Over the past two weeks, the Ospreys Community Staff have been engaged in several workshops to assist in raising the already high standards employed by the Ospreys Community Department.
OSPREYS COMMUNITY DEPARTMENT RAISE THE STANDARDS
The Ospreys Community Department holds its service to the rugby public, above all else. It is the belief in the department that without the invaluable input of the masses of volunteers working in the grass roots game, that the game of Rugby would struggle to be played, let alone develop. To that end, we have engaged our Community Staff to raise their standards and really focus on the nitty gritty of successful development practice.
We have a wealth and variety of experience amongst our Coach Educators within the Ospreys Region, who many of our coaches in the community are likely to have met whilst on our Coach Education courses. In order to provide a more enhanced education service, we have involved our Coach Educators in workshops for standardization of paperwork, assessment decisions and also action planning for candidates for when they leave our courses. Through these workshops, our Coach Educators have viewed live footage of coaches coaching, and deliberated the ideal outcomes of those sessions for the coach's development. Almost as importantly they have discussed and standardized the most effective way of completing candidate records to assist the coaches to look back on their experience in the future.
This method of training ensures that all our Coach Educators see, hear and evaluate the same experience, whilst also prioritising and delivering the same relevant feedback for the coach at that point of their learning experience.
Coach Education Development Officer, Dan Owens commented - "The Ospreys Coach Education Courses are currently setting the standard for Coach Education in Wales, we intend to keep things that way. We set ourselves high standards on courses, to provide the coaches on course with fair, honest and effective feedback to assist them in their development. These workshops ensure that even our recently qualified Coach Educators are making the same decisions as our most experienced ones, which can only be of benefit to the coaches on the course. These small details we are developing we are sure will drive our courses from being the best in Wales, to being the best in the UK"
As with our Coach Educators, our Ospreys Community Coaches were invited along by our Player Development Officers, to deliver sessions in front of the Coach Development Officers. The basis of the evening was to share ideas for working with young players, to make sessions more, Active, Purposeful, Enjoyable and Safe. It is also a good opportunity to demonstrate and highlight the experience we want the young players in Ospreylia to have when they are involved in one of our development sessions. Unfortunately there is only one way to do this, take part yourself and find out from experience what works and develop it to work better.
Gary Clement, Ospreys Player Development Officer, Bridgend said - "Our Community Coaches come from all over the region, sometimes outside, and very rarely do we have a chance to all come together. What the Coach Ed department has done is provide us that opportunity. We have pulled together the experience from all corners of the region to share ideas and coaching tactics, and are having fun in the process. We want this fun to translate out into the community development sessions we deliver; that is why we have all come together tonight."
Owen Phillips, Ospreys Community Coach said - "I have only just come onboard with the Ospreys, but already I have learned a lot. Being in Llandarcy Academy with all this coaching experience and knowledge is a great learning experience for me -tiring- but very enjoyable. I can't wait to put some of these new ideas I've picked up into practice."
The Ospreys Community Coaches are available to come to your club or school and deliver fun development sessions for your players. To arrange for a visit, please contact your local Player Development Officer.
The Ospreys Community Department, is looking forward to working ever closer with the Ospreys community. If you have already had any experiences with our Community Staff and wish to share them, please forward them to daniel.owens@ospreysrugby.com - with your permission, we may place them on the website or in our match day programmes, to tell the whole of Ospreylia what is happening out in the community.