The MAPLE Framework: A Child-Centred Coaching Model for Martial Arts

Why the MAPLE Framework is the key to child-centred coach

Ben started training with us when he was five years old. I don’t think he would be insulted if i suggested that he wasn’t a standout kid. He was generally quiet and a little unsure of himself. As he got a little older, he moved out of our young children’s programme and into our mainstream Taekwondo programme.

When it came to sparring, he spent most of the time running away. Not metaphorically but actually. He would physically turn away from a technical exchange and even throw himself on the ground to avoid getting kicked. If you had been looking around the class for future black belts, champions or coaches, you wouldn’t have been looking Ben’s way.

He stayed anyway. Not because he was exceptional, but because we never made him feel like he wasn’t. Over time, things slowly changed. His sparring started to improve and he showed an interest in competing. Although he was tall for his age, he struggled with the physicality of sparring. With support and a little time his performances slowly improved and he started to win the odd match. At cadet level, he won his first open competition and at junior level, he became a British Champion and took part in his first high level international competition.

Towards his mid teens he started to show an interest in coaching, so we took him on as apprentice at 16. At 22, he is still on our coaching team and also contributes to the very project you’re reading right now. He went from being a shy, slightly awkward young kid in to a great coach that still competes on a regular basis. He still enjoys competing but spends more time inspiring the next generation of students. In his personal life he owns his own car, pays in to his pension and is currently saving for his first house, all while doing work he loves.

The funny thing is, Ben isn’t the exception. Everyone of our coaches trained with us as children and none of them were the athletic kids that could turn their hand to any sport. They continued to train with us into adulthood because we built the experience around them, we didn’t try shoehorn them in to a rigid martial arts system that had remained unchanged for over 100 years. We took a child-centred rather than a coach or martial arts centred approach.

That’s the core idea behind the MAPLE Framework and it’s what this article is about.

Most retention problems in martial arts can’t be fixed by adding more techniques to your syllabus, giving out more stickers/certificates, adding more belts to your system or moving to your ultimate dream supercentre. They are fixed by creating a safe and inclusive environment, taught by coaches that care, using a curriculum built with children in mind. If you can tick those three boxes, everything else will fall in to place. Kids have fun while developing skills, parents are happy, coaches enjoy their work and your club grows without you having to become a marketing expert. The MAPLE Framework is how you make that happen in practice.

What child-centred coaching actually means ........and what it doesn't

Child-centred coaching does not mean soft coaching, letting the children do whatever they want, abandoning structure or lowering your standards. If anything, it asks more of you as a coach, not less. More preparation, more observation, more asking questions, more conscious decisions. The idea that structure and high standards are somehow in conflict with putting children first is one of the most persistent myths in children’s sport coaching and martial arts is no exception.

So what does it actually mean?

At its simplest, child-centred coaching means building the experience around the child rather than around the martial art, the coach or what the parents want. It means asking “who am I coaching and what do they want AND need?” before you decide what to teach or how to teach it. Approaching coaching this way shifts focus from teaching techniques to creating an experience built around the child.

I started my own martial arts training back in 1990 and started coaching in 1996. I have to say that training and coaching were very different back then. As students we learned a syllabus, passed our black belt (based on our ability to perform the martial art) and became an instructor. No knowledge of coaching, motivation or development required. All we had was a technical syllabus and we delivered it the same to whoever turned up. We had some success with this approach for self motivated adults but children are different. Not slightly different but fundamentally different in how they learn, what motivates them, how they respond to challenge and the best way to help them develop skill. The number one rule repeated throughout coach education is that “children are not mini adults”. Once you start understanding how different children are physically, psychologically and socially [LINK: stages of development links], it will change your approach to coaching children forever.

The mindset shift is from instructor to facilitator of learning. In a traditional martial arts class the instructor is often the source of all discipline. They set the rules, monitor compliance and apply consequences. Being a hyper teenager myself during the 90s, i did my fair share punishment press ups and burpees. While this operant conditioning methodology might produce a well-behaved class, it does nothing to produce self-disciplined children. Self-discipline has to grow from the inside. Children need opportunities to practise making good choices, regulating their own behaviour and connecting their actions with outcomes. Your job is to create the conditions for that to happen. [LINK: Self-control and delay of gratification — existing article]

This connects directly to one of the most important questions you can ask yourself as a children’s martial arts coach: is your coaching philosophy actually aligned with the service you say you provide? Most clubs market confidence, self-discipline and resilience. Not all of them coach in a way that genuinely develops those things. [LINK: Coaching philosophy — existing article]

Most of the children you coach will never compete at the highest levels of your martial art. Most will not go on to teach. But the resilience, self-belief and life skills they develop in your classes will go everywhere with them. That is the real return on a child-centred approach. Hopefully they will remember some of the techniques you taught them over the years too.

