Coaching Guides

Whether you are an experienced Special Olympics coach, or just starting out, this is the place to come for background, guidance, tips and strategies. We will continually try to anticipate your questions and information needs and post the answers to your most frequently asked questions here.

Feel free to click on the sport you are coaching to see an extensive table of contents of information to help you be a great Special Olympics coach. Some information is common to all sports and some is sport specific, so look at it all as you get time.
The pages are designed, so that you can print them if you want to take them with you to practice and to make copies for your athletes to take home with them. Athletes frequently like to try things at home, between practices. And their families also like to see what they are working on so they can help too.

Within the Teaching Sport Skills section of each sport, you will find a number of videos showing how to teach the various skills necessary to play sports. We are now beginning to offer Dartfish versions of these videos — enhanced, multimedia presentations that provide in-depth analysis of sport drills and exercises through diagrams, spoken and written commentary and other methods. They are currently available for Aquatics and Football, and will be available for other sports in the future. Whenever you see the Dartfish icon (shown on the right), click on it and the Dartfish video will begin loading. These videos are not recommended for those with slow Internet connections, as they utilize considerable bandwidth, but for those with faster connections, all that is needed is the Macromedia Flash Player. For more information on our Dartfish videos, please click here.

To get the most out of the coaching guides, we recommend having Windows Media Player 9 Series and Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you find that you are unable to play videos, open Windows Media Player and, on the "Tools" menu, click "Options," and then click the "File Types" tab. Click the "Select All" button to set Windows Media Player as the default player for these file types. Then return to the Special Olympics Web site and click on the video icon again. If you still are unable to play videos, or have trouble downloading documents, contact your Special Olympics Program office to have them send you a CD or printed copies of the coaching guides.

As always, we welcome your ideas and suggestions on how to make our sport resources more helpful for you. YOU are the "front-line" of the Special Olympics program! We want to give you as much support as possible to help make your coaching experience fun, rewarding and fulfilling. Contact us to give us your ideas or comments!

A number of pages contain MPEG video clips with instructions on teaching various sports skills. If you have a slow Internet connection or find that a video does not play properly, please right click on the video icon, choose "Save Target As..." and play the video from your computer.

Principles of Coaching

Coaching Special Olympics Athletes

The Coaching Team

Preparing the Athlete for Competition

Nutrition, Safety & Fitness

Sport Safety and Risk Management

Basics of Special Olympics