Winston Crooke and James Weekes from the Nevis Cycle and Triathlon Club traveled to Trinidad to attend a four day Triathlon Community Coaching Course. This course was organized by the ITU (International Triathlon Union) and funded by the BG group, to enhance the performance of regional athletes with special attention to our youths. One of the aims is to ensure that young people receive the proper training and guidance that goes to making them better and injury free athletes.
ITU coaches Alan Ley, Gale Bernhardt and Tracey Shelley were responsible for guiding all the apprentice coaches from present from Antigua, St Kitts & Nevis, Grenada, Bermuda, Barbados, Tobago and the host country Trinidad.
All three head coaches were present at every session which began at 8:00 am and finished at 5:00 pm daily, for the entire 4 days, as they lead the assembled group through the basics of coaching at the community and club level. Normally this would be a very long day but because of the rich teaching and illustration, accompanied by the experience of the coaches it seem there was never enough time to absorb such healthy information. These sessions were not just verbal but we also had hands on practical work, where the couches would ask or create certain circumstances and have us elaborate or demonstrate how we would handle such situations if they were to arise. We were also placed into groups of three to deal with certain problems or create training schedules to accommodate various age groups.
It would take us forever to outline all the benefits of this course, we saw this course as very fitting, especially now that we are presently working on a youth Triathlon program, it also showed us that we are on the right track with investing our time to mold these young ones into future athletes. We now have added incentive to work with our kids and usher them to become bigger and better tri stars of the future.
Attending this course was not only educational, and informative, but it gave us the opportunity to meet with our peers from around the region, to cement those relationships and make new ones, plus it gave us the chance to see how our home grown program fitted in to the world view of Triathlon and kids involvement in the sport.
All in all we think the course was excellent and we look forward to attending the next course, which is a level 1 certification, to be even more informed in how to train and coach tomorrow’s Triathletes.
At the end of the final session we were all given certificates for completing the first level of this coaching course.
Many thanks goes to the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Affairs which made attending this course possible, we learnt a lot and we intend to put our newfound knowledge to good use.