That is the philosophy behind MAPLE. The rest of this article is about how it works in practice.

Why children quit and what actually keeps them coming back

Ask most martial arts coaches why children at their club drop out and you will get one of a handful of familiar answers. They moved schools. They got into football. The parents couldn’t make the times work anymore. They want to try some other activities. These things happen and some of them genuinely are outside your control. But the research into dropout from youth sport tells a more nuanced story that is worth understanding in a little more depth if you are serious about retention.

In a study examining youth participation trends across 18 different sports and 27 countries, dropout from martial arts from the under 8s to under 18s was the second highest of all the sports measured. Between 70 and 90% of registered participants in martial arts disengage by age 18. That is a striking figure for an activity that markets itself specifically on building confidence, self-discipline and resilience.

The reasons children leave are not what most coaches assume and they change as children get older. Understanding this difference is one of the most practically useful things you can take from this section.

For younger children, the research is reasonably clear. A study by Cope et al. identified five factors consistently linked to children staying in sport: their perception of their own competence, fun and enjoyment, their parents, learning new skills and making or maintaining friendships. What is not on that list is also worth noting. Probably surprising to many, extrinsic factors such as stickers, winning, trophies and certificates don’t even make the top 5. The things many clubs spend a significant amount of energy and resources on are not what keep younger children training. For this age group enjoyment and intrinsic motivation is central. This comes from being engaged, challenged at the right level, having fun with their friends and being involved in varied and interesting sessions.

This is where Self Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, gives us the most useful and well researched frameworks. Their research identified three core psychological needs that produce intrinsic motivation. This kind of motivation keeps children participating because they want to, not because they have been nudged or rewarded into it. Those needs are competence, autonomy and relatedness. [LINK: Self Determination Theory — existing article]

The perception of competence is critical for younger children. They don’t necessarily need to be able to do everything you ask them to do, but they do need to feel like the task is within their reach. Where possible you want to set tasks in their Goldilocks zone. This is where the activity is not too hard but also not too easy. Too easy and they disengage. Too hard and they give up when they feel the goal is out of their reach. Getting the difficulty level right for every child in a mixed ability class is one of the hardest and most important things you will do as a children’s martial arts coach. This is where the skill of differentiation is really important. [LINK: future article on differentiation and challenge point]

Autonomy is the sense that a child has some ownership over what they are doing. This does not mean you need to throw structure out of the window and let them do what ever they want. It just means that coaching should be a two way interactive activity, where you work together to build trust and understanding. With your youngest students, autonomy may look like asking questions and valuing their answers. In the older age groups, you may work together to build custom mini training programme for outside your regular classes. For some of the mid teen students it may even look like asking these students if they want feedback from you. Solving problems for our students may feel like the right thing to do in the moment but as well as reducing autonomy, it can also reduce opportunities for them to build the resilience and confidence that comes from solving your own problems. By all means scaffold the learning, but try to resist removing the learning opportunity entirely.

Relatedness is the social connection piece of the puzzle. Children who have genuine friendships in your class are significantly harder to lose than children who feel like they are training alongside strangers. The beauty of martial arts programmes is that children get to train as part of a team but progress in their own time. A coach who knows their students, uses their names and notices when something is off is providing something no amount of technical instruction can replace. Out of all the things you can do to build connection, showing students that you see them and care about them as a person as well as their development is the thing that often sticks with them. Ask any adult about a coach or teacher they remember fondly and it probably won’t be because of their ability.

The picture changes as children move into adolescence. Research led by the head of my doctoral supervisory team, Sergio Lara-Bercial at Leeds Beckett University, examined dropout across seven European countries. The three biggest reasons older children leave sport are not what most coaches assume. Top of the list was competing demands on time, particularly schoolwork. Second was finding other activities more enjoyable than sport. Third was the stress of not performing as well as expected.

