ACF celebrates 10 years of cricket coaching education in the USA

The ACF Coach Certification Programme, managed and run by the renowned Jatin Patel, multi-sport coach, Cricket Hall of Famer and Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, celebrates its 10th anniversary this week.

Launched in May 2014, the unique cricket coaching certification programme is designed from an American coach's perspective of how educators in schools and colleges understand and teach the game to students. By following these guidelines to educate Americans for sport cricket, it is expected that coaching cricket to American boys and girls would be much easier, as well as certifying coaches based on coaching techniques used by American sports coaches.

The Level 2 coaching certification programme was launched a year later in 2015. Prior to the 2020Corona pandemic, ACF partnered with Omtex Sports in India to launch T20-based global virtual coaching programmes. ACF has also been actively involved in a few statewide school education programmes in the USA,

To date, ACF has conducted 86-weekend coaching clinics, some with the cricket legends, to train coaches in most of the states, including many teachers, educators and future physical education teachers trained at nine universities in the last ten years, and many physical education teachers at the elementary school level,

The Level 1 school programme consists of coaching the fundamentals and introducing cricket as part of the school PE curriculum.

ACF Level 2 certified coaches are trained to provide training to Level 1 coaches and there is a sufficient number of coaches available to do so on a year-round, on-demand basis. By May 2024, there will be more than 500 ACF Level 2 certified coaches in the USA, not including out-of-state coaches, school and college instructors.