by David Pierce, Ph.D.
During the spring 2024 semester, our senior capstone course in Sports Innovation at Indiana University Indianapolis partnered with Mudsock Youth Athletics (MYA) in Fishers, IN, and the Center for Sports Transformation (CST) to examine recruitment, retention, and quality of volunteer youth sports coaching and present ideas that would help MYA to continue to create a healthy ecosystem for coaching. The students interviewed 45 youth sports coaches in Mudsock, and the CST held three four-hour zoom meetings with members of the Mudsock Board. Students watched these board meetings as part of their research process.
Indiana University Indianapolis Student Projects
Throughout our research, we identified a clear desire to create a consistent coaching culture that spans across all programmatic offerings in Mudsock. Creating consistent and shared language within the organization that is shared across coaches would have several benefits:
- Establishes a distinct culture and identity
- Promotes character development in athletes
- Sets clear expectations about desired behaviors, mindsets, and principles
- Increases confidence for new coaches
- Reinforces key messages to amplify the message
- Creates shared, quality experiences for kids across all sports and teams
One of the student groups developed The Mudsock Way to brand and create energy around this initiative. Students created a framework the Board can build on that allow for best practices in youth sports coaching to thrive under the branding of The Mudsock Way. The framework focuses on what we want coaches SAYING and DOING at the following key moments in the season:
- Prior to First Practice: Welcome Email, Preparation
- Practices: First Practice, At-Home Practices
- Games: Before the Game, During the Game, After a Win, After a Loss, The Car Ride Home
- Tough Moments: When Parents Complain, When the Refs Make a Mistake
- Celebration: Last Game, End of Year Celebration
Each moment was divided into four sections that represented what we want coaches DOING and SAYING to ATHLETES and PARENTS. The Board started to complete this exercise on Board Call #3 by generating ideas for these four areas. The students completed the template and offered four recommendations for delivering it to coaches in ways they can remember it: Mudsock Playbook, Push Text Messages at key relevant times during the season that align with the moments, Lanyard with notecards, and emails. The students recommended gathering coaching leaders in Mudsock at the Mudsock Coaching Leadership Summit and use the World Café to customize and create The Mudsock Way. Participants would have the opportunity to offer their ideas for what coaches should SAY and DO to ATHLETES and PARENTS at the key moments, and then work in subgroups to take all the ideas and distill the best answers in ways that are memorable, repeatable, and observable. Completing this activity and implementing The Mudsock Way across the organization will promote collaboration, consistency, and culture in ways that will establish Mudsock as the premier community sports organizations in the United States.
The remaining projects focused on how the Mudsock office and Board could facilitate enhanced ways of IDENTIFYING, REWARDING, and SHARING knowledge of the best coaches in the organization. While the overwhelming majority of feedback from the coaches during the interviews was positive, one important theme across the interviews with coaches was the feeling of uncertainty about their ability and a sense of isolation once the season began. Coaches recognize there is quite a bit of CONTENT provided to them by the organization and available online, but due to time constraints, knowledge, and experience they often lack the CONTEXT to operationalize the information in ways that fit their specific coaching circumstance.
The central theme across the remaining ideas was to create a diversity of touchpoints and environments that will promote opportunities for coaches to interact at important moments that creates coaching conversations, reflection, and learning, thus providing coaches with the context needed to put practice and training plans into action.
One of the groups pitched hiring a “Director of Coaching” position in the Mudsock Office that would oversee the various initiatives and programming involved in creating and executing groups of coaches learning from each other as described above. This position would be responsible for the overall long-term program development and spirit of continuous improvement amongst coaches within Mudsock. The group recommended that each sport board create a dedicated volunteer board position called the Coaching Specialist to oversee coaching for that sport (currently, soccer and basketball have this board position) and communicate regularly with other Coaching Specialists and the Director of Coaching. Armed with a new Director of Coaching and Coaching Specialists for each sport, Mudsock has the talent in place to create a community of confident coaches sharing their knowledge with each other.
One group (“Sideline Support”) offered a variety of ideas for coach connection and knowledge sharing rooted in the Coaching Association of Canada model for building coaching communities of practice. Ideas included social gatherings, guest speakers, coaches vs. coaches game, special events, a regular cadence of in-person and online meeting opportunities, an “on-call” person to handle emergency coaching issues, and pairing experienced and inexperienced coaches together for joint practices as facility space will allow. The Mudsock Board could build on these ideas and identify ways for this to work within the Fishers community.
Based on feedback we heard in the second CST meeting with the Board, it was also apparent that we needed a better or more comprehensive way to identify the best coaches rather than just anecdotal knowledge. Those who are the best coaches should be the coaches should be the one’s leading joint practices, speaking at events, and being the most encouraged to share what they do. As a result, one group developed the Coaching Performance dashboard to identify the best coaches and provide Mudsock with coaching performance data. The dashboard collects two types of information:
- The 4C’s: Parental assessment of the extent to which their child improved their confidence, competence, character, and connections with others over the course of the season. This is 4 survey questions parents answer on a 1-7 scale.
- Player Improvement: At the end of the season, coaches will report scores and the same drills that were used during the draft process so that improvement can be measured from the start of the season to the end of the season. A small amount of time can be allocated in a late-season practice to collecting this information.
These top coaches could also be prime candidates for the Coaching Specialist position, particularly as their own kids age out of Mudsock but they still have a passion for coaching and for Mudsock and want to continue to be involved.
Another group, Mudsock Ignite, focused on rewarding coaches and creating a sense of status within the community. This group focused on making coaches feel valued and recognized and feel a sense of belonging. They created a revised cadence from when the coach volunteered to be a coach to when the season started to ensure that coaches, particularly new coaches, felt like they made the right decision and have the tools needed to be successful. They had creative ideas like new coaches receiving a welcome package produced by Tactive, a local company, that would include a Mudsock shaped box with various thank-you items inside. As a retention reward, the group pitched the idea of a pins that can be inserted into a puzzle display that shows how many seasons or sports someone has coached in Mudsock. They also built out rewards for top coaches (based on the dashboard), that are visible signs of the best coaches (hats, quarter-zips, pickle ball set) that are Mudsock branded.
The final group developed a platform called Next Play that moved the collaborative coaching into the digital online environment using AI. The platform allows coaches to create, edit, manage, and share AI-generated practice plans with the Mudsock coaching community, allowing the best plans to bubble up to the top based on Reddit-like community feedback. Harnessing the power of AI, Next Play can quickly and intuitively get coaching content into the hands of coaches, and still gather feedback for other coaches. It moves the synchronous and place-based coaching collaboration described above and puts it into an intuitive on-demand digital environment.
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