The time issue is largely outside your control. Schoolwork, exams and social lives will always compete for an adolescent’s attention. But the other two are very much within a coach’s influence. If a teenager is finding other activities more enjoyable than training, that tells you something about what your classes are offering them at that stage of their development. Adolescents need to be challenged, trusted with more autonomy and made to feel that what they are doing matters. If your programme for teenagers looks like a slightly harder version of your children’s programme, you have a problem. And performance stress is almost entirely shaped by the climate you create. A coach who reacts to mistakes with frustration, who compares children to each other, or who only praises the top performers is actively creating the conditions the research identifies as a driver of dropout.

The research also suggests that dropout for adolescents rarely comes down to a single cause. It is more often a gradual accumulation of small pressures, any one of which might be manageable on its own, but which combine over time to the point where stopping just makes sense. The researchers describe this as a dynamic tricky mix of big rocks, pebbles and sand. The big rocks are the systemic issues like time, competing interests and performance pressure. The pebbles and sand are the more localised factors. A loss of friends in the class. A coach who does not notice them. Sessions that no longer feel relevant to where they are in their development.

What this means in practice is that retaining adolescents requires a different conversation than retaining younger children. You are not trying to make training more fun. You are trying to make it worth the trade-off against everything else competing for their time and attention. That is about purpose, relevance, identity and belonging at a deeper level. It is about the child feeling that what they are doing in your club matters to who they are becoming. [LINK: future article on retaining adolescents in martial arts]

A word on belts, trophies and sticker charts. Extrinsic rewards produce short-term engagement but research consistently shows they undermine intrinsic motivation over time. When the reward becomes the reason a child trains, the training stops the moment the rewards stop feeling meaningful. This is why many clubs see a spike in attendance around grading time followed by a dip shortly after. The belt was the goal, not the training. The related research by Carol Dweck on growth mindset is worth a mention here too. Praising children for their effort and the process of improvement rather than their outcomes or natural ability produces children who are more motivated and more likely to stick with something when it gets hard. [LINK: Growth mindset — existing article]

One factor that applies across all ages and rarely gets the attention it deserves is the parent. My own doctoral research found that in the majority of cases it is the parent’s motivation rather than the child’s that brings a young child through your door in the first place. That is not a problem. It is just the reality of how most young children end up in activities. The problem comes when coaches focus entirely on the child and treat the parent as a spectator. When parents understand what you are trying to achieve, can see genuine progress and feel like partners in their child’s development, they become a big part of the reason a child keeps training. When they don’t, they quietly start looking at other options, often long before they mention it to you. [LINK: future article on parent engagement and communication]

Understanding what drives dropout at different stages of a child’s development is the foundation of everything that follows in this article. The MAPLE Framework is built around addressing these factors deliberately rather than leaving them to chance and doing so in a way that works for each individual child rather than for the class as a whole.

Retention by Payne: How to build a motivational flywheel

One bad experience can be the start of a spiral that ends in a child leaving your club. But the reason a single bad experience can take a child down is almost never the experience itself. It is what was or wasn’t already in place underneath it. Retention is built in layers and those layers are what determine whether a difficult moment becomes a problem or just a moment.

Over the last few years i have been working on a model i call Retention by Payne (The original model was called ‘Motivation by Payne’). It pulls together research from behavioural science, motivational theory and habit formation with what i have actually seen work across two full-time clubs.

The model has five layers, each one building on the last. Get the lower layers right and the upper layers become easier. Skip them and everything above feels harder than it should.

Environmental Design

The environment you create as a coach does a lot of the work before you have said a word. How a child feels when they walk through the door, who they see already training, how welcome they feel, what they do in the first sixty seconds. All of that shapes behaviour before coaching even starts. This is the world of nudge theory and friction design. Making the behaviours you want easy to do and the behaviours you don’t want harder to slip into.

The physical space itself is part of this. Is your venue clearly signposted, well lit, clean, uncluttered, and looks like an inviting place for children? Is there a place for parents to sit and watch comfortably? Can children easily find the changing areas, the toilets or where to put their shoes without getting lost or flustered? These things sound small but they are what determine whether a child steps on the mats ready to train or refuses to even take a step in to the training room.

