ICOACHKIDS approach to coaching puts children first

By John Harrington

An impressive list of speakers has been assembled for the 2024 Gaelic games Coaching Conference which will take place in Croke Park on Saturday, November 23.

One of them is Sergio Lara-Bercial, Professor of Sport Coaching at Leeds Beckett University and co-founder of ICOACHKIDS, a global coaching movement whose mission is to promote sport policy, education, and practice that puts children first.

The Gaelic games family has established a partnership with ICOACHKIDS and created co-branded Gaelic Games Family versions of ICOACHKIDS MOOCs videos which are evidence based where the vision is where every child has access to positive sport experiences that foster a love for sport, play and physical activity.

There are six ICOACHKIDS videos currently on Tobar, the Gaelic games online learning hub, with various topics such as motivating children in sport, the role of the children’s coach and reflective tools for coaches that are tagged accordingly to the specific stages of the Gaelic Games Player Pathway.

The ICOACHKIDS pledge is made up of 10 principles (see below) which are consistent with what the Gaelic games family advocates across F1 Nursery and F2 Go Games in so far as they are inclusive and child centred with fun and safety prioritised.

Ahead of the 2024 Gaelic games Coaching Conference, we spoke to Sergio Lara-Bercial about the ICOACHKIDS philosophy and how coaches can create a positive environment for children in sport.

GAA.ie: Sergio, for people who might not know about your background in sport and where it has taken you, can you give us a little flavour of your life experience?

Sergio Lara-Bercial: Originally, I'm from Spain but I came to the UK in 1999. I was a basketball player and played one year in Liverpool. Then the following year I committed high treason and moved to Manchester which didn't go down well! I didn't quite understand how bad the rivalry was at the time. I have been in Manchester ever since. I played for the club there, Manchester Magic, and I'm still there coaching.

Even when I was playing in Spain, I was always coaching in the junior programmes of the clubs that I played for. I’ve always been passionate about coaching and that has guided my life a little bit. My original degree was in physiotherapy, but I never practiced because I finished my degree and then my gap year was to come to the UK to play for a year and that was meant to be it but then I stayed here.

Instead of going down the physio route I then did a Master's in Sports Psychology and then my PhD. I've always tried to keep those two things compatible. I've always had a full-time job as well as my coaching, and that was initially with UK Coaching, doing coach development. Then in 2011 I moved to Leeds Beckett University to start my PhD and to work with the late Pat Duffy and the ICC, the International Council for Coaching Excellence. So, it's always been that idea of keeping coaching going. I know it sounds a bit grand, but I can't live without coaching.

GAA.ie: Talk to me about ICOACHKIDS. When and why did you start it?

SLB: I've been very fortunate that I've always coached at every level of the spectrum. A little bit less so now because I've got less time, but, when I was at the height of my coaching, I could be coaching seven year olds on a Friday night and then travel with the national team the following week to play at the European Championships. I've always had a foot in each camp. The elite coaching, but also community coaching.

I always had an interest in children's coaching, but it really came to a head when I had my own children. Then I really thought more about what kind of sport environment are we giving these children?

I had been thinking about this in multiple ways, but it really crystallized in 2016 when we had an opportunity to apply for a grant to the Erasmus Plus Program of the European Commission to develop ICOACHKIDS. It was a partnership between seven different partners from across different seven different countries in Europe to really start creating something that I thought was missing.

When you do your coaching qualifications, your coaching budgets, it's always about the sport. The bulk of the information is around the X's and O's of your sport. Technical, tactical, physical preparation, whatever. We know that a majority of coaches, around 80%, are going to end up coaching young children in the community at grassroots level but we never talk about children in those qualifications.

One of the mantras that I use all the time is if you want to coach basketball to Jimmy, you need to know a little bit about basketball, you need to know a lot more about coaching, and you need to know everything about Jimmy.

That was my motivation. To give coaches the evidence-based, high-quality resources that allow them to be the best possible community grassroots coach working with children they can possibly be, because they didn't exist until we created them. You get bits and bobs here, but not something as comprehensive as what we've done with ICOACHKIDS or as evidence-based. We bring it to the level that any coach can understand it, but it's really underpinned by the science that is out there at the moment.

GAA.ie: Kids are kids, so presumably these principles work just as well regardless of the sport?

SLB: Exactly. They're completely generic. The main idea is we want coaches working with children to really understand what children want and need from sport, how that may change as they get older, and how that may change depending on things like gender, socio-economic circumstances, or the motivations of the children. Some children want to be the next Olympic gold medallist, some children just want to have a social time with their friends and that's their main motivation.

GAA.ie: Should the number one priority of a youth coach be to keep as many as possible playing for as long as possible?

SLB: Totally. That's a phrase that we use quite a lot. Another key message is, let's get rid of this pyramid. Sport is always being organised as a pyramid and we want to transition from a pyramid to a square, but also to a cube. The idea of the pyramid is that people start playing one sport and then some of them get move on to the next level until you get your elite.

