Today marks the first day of UK Coaching Week 2025, and as we continue our strong collaboration with UK Coaching, we are thrilled to be official partners for the week! UK Coaching is a leading charitable organisation in the UK that supports over three million sport and physical activity coaches. 

This year’s campaign focuses on the theme #PassItOn, emphasising the power of sharing as it invites coaches, organisations, and the public to share the best coaching advice they’ve received. The purpose of this is to share coaching advice that has had the greatest impact, in order to spotlight how great coaching can have a lasting impact. 

Brilliant coaching advice can differ depending on the sport. A gymnastics coach may focus on flexibility, agility and individual precision, while a rugby coach will direct attention towards team strategy, leadership, and communication. Although we at Fight for Peace focus on boxing and martial arts, we recognise that there are valuable insights that coaches can share. 

At Fight for Peace, a key piece of advice that’s worthy of spotlighting is the opportunity to use skills learnt in sport for wider personal development. This idea forms the basis of our Life Champions course, which is undertaken by all our coaches and is fundamentally about helping young people develop, not solely into athletic winners, but life champions. 

By blending key characteristics, such as building resilience, with values like courage and solidarity, the Life Champions course teaches coaches how to incorporate additional elements into training that help young people be their best in both sports and outside in their lives. 

Staying humble is one such element that an athlete can develop. If you are too proud to accept that you made an error, or that the opponent was more skilled than you, you will never identify how you can develop and improve. In other words, both winning and losing enables you to learn about yourself. This can also be applied in life, such as when competing for a job. It’s important to respect your opponent, appreciate the chance to learn about your weaknesses, and remain open to growth.

Reaching over 200 coaches so far, the Life Champions course transcends solely combat sport and has supported coaches in gymnastics, badminton, football and basketball. The valuable feedback we’ve gathered demonstrates how this course is shifting both mindset and practice, as a young woman gymnastics coach shared: “I never knew that coaching had more to it than just being a coach.”

We also collected feedback from young people at Fight for Peace Alliance partner Tamworth Boxing Club, whose coaches embedded Life Champions content into their weekly boxing sessions. Two particular findings were worthy of note:

• The number of young people who said “I am good at working in a team” rose incredibly from 25% to 80%, 
• while those who said “I stay humble and thank others, whether I win or lose” increased from 45% to 95%. 

These gains reflect not just improved sporting behaviour, but stronger social and emotional skills. They are also a testament to the course’s accessibility and impact. As well as a demonstration of how sound coaching advice can be transformational and have a lasting impact on the coach and athlete. As eloquently worded by legendary basketball coach John Wooden; “a good coach can change a game, a great coach can change a life.”

So in the spirit of UK Coaching Week, we’ll be supporting the importance of passing it on by hearing from our coaches, who share advice and experiences that have profoundly shaped their lives and practices.

TWe are pleased to be running a Time2Learn session during UK Coaching Week on 6th June from 12- 1pm. This will focus on how coaches can build the confidence of young people outside of a strictly sporting environment, by presenting practical strategies and tools for developing essential skills for sport and life. Registrations are free and close at 23:59 BST on Thursday 5th June. You can register here: UKcoaching.org/time2learn.  

For more information on UK Coaching, check out here: https://www.ukcoaching.org/our-courses/courses/elffp