Coaching children and young people in the UK – current state of affairs 400 days away from London 2012

Abstract

On July 6th 2005 London was awarded the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Singapore. The promise of building a successful legacy for children and young people around the London Games (Our Promise for 2012, DCMS, 2007) was highly influential in swaying the votes of the members of the International Olympic Committee towards the UK’s capital. In the years following the announcement, an unprecedented level of investment has been put into creating such legacy. Within this climate, coaching, and specifically the coaching of children and young people, has come to the fore as a key component of the system that will deliver on the legacy promise. In fact, in many cases, coaching has been the catalyst for systemic change in sport. As the leading national coaching agency, sports coach UK, has played a pivotal part in this process. The UK Coaching Framework (sports coack UK, 2008) established the direction of travel. Recently, sports coach UK has led an industry-wide group in the development of a Coaching Children Action Plan for the period 2010-2013 (Lara-Bercial and Fisher, 2010). With less than 15 months to the start of the London Games, coaching continues to play a big part in the delivery of the promise made by the London bid team in Singapore. The creation of a Coaching Children Curriculum (Haskins, Jolly and Lara-Bercial, 2011) has accelerated this development for a high number of sports. After a recent change of government, however, and deeply rooted in a global recession, there remain a number of key challenges.