UK Coaching is leading a nationwide recruitment drive to expand the coaching workforce across all sports, including archery, to ensure the nation has more opportunities to be active.
The partnership will see UK Coaching - a charitable organisation for physical activity and sports coaches -joining forces with Archery GB to help us overcome specific challenges around coaching recruitment and retention. The aim is to significantly increasing the number of coaches over the next ten years.
The announcement comes at the start of UK Coaching Week (6-12 June) - the annual national awareness campaign which encourages athletes, coaches and the public to celebrate great coaching.
Despite individual challenges, common themes have emerged around the need to inspire and create more opportunities for young people into coaching, as well as those from diverse communities. The collaboration will ensure coaching becomes more accessible, inclusive and innovative than ever before.
Coaches encourage people to be more active, more often, and positively influence lives and communities. A total of 6.6 million people (14% of the adult population) gave up their time to support others to be active from November 2020-21. However this is a fall of more than 3.1 million people compared to the previous year*, and follows a drop in numbers in the years prior to the pandemic.
To support the recruitment drive, UK Coaching has launched '#Born2Coach' - an initiative that aims to significantly boost the coaching workforce by inspiring people to become coaches and empowering current coaches to enhance their skills.
To begin your archery coaching journey find out about how to become an Archery GB Session Coach (Level One).
If you want to help archers take their archery to the next level, then the Development Coach (Level 2) course will give you the skills you need to be successful.
Mark Gannon, UK Coaching CEO, said: "As we learn to live with Covid and seek to recover from the challenges of the last couple of years, we want to play our part in supporting more people taking part in physical activity and sport. Coaches will be an important conduit for engaging a broader range of people from more communities in physical activity and sport, which will improve the nation's health and happiness.
"We are proud to be spearheading this industry-wide partnership to provide deeper insight into the life of a coach, and what great coaching looks and feels like. With the help of our network of physical activity and sports organisations we will empower existing coaches and recruit the next generation of coaches."
Lloyd Brown, Archery GB's Coach Development Manager, said: "As clubs rebuild from the impact of Covid, we're encouraging more people to come forward and develop coaching skills to support new and current archers. Being a coach is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have and we've recently made some big changes to our coaching courses to make it easier to learn about coaching.
Coaches are at the heart of archery, and it's our ambition for all archers to have access to positive coaching experiences. Our role in this to provide an effective system to support coaches in their development."
Archery GB has created our learning offer for coaches based on the following principles:
High quality: We strive to provide content that is high quality, relevant and engaging, whether online or practically. This is why we always turn to specialists in the design and delivery of content.
The power of peer-to-peer learning:Â We recognise that coaches learn a lot about what they know from other coaches, not courses. This is why we set up an online community for coaches, called Learning Curve.
Independent learners:Â It's coaches that need to have the most control over what, how and when they learn, and our job to provide this flexibility in our offer. This is why we now have modular based learning.
