What's a coach
Coach! A bus? A football trainer? A 2-door enclosed automobile? Looking up coach in dictionary like Merriam-Webster won’t help you much further to know for what coaching is about. The first entry reads as following: “A large usually closed four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage having doors in the sides and an elevated seat in front for the driver.”
So, what does it mean? Where does it come from? The word coach entered the English language from France (la coche), coming from German (die Kutsche), but stemming from Hungarian. It’s one of the example where the place of origin gave the name for the product like Jeans (from Genua, in French Gênes) or Denim (French de Nîmes): The carriages built in the city of Kocs (not far from Vienna) were simply called Kocs, pronounce coch.
Around 1830 the word “coach” turned at Oxford University into a slang word for a tutor who “carries” a student through an exam. Thirty years later the word coach entered the sports world. From 1900 onwards business managers opened to scientific models, e.g. in the 1920 the Hawthorne studies. This included also methods of psychology. With the humanistic movement starting in 1960 managers were asked to treat employees well for better performance. Consequently, human resources journals referred to it and then management and training journals. In the 1970s the US-American business world discovered the real potential of coached managers as it literally can return you millions of dollars. Then, coaching really took off and became popular world-wide. Nevertheless, coach is not a protected profession. Anybody can present him- or herself as a coach. Thus, you should choose wisely. A short guideline could be: How to find the best coach.