From an international perspective, it is indispensable to shed light on the education and certification of sports coaches within different countries in order to exchange good practices and facilitate international collaboration. This article highlights the past, present and future of coach education in Flanders, Belgium. A historical overview of the main initiatives of public, private and academic partners and their shifting relationships with regard to coach education provides insight into the establishment of the current Flemish School for Coach Education, a unique cooperative association between the public government, private sports federations and academic institutes for physical education. Key elements of the Flemish coach education system are presented: mission, organisation and partnerships, framework, competence model, learning pathways/culture and quality assurance. Important future steps involve the transition from a linear framework to a context-specific and nonlinear alternative, based on long-term athlete and coach development models, rethinking coach competences for all programs and implementing a blended learner-based approach with more focus on unmediated, nonformal mediated and internal learning situations.

As large-scale coach education programs receive a growing amount of attention and investment (e.g., human and financial resources), the case for increased understanding of their impact is a pressing matter. In this paper, the authors outlined the creation of the Flemish Interactive Coaching Monitoring System (FICOMS) within the Flemish School for Coach Education (Belgium). The FICOMS is a data warehouse consisting of multiple databases, which was set up in 2019 to integrate data on coach education and coach certifications (1960–present), active coaches within club-organized sports (2014–present) and sport clubs, sports participants, and sports infrastructure. The FICOMS provides a variety of interactive and externally facing dashboards with useful statistics on coach education and coaching in Flanders. For example, the evolution of dropout ratios of qualified versus nonqualified coaches in sports clubs and sports federations can be identified, as well as the evolution of the percentage of qualified coaches in a specific sport, sports federation, or gender, or regional differences. By describing the main characteristics of FICOMS and sharing some emerging insights and early possibilities, the authors aimed to clarify the potential of this information technology for different stakeholders, such as governments, policymakers, sports federations, Olympic committees, education partners, municipalities, and researchers.

Alongside knowledge and understanding of the sport (what to coach) and strategies to support learning (how to coach), critical reflection is an important feature of high-quality coaching practice. Accordingly, there is a clear need for evidence-based tools and frameworks for appreciating and developing coaches’ critical reflection skills, through coach education programs. The purpose of this study is to share the results of an intervention intended to develop coaches’ critical reflection skills through a formal gymnastics coach education program within the Flemish School for Coach Education (Belgium). A pre–post test design was used to compare the development of written critical reflection skills in 25 gymnastics coaches (14 intervention and 11 control). Statistical analysis of data revealed that the intervention had a significant (p < .01) impact on the quality of coaches’ critical reflection. Coaches exhibited a positive, upward, trajectory from descriptive verbalizations to a deeper level of self-awareness, and greater criticality, along with demonstrating a willingness to adopt alternative ideas/approaches. Findings are discussed in relation to existing research on critical reflection as a feature of coach education. This study offers a unique critical reflection strategy that has the potential to meet the learning development needs of coaches in a formal coach education program.