Beyond the physical space, environmental design covers how you schedule classes, how you handle missed sessions, how you onboard new members, how you structure your payments, even how you place children on the mats before you start a class. Don’t forget that these consideration cover the environment for the parents as well as the child.

The social dynamics of your environment matter too. Children who see other children like them training will train. Children who feel like they are on the outside will think twice before stepping on the mats. We know from the research that children today are already more anxious than they have been in the past and for many, it will take time to get used to a new activity in a new environment.

Environmental design is the entry condition for everything that follows in the model. Get this layer wrong and it does not matter how inspiring your coaching is. The child was not going to be there anyway. [LINK: future article on environment design and onboarding]

Intrinsic Motivation

Once the environment is doing its job, the next layer is about making sure students build a connection with the training and take part in classes because they enjoy it. This is Self Determination Theory territory, which we touched on in the previous section. The three classic needs identified by Ryan and Deci are autonomy, competence and relatedness, but i would add purpose and variety to that list.

Autonomy is giving children some ownership over what they are doing. Not letting them run the class, but making training feel like something they are doing rather than something that is being done to them. Competence is the sense of getting better at something that is within their reach. Relatedness is feeling connected to the people they train with and the coach at the front of the room. All three of these came up in the previous section and are well covered in the research.

Purpose and variety are my additions to the classic three, based on what i have seen across two decades of running full time clubs.

Purpose is a child understanding why they are doing what they are doing. Not in an abstract philosophical sense, but in the practical sense of knowing what a drill is for, why a particular sequence matters, why this week looks different to last week. A child who is just going through the motions because the coach said so is having their autonomy and their purpose squeezed at the same time. A child who understands that today’s footwork drill feeds into next week’s sparring goal has a very different relationship with the session.

Variety is about keeping training genuinely interesting long term. Children are naturally novelty-seeking. We all know and understand that the students we teach need to put in the reps to improve but that does not mean that every rep needs to look the same. This does not mean reinventing the wheel every session. It means using games, play, rotating through different areas of your curriculum, introducing new equipment, running themed weeks, changing the group dynamic, anything that keeps the sessions feeling fresh. It is also why a nested rotating curriculum can work better than a linear one for children. It’s also why clubs that rely on drilling the same material in the same order month after month see their older children drift first. [LINK: linear vs rotating vs nested curriculum article]

Get these five elements working together and training becomes something children look forward to. That is the shift this layer is responsible for. The move from “i have to go to training” to “i want to go to training”. Once that shift has happened, the heavy lifting of the remaining three layers becomes a lot easier. [LINK: Self Determination Theory — existing article]

Self-Regulation

Children who train consistently over long periods have learned to keep turning up even when they do not feel like it. That is self-regulation. Learning to manage emotions, ride out motivational dips and keep going through the inevitable setbacks. No child is intrinsically motivated every week for a decade. There will be weeks where a competition did not go well, weeks where a friend left the club, weeks where they would just rather stay at home and play on their console (especially the teenagers).

Self-regulation is what carries them through those weeks. It is the bridge between intrinsic motivation and genuine habit.

It is also one of the few things martial arts is genuinely well placed to develop as a by-product of training. Every session gives children opportunities to practise managing frustration when a technique does not click, delaying gratification while they work towards a grading, staying calm when a sparring partner catches them with a good shot and keeping their effort up when their energy is low. The research on delayed gratification, going all the way back to the marshmallow test, shows that children who can regulate their impulses in the short term tend to do better in school, in relationships and in their careers. That is a big claim to attach to a hobby, but the evidence is reasonably well established. [LINK: Self-control and delay of gratification — existing article]

The key point for retention is this: self-regulation is a skill that has to be developed and it is developed through practice. A child who has never had to push through a difficult week in training will not suddenly develop the tools to do so when motivation wobbles. A child who has, probably will. This is why the coaching climate matters so much. Coaches who make the rewards immediate, who let children quit drills the moment they get hard or who step in and solve every problem for their students are quietly robbing them of the practice they need to build this layer.

Get this layer working and the weeks where they would rather stay home and play on their console, or the weeks after a disappointing competition, stop being the weeks that end their training. Self-regulation fills the gap that motivation has left behind. Once that is in place, the next layer becomes possible.

