I started another class this past week, a Sports Management course about the human resources side, so I spent yesterday focusing on that and now I am back on this Saturday doing some more tweaking to the Life After the Games brochure plus reviewing the Athlete365 material promoted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). My first concern was whether I would even be able to access the course, considering I was never an Olympian. I thought that maybe they had some sort of procedure where you had to show proof that you have competed in the Games. As it turns out, no such procedure exists. I was able to create an account to log in. I took the course called Life After Sport incognito, meaning I used a fictitious name, one of a character from a manuscript I wrote a few years back but have not had published.
The site itself does not appear to be a centrally-coordinated effort like our program. I liken Athlete365 a lot to LinkedIn Learning, which has videos on a variety of subjects on professional development. Athlete365 has a presenter delivering high-level talking points about the subject at hand. The course on Life After Sport is definitely not as in-depth as what the ICC wants to offer. This is only one course out of many, but so far my hypothesis that our program is not like Athlete365 is correct. I will need to try another course of the IOC’s just to be sure, and I plan to do that tomorrow.