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Qualifications of a Gaming Coach

Gaming coaches especially aim coaches popping up in the immensely toxic/gatekeeping environment to start to help people develop and become a coach but what are the true qualifications/requirements to become one. People will always throw around arbitrary requirements such as needing to be a top performer but something like this should always be a tiny part of what makes a good coach.

Recommended Prerequisite reading by RESPRiT: What is a Coach, Really?


Basic Qualifications

  • Have qualification or experience in teaching, analysis, or tutoring.

  • Have significant experience, understanding and active involvement in the specified activity.

Evaluation of a Coach

To arbitrarily evaluate someone’s strategy or theory analysis ability on statistics like accuracy, KDR, and win/loss in a ranked situation is not the most effective way to show competency in coaching and analysis.

It can be an indicator of pure mechanical expertise which is an important factor in overall skill, but there are more important skills to expound upon, such as communication, goal-oriented achievements, adapting to new situations and styles of encounter. These are things not every top performer can do.

For many players, their performance doesn’t always come from an explicit understanding of the tasks at hand. So they may not always fit the qualification of understanding the activity enough to analyse other players’ performance.

Different Levels of Coaching

When thinking about this you have to split the different levels of coaching and people’s proficiency with coaching qualifications or experience coaching like a coach focusing on new players requires knowledge of many different methods of teaching and to be highly adaptable. This is the case because of the greater number of beginners and the often lack of exposure to the correct techniques and methods of the players above their skill.

While then a coach who focuses on the best of the best is the proficiency of the analysis and development of techniques and less on adapting to the player cause most likely the player has and can learn to the strategies with analysis and their own experience to have the range of developed skills

But things like a beginner coach can be trained outside of the field or game as more people have gone through to the level that they are training too and it’s about refining the fundamental skills and giving that range to help more people.

Gatekeeping Culture

Now with a lot of the gaming community(even more so in the aiming community), there is a huge toxic environment surrounding the thing as simple as helping people. Often again they are always focused on how proficient people are within the field rather than the skills that I have talked about above. This makes sense for a surface level opinion because there is solid evidence correlating performance with knowing how to execute with proficiency. But it may not always be the case for everyone as you can be good at a game without knowing how you came to be good. But many popular coaches ignore this fact and all of the other information I have laid out in the above sections, so we need to really analyse these coaches and their motives behind this. Many popular coaches in various fields use their popularity to make a kind of monopoly through campaigns to takedown and harass people because of these aspects around their rank and such when they are never a good thing to focus on for a coaches ability to coach.

To overcome this see when popular coaches do this and if they are focusing on the right things and use the steps of evaluation to help with this. We need to get rid of it in every field and promote quality coaches for their coaching ability, not their ability to promote themselves. Plus with this, you can help out coaches who you think do good coaching by recommending them to others and such so we can get past these coaches who may not always be worth people’s money.

Coaches should be seen as good and uplifted for their coaching, not because of their reputation and popularity


Tags: gaming, opinion, aim training

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