Masamitsu ITO
Associate Professor of Nippon Sports Science University, Japan
Coaches play significant roles for helping athletes achieve their goals, which are often the enhancement of perfomianceln order for coaches to be continuously successful in developing better athletes, coaches need to keep updating their knowledge and improving their coaching skills. Coach developers are the people who help coaches to hone their coaching crafts effectively. The International Council for Coaching Excellence, ICCE, published the International Coach Developer Framework (ICDF) in 2013, which gives us the basic understanding of coach developers' roles and competences. According to ICDF, facilitation, assessing, mentoring, program design and evaluation, and leadership and personal development are the key areas which coach developers should be well equipped.
Since 2013, the government of Japan has been running the Sport for Tomorrow (SfT) program which supports the global development of sport, including assistance to developing countries, training future sport leaders, and promotion of the anti-doping movementtowards 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games. Nippon Sport Science University has been fortunately able to get a funding from the Japan Sport Agency to establish the NSSU Coach Developer Academy (NCDA) under the SfT program. The academy's vision is to create a coaching culture in sport that leads to a positive experience for everyone involved through sport. Our missions are to foster international coach developers and to build a network of coach developers across the world. NCDA and ICCE have been working closely to deliver and improve the NCDA coach developer program. The participants are selected from the three categories, i.e., inlemational/nalional sport federations, national muIti-sporl governing bodies, and universities. The number of participants were 6, I8, and I2 in the Ist, 2nd, and 3rd cohorts, respectively. We have invited 7 people from the Asia region so far (Japan: 3, Singapore: 2, Philippines: I, Israel: I).
The Japan Sport Association (JASA) has been reviewing their coaching qualification scheme and is going to implement a new system from the April of 2018. The .lASA's new system will be constructed based on the model core curriculum developed by the Japan Sport Agency in March 2016. In the current JASA's coaching qualification scheme, the professional knowledge of coaching has been the main subjects, whilst the interpersonal and intrapersonal knowledge will be of greater importance in the new scheme. The delivery style will also be an issue. The majority of coach education classes in the current JASA's program have been delivered with the traditional lecture style by university lecturers. On the other hand, a variety of active learning delivery styles will be adopted in the new scheme, so that coaches can learn more effectively. The development of coach developers who can deliver these active learning sessions will be our next challenge.