By Monday Nas Ozoya, MCIMSPA, MEASM, MIEEE, FIFA Guardians Safeguarding Platinum
Nigeria regularly discusses the shortage, cost, and availability of coaching qualifications.
A quieter question receives much less attention:
How many qualified coaches can apply basic training science safely, consistently, and appropriately to the players in front of them?
A licence confirms that someone completed an approved course. It does not automatically prove that their knowledge remains current, that they can apply it in practice or that they understand the different physical and psychological needs of children, adolescents, and adults.
Ask coaches to explain four areas:
1. Can you apply the SPORT principles?
SPORT is a useful introductory framework:
β’ Specificity: train for the actual demands of the sport and playing position
β’ Progression: increase demands gradually as the athlete adapts
β’ Overload: provide enough challenge to stimulate improvement
β’ Reversibility: understand that adaptations decline when training stops or is substantially reduced
β’ Tedium: introduce appropriate variation to support motivation and engagement
Knowing the words is not enough.
Can the coach translate them into an age-appropriate weekly programme? Can they explain why one activity is being used, what adaptation is expected and how the session will progress?
Without that connection, training can become habit, imitation or punishment rather than purposeful development.
2. Can you use FITT to structure training?
FITT asks four basic questions:
β’ Frequency: how often should the athlete train?
β’ Intensity: how demanding should the activity be?
β’ Time: how long should it last?
β’ Type: what form of training is appropriate?
Modern exercise prescription also considers volume and progression. However, even the basic FITT questions can expose weak session planning.
A long, exhausting session is not automatically effective. Fatigue is not proof that learning or physical adaptation has occurred.
Running young players until they are exhausted and calling it discipline is not a training methodology.
3. Do you understand progressive overload and recovery?
Improvement requires appropriate challenge. The body must experience sufficient stress to adapt.
However, training stress must be balanced with recovery, sleep, nutrition, match exposure, school demands, emotional wellbeing, and the athleteβs stage of growth.
The joint ECSS and ACSM consensus explains that overload can produce beneficial adaptation when followed by adequate recovery. Excessive loading without sufficient recovery can instead lead to non-functional overreaching and, in more severe and prolonged cases, overtraining syndrome. Overload without understanding is overuse with better branding.
The coach’s role is not simply to demand more. It is to determine when more is appropriate, how to introduce it, and when the athlete needs recovery.
4. Can you recognise warning signs?
Persistent fatigue, deteriorating performance, mood changes, disrupted sleep, loss of motivation, repeated illness and increased injury problems may indicate that something is wrong.
However, coaches should not diagnose overtraining syndrome themselves. Its symptoms can overlap with illness, nutritional problems, psychological distress, and other medical conditions.
The coachβs responsibility is to:
β’ monitor changes in performance and behaviour
β’ maintain appropriate training records
β’ speak with the athlete and parents where relevant
β’ reduce or modify training when warning signs appear
β’ refer the athlete to qualified medical or sports-science professionals
The International Olympic Committee recommends evidence-informed, holistic, and individualised approaches to youth development that protect health while supporting long-term participation and performance.
This is not an attack on Nigerian coaches.
Many grassroots coaches work with limited equipment, poor facilities, irregular income, and little access to sports-science support.
The problem is therefore systemic.
If coach education teaches scientific principles briefly, evaluates them once and never examines their practical application again, the system may produce certificates without ensuring continuing competence.
A credible national coaching framework should require:
β’ sports-science education at every licence level
β’ age and maturation-appropriate coaching
β’ practical assessment of session planning and load management
β’ safeguarding, first aid and emergency-action training
β’ periodic licence renewal
β’ compulsory continuing professional development
β’ mentoring and supervised practice
β’ access to sports scientists, physiotherapists and medical referral pathways
β’ simple workload, wellbeing and injury-monitoring tools
β’ education for parents and academy administrators
The objective is not to turn every coach into a doctor or physiologist.
It is to ensure that every coach understands the limits of their competence, applies sound training principles, and knows when specialist support is required.
The consequences of poor training design are not abstract.
They can show up as recurring injuries, burnout, declining motivation, disrupted education, and promising young players leaving the game before reaching senior football.
A playerβs development depends not only on talent, but also on whether the person designing their training understands adaptation, recovery, and long-term athlete welfare.
So here is the question for coaches, academies, and licensing authorities:
Could every licensed coach explain SPORT, FITT, progressive overload, and recovery to parents, and demonstrate how those principles appear in a real weekly programme?
If not, Nigeria does not simply have a coach-qualification problem.
It has a continuing-competence problem.
What requires greater attention: access to sports-science education, practical assessment, continuing professional development or stronger monitoring of academy training practices?
