Kyle Bissell

Kyle Bissell has been coaching and studying how to best facilitate skill acquisition across sports since he was 15. Over more than three decades since, he has taught people to move and to learn across an unusually wide range of settings—as a ski and snowboard coach and leader within one of the country’s largest snow-sport schools, as the founder and head coach of a nationally recognized archery training center, as a physical educator, and as a developer of coaches on the national and international stage. That lifetime as a practitioner is the foundation for his work as a full-time faculty member and director of pedagogical support in exercise and sport studies at Smith College, where he builds a bridge between the science of motor learning and the everyday practice of sport coaches—a bridge he has spent his career standing on from both sides.

At Smith, Bissell teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in sports coaching, built the Introduction to Sports Coaching course around national standards and mastery-based learning, and facilitates the Motor Learning Lab within an NCACE Level V–accredited program, mentoring master’s candidates as they translate research into quality coaching behaviors. His doctoral research centers on the Skill Acquisition Strategies Scale, a first-of-its-kind instrument that measures how frequently coaches apply evidence-based motor learning strategies in practice—designed to become a foundational metric for coach education curricula and observer-based assessment.

That research is grounded in years of developing coaches at the highest levels—all told, coaches from more than 20 countries. Bissell founded and led the Sattva Center for Archery Training and spent more than a decade as a coach trainer, curriculum developer, and, most recently, education manager for USA Archery, overseeing a national pipeline of more than 6,000 coaches and serving as lead author of the Level III training manual and Level IV Coach course. He has led national symposia and international workshops—among them a seminar for World Archery and Olympic Solidarity that developed female coaches from 13 countries in San Salvador—and has presented for USA Archery and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee. In 2025 he was named Coach Educator of the Year by World Archery Americas, in 2023 he received USA Archery’s “Doc” Counsilman Science Award, and in 1997 Skiing magazine listed him as one of the best ski instructors for children in the United States.

Research Interests

Motor skill acquisition, coach development and coaching science, and the intersection of sex and gender in sport.