Development Officers Blog

Finally the snow covered mountain roads are clear to drive and access out of the top of the Rhondda Valley is now available. Despite my own travel issues, what else has been going on in the world of Coach Development in the Ospreys region?

Coach Ed Courses

In the past 3 months since December I've been really busy operating coach education course, along with my counterpart Tony Thomas. We have readily delivered seven Tag Leader Awards in addition to the WWRU Event, one Level 2 Award and one Level 1 Award. We are currently preparing our second Level 1 being held at Pyle RFC this month. AS I'm sure you can imagine, a tremendous amount of organisation and effort goes into these events, to ensure the candidates have a really positive experience. This coupled with the efforts of our coach education team, without which we would never be able to deliver our coach education programme, we are consistently in their debt.

Coach Ed online system

As many of you may be aware, the Welsh Rugby Union has developed and implemented a new online Coach Registration and Coaching Course Application system. Despite there being several unanticipated 'glitches' with the system, it is now in full flow. If you are interested in booking a coaching course, please visit:

http://www.wrucoaching.co.uk/

If you do experience any problems with the system, please feed this back to me so I can approach the developers to further improve the user interaction systems.

daniel.owens@ospreysrugby.com

WWRU Tag Award

As part of the Ospreys ongoing commitment to the development of the Women and Girls game, we have recently operated a Community Tag Leaders Award on behalf of the WWRU Tag Award. The event was made open to teachers or representatives of schools that have entered into the annual WWRU Tag Rugby Tournament. Representatives from all corners of Ospreylia were in attendance including teachers and pupils from Ogmore, Dwr y Felin, Arch Bishop McGratg and Cwrt Sart Comprehensive Schools. Joined by students from Gorseinon College, all in attendance had a really good time, playing rugby based games and learning the rules of the Tag game.

Development of the Coaches Filing Cabinet

As a department, we recognise there are limitations to the courses we operate in terms of their assistance to the coach beyond the course. In an effort to compliment our coach education courses, and also support the developing coach, we have developed and are running a timetable of events whereby coaches are invited in to view deliveries on different rugby related topics that are not covered on a course. We have termed these Coach Development Evenings, and to date have covered 4 topics, which the handouts for each topic will be downloadable online shortly:

(http://www.ospreysrugby.com/community_coach_development.php)

In addition to our coach education workshops we also realise that as volunteers in the majority, coaches have little time to effectively plan and prepare for games and coaching around their professional career. Again, in assistance to these coaches we are developing a library of resources to assist the coach with their coaching life. We will keep you updated on the progress of this resource, but I am looking to have it completed by September 2009.

Thanks for paying attention for so long. Congratulations to the Ospreys on their win against Connacht, and good luck to the boys for the remainder of their European and domestic campaigns. Come on the OSPREYS!