Monitoring formal sport coach education: Lessons learned from trialing a set of menitoring and evaluation tools

The academic literature on coach education has paid scant attention to monitoring and evaluation, despite agreement on its importance and evidence of variable delivery. This paper reports on a project that adopts a programme evaluation approach to a sport’s coach education provision. Following the description of a programme evaluation model created for this purpose and a monitoring and evaluation toolkit devised to address each stage of the model, the paper reports on the feedback generated by two national governing bodies of sport in the UK that trialled the use of the toolkit. The feedback identified improvements the monitoring and evaluation materials and number of barriers to implementation. A non-prescriptive, self-administered, incremental, selective and sport-specific approach is recommended, with an emphasis on a development and improvement objective.