October 22-24 was a big weekend for potential coaches and coaching facilitators from across Canada. 12 candidate coaches signed up to learn more about wheelchair basketball and five current coaches jumped at the opportunity to learn from the best at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC. A big thank you to all the players who came out over the weekend to give these coaches an opportunity to practice their new skills!
Tim Frick was the Master Learning Facilitator of the weekend, instructing the learning facilitators how to teach the candidate coaches the fundamentals of coaching wheelchair basketball: all high level coaches themselves, looking to follow in the footsteps of Tim Frick and become coaching clinic facilitators. It was late nights and early mornings for the five learning facilitators. Five time Paralympic coach Tim Frick spent the weekend imparting invaluable knowledge to coaches Marni Abbot-Peter, Cheryl Corrigan, Bill Johnson, Joe Higgins and Michael Broughton.
It was also a great opportunity for the candidate coaches. “We were very fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from some of the top wheelchair basketball coaches in Canada this weekend." Holly Tawse, one of the candidate coaches said “I’ve taken level one courses before, but this was amazing.”
”The candidate coaches did a great job. They were enthusiastic and very diverse in their approach to coaching” Kevin Bowie, a wheelchair basketball referee who was on hand to impart his knowledge and help-out with the final assessments of the candidate coaches after his evaluator training session. For many of the coaches this was just the first step in what we hope will be a long career involved in wheelchair basketball!
“It was a fantastic event. The evaluator training session was the first ever in Canada, and the Learning Facilitator training was the first ever in Western Canada. The quality of the Learning Facilitators was outstanding and that contributed to the overall success of the Introduction to Competition clinic. The effort and quality of participation by the candidate coaches really made the clinic come to life, and the local athletes who helped the coaches learn to coach were fabulous. Overall, the competence of our coaches at the grass roots level took a significant move forwards.” commented Coach Tim Frick.
Congratulations to Anthony Purcell, Cindy Lawson, Dylan Young, Holly Tawse, Lindsay Peake, Makiko Harada, Mitch Kosterman, Nathan Bragg, Neil Feser, Ross Norton, Steve Ryan and Greg Sadler for your efforts this weekend as candidate coaches!
