This article presents a visualization tool adapted from rehabilitation exercise therapy as a means for coaches to organize and select activities to progress or regress the skill difficulty to match the needs and abilities of their athletes.

One thing that veteran ballplayers and fans know, long before the opening pitch, is that there are dangers on the base path. That is illustrated by this case of 13-year-old second baseman Tara Kelly, whose ankle was fractured when an opposing team's player slid into her as she made the tag.

The recommendations in this article came from two coaching colleagues and professional friends who reflected on their coaching careers as part of an action research project. The recommendations in this article primarily come from the perspective of the lead author's coaching business experience, while the second author took on the role of…

Soccer is one of the most favored sports among children ages 6 to 12 years old. Organized training rooted in pedagogical principles is essential to ensure children develop the needed skill and attain the desired benefits of soccer. This article provides practical tips for coaches to improve their coaching skills and create a positive and effective…

Concerns exist about how the landscape of school sports is changing, leaving many school coaches feeling unprepared to meet the challenges of this role today. This article explores the status of school sports coaching by drawing on recent findings from the National Coach Survey, the first-of-its-kind survey in the United States released in 2022.

Mental health is an emerging area of interest in sport, but there is a paucity of educational initiatives in sport management curricula to train the next generation of sport managers to address the mental health needs of athletes, a type of knowledge that the mental health literature operationalizes as mental health literacy. One goal of…

Young athletes want to be successful in many aspects of their game. Unfortunately, some athletes allow their desire to be successful to turn into perfectionistic behaviors that do not benefit them and can lead to burnout. Coaches have a responsibility and want to help their athletes through their unhealthy perfectionism, but many coaches do not…

A coach's purpose and core value system are used in everyday decision making with relation to student-athletes. Understanding one's perspective as a coach in educational athletics can help all coaches, specifically young or beginning coaches, to recognize the importance of establishing a personal coaching philosophy they can rely on in difficult…

Sport coaching involves continuous learning as coaches seek to manage the complexity of the sport environment, address the ever-changing aspects of their sport, and find more effective and efficient ways to promote athlete development and maintain a competitive advantage. Therefore, coaches regularly find themselves in situations where they need…

Never has the domain of sports coaching been so inundated with "secondary information." In high-performance contexts, for example, coaches are routinely presented with detailed reports specifying features about an athlete's or team's performance. Here, we question whether such detailed secondary information has led us to know "too…

Cross country has grown in popularity and provides youth with the ability to put into practice both physical capability and mental strength and preparedness. However, such preparedness can also lead to physical injuries such as shin splints, or mental fatigue, which can lead to dropout and/or burnout. Yoga is an activity that has become…

Due to the significant growth of participants in sports around the world, this article aims to identify the effects of early specialization, as well as the roles and responsibilities of the professionals and people involved in athlete development, especially in the context of soccer. It describes the phases of Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD)…

The purpose of this article is to review the four sources of self-efficacy and provide practical examples of how physical educators and youth sport coaches can implement them into their current practice to improve motor performance.

Tackle football has the highest number of injuries in contact sports. Certain injuries in the head and neck may severely impact the player's physical, neurological, and physiological functionality, even sudden death, as well as the quality of their personal life in the long run. These injuries commonly occur during a collision when a defender is…

School-age children receive a myriad of physical, social, emotional, and cognitive benefits from being involved in sport, as well as several academic benefits. Children who participate in sport are more likely to have a higher GPA, increased daily attendance, and greater high school graduation rates than their non-sport participating peers.…