act upon action plans that will help you to realise these priorities. Put simply, coaching is about helping you to create and work towards the grandest version of the greatest personal vision you have; to achieve success - success being the continuous realisation of a worthy goal or ideal.

You will be guided through a detailed process beginning with the need to re-evaluate your present position, who you really are, where your priorities lie and the need to make a definite and conscious decision about the future you would like to create. With the help of a personal life coach you really can re-shape your life, overcome all the obstacles and live the life that you love.

Coaching is essentially a conversation - that is, a dialogue between you and your coach. Within a productive, results-oriented context, coaching involves coaching you to access what you already know. The reality is that you have the answers to all your questions - asked and unasked. Your coach provides the essential assistance, support and encouragement to seek and find these answers; to guide you towards asking the right questions, and deal with the answers.

Coaching also incorporates learning and yet a coach is not a teacher and will not necessarily know how to do things better than you but this does not matter.

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