Hey y’all!
Welcome to The All Around Coach! I’m Kat, and I’m a lot of things – a cat lover, a Crossfitter, anxious and type-A; but I’ve always considered myself a coach first. Working with stroke patients in a physical therapy clinic? Coach. Running a quality improvement study for heart failure patients? Coach. Developing after-school programs at a national non-profit? Coach. My goal has always been to help people achieve their potential and to help them feel awesome about themselves and what they can do.
Why should you listen to me?
Coaching gymnastics was the first job where I had complete autonomy over my work. Autonomy that as a 19 year old I probably did not deserve. Luckily, I fell into a major at college that taught me some of what I needed to know. And after I fell into my first full-time coaching job, trial and error taught me a lot more.
I went to graduate school for behavioral science and health education – a fancy way of saying I studied how to get people to make healthy decisions. I had many classmates that studied things like domestic abuse and drug addiction. Meanwhile, I focused on the one thing I knew better than anything else: coaching. As a young, overwhelmed coach, I struggled to find the training I needed, so I knew good training for coaches was scarce. So I decided to write my thesis on that very topic. When I started my research, I discovered not only was there no training – there was no information period. Nothing about the most important things to teach youth coaches and nothing on the best way to teach coaches.
That creates a crisis in youth sports.
Time Magazine reports that kid’s sports are a $15 million dollar industry. Almost 8 million youth play high school sports alone according to the NFHS And yet The Washington Post found that not even a third of youth sport coaches have training in CPR or concussion protocol – literally the bare bone basics of keeping someone alive. It should not be surprising that coaches also lack training on sport skills and tactics. Or that have little knowledge of effective motivational techniques (Wash Post).
Think about that. Less than a third of these people have any training in how to appropriately motivate children.
No wonder we have epidemics of childhood obesity and child abuse at the hands of coaches.
Coaches deserve better, and the kids deserve better. I’m here to help fill the void. When coaches get the training they need, they will be at their best. And when that happens, young athletes will be the best people they can be.
Interested? contact me or subscribe to my newsletter!