Building the all-important bond to a school and a first experience

Gmax Trackstars is a fast growing athletic academy with experienced coaches. The academy boasts highly capable coaches, all of whom are qualified and have earned the trust of local primary schools, allowing them to run daily athletics sessions with contracts signed to retain the coach’s services for multiple academic terms. These sessions are designed to ensure the children are having fun whilst also enhancing their abilities.

Simon, one of the supervising coaches, was coaching for the first time at Adamsrill Primary School in Sydenham and St Joseph’s Primary School in Deptford. Simon really enjoyed the sessions he coached as he doesn’t have any younger siblings, nieces or nephews , meaning that he hasn’t had the responsibility of  mentoring young people. Simon realised he had the trust of the school staff for him and his colleagues to run the sessions without a teacher present. The children were very well behaved, very enthusiastic and listened to every word he had to say, which was vey pleasing for Simon.

Because they were young, Simon did some athletic games to make sure they were having fun as well as making sure they understood the purpose of the sessions. Bean bags, relay batons, cones, hoops and a toy cricket ball were all utilised to create the games such as the children racing to grab the ball/baton quickest from Simon’s hand or team relay racing where the aim was to collect all the bean bags ahead of them one by one.

After the session ended, Simon learned a lot about himself when he was coaching them which is very essential as a coach in order to improve in the future. He didn’t realise how much pleasure he would get from the attention from the children, they listened to him as well as enjoyed the session which is very important. However, he learnt that he could be too nice to the children and that he should keep a balance between being nice and being stern.

Eugene Kwaw