Fives Coaching Accreditation

EFA

Fives Coaching

“YOU CAN’T TEACH ME ABOUT SOCCER, MUM.
Children’s coaches must have qualifications…volunteers may be driven out of sport.”

These were the headlines of an article in The Times last April, following a press release from UK Coaching Framework, claiming that the volunteer coaching culture was holding back Britain’s development as a sporting nation. The thinking is that sports coaching by unqualified coaches can often be ineffectual and in extreme cases actually harmful.

In Fives, the delivery of coaching has become an increasingly difficult problem. In schools we have long been used to relying on teachers but, with an increasing range of sports available, it is less and less common for fives-playing schools to have a fives-playing teacher. The rise and fall of fortunes of Fives in a school can often be directly attributed to the quality of coaching provided. Indeed the lack of teacher support has led to the game of Fives appearing to be in jeopardy in some schools. The Eton and Rugby Fives Associations have both tried to shore up the deficiencies in some schools by arranging coaching weekends: Eton Fives at Cranleigh in 2005 and Mill Hill in 2007, and the Rugby Fives at St Paul’s in 2006. All these courses concentrated on the technical aspects of Fives for school teachers, and were considered to have been extremely successful.

A life-line has come from visiting coaching provided by Howard Wiseman and his young gap year coaches, and Ian Hutchinson, although the young coaches, often fresh from school, are of variable quality: many are good players but few have teaching experience.

Both Associations have realised the need to set up a proper coaching structure. The reasons are:

To set a standard of competence;
To ensure that learners are properly taught;
To formalise the current informal arrangement;
To enhance the CVs of teachers and coaches;
To lead to national recognition by Sports Coach UK (SCUK)

At national level there is a huge movement, backed by government money and with its eye on the Olympics of 2012, to drive up the standard of coaching. This is SCUK, a bureaucratic juggernaut with which the two Fives associations, together with City Fives, the ‘one-wall’ fives organisation, have thrown in their lot. Unfortunately the demands of SCUK in terms of paperwork and attendance at meetings and seminars, often in Leeds or Coventry, have been beyond our resources, and we have decided to plough our own furrow, at least for the time being.

However, it seems sensible to follow the steps required by SCUK. The first is to carry out an audit of current status: location of courts; usage (number of players and frequency); coaching in place; coaching required. This has been completed for Eton Fives, showing that there are currently 183 courts in use at 38 centres, being regularly used by about 2000 players. Coaching needs have been identified. The audit for Rugby Fives and City Fives is in progress.

The plan is to have a core syllabus appropriate to all three codes (parts 1, 2 and 4 below) diverging for part 3 where the technical skills for Eton and Rugby fives will be treated separately, ‘one wall’ skills being included in each.

Part 1. General

Part 2. Principles of Coaching

Part 3. Technical Skills

Part 4. Related Issues

Before any of this can be transferred from paper to reality, training sessions for coaches and assessment procedures have to be set up, trainers and assessors have to be appointed, criteria for assessment have to be agreed, and resources such as coaching manuals and DVDs have to be updated. Only then will we be in a position to award our own accreditation and be able to recognise our coaches with formal qualifications. There is much to do.

J.D.C.V.

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