Sport Canterbury coaching adviser Pat Barwick, who has trained nearly 40 mentors for several sports around Canterbury, says the programme works for most sports because "a coach is a coach; it doesn't matter what sport you're in. It's about how you deal with people."

She says she can spot a potential coach in a crowd of hopefuls. She looks for those who can express themselves well and are at ease with others.

Pat says the science of coaching requires intimate knowledge of the sport. But the art, which is where most of the coach mentoring programme comes in, is about how to train and communicate. That's why Athletics New Zealand, in adopting Pat's scheme into a national programme, selected mentors who come from outside the sport.

Mentoring is certainly not about making all coaches the same. Pat's not creating Todd Blackadder clones.

"It's about helping them to be better at doing the things they need to do to be effective as a coach, for themselves" she says.

New generation, new needs

Effective coaching these days is a far cry from the dictatorial style practised by many coaches in the past. Pat says that style did work for many back then, but won't for the current generation. With a coaching career in hockey spanning 40 years, including New Zealand international and Olympics sides, she has seen things change.

"Nowadays young people are very much more used to having a lot of say in what happens. There is quite a change in the approach that's required. That's where mentoring comes in because coaches need something more than an intimate knowledge of a game's skills.

"They become part psychologist, part mentor, part motivator."

To develop coach communication and planning skills, the coach mentoring plan isn't overly prescriptive or impose hard and fast rules.

"Most people think it's a master coach-type programme and they think you'll come in and beat your chest and say 'this is how you'll do it' and that's absolutely wrong for mentoring."

Accepting weakness to overcome them

Neither, Pat says, is the programme designed to assess coaches. Coaches need to be able to express their weaknesses and get help to improve rather than hide deficiencies to gain favour from an assessor. The first step in training people to become mentors is to make sure they understand this.

More information

Contact Pat Barwick at Sport Canterbury or by email pat@sportcanterbury.org.nz or phone 03 373 5060.

Elsewhere

See the Sport New Zealand coach mentor resources in the Managing sport section.