The Coaching Process : A Practical Guide to Improving Your Effectiveness

This book provides a concise, up-to-date background for effective coaching. It focuses on the 'how to' of coaching. It provides practical strategies that coaches use to improve their own coaching. This book also aids coaches in developing approaches to produce an environment conducive to athletes' enjoyment and success.

It is designed as a self-teaching text to help coaches develop skills and to provide them with awareness of the factors which can promote the performance and enjoyment of their athletes.

The skilled coach is one who is capable of maximising the benefit that athletes take from the training session and integrating that benefit into the competitive context. The Coaching Process emphasises coaches' instructional role and aims to help them understand the learning processes involved from both the coach and athlete perspectives. To this end, it covers the pedagogical, psychological and sociological aspects of coaching.

Lynn Kidman is a lecturer in Sports Coaching for the School of Physical Education at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Lynn has coached athletes of various age groups, from ages 5-75, in the sports of swimming, basketball, volleyball, softball, tennis and soccer. Her PhD was earned in the area of self reflective analysis for coaches, a basis for this book. Lynn and her family, Bob, Matthew and Simon, live in Dunedin. Lynn enjoys watching her children participating in their sporting and academic pursuits, teaching coaches and coaching.

Stephanie Hanrahan is a senior lecturer in sport and exercise psychology for the Departments of Human Movement Studies and Psychology at the University of Queensland. In addition to teaching swimming and ice skating, she has coached volleyball in three countries - novices and state level players, children and adults, males and females. As a psychologist she has worked with athletes and coaches from a wide variety of sports - from ballet to football and from lawn bowls to skydiving. After 17 years of representative volleyball at the open level, Stephanie currently restricts her sporting involvement to local A-grade volleyball, social tennis and swimming.