Coach Academy - raising the bar to take on the world

Snow Australia’s Coach Academy was born with a simple vision – to match the focus and commitment Australian winter sport has always brought to our athletes with a coach development pathway designed to support and expand skill, capacity and opportunities of our domestic winter sport coaches across all disciplines.

Bringing together emerging coaches from each discipline of snowsports, the Coach Academy is broadening the foundation and capability of elite programs to better equip coaches guiding talented athletes toward the top of the sport.

Entering its fourth year, emerging talent and pathway coaches across each discipline are invited to apply directly to the Academy, while club coaches can be nominated and go through an application process to be accepted. The self-reflective application looks to gain insight into each candidate’s experience level and awareness around key coaching capabilities, while gaining a sense for commitment, willingness to grow, evolve and engage fully in a highly-collaborative development environment.. 

“The ultimate aim is for the Coach Academy to be like a ‘Top Gun’ school for future Olympic coaches, while contributing to the long term development of coaches across all winter disciplines,” says Chip Richards, Lead Facilitator for Coach Academy. “The program focuses on identifying our emerging coach talent in Australian winter sport and helping them to grow and develop to their best potential.”

While Australia has enjoyed growing success over the past 20-30 years in snowsports, many of the best athletes have traditionally relied on the expertise of overseas coaches to take their performance to the next level. Coach Academy seeks to boost the standard of coaching across all Olympic and Paralympic disciplines to the level where the majority of Australian athletes can be guided right up through the performance pathway by home-grown coaches. 

“Historically, when Australian winter sport athletes reach a certain level and they’re ready to progress up into high-performance and elite levels of the sport, our domestic coaches and club coaches have handed these athletes up to mostly international coaches to take the next steps into high performance,” said Richards. “This has allowed us to learn a lot from International coaches while unlocking some extraordinary outcomes in our athletes, but in some cases may also have inadvertently stunted the development path and career progression potential of some of our emerging coach talent.”

In recent years, Australian mogul coaches Pete McNiel and Kate Blamey have powerfully broken this cycle by coaching Jakara Anthony (and others in the program) right up through the pathway as a moguls skier.  “The vision of the Coach Academy to help bridge this gap for many other emerging performance coaches to do the same,” said Richards.”

“We now have a few disciplines where Australian coaches are moving up into the national and high performance levels with their athletes. The ultimate aim is to develop this foundation across each winter discipline so that future Olympic & Paralympic cycles feature many high-performance coaches playing leadership roles right alongside our high-performance athletes.”

Those participating in Coach Academy experience a 12-month, rolling admission program that includes annual Live Labs in Jindabyne, monthly Gold Medal Coach guest speaker sessions, discipline-specific coach huddles, 1:1 mentor and apprenticeships, podcasts, video content and extension programs.

Coach Academy coaches are now woven into NG32 program initiates, E-Elevate opportunities, and other Australia-wide system coach development programs. Members of this group have also been recognised as Coaches of the Year inside the Australian Club system.

This year’s kick-off session earlier this month saw Sydney 2000 taekwondo gold medallist Lauren Burns present her research on the Athlete-Coach Performance Alliance to the entire cohort, while a focused group of 14 coaches were involved in the live / in-person Emerging Talent Program season launch camp at Jindabyne.

“One of the things I love about the Coach Academy is bringing together coaches from dramatically different disciplines to learn and share best practice approaches with each other,” said Richards. 

“If you look at the technical skill required from snowboard cross to freeride or aerial skiing - they’re practically different sports from a technical perspective. Because the athletes and coaches have such technically different skills to develop, the cross-learning they receive from each other is mostly about the more human elements of coaching - mindset development, personal resilience, team culture, leadership and communication.

“These universal aspects of coaching and performance form the broader offering in full group sessions, while members from each discipline gather regularly to discipline huddles to ‘think tank’ more technical elements together.

“Ultimately we want to support the progression pathway for those coaches who are ready to move towards high-performance, while expanding connectivity, capability and career opportunity for all emerging coaches across Australian winter sport.

“As we move into our fourth year of the program, we are inspired by the achievements and progression of our Coach Academy coaches to date, we’ve learned a lot from previous cohorts and our many guest speakers, and we are ready to take things to the next level.”

Click here to read more about Coach Academy.