The Youth Strength and Conditioning Association was founded in 2016 to address some major challenges that coaches and practitioners face.
A couple of these major challenges were and still are:
- Overcoming the fears – having the knowledge and confidence to deliver S&C, fitness and movement work with young people.
- Being a part of an ever-evolving community that provides continual support, CPD and insurance ensuring we can always deliver and we do a great job.
In order to overcome these challenges we set about defining what exactly we were looking to achieve and how we were going to achieve it.
In this blog I want to outline that mission, vision and values for you.
My hope is that if these resonate with you then you’ll join us and add value to our organisation. We need great people, just like you.
Our mission:
Very simply our goal is to accelerate the health, wellness and movement quality of young people worldwide.
Yes it’s ambitious but you have to aim high. There is a western world obesity crisis fuelled by lack of movement and poor wellness and health. We want to impact that.
The initial steps: (Our vision)
- Bring the Excite, Engage, Enable coaching methodology to every training session, every practice and every young person’s life.
The Triple-E™ method is critical. It’s really not about sets and reps (more to come on this).
- In order to do this we need inclusive training environments that young people are excited to be a part of.
Our terminology for this is an elite but not elitist training environment for every young person in the country to have access to. We need YSCA affiliated training groups across the UK and worldwide that young people can grow and develop within.
- Clearly, to achieve these goals we need to build a capable and passionate coaching workforce that are empowered to create physically and emotionally healthy young people. You can read more about our coaching pathway here.
Setting our goals high as we have done means it will be a challenging road. We don’t have a chance of achieving it unless we agree on some key values that we stick to rigidly.
Working through this with our faculty members we have decided on four key pillars that underpin our educational framework along with the sessions that our youth coaches deliver in the trenches.
Very simply, the YSCA values are:
Learn by doing
We believe that the most effective learning style is specific to the activity that you’re undertaking.
Our coaching pathway is about enabling our coaches through movement. Which in turn is the essence of the sessions that we, and our coaches put together for the young people we work with.
Expect to get stuck in during our coaching courses, but the nature of the teaching methodology means that you work at your own pace in an inclusive environment. Exactly like we work to facilitate for our athletes and young people.
Exploration builds ownership
Our goals as coaches is to develop an exciting, engaging environment that facilitates learning, health and development. Central to this is the concept of exploration. If we put too many barriers in place we lose the freedom and movement to play. Our goal is to facilitate learning through a game based curriculum that encourages exploration and subsequently promotes learning.
Empower through coaching
Coaching is absolutely critical to the development process. A good coach is part mentor, part teacher and absolutely is the catalyst to the learning process. We teach our coaches the skill of coaching in all YSCA courses. This is not about blowing the whistle and putting out cones. This is about empowering through being present in every way for the young people you are working with. Being a coach to young people is a true privilege in life and fulfilling in every way.
Health before performance
The work that we do as coaches is not about developing elite young athletes. On the contrary it is about building the foundations of effective movement for all people, irrespective of their athletic talent or aspirations.
The fundamentals we teach to our coaches and our students are there to serve us throughout life and to make a positive impact on our health and wellness and not just simply about performance. Of course should our students have those aspirations our curriculum will absolutely facilitate those goals too.
We don’t have competition. We are empowered by our own mission to create change. But we need people to help us!
I’d love to know your thoughts on this. DO you want to join us? If so please get yourself registered onto a coaching workshop HERE, or drop us a message if you have any thoughts or questions HERE.
My warmest regards,
