12
Hand-picked AIS coaches in the pilot cohort
CASE STUDY · ELITE SPORT
Coaches teach athletes how to perform at their best. Then forget how to do it for themselves. So we started with the coaches, not the content.
re cap
12
Hand-picked AIS coaches in the pilot cohort
5
Feedback rounds, one after every second unit
10
Units rebuilt for high performance sport
reason
A high performance coach spends every day looking after the wellbeing of someone else. The athlete's preparation. The athlete's recovery. The athlete's headspace, mood, sleep, body, life. By the time the coach gets home, the work of looking after themselves is rarely top of the list.
The AIS came with evidence, too. They ran their own literature audit, a national coach survey and a series of co-design workshops. All three found the same thing. Wellbeing support for coaches was scarce, mostly mindfulness-based, aimed at the individual rather than the system, and almost never evaluated for whether it actually worked. Coaches described the support they could find as fragmented, and said they were navigating it alone.
One line in that research shaped everything that followed. Coaches cautioned against superficial interventions, because superficial interventions are frustrating. So a workshop series was out. An app was out. A wellbeing week was out. What the coaching community did not have was something with the depth, the rigour and the credential of real professional development.
"There's no point chasing the final one percent of performance gain until you've nailed the ninety-nine percent first. Wellbeing is that ninety-nine percent."
Bill Davoren, HP Coach Development Manager, AIS
The Cert IV in Wellbeing Science already teaches what high performance coaches needed. The science of being human. The tools to manage your own emotions, energy, relationships and recovery. Then, once you have applied it to yourself, the qualification to apply it with others. The question was whether the language, the examples and the assessments could be re-cut for the world coaches actually live in.
We didn't write the AIS edition first and hope the coaches would like it. Twelve hand-picked coaches enrolled in the Cert IV in its standard form. After every second unit we sat down with them and asked one question. What needs to change for this unit to land harder inside a high performance environment?
The vignettes. The scenarios. The portfolio. The assessment briefs. The language. Every answer was captured. Every answer fed back into the rebuild.
None of these are cosmetic. Each one came from a coach saying the same thing twice in a room, and each one changed the build.
The history lesson went. The foundation unit opened with the global history of wellbeing science. Coaches said it read as academic and slow. It now leads with why this matters to a high performance coach in week one.
Ten uploads became one artefact. The original design asked for a separate submission per unit. Coaches called it administrative. It is now a single Wellbeing Portfolio a coach builds and owns across all ten units, in whatever medium suits them.
There is no typical week. The environment audit asked coaches to review a typical week. In high performance sport that week does not exist. It now asks them to choose a context, training block or competition and travel, and audit that.
Typing stopped being the only option. Coaches do this work in airports, hotel rooms and between sessions. Voice and video evidence is now accepted wherever the assessment allows it, and the whole build is mobile-first to WCAG 2.2 AA.
Travel. Time zones. Foreign hotel rooms. A season that does not stop because you need a quiet week to study. Those are not edge cases for a high performance coach, they are the job.
So every task is sized to be realistic around coaching workloads, and the whole course goes where the coach goes.
“Coach wellbeing is mandatory, not optional. This is part of the job.”
“It's improved my wellbeing and my effectiveness as a leader of people, a husband and a father.”
“Taking action has made low-level, ongoing draining stresses less draining.”
Before any of this was designed, the AIS built its own evidence base on coach wellbeing. A literature audit, a national survey, focus groups, and a stakeholder study. Every one of those findings is published openly on the AIS Coach Wellbeing Hub. The course was built on top of them.
Audit the evidence. The AIS reviews what is actually known about high performance coach wellbeing, and what isn't.
Ask the coaches. A national survey. Coaches across the Australian system describe the enablers and the barriers in their own words.
Go deeper. Forty coaches across six focus group workshops around the country, on what support would genuinely help.
Publish all of it. Every finding released openly by the Australian Sports Commission. Nothing held back.
Open the doors. The qualification goes live on the AIS Coach Wellbeing Hub, and registrations open to the national coaching community.
The six studies behind this work are published by the Australian Sports Commission and free to read on the AIS Coach Performance Wellbeing hub.
re built
re:cognition was signed as a non-exclusive Official Supplier of the Australian Institute of Sport in 2026. The first open cohort commences August 2026.
New unit guides, workbooks and assessments, grouped into learning blocks and completed in order. Accreditation maintained the whole way through.
High performance coach vignettes and AIS expert segments shot with the people the next cohort will recognise. Real stories about pressure, travel and identity, not testimonial B-roll.
Self-paced, mobile-first, with every video, diagnostic, activity and portfolio in one place, and a re:cognition Student Support Coach assessing every unit.
The contextualised Cert IV now sits inside the AIS Coach Education program, alongside the development pathways coaches already know.
Beyond elite sport.
Elite sport is not a special case. It is an early one. If you have a workforce carrying the human side of the job with no structured way to build the capability, the conversation starts the same way it did with the AIS.
11250NAT Certificate IV in Wellbeing Science is nationally recognised training owned, delivered and issued by re:cognition, National Provider No. 40655. The Australian Institute of Sport is a customisation and delivery partner, not the registered training organisation. re:cognition is a non-exclusive Official Supplier to the AIS under a supply rights agreement with the Australian Sports Commission.
