Coaching Trends

It’s getting harder to find coaches and fewer of them were trained coming out of the pandemic. The trends below come from the Aspen Institute’s State of Play 2023 report, courtesy of interviews conducted with leaders in the youth sports space, data analyzed by the Project Play team, or articles and research produced by other entities.

Top 5 Coaching Trends

It’s getting harder to find people to coach at all levels. Coaching is typically a rewarding way to give back to the community and inspire youth. The vast majority of sports programs rely on parent volunteers to serve as coaches. But we’re living in a period in which volunteerism is disappearing within all aspects of society. Formal volunteer participation in America fell to 23.2% between 2019 and 2021 – a 7% decline that is the largest drop the U.S. Census Bureau has recorded since it began tracking the statistic in 2002.

Programs that pay coaches are also finding new challenges. In California, the largest state in the country for youth sports, leaders of club sport programs worry that their industry will get swept up in legal efforts by unions and other parties to treat Uber and Lyft drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. Many club coaches are contractors.

Depending on how these efforts evolve, youth programs could be required to reclassify independent contractors as employees. The Los Angeles Breakers FC youth soccer club is being sued over claims that it misclassifies coaches as contractors to avoid paying overtime. If coaches are deemed employees, some club leaders warn that they may have to raise participation fees and have less ability to waive fees for lower-income youth.

Parent behavior isn’t helping. People who organize sports activities, including athletic directors at schools, often point to difficult relationships with parents as a key reason fewer people want to coach. Still, in the National Coach Survey, 78% of all coaches said their experience is “very or extremely satisfying.” Tennis coaches (59%) were the least satisfied while football coaches (84%) rated highly.

Despite feelings of satisfaction, football coaches also reported the highest level of stress at 29% – above the national average of 21%. One reason may be football coaches’ lower perceptions of parents than coaches in other sports. Football coaches were two times more likely than other coaches to report parents “often or always” criticize their coaching performance and the performance of other athletes. Also, far more football coaches (56%) said their team’s parents criticize the performance of referees than the national average (33%).

Fewer coaches are trained coming out of the pandemic. Sport providers did not use the pandemic and its limited competition schedule to get coaches educated in key competencies. Less than one-third of youth coaches in 2022 were trained within the previous year in concussion management, general safety, physical conditioning, sports skills and tactics, and effective motivational techniques, according to data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA). Fewer coaches were trained in these areas compared to 2019 before the pandemic. Only CPR and basic first aid training increased from 2019 (37%) to 2022 (42%).

The decrease in trained coaches may have happened because some volunteer coaches are asked to do a lot, said Jason Sacks, president of Positive Coaching Alliance. “If you’re a parent signing up to help, you’re asked to do a background check, SafeSport training, concussion training, CPR, learn skills and drills, and on top of that, understand positive youth development,” Sacks said. “Parents might only have time to do one of those. Is there another way to give them resources on some subjects, such as a PDF with 10 tips, instead of a training?”

Coach training rates don’t account for the quality of the instruction and whether it makes a difference. “What we hope coach training does is inspire people to get on a pathway toward behavior change,” said Megan Bartlett, founder of the Center for Healing and Justice Through Sport (CHJS), which in 2023 released a new toolkit for coaches to create inclusive environments. “But behavior change comes from a feedback loop and someone seeing things you don’t want to do and calling you on it. It doesn’t change in episodic training. What the coaching field doesn’t have is accountability and anybody coaching the coaches on a consistent basis.”

CHJS and the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, in partnership with Nike, recently launched an innovative coach training initiative for Rec and Parks' Women Coach LA (WCLA) program. CHJS trained a cohort of 40 female coaches for four Saturdays in a row and paired that training with live coaching observation and feedback to the WCLA coaches. “The combination of offering inspirational training sessions, followed by observing coaches work directly with athletes, was particularly powerful,” Bartlett said. “The coaches learned dramatically more in a setting where trainers could support and share timely feedback.”

The Million Coaches Challenge, a cohort of sports-serving organizations, is committed to training one million coaches in youth development. In 2023, CoachUp! Washington, Little League, LiFE Sports at The Ohio State University, USA Fencing, USA Weightlifting and USA Triathlon have made significant efforts to train more coaches as part of the challenge.