Habitual Behaviour

Consistent participation gradually becomes automatic. The decision of whether to come to training stops being a decision. It is just what happens on a Tuesday evening. I have been going to the gym at 6:30 AM Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning so long that it’s now automatic. My alarm goes off and i get up and start getting ready. While my brain is making up excuses on why i don’t have to go, my body is picking up my gym bag and walking to the car.

Research on habit formation from writers like Charles Duhigg and James Clear is clear on this point. Habits are how sustained behaviours are made possible without relying fully on willpower every single day. Duhigg describes the habit loop as cue, routine, reward, where a consistent trigger leads to a consistent behaviour, which leads to a consistent reward and over time the loop becomes automatic. Clear builds on this in Atomic Habits, arguing that environment and identity are what make habits stick rather than motivation or willpower.

For a children’s martial arts club this matters because willpower is not something you can always rely on from an eight year old. Or a fourteen year old for that matter. But a habit, embedded in their weekly routine and supported by their family and their coach, can carry them through the time where motivation alone would not be enough.

This is also where the work of the earlier layers really starts to pay off. A well-designed environment creates the cues. Intrinsic motivation produces the early reward that keeps the loop turning. Self-regulation keeps the loop running through the weeks where the reward feels further away. Get all three of those right and the habit forms almost by itself. Skip any of them and the habit never gets a chance to take root.

In practical terms this looks like consistent class times, consistent attendance, consistent expectations from home and consistent familiar faces on the mat. The child who trains on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for three years does not decide whether to come to training on a Tuesday evening. That decision was made a long time ago. It is just what Tuesday evenings are for. [LINK: future article on building the training habit]

Identity

The strongest retention happens when martial arts becomes part of who the child is rather than something they do. James Clear makes this point well in Atomic Habits. Behaviours that are tied to identity are the ones that stick, because stopping the behaviour would feel like stopping being yourself.

A child who identifies as a martial artist keeps training because stopping would feel like stopping being themselves. You see this in the children who describe themselves as martial artists to new people they meet. They wear their club hoodie when they are not at training, talk about their coaches and training partners in different parts of their social world. You also see it in the way they respond to setbacks. A child who thinks of martial arts as something they do might quit after a bad grading. A child who thinks of themselves as a martial artist will take the same setback, sit with it for a few days and come back in next week anyway. The difference at this stage is less motivation or willpower and more identity.

Like experience, Identity is not something you can hand a child. It grows over time. A well-designed environment, repeated positive experiences, the self-regulation to get through the hard weeks and the habit of showing up week after week for long enough that training becomes part of who they are. Get the lower layers right for long enough and it creates a flywheel effect that propels them towards the identity of a martial artist.

While you see this in professional sports clubs all the time, it’s less prevalent in martial arts clubs. Once you do reach it, it makes it difficult for your students to quit training. Children who train with you into their teens and twenties are not staying because the programme is novel or because the rewards are compelling. They are staying because this is who they are now and you and your club are part of the world they have built around that identity. [LINK: future article on identity-based retention]

Each layer feeds the next. A well-designed environment creates the conditions for intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation produces the early self-regulation that makes habitual behaviour possible. Habit, over time, becomes identity and when identity is in place, a child does not stay because they have to, they stay because that is who they are now.

These five layers work together to build the kind of retention most clubs never reach. If the layers are the what, MAPLE is the how. It is the coaching model i use to build each of these layers intentionally, class by class. [LINK: Retention by Payne dedicated page]

The MAPLE Coaching Model

Everything we have covered so far has been building towards this. The case for child-centred coaching. The research on why children stay and why they leave. The five layers that actually build long-term retention. Now we need a model for how coaches can bring all of this together in practice. That is what MAPLE Coaching Model was created to help deliver.

MAPLE stands for Martial Arts Physical Literacy Engine and the model is adapted from work originally done by one of my undergrad lecturers Dr Andrew Abraham and his colleagues at Leeds Beckett University. I have taken the core elements of that work, adapted them for a martial arts context and built it into something that works as a practical tool for coaches rather than just an academic model.

