Whilst the issue of how to best educate sports coaches in the UK persists there is, however, a consensus that the use of informal learning helps foster deeper engagement with the process of reflection. This consensus outlines how the cycles of experience, consideration of practice, and subsequent future action can challenge existing coach behaviour and develop greater self-regulated skills of reflection. In this context, this study builds upon previous work advocating the benefits of experiential learning and uses the Higher Education (HE) context. It does this through exploring a non-campus based one academic year coaching experience that 48 student-coaches enrolled on sport coaching programmes highlighted. Using a qualitative approach, specifically journal and autobiographical entries, recollections of their coaching ‘journey’ were chronicled. Findings revealed that the use of external, longer learning processes challenged them in a way that other shorter based incidences of coaching and traditional, classroom-based learning could not. Their recollections also emphasised that any meaningful changes in their coaching practice had come from what they termed ‘real-world’ coaching, a term that repeatedly appeared as a consistent theme, and that unique challenges within the context of physical practice could lead to a ‘flow’ state and greater meta-cognition.