The Coach Accelerator

Your Fastest path to coaching mastery

dodge the pitfalls, get to coaching mastery, Live your dream

After an initial period of enthusiasm, most coaches bump up against limits of confidence, knowledge, and real-world experience. You want the best possible performances for your athletes, but which philosophy should you choose? How can you communicate effectively with your clients, but not spend all your time communicating? How can you structure your business to serve your athletes and your life? At The Coach Accelerator, we’ve identified the biggest mistakes many coaches make in their professional development and teach them to leap those pitfalls. The end result? Masterful coaching achieved faster and improved outcomes for any athlete with whom that coach works.

Who we want

If you’re a coach in your first year or two, or an athlete thinking about coaching, you are who we want in the Coach Accelerator. If you’re passionate about making other athletes faster, happier, and healthier, then we want you. If you’ve started coaching as a small side hustle but want to make it your full-time gig, this is the place for you. At Campfire Endurance Coaching, we hold the following values dear:

• “Fast” and “Slow” are relative terms, relevant only to the athlete at hand. Also, “slow” is never really a helpful word.

• A happy and confident athlete is one poised for success, and it is our job to move the athlete in that direction.

• Understanding the athlete through and through is a precursor for a successful coach-athlete relationship.

• However our athletes behave, in success or failure, we keep our egos out of their experience.

• Sarcasm of any kind has no place in good coaching.

• There is nothing wrong with being last, and there is no moral achievement in being first.

• An athlete’s physical and mental development is our primary goal—success will follow from achieving that goal.

• We think long-term, over several seasons, imagining and then realizing the transformations our athletes seek.

• Our ultimate goal is to create sport mastery, in effect eventually making ourselves obsolete.

• We are lifelong learners who never settle, always finding (but evaluating thoroughly) new approaches to coaching.

Doesn’t all of that sound amazing? If you are on board with those approaches, but maybe have struggled to articulate them, then we will teach you how to live these values with athletes, seeing them grow and succeed.

REQUIREMENTS

The only thing we ask is that you have your USA Triathlon Level I certification. It’s possible you don’t have that certification, but have significant coaching experience. If that is the case, please note it on your application and we can discuss on a case-by-case basis.

How and how long?

The Coach Accelerator is a 12-month program, over the course of which we will teach you the Campfire Endurance Coaching approach to success at any level: beginner to professional. You will work with real athletes, writing their coaching programs while being mentored by the head coaches in every facet of coach development. You will get real-time contact with Chris and Molly as they teach you monthly lessons and follow-up on the coaching plans you write. This coaching apprenticeship model will let you do real coaching without ever straying too far from a sensible approach—this is where we have made the mistakes for you, and can steer you away from the classic pitfalls of young coaches. Over the course of twelve months, led by the head coaches, you will learn the following:

• How to communicate empathically, but also scientifically

• How to coach qualitatively as well as quantitatively

• How to leave your ego at the door when coaching

• How to discern an athlete’s motivation and then how to feed it effectively

• What pieces of equipment are necessary, nice, or just fancy

• Best practices for developing an endurance athlete’s aerobic engine

• How often (and what kind) of technique work you should prescribe

• When speed work should appear in an athlete’s program

• Macrocycle (year-long or longer) design for each sport and for triathlon as a whole

• Workout design for all three sports

• What place testing has in endurance sports and how to evaluate any kind of test or testing equipment

• What zones/ranges really are, and how to set them up to ease communication between you and your athletes

• Mental development best practices

• How to help an athlete set goals for a race and execute a race

• How to set up and build your own coaching business

That’s a lot, but really it only scratches the surface. You’ll be the beneficiary of Chris and Molly’s several decades in the sport and in the business, priming you for long-term success in an industry where coaches start strong but often fade, overwhelmed by the the wide spectrum of athletes and approaches out there. We’re confident that we can set you up with a framework for success, one that will provide you with a good answer most of the time, and an equally powerful response when you don’t know the answer.

What you’ll get and what it costs

When you join The Coach Accelerator, you’ll learn everything we outlined above, but you’ll also get paid. Coach Accelerator participants work with real athletes, and you will see a portion of those athletes’ coaching fees. Paying you defrays some of the overall cost of The Coach Accelerator and sends a powerful message to you and the athletes you work with: this is real. You’ll also get regular semi-monthly (that’s twice a month—it’s confusing) meetings with Chris and Molly to answer questions about your athletes and to go through that month’s lessons. Just as we do with our athletes, you can contact us any time via email or text (well, maybe not any time—boundaries are important in your coaching life). As lifelong educators, we’ll always have your coaching development in mind. You’ll also be able to put our successful coaching methods to work in your own racing, seeing how they work for you and how you might tweak them for your experience. But most of all? You’ll learn how to think big picture with your athletes, coming to understand that fads come and go and that a good coach is a great filter of information for their athletes. If that is the only thing you learn over the course of a year, it would be worth it.

Coach Accelerator Apprentice Coaches take home a percentage of their athletes’ fees each month, with the remainder of those fees going to Campfire to cover tuition, software fees, and the associated costs of coach development. After accruing a set number of athlete-months, Apprentice Coaches will have the opportunity to step up their commitment, their athlete load, and the percentage of revenue that they take home each month. After the entire program is complete, we’ll talk about your future as a coach, and whether you’d like to work with Campfire Endurance Coaching as one of our permanent coaches.

Ready to start?

If you’re ready to take your coaching from a side hustle to the main event, then you should apply below. You can spend years making mistakes on everything from workout development to your business taxes, and what you want to be doing is to be helping athletes and improving your coaching game. We’re going to accept three budding coaches for the inaugural year of the Coach Accelerator, firing your career into orbit and setting you up for long term coaching success. Apply now.