Our Coaching Internship Process
True story: I almost quit my coaching internship the night before I was supposed to coach my first part of a class.
I loved CrossFit and wanted to share it with other people. But the thought of standing in front of a group of people and telling them all what to do scared the heck out of me. I didn’t think I could do it. So I picked up the phone and got ready to text the owner of the gym to tell him I was out.
But then I thought that if the only reason I didn’t want to coach is that I was scared…that wasn’t a good enough reason.
So I put the phone down, went in to coach the next day, was totally terrified, stumbled through awkwardly. And then I kept coaching and kept stumbling through awkwardly, until finally I stopped feeling so awkward and started getting better at it.
I think the real turning point for me was when I realized that coaching group classes meant I had a captive audience for all my favorite dad jokes! But that did not happen overnight.
Searching for coaches - what we look for
We’ve had success with both external and internal hires. One reason we like to hire internally when possible is that the person is a known quantity and by the time they’re interested in coaching and we’re interested in training them, we’re fairly certain they are going to be a a good fit. We’ve generally seen whether they are responsible, friendly, a hard worker, honest, and want to improve. Internal hires usually don’t come with previous coaching experience, so we also have to believe they want to put in the work to be a great coach.
We can teach coaching skills and technical knowledge. We can’t teach a person to care. So we hire smart, dedicated, caring people, and teach them the skills they need to excel.
The internship process
1on1s
Shadowing classes
Assistant coaching
Lead coaching
After initial discussions, the coaching internship starts with a series of 1on1s where we teach movement standards, coaching progressions, common faults, and cues for CrossFit’s foundational movements and other movements we use regularly in class.
Once we have taught them, it’s the intern’s turn to coach us! They practice coaching us through all the movements they learned about in earlier sessions. We also demonstrate movement faults and have the intern practice giving us corrections, triaging to make sure they understand the most effective cue for a given fault.
Then we move on to shadowing classes. When shadowing, interns take notes on how we run the class and compare that to their own class plan. They develop their coaching eye by observing athletes in the class. The lead coach discusses with them what s/he is seeing, what corrections need to be made, and why.
Shadowing then leads to assistant coaching. In this stage, interns focus on seeing movement faults and effectively cueing members to fix them. Conversations here often involve the lead coach asking, “What do you notice about __?” … “What could they do to fix it?” … “OK, go tell them.”
After assistant coaching, interns start leading parts of classes, then full classes, with a head coach observing and assisting. At this stage, the intern’s job is to orchestrate the class as a whole, while the head coach gives more detailed feedback to individual members. We also debrief after every class, giving the intern at least one thing to work on improving in their next class.
A head coach continues observing the intern’s classes until we are confident in their ability to actively coach our members to improve while conducting an organized, well-run class.
Ongoing coach development
When the internship officially ends and the person has graduated to being a full-fledged coach, their education continues with ongoing evaluation and feedback, regular all-staff coach development sessions, and bi-annual reviews.
Even those of us who have been coaching the longest need to upgrade our skills and try to be a little better every time we coach. Complacency is the enemy!
I love coaching group classes now, and don’t get scared anymore. But even 10+ years into my coaching career, I never forget what it felt like to coach for the first time! It’s hard and there is a lot to keep track of. We strive to give our interns the right balance of challenge and support so they can effectively support our members’ fitness journeys and excel in their roles.