Course summary

Whether you’re coaching Olympic athletes, grassroots teams or talented young players, we’ll help you take your career to the next level. Our MSc in Sport Coaching brings together our wide range of teaching expertise, innovative and internationally important research and professional connections. The flexible part-time course is suitable for active and aspiring coaches, as well as PE teachers and further education tutors, who are affiliated with any sport around the world. You put the theory into practice in your own day-to-day job. And as it’s delivered entirely online, you can fit studying round your work commitments and at a time that suits you. We use podcasts, blogs, class discussion boards, presentations, drop-ins and other interactive sessions so you can share your experiences and ideas. While on the course, you have opportunities to collaborate and engage with key coaching networks, such as UK Coaching, and academics from across the world. There will also be guest lectures and a brokering service to link you with sport organisations for research projects. On the podcasts, you’ll hear from elite-level sports professionals, such as people from the Premier League. The interdisciplinary approach means you’ll share some of the modules with students on our Masters degrees in Sport and Exercise Psychology and Applied Sport and Exercise Science. This gives you access to a diverse set of specialist staff, including those dedicated to coaching strategy and practice. Topics will include how to improve performance under pressure and the psychology of leadership and group dynamics. You’ll also analyse data sets on athletic performance and coach decision-making. We’ll dive into different cultural aspects of coaching too, where you can use your own reflections to frame the effectiveness of your coaching philosophies and practices. A significant part of the course will be devoted to research methods. We get students to produce their own thesis in the style of an academic journal. Many of them go on to see their work published in actual journals. You can choose your research question and tailor it to your own interests and work. Alternatively, you can align the topic with the research expertise of staff or take advantage of the brokering service we facilitate with coaches and national governing bodies of sport to research important topics that can help them in their pursuit to optimise performance. Our academics are producing some world-renowned research, including on the psychology of leadership in sport. Researchers also cover issues as diverse as concussion and how it affects sport coaching, along with other contemporary topics such as improving the athlete to coach transition and how to better support women in coaching and sport. On successful completion of study, we will issue the following award: MSc Sport Coaching