Gaelic Games Coach Pathway

All coaches are at the heart of this new Pathway – and there will be a key focus on creating an effective coach development environment. The Gaelic Games Coach Pathway follows on from the successful launch of the Gaelic Games Player Pathway in 2021. The Coach Pathway has been created to mirror the Player Pathway, ensuring that coaches are provided with the knowledge, skill, and capacities to develop players within and across phases of the Gaelic Games Player Pathway – “just for me” and “just in time.” The Pathway is also heavily informed by the cross-Association coach education study conducted in 2020 with over 10,500 coach respondents. People identified a lack of time and other commitments as barriers to engaging in learning. They said they wanted shorter, more bite-sized learning opportunities. Consequently, a key feature of the new approach is to provide flexible and modular courses.

The Coach Pathway will exhibit a Coach ‘Learning Space’ that aims to reflect the variety of coaching needs, and the breadth of learning opportunities that should be provided for coaches.  This ‘Learning Space’ is accessible to all following the completion of the Introduction to Gaelic Games course, with the exception of core modules and specialist modules which have a pre-requisite of participants required to complete Award/Level 1 formal courses.  The Learning Management System (TOBAR), linked to Foireann, will power the delivery of the Coach Pathway.  All three Associations are committed to providing coaches with the right supports at the right time, which will enable them to individually empower themselves to engage with the many challenges they will face along their Coach Pathway journey.