The level 5 coach's conference took place on 21st - 23rd of January. The venue was the all new Tollymore, National Outdoor Centre for Northern Ireland. The new building is really beautiful designed and is comfortable with plenty of social areas and lecture facilities.
The conference itself was excellent and is always a great opportunity for BCU level 5 coaches to share coaching methodologies and theory and how all these new ideas translate into practice. It is also an opportunity for aspirants who are on their 3 year mentored and practice year to find out about and question the assessment process.
Dave 'The Bullet' Carrol opened the conference with a presentation questioning the very reason why we paddle and are coaches guilty of taking ourselves too seriously? Are we forgetting why people get involved in paddlesports by getting too bogged down in NGB bureaucracy and coaching jargon?
Following on from Dave was chartered business psychologist 'Stephen Gibson' who talked about mentoring v's coaching, achieving rapport and trust with students, recognising anxiety and giving feedback.
Professor Dave Collins delivered two excellent tutorials on the subject of memory retention and application, creativity in setting practice for longterm students. The later included theory of adventure sport coaching, classical v's Naturalistic decision making. Also discussed was a model of declarative knowledge, procedural and tacit knowledge. There are clearly similarities between coaching, youth work and outdoor education theory and practice. Dave's presentations were excellent and gave plenty of food for thought. Dave was responsible for drawing up the BCU coaching processes course and actually delivered the first course in NI at Tollymore back when it was a log cabin.
Olly Sanders presented the APC (association of paddlers and coaches) see the link above or click here http://www.apcpaddlerscoaches.co.uk/ Exciting times ahead for this initiative.
All in all it was a really great weekend of upskilling and getting up to speed with current best practice. Big thanks to all at Sprt NI & CANI who put in loads of hours work to bring the L5CC to Northern Ireland, especially Roger Hamilton, Ashley Hunter and Oisin Hallisy. See you all at the Brenin for the next one!
Finally CANI will publish the PP's from the lectures shortly and I will (with CANI's permission) put them in the resources section of this site. Well worth a read if you are a level 5 aspirant or someone progressing through the new BCU/UKCC coaching scheme.
