High Performance Coaching Specialization

If you’re interested in learning how to help athletes achieve optimal athletic performance at the high school, collegiate, or professional levels, the UF online M.S. in Sport Management with a specialization in High Performance Coaching (HPC) may be the right fit for you. The specialization is designed to enhance the efficacy of active coaches and to better prepare students for managerial coaching positions or careers in athletic administration. Individuals who will benefit from this training path include those pursuing career trajectories leading to these positions: head coach; associate head coach or coordinator; strength and conditioning coordinator; or sport administrator (working directly with coaching staffs).

The HPC specialization includes 9 credit hours of coursework that can be used to satisfy the elective requirement for the M.S. in Sport Management degree program. Courses from this specialization’s curriculum may also be taken as individual electives by students not pursuing a specialization.

Focusing on both the psychological and social elements of athlete performance training, the required courses are designed to offer theoretical and practical insight into creating an effective performance evaluation and development program. Drawing from the latest research, you’ll learn to work with athletes to assess their abilities and develop programs to foster skill development and enhance performance. You’ll also acquire a deeper understanding of how coaches can apply sport management principles to team management.

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To learn more about the University of Florida’s online master’s in sport management and download a free brochure, fill out the fields below. You can also call (352) 662-3395 to speak to an enrollment specialist about the program.

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High Performance Coaching Courses (9 credits):

PET 5185 High-Performance Coaching: Priority Alignment (3)

This course will be built around the question, “Is there a way to pursue greatness without collateral damage?” This course presents conversations with high achievers showing the paradox of achievement and strategies to navigate the undermining forces of society. The goal of the course will be to help you find perspective, create priority alignment, and answer the very personal question: “What’s really important?”

PET 5186 High-Performance Coaching: Exploring Team Dynamics (3)

This course will be built around the question, “What are the top 3 things that get in the way of a team maximizing its abilities?” The goal of this course is to delve into the human-related issues that can get in the way and create structure, systems, and organize content to provide teams the platforms for dealing with those issues. Using a sport example, the course will follow two teams, Oregon women’s basketball and Gonzaga men’s basketball, over the course of a season and provide real-world examples of how human-related issues were addressed.

PET 5187 High-Performance Coaching: Creating Winning Environments (3)

This course is designed around the question, “How do I build an environment where people can do their best work?” The course will be built around discovering and creating systems to help define your team standards, catch above-the-line behavior, convert below-the-line behavior, and model your expectations within a team environment.

PET 5188 High-Performance Coaching: Building Character through Sport (3)

This course will be built around answering the question: “Can you take character development into the paid-to-win world of athletics and/or high performance?” Focusing on the development of the person first can help mitigate the pressures of high performance. This course will focus on the fundamentals of character development on the individual level and repurposing the sport experience to create a Person>Player environment.

PET 5766 High-Performance Coaching: Leadership Through a Sport Lens (3)

Students will examine facilitation techniques to foster intrinsic motivation and self-awareness among those they lead through a sports lens in high-performance settings. Individual development dialogues will assist those they lead on a journey of self-discovery with the goal of creating a platform to develop a positive and healthy inner coach.

SPM 5206 Sport Ethics (3)

This course is designed to encourage sport managers to think about the moral and ethical dilemmas typically encountered by managers in the sport industry. The course will better acquaint and refine sport managers’ understandings of sport relative to issues such as sportsmanship, violence, performance enhancing drugs, race, gender, and media. This will better prepare students in this class to be agents of change within the sport industry to help it strengthen and prosper. This will be accomplished through student discussions, case studies analyses, formal debates, and the development of position papers on particular topics, which will be supplemented with lectures and readings.

After successfully completing this course, students should be able to:

Describe ethics and morals, and discuss their role and application to sport managers and the sport industry
Apply the theoretical and foundational concepts that support ethical and moral reasoning
Compare the similarities and differences of various ethical theories
Discuss factors that influence their decision making and avoid negative factors that may impact their ability to be an ethical sport manager
Identify, analyze, and debate specific issues relative to ethical dilemmas commonly encountered within the competitive sport context
Demonstrate effective written and verbal communication such as critical thinking, deductive reasoning, decision-making, and research skills