The model is best thought of as a magnifying glass. On the handle you have the coach’s WHY, which informs everything else. Inside the lens you have the four areas coaches make decisions about every time they step on the mats: WHO they are coaching, WHAT they are coaching, HOW they are coaching it and WHERE it is happening. At the centre of the lens sits our adapted version of the coaching process: Plan > Coach > Review > Research. Five elements, one cycle at the centre and each part informing the others.

WHY — The lens you look through

Your WHY shapes every decision you make as a coach, whether you realise it or not. It is made up of your personal beliefs, your experiences as a martial arts student and coach, your core values, your coaching philosophy and the educational influences that have shaped the way you think. Two coaches can look at exactly the same child and arrive at completely different decisions about what that child needs next, because their WHYs are different.

This is the element most coaching frameworks leave out entirely. Personally, I feel that is a mistake. If your coaching philosophy is to produce trophy winners, your classes will look very different to a coach whose philosophy is to build well-rounded young people who love being active. Neither is wrong on its own terms, but the WHY drives everything downstream. Getting clear on yours is one of the most valuable things you can do as a coach, because it turns every other decision in the model from a guess into something rooted in a clear sense of purpose.

WHO — Understanding who you are coaching

Before you decide what to teach or how to teach it, you need to understand who is standing in front of you. The WHO covers the wants, needs, motivations and developmental stage of every child in your class. No two children arrive with exactly the same starting point. Some are confident from day one. Others are barely holding it together. Some are naturally athletic. Others are still learning how to balance on one leg.

The SPEC lens is a useful way to think about this. SPEC stands for Social, Physical, Emotional and Cognitive development and reminds you that a child’s development happens across four different dimensions that do not always move at the same pace. A six year old might be socially confident but physically behind, or physically capable but emotionally fragile. Pitching your coaching at the whole child rather than just the chronological age is one of the biggest shifts child-centred coaching asks of you.

Knowing the WHO is what allows every other decision in the model to be a good one. Skip this and the rest of your coaching is a guess. [LINK: Stages of development — existing article]

WHAT — Your curriculum, not just your syllabus

The WHAT is your curriculum and if you have read anything i have written previously, you won’t be shocked to discover that it is bigger than your technical syllabus. A syllabus is the list of techniques a child needs to perform for each belt. A curriculum is everything you are actually developing in them. The techniques are part of it, but so are the FUNdamental Movement Skills and Functional Movement Patterns that make those techniques possible. So is the tactical understanding that helps the children apply their techniques in practice. So are the life skills that sit alongside all of it such as self discipline [LINK: Self Discipline – existing article], perseverance, respect, confidence. [LINK: New Lifeskills article]

A well-built curriculum also considers physical literacy. This is the child’s relationship with movement and physical activity across their whole life, not just inside your class. You are not just building martial artists. You are building children who will hopefully stay active into their teens, their twenties and beyond. Whether they do or not is partly determined by the experiences they have on your mats. [LINK: Curriculum structure — existing article]

HOW — The way you actually coach

The HOW is your coaching behaviour. It is the drills, the games, the feedback, the language, the way you run different session activities, the way you introduce a new technique, the way you respond to mistakes, how you develop skill. It is how you actually deliver everything your curriculum contains.

Most martial arts coaches spend far more time thinking about the WHAT than the HOW. We spend years learning new techniques, refining our syllabus and adding to our curriculum, but significantly less time examining how we actually coach. Part of this is because the WHAT is easier to develop. You can go on a course, learn a new technique and add it to your programme. The HOW is harder because it requires you to honestly examine your own behaviour on the mats.

But the HOW only works well when the other elements are already in place. Even the best coaching behaviours are ineffective when they are applied to the wrong child, on the wrong content, in the wrong environment, driven by a muddled WHY. A coach who develops their HOW without first getting clear on their WHO, WHAT and WHY often finds that their classes still do not quite work. The HOW was not the bottleneck. [LINK: Coaching behaviours — existing article]

WHERE — The environment and culture you coach in

The WHERE covers the culture, climate and context of your coaching. It is the combination of your physical training environment, the motivational climate you create, the relationships between the children in your class, the expectations you set, the rituals you build and the way you handle the moments that go wrong. It is the water your students are swimming in.

