About S4K Camp
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Our Coaches: Sports Entertainers
The secret to our success at S4K is our amazing coaching team. Fondly referred to as “Sports Entertainers” in our specialist sports classes, camps and parties, our team are experts in engaging every child and teasing out even the shyest of children.
Our S4K Coaches undergo market leading training to equip them with the skills needed to maximise every child’s experience, as well as providing them with the technical skills to progress.
S4K provide specialist sports classes and academies for toddlers to teens, school and nursery PE and sports lessons, kids multi-activity holiday camps during half terms and school holidays and birthday parties for those special occasions.
All of these activities require different levels of skill and approach. Teaching a class of 30 8 year olds is a very different experience to teaching a room of 18 toddlers in nursery.
S4K coaches are trained and developed across each activity in turn, following our in-house designed career pathways that qualify them through the levels through training and assessment.
How Are Coaches Qualified?
Every coach is inducted into the S4K Way through a combination of practical workshops, online and on the job training.
It takes our coaches four months of training to reach Qualified Lead Coach status and a further two months to secure an Account, Site or Venue Management role.
We carry out four separate assessments throughout the qualification period – just to make sure that we are meeting the high standards that we set for ourselves for our parents and children.
Our coaches receive training in the following areas:
- Child Behaviour Management (CBM): Each age group that we teach at S4K requires a different style of CBM. Coaches learn how to manage individuals and groups of toddlers, pre-schoolers, 5 to 7 year olds and beyond, learning the positive reinforcement strategies required to maximise engagement and progression.
Child Psychology: There is a lot of child psychology involved in the techniques that we use to teach children and how our coaches use these. In fact psychology is a passion and the background of one of our co-founders, Dr Mark Gould. Coaches learn to teach young children through touch and vision, while also making use of innovative S4K equipment to help children build up strength on both sides of the body from an early age. We use a technique called “analogous learning”, which involves wrapping our technical programs in entertaining stories and fun too – and that’s just the tip of the psychological iceberg!
Coaching: Of course, coaching needs to play a large part in our training. Coaches build up their capabilities by leading different activities each week under the guidance of managers and experienced coaches.
Technical Sports Knowledge: Each S4K program is based on world class coaching techniques. For example, S4K Football is based on the Dutch Coerver, Spanish Tiki-Taka and Brazilian Futsal, while S4K Rugby has been designed around the precision ball handling of the Aussie Rugby League and the All Blacks Rugby Union sides. Our coaches learn these methodologies and put them into practice during their training period.
Communication Skills: Many (although definitely not all) of our coaches are younger individuals. We spend time teaching these guys and girls about how to communicate with different age groups – from toddlers to parents. This means that our coaching team are confident in providing feedback on your child’s experience and helping to identify coaching points that you can practice with your child outside of the class (our Practice@Home initiative).
Entertainment: This is a huge part of coach training at S4K. Entertaining children leads to them having fun, from fun we can engage every child in the sporting experience and from engagement, children can develop passion for a lifelong habit of healthy living and sporting exploration. How we entertain is very much the fabric of the S4K Way.
Our S4K coaches have a passion for child development and sport. They want to see your child have the best experience with S4K and want to help them to be the best that they can possibly be.
S4K are here for the journey and our coaches are a very special part of that.
Do you know someone who would love to coach children? Do you have a passion yourself? Apply for a role with us today by clicking here.