Exploring Canadian coaches' experiences with the national coaching certification program's streams and certification structure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, the National Coaching Certification Program (NCCP) provides standardized, inclusive, and safe sport education to coaches and coach developers across the country (Coaching Association of Canada, n.d.) – ensuring coaches are competent in their roles. While a significant number of coaches pursue NCCP training each year, not all complete the process to become fully certified. In an effort to better understand and facilitate more coaches in becoming certified in their respective sports, the overall purpose of this study was to explore coaches' experiences with the NCCP's coaching streams and certification structure. As part of a larger study involving a survey completed by 169 coaches across Canada, 13 coaches engaged in follow-up focus groups, and seven completed individual interviews, representing 17 different sports, and nine provinces. Focus groups and interviews were conducted virtually over Zoom and recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using Braun and Clarke's (2019) 6-step thematic analysis framework. Results were summarized under three key themes, describing: (a) positive coach perceptions of NCCP streams/certification structure (e.g., The Locker for review of completed courses, availability of remote courses and evaluation, and personnel for NCCP-related support), (b) areas for improvement (e.g., reduce course duplication, improve transition to new system, enhance mentorship, decrease bureaucracy), and (c) barriers to NCCP certification (e.g., expense, perceived lack of value and incentive, quality and availability of facilitators and evaluators, requirements around maintenance of certification). Overall, results indicate both positive and negative perceptions of NCCP streams/certification structure - impacting coaches' intentions to continue their education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".