The important thing about WHERE is that you are designing it whether you mean to or not. Every time a child walks into your training room, they are being shaped by that environment before you have said a word. Coaches who pay attention to their WHERE do so deliberately and with intent. Coaches who ignore it still have one, it is just less likely to be the one they would have chosen. [LINK: Motivational climate — existing article]

The coaching process — Plan, Coach, Review, Research

At the centre of the model sits the coaching process itself. Plan a class, coach it, review how it went and research the things that came up in the review that you do not have a good answer to yet. The cycle then starts again in planning the next session, informed by everything you have just learned.

Most coaches do the first two. They plan a class (sometimes) and they coach it. The Review and Research stages are where the real development happens, both for the coach and for the children in their care. Reviewing a session honestly, asking what worked and what did not, is how you avoid repeating the same mistakes class after class.

Research is the element i added because only using the three classic stages felt too insular. A coach who only plans, coaches and reviews is drawing entirely on what they already know. Some of the best development ideas come from outside your own four walls. This can show up as a conversation with a colleague about something they tried, a book chapter that reframes a problem you have been wrestling with, a blog post that gives you a different way of thinking about something, a paper that explains why something you have been doing works or does not work. Research is how you make sure your coaching is not just a feedback loop of your own existing thinking.

This coaching process is what separates coaches who develop year on year from coaches who are still delivering the same classes they were a decade ago. A coach who plans well but never reviews is just coaching on autopilot with better paperwork. A coach who runs the full loop, even imperfectly, is the kind of coach the children in your classes will remember for the rest of their lives. [LINK: Reflection in and on action — existing article]

Where to go next

If you have made it this far, thank you for sticking with me. I know that has been a lot to take in, but that was always going to be the case. The shift to child-centred coaching is not something you make in an afternoon. It is a direction rather than a destination. This article is the map, not the territory.

You will have noticed that the article contains links throughout to cluster articles that go deeper on specific points. If anything you read sparked a question you want to chase down, those links are the fastest way to pick up the thread. You do not have to read the article again to find them. Just search the page for the topic and follow the link.

Where you go next beyond that depends on where you are and what you are looking for. Here are five different paths, each one pointing you towards the right resource for where you currently find yourself.

If you want to understand retention in more depth → Retention by Payne is the dedicated breakdown of the five-layer model we covered in Section 3, with more detail on each layer and how they interact. [LINK: Retention by Payne]

If you want to go deeper on MAPLE and its elements → The MAPLE deep-dive page pulls together every cluster article on WHO, WHAT, HOW, WHERE and WHY in one place. This is the route for coaches who want to work through the model element by element. [LINK: MAPLE deep-dive]

If you want a structured programme to actually implement this on the mats → The signature course walks you through applying the MAPLE framework in your own club, class by class, with the frameworks and tools that support each element. This is where the thinking becomes practice. [LINK: Signature course]

If you want free resources to start with this week → The resource library contains downloads, checklists, templates and other practical tools you can use straight away. No commitment, just useful things for coaches. [LINK: Resource library]

If you want to be part of a community of coaches doing this work → The Retention Network is the membership community for coaches who want to share ideas, get feedback and keep learning alongside other people who take children’s coaching seriously. [LINK: Retention Network]

A note on the article itself

This is the master article on the MAPLE child-centred coaching framework and the thinking that underpins it. My plan is to keep updating it as my own thinking develops, as new research comes out and as the cluster articles behind it grow. If you come back in six months, there will be things in here that were not in the version you read today. The core of the model will not change, but the examples, the links out to cluster articles and the research references will evolve over time. Bookmarking this page rather than just the cluster articles will mean you are always reading the current version.

A final thought

If you have spent the last twenty minutes reading an article about coaching children, you are already ahead of most coaches. Most do not think about this stuff at all. They coach the way they were coached, deliver the same syllabus every year and wonder why their retention numbers are not what they would like them to be. The fact you are asking better questions means the children you coach are going to benefit, whether you take the next step with me or not.

Come back to this article whenever you want. Pick a direction when you are ready. The work is worth doing.

Phill Payne

Phill Payne has been coaching martial arts since 1996. He holds a BSc and MSc in Sports Coaching and he is currently undertaking doctoral research at Leeds Beckett University. He is the creator of the MAPLE Framework and has worked with National Governing Bodies such as British Taekwondo to develop their national children's programme. He runs two martial arts centres and founded MartialArtsCoach.com to help coaches build sustainable, child-centred businesses.

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