Coaching Resume Samples and Guide | ResumeCoach (2024)

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Give your coaching resume a workout with professional pointers

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Written by

RC Team

Updated on August 10, 2023

Resume Samples

1. Candidate seeking basketball coach role:

2. Candidate seeking track and field coach role:

Coaching Resume Vocabulary & Writing Tips

Getting industry-specific terminology onto your resume is an essential part of your gameplan for getting hired. Most employers today useapplicant tracking software (ATS)to check that candidates can demonstrate a good understanding of the profession. Not working enough of these keywords and expressions into your resume could lead to your document being filtered out.

Additionally, when you’ve finished writing your resume, make absolutely sure you proofread the whole thing to ensure there areno spelling or grammar errors. Mistakes like these will simply see you ejected from the arena.

Coaching Resume Tips and Ideas

School sports are a big deal and institutions all over the country are on the lookout fortalented coaches to lead their football, track and field, and other sports teams. The rewards for getting your coaching resume right are almost as great as the thrill of leading your team to victory.

It takes someone special to coach a successful team. A good coach needs to bring the right mix ofstrategic thinking, great motivational abilityand a decent knowledge of physical fitness and the best methods to avoid injuries. All these elements and more need to be on paper when the hiring manager sits down to look at your application.

In the following guide, we’ll explain how you canoptimize your coaching resume so that it gets the attention of a recruiter easily. You’ll learn how to lay out your document so that it is easily noticed and how to get exactly what an HR person is looking for on the page.

If you’re looking tosave time and design your resume quickly, try out ourresume generator. This quick and easy-to-use tool will help you pick the right template based on your level of experience and select the most effective sections to get the job.

Format

In most cases, your coaching resume will be most effective if you use areverse-chronological format. This layout places the maximumemphasis on your most recent work experience, which coincidentally is precisely what a recruiter will look at first.

However, this is not the only option available. If you’rechanging career, or have less recent experience, you may opt instead for a combination format template. This style of resume places equal importance on your skills as well as your experience. In the case of coaching, your skills are almost as important as your career history, so you can still gain an edge with this format.

Design

To create an eye-grabbing coaching resume you should focus on making a document that is attractive but ultimately readable.Readability is the most important element of any resume design, as this will help your best achievements really stand out.

To do this effectively, you will need to start withclear and easy to identify sections. These should be explicitly marked with headers and arranged neatly in a segmented format. Each section should also be well separated with a good amount (although not too much) white space.

The text you use and how you lay it out is also important. To make sure that a recruiter can quickly read through and find your top achievements easily,write in a clear 12 point font and choose a legible typefacesuch as Times New Roman or Arial. Finally, to make your text extra distinct, break up the information-heavy sections of your resume into bullet points.

Photo

A photo is not required on your coaching resume. The hiring manager will be much more interested in your ability to lead a team rather than your appearance. In fact, for jobs in the USadding a profile photo could be disadvantageous.This is due to the fact recruiters might be worried of appearing to show bias that could fall foul of employment discrimination rules.

Sections of a Coaching Resume

To get noticed by an employer you need to include a mix of information. Principally, recruiters will want to know yourwork history, your abilities, and your training and education. Of course, they will need to know how to contact you otherwise your resume will serve no purpose at all. Therefore you should, at a minimum, include the following sections on your document:

• Contact information
• Resume objective/summary
• Work experience
• Skills
• Education

Obviously coaching is a versatile profession andeach candidate will bring something a little different to the field. In order to represent the different achievements and types of experience you might bring, you can also use one or more of the following optional sections:

• Volunteering
• Awards
• Achievements
• Hobbies and interests

Resume Length

The most effective resumes keep things short and concise.Thus it’s best to keep your document to just one letter page. However, if you’ve won scores of trophies and have decades of experience, you can consider extending to a second page. However, try and keep the length shorter where possible.

Coaching Resume Section Headings

Recruiters will often spend just6-10 seconds judging whether your resume is up to the task. Therefore, you’ve got to push to get their attention from the go. This luckily isn’t too difficult, the trick is to have a killerresume summaryorresume objective statementto launch your document.

This only takes a couple of quick sentences but in this short paragraph, you cangive the hiring manager just the incentive they need to keep reading. Try to get their attention with a few of your top achievements, a little of your personality and an idea of how your experience will fit the job on offer. Tailoring your summary or objective statement to the job description of the position you’re applying for will help you get the most from this section.

Work experience

Your work experience is the main event of your resume and you should aim to make it as relevant and focused as possible. In thework experience sectionof your coaching resume, you shoulddetail as many of your recent jobs as a coach as you can. For each entry add the name of the school or organization you worked with, the position you held, the dates you worked there and the main duties you undertook.

For each job you list on your document, be sure to include as many quantifiable achievements as possible.Refer to prizes you and the team won, detail the precise contributions you made and show how you have grown as a professional over the duration of your career.

This last part can be very easily done byonly listing the newest tasks you took on in your most recent jobs. By not repeating the same common tasks that you did in every job for each entry you’ll also keep your document sharp and concise.

Skills

Coaching is a very skillful profession, so you’re going to need to demonstrate that on your bio. Firstly you should showwhat hard abilities you will bring to the job. These can include one or more of the following:

• Coaching methods
• Sporting strategy
• First aid
• CPR
• Creating practice drills
• Goal setting
• Safety

However, being a trainer of peopleyou will need to bring some important soft skills that will help motivate and manage your teamand students. These more people focused skills include:

• Teamwork
• Leadership
• Approachability
• Organization
• Communication

Education

You don’t necessarily need a degree to be a great coach. In many cases,a high school diploma in youreducation sectionand relevant experience will be enoughto convince the hiring manager. However, if you’re going for a more competitive position a relevant BA in subjects like Sports Science or Sports Management could make the difference.

Aside from your formal education, you should alsodemonstrate some of the extra skills you’ve been formally training insuch as CPR and first aid. Institutions will want to see that you can maintain their safety standards and make sure everyone on the team is well looked after.

Finally, and most importantly, you will also needthe correct state license to coach sports. You may also need to provide evidence of a recent police background check, especially if you’re going to be working with children.

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