Professor Sergio Lara-Berical: It Takes a Village to Raise a Sport Coaching Professor - Building the Evidence for Practice-Based Research

Professor Sergio Lara-Bercial will reflect on his journey to ‘accidental Professor’, and the need for practitioners to have adequate levels of support when transitioning into academic positions.

Professor Sergio Lara-Bercial was born in Madrid, Spain at a time of rapid change in the country. He fell in love with basketball early in life and was able to spend a few years in the lower pro-leagues before deciding to take a leap of faith and move to the UK with his high-school sweetheart. Professor Lara-Bercial has been a basketball coach for nearly 30 years at all levels of the sport, from community to senior international and has guided male and female teams to 18 national tiles. In the late 2000s Sergio started working for UK Coaching where he met the late Professor Pat Duffy, a life-changing event if there ever was one. Under Professor Duffy's guidance, he moved to Leeds Beckett University in 2011 to support the work of the International Council for Coaching Excellence and complete a PhD.

The ensuing 12 years have been a globe-trotting adventure working with an incredible amount of inspiring people dedicated to the development of sport coaching globally. As a result, Sergio has been involved in a wide range of projects and initiatives and published widely on a variety of coaching-related topics. He is also the co-founder of ICOACHKIDS, a global movement helping coaches put kids first in sport, and consults for multiple high-level organisations such as Nike, UEFA, FIBA, the IOC, and The European Commission. He lives in Salford with his wife Susana, their two children Luca and Dario and a Yorkshire Terrier named Charlie.

This lecture is part of Leeds Beckett University's Inaugural Professional Lecture Series.