At Special Olympics, winning and losing are beside the point. Doing your best is the goal, and for millions of people around the world, Special Olympics coaching guides are the essential tool to bringing out the best in athletes of every ability.
Name your sport. Special Olympics coaching guides cover football, swimming, cycling, badminton, tennis and many other sports. Try a coaching guide.
Find Your Guide
Want to be a better swimmer? Want to learn how to swim? The Aquatics Coaching Guide is right here.
Are you a cyclist? Have you wondered about drafting, hopping over curbs, maintaining a solid cadence, or just how to go faster? The Cycling Coaching Guide is for you.
Ever heard of bocce? Do you ever wonder about the rules of badminton? Maybe you're a basketball, softball, football or soccer coach and want some tips. Find the rules for table tennis, volleyball, judo, bowling, floor hockey, figure skating, powerlifting and more.
Bringing Out the Best
Special Olympics developed its coaching guides as a way to bring out the best in its more than 3 million athletes with intellectual disabilities. At hundreds of Special Olympics sporting events around the world, the most victorious athletes are the ones who've achieved a personal best, and not always the ones who finished first, second or third.
Whether you're a coach, an experienced athlete or just starting out, Special Olympics coaching guides and rules are at your fingertips. The Coaching Guides and all their 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.
About the Coaching Guides
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 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. (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 Adobe Flash player.)
Rich Online Resources
To get the most out of the coaching guides, we recommend having Windows Media Player 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!
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| | What YOU Can Do | |
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| | - Get in touch with Special Olympics near you to see what you can do to help.
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| | Step forward and volunteer to be a coach at Special Olympics.
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| | - Get in the game by joining Special Olympics Unified Sports®, where people with and without intellectual disabilities train and compete together on the same team.
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