Men continue to dominate youth coaching. Only 26% of youth sports head coaches in 2022 were female, up slightly from 24% in 2019, according to data from SFIA. That’s still well below the representation needed as women who coach balance the demands of coaching with work and family life. Even in softball and volleyball, sports predominantly played by girls, about 4 of 10 youth coaches are men, according to new analysis of the 2022 National Coach Survey. In both basketball and soccer, 81% of the coaches surveyed were men.

A study of 20 women high school coaches found that a supportive partner who encourages them to coach and doesn’t make them feel guilty about coaching is key. For women with families, coaching becomes a family activity where children can become part of the program, extended family pitch in, and the wider school or sport community helps with caretaking.

Coaching HER, a project of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, offers a free coaching module that challenges the status quo and the taken-for-granted assumptions of what it means to coach girls. The tool helps coaches minimize gender inequalities and to coach differently. The Women’s Coaching Alliance (WCA) is trying to create a new model to increase the number of female coaches. In the last year, the nonprofit has turned 59 San Francisco-area high school and college-aged girls into youth coaches for rec volleyball, basketball, cross country, flag football and soccer, according to The Athletic.

Training coaches on mental health and wellbeing for kids is becoming a priority. In Ohio, a state law was passed requiring all school coaches to complete a student mental health training course approved by the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. Every school coach will need to take the training upon renewing their pupil-activity program permit every three to five years. The goal is to help coaches recognize mental health issues among their athletes, determine how severe they are, and get the student connected with someone who can help.

Many coaches want to help but lack confidence. Soccer and baseball youth coaches reported feeling less confident supporting their athletes’ mental health than coaches in other sports, according to new analysis of the 2022 National Coach Survey. Yet soccer coaches in particular expressed greater interest to be trained in areas related to mental health, performance anxiety, emotional regulation, and social-emotional learning than their peers.

Less than half of baseball (45%) and soccer (41%) coaches said they feel “moderately or extremely prepared” to work with athletes struggling with mental health – a lower rate than basketball coaches (57%). Baseball and soccer coaches also feel less prepared to link athletes to mental health resources, help them navigate social media, and identify off-the-field stressors.

Coaches are embracing new technology and game formats to engage children. Quickball is emerging as an enjoyable way for boys and girls to learn baseball and softball fundamentals in a high-speed, low-pressure format. Quickball can be played anywhere from a field to a gym to a parking lot to a beach. The sport does not require gloves, equipment or large rosters, creating more opportunities for players of all ages to participate. Quickball, which uses a patented foam ball and weight-balanced bat, was promoted at Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game activities the past two years and has replaced tee ball in some communities.

Pickleball continues to grow, with 1.1 million youth ages 6-12 playing the sport in 2022 – roughly the same number that play flag football, according to SFIA. Tennis participation for ages 6-17 was up 43% from 2019 to 2022. Pickleball has positively impacted interest and engagement in tennis among younger people, according to the Tennis Industry Association’s 2023 national participation report. Tennis remains the racquet sport of choice for Americans of all ages (23.6 million), although pickleball (8.9 million) has surpassed racquetball and badminton.

In golf, the National Golf Foundation (NGF) credits Topgolf, a popular driving range game with electronically tracked balls, as a key factor for increased youth participation. Golf has 3.4 million junior participants ages 6-17, its highest level since 2006, according to NGF. Golf’s core participation rate during 2019 to 2022 increased from 4.6% to 6.1% for ages 6-12 and from 5.3% to 7.9% for ages 13-17.

Basketball is leveraging analytics with Shoot 360, which uses augmented reality and motion capture to track kids’ shooting, passing and ball-handling. Shoot 360 will soon be in 47 locations in 25 states across the country, including the Golden State Warriors Youth Academy. Children can compete against each other in various locations.

Research Sources

Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA)
SFIA commissioned an online, nationally representative survey from Sports Marketing Surveys (SMS) that the Aspen Institute annually uses to track sports participation rates and coach training data. In 2022, the most recent year with available data, SMS conducted 18,000 online interviews with people ages 6 and older. Strict quotas associated with gender, age, income, region and ethnicity were followed to ensure a balanced sample.

National Coach Survey
In 2022, The Ohio State University LiFEsports Initiative, Aspen Institute, Susan Crown Exchange and Nike partnered to conduct the first youth sport coach survey in the United States. More than 10,000 coaches completed the survey to assess their backgrounds, experiences, philosophies, behaviors, and training history and interests. In 2023, Ohio State’s Dawn Anderson-Butcher and Samantha Bates collaborated with the Aspen Institute on additional sport-by-sport analysis from the survey results. Read 2022 National Coach Survey report.