Supporting of youth coaches : Good examples of football clubs

The football in Sweden activates hundreds of thousands of children and youngsters every week wherevolunteer coaches are responsible for the activities. On these occasions, the youth sports coaches havethe opportunity to give children and young people a positive experience of football and physical activity,which hopefully evolves into a lifelong interest. For the youth sports coaches to be able to offerdevelopment and fun football activity, it becomes apparent that football clubs have a great responsibility.The clubs should support and create good conditions for the youth sports coaches in their role. Sportclubs management of volunteer workers appears to be major deficiencies, and leadership developmentstrategies are often lacking. In this study, specific clubs have been chosen as good examples of how towork with recruitment, education and development for youth coaches. The purpose of the study was toinvestigate the strategies the clubs work with in recruiting, retaining and developing their youth sportscoaches, as well how they are expressed in the clubs operation plans and policy documents. The datacollection was done with analyzes of the clubs programme of operations and policy documents, as wellas interviews with board members and the person who has education responsibility in each clubs. Theconclusions of the study are, in general, that the clubs have conscious and similar strategies forrecruitment, education and developing youth coaches. In the clubs they have clearly set goals andguidelines. They also have mentoring, projects, education and social meetings with the coaches. Byhighlighting the good clubs strategies, there is a possibility that other football clubs can be inspired bytheir work and that more clubs take greater responsibility towards their youth coaches. The report endswith a final discussion with suggestions on how the clubs can continue to work with education anddevelopment