Further Education - Coaching Children
12.05.2019
The Swiss PGA, in collaboration with Swiss Golf and Jugend + Sport, hosted their 2nd Further Education Day of the 2019 season. PGA golf professionals and junior captains from Swiss Golf clubs were able to learn from Sergio Lara-Bercial. Alongside being an active Basketball coach, Bercial is one of the world’s leading sports researchers and has been a part of much modern study including coaching children sport and understanding multiple winning sporting coaches. He is also heavily involved in the development of icoachkids.eu – an EU funded initiative to ensure the latest factual information is available at no cost to any person involved in coaching children sport.
The active day involved coaches in exercises exploring the nonlinear nature of child development and their Biological, Social, Psychological and Emotional differences. Failing to understand and adapt for these, heavily increases the risk of children leaving sport for multiple reasons including injury, boredom or a lack of friends or fun. Following this, the 10 Evidence Based Rules that is known as the “icoachkids pledge”, gave the captains and coaches a simple framework to reflect on how effective their junior programmes are.
The afternoon session delivered by Russell Warner (Swiss PGA) looked at the latest research into children’s experiences of golf coaching (compiled by Dr. Richard Bailey) and again challenged coaches and clubs to see how and where they can improve. To conclude the day, all participants created an action plan for their own coaching programmes or golf club. We look forward to seeing some of these plans in action and hope the numbers of junior golfers in Switzerland will continue to grow.
For more information on the icoachkids initiative, please visit: www.icoachkids.eu
