Workforce
The Coach Developer/Trainer Workforce
As with coaching, Coach Developers and training workforces can be predominantly male. Developing, deploying and promoting female Coach Developers or trainers at learning events may help encourage female attendance.
A mixed gender team of deliverers at a learning event will provide diversity in how the content is being delivered, which will create a more effective learning environment for all coaches. As you can see from recent Sport Ireland reports and recent academic research on Irish coaches (Barrett, Sherwin & Blackett, 2021) which recommended increasing the number of female tutors on coach developer training courses as males still make up the majority of those delivering coaching courses.
31 coaches attended Coach Developer training in 2020. These coaches came from 15 different NGBs. The male/female breakdown is identified in the pie chart below.
Sixteen tutors were trained to deliver Coaching Children modules in 2020 (88% female, 12% male and another sixteen tutors were trained to deliver the Physical Literacy module (56% male, 44% female).
Sport Ireland Coaching delivered a Coach Developer CPD webinar in December 2020 to 43 Coach Developers from 10 different NGBs (72% male, 28% female).
Chapter 3: Developing Coaches Suggested Actions
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Audit your current Coach Developers, tutors, trainers, to discover the gender breakdown within your organisation. As well as gender, consider the breakdown of various differences; age, ethnicity, disability, beginner, intermediate and advanced, length of coaching experience, etc.
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If there are significantly less females, explore the possibility of hosting a workshop to upskill female only Coach Developers.
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Examine your communication and promotional methods when seeking to recruit new Coach Developers. Do you use language that would encourage females to sign up?
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Proactively ensure that there is a minimum number of female Coach Developers involved in every coaching course/workshop that the organisation runs.