1 Planning and Managing a Mentoring Programme in Sport
and guidance offered within the resource aim to support governing bodies of sport and other organisations in planning, implementing and reviewing structured mentoring programmes.
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In producing this resource, key outcomes from a pilot project on mentoring sports coaches in Northern Ireland have been employed to inform guidance and recommendations. This project involved Sport Northern Ireland, sports coach UK, Hutton Park Consulting, Cricket Ireland, Ulster Hockey and Ulster Rugby.
After reading the initial background section of the resource, you will appreciate that the current situation in terms of mentoring sports coaches is variable and may be confusing. Lead agencies such as Sport Northern Ireland and sports coach UK wish to address the current lack of coherence and consistency in mentoring programmes.
Sport Northern Ireland and sports coach UK collaborated in planning, implementing and reviewing the pilot project. Also, collaboration between sports coach UK, Coachwise, 1st4sport Qualifications and Hutton Park Consulting has led to the development of a Level 3 Award in Workforce Mentoring1
learning programme and a resource book entitled Mentoring in Sport2
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his resource aims to explain how to set up and run a formal mentoring programme for sports coaches. The explanations
Your organisation may consider that a mentor training programme is sufficient to support your needs, or may choose to encourage or require your mentors to undertake such a qualification within an appropriate time frame.
Background to Mentoring
Mentoring has the potential to be a very powerful strategy in supporting the individual development of coaches in sport. Despite the historical roots of the term in Greek mythology, mentoring only emerged as an area of interest in professional literature after an article was published in the Harvard Business Review(Roche, 1979). This suggested that professionals who had mentors benefited in terms of satisfaction and professional development.
Undoubtedly, successful mentoring programmes can improve coaches’ behaviour and practice and support their overall development. For this to occur, many key factors have to be considered and planned into a structured, coordinated programme. Mentoring can certainly be successful when kept informal, but the purpose of this resource is to support governing bodies and other sport organisations in setting up and running more formalised mentoring programmes.
, an associated two-module
Research conducted by InVEST for sports coach UK in 2007 stated: ‘Mentoring in sports coaching within the UK is currently sporadic with little coordination, consistency or sharing of good practice.’ Certainly, mentoring in coaching, as in other areas, remains quite confusing, with no universally accepted definition. Mentoring still requires more valid and robust research in terms of supporting its specific value, but the research that we have indicates that coaches value mentoring- type activity to support their personal and professional development. The different definitions
© Alan Edwards
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