The idea of the square is that okay, even if you don't make the elite, you can still play recreationally. The idea of the cube is that it might be that you don't want to play that sport anymore, so then you transition to another sport in your teenage years. Or, in my case, as a 50-year-old with a with a wonky hip, I might want to start doing something that works for me.

The priority is, as you say, that we keep as many as possible playing sport for as long as possible. Not only children, everyone we can for as long as possible in the system. The other idea around the cube is that, okay, we might not be able to keep everybody as a participant or an athlete for multiple reasons, but we want them in the family of sport as referees, coaches, sponsors. It's the idea of creating that ecosystem that allows everybody to stay involved.

GAA.ie: Generally, in Gaelic games a coach starts in the nursery with their child's age-group and then works their way up through the age-groups in tandem with their child. Have you any tips for coaches as to how to best evolve as a coach as the age-group of the teams you work with gets older?

SLB: The main tip, really, is just to be open minded. I always say there's only one question you need to ask yourself as a coach all the time. That is, 'What do they need from me now?'

It's easy to go into your season planning or your session planning with a really preconceived idea of what you want. And that's okay, you need to have a structure in your head of what it is that you're trying to achieve. But, once you get there and you see the group that you have, you have to adapt to them. You have to do this too minute by minute within the session too and you do this by constantly asking yourself that question, 'what do they need from me now?'

You're there to serve them, they're not there to serve you. While you might have some objectives that you want to achieve, how you get there really depends on what they need from you. The main thing would be to remain open-minded and completely buy into the idea that you're there for them. They're not there for you.

It’s really easy to fall into the trap of, 'I'm here to win the league', 'I'm here to make a name for myself as a coach'. Those are all legitimate goals but let's not forget that, deep down, we're here for them. That's the main thing.

GAA.ie: Is it fair to say that competitiveness is a natural outcome with children rather than one you have to artificially create?

SLB: The sport experience is very different for every child. I think that's one of the one of the downsides of the pyramid. In that pyramid model, there's only room for the competitive kids. But there are kids that really enjoy doing sport and don't really have that competitive streak, or they haven't developed it yet, and some of them will never develop it and are just happy to play.

I think that's where we have to provide environments where they want to stay in the environment long enough so we can discover who wants to compete and who doesn’t and allow children to be on the wrong timetable.

I think sometimes we force some of these things upon them way too early. But there's no escaping that there are tensions because resources are limited.

GAA.ie: Is it sometimes forgotten that sport is meant to be fun?

SLB: One of the 10 principles ICOACHKIDS is that it should be fun and safe. Another is that we have to prioritize the love of sport over learning sport.

It's very easy to do the opposite and sometimes I still do it. I'm coaching tonight, and I know my plan for tonight is that I want to introduce a couple of new tactical things. I'm mindful that, as part of that process, there is a high risk that I take the fun out of it because I'm too focused on the learning.

It's just being mindful that I can't let that go too far. If tonight I'm going to spend 20- or 25-minutes teaching them a couple of ideas that I think are really important for their development, I need to then offset that with something else after that is going to just bring them back to the fun and that they go away thinking, 'oh, that was fun'. They don't remember the first 25 minutes we did that were very tactical and demanding mentally. It's about that balance because it has to remain fun.

Children gravitate to those things that are fun. That's why when people complain about video games and things like that, my response is always, 'What can we learn from the video games?' Kids come keep coming back to the video games for a reason. Because they're fun, because they really scaffold the challenges really well, so you keep coming back because you want to get better. In a way, in coaching we need imitate what the video games are doing and that's hard.

GAA.ie: What do you think a coach will get from the ICOACHKIDS resources and why might they be beneficial?

SLB: A number of things. I hope the resources will give you an understanding of what children need and want from sport. A phrase that we use a lot is that we should learn to look at the sport through the eyes of the child as opposed to the eyes of the adult. That's where we need to start and they will definitely get that overall knowledge of what it is like to be a developing child and what sport can do for them and what they want from sport.

Then lots of ideas around how to make the experience better for the children. Ideas around teaching how to organize your sessions to ideas around motivation. How to make sure that children are enjoying their sessions and coming back. Ideas around safeguarding. So, how do we keep children safe and how do we keep ourselves safe?

Ideas as to how you can, while keeping it fun, also work on the physical development of your participants. We're also very strong on trying to use a holistic approach to coaching. I always say, 'I don't coach basketball, I coach children, and basketball is my vehicle'.

I'm here not to teach them just about basketball, but hopefully to help them be happier, to help give them some life skills they can use in other areas of their life, or just to have a contribution that goes beyond basketball in the life of that child.

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Tickets for the 2024 Gaelic games Coaching Conference on November 23 can be found - here - with prices as follows:

€65 per person (for a group of 5 delegates, club price) or €75 per person (individual). Includes lunch and refreshments and great day out in Croke Park!