ABSTRACT
Jim, a national level basketball coach, described his thoughts on mentoring as follows: ‘I have never had a mentor – not directly – not assigned in I think the way is being mooted at the moment. You tend to have critical friends, people that you go to and I think that’s quite important. So if that can be conveniently formalised in some way, I guess it could be a good thing. But if it’s just from the point of view of the assessment of a coach, then I think that might have some difficulties to it then because there are only a few mentors around probably that could do the job.’ He went on to say:
So if mentoring is something to do with being advised, you might say it’s good for someone to come along and say ‘look Jim, you’re going to have to stop this high pressure defence, or attempts at it because your kids aren’t fit enough – don’t you see it? Look they’re really dragging. Unless you do a, b and c, you’re going to get beaten using this pressure defence system.’ Somebody told me something like that once and I thought ‘oh right’ and I’d been plugging away with it in the hope it might work. You need somebody like that sometimes to kind of advise you in the ‘here and now’ of your coaching – the sort of immediate ‘oh we’re playing the league leaders next week’ but you also need the longer term thing. Mentoring, I think is a really solid idea, in the sense that coaches need to think beyond themselves and if they get someone to look at their practice but how it can be set up formally is an issue.
