Coach Bowls: All you need to know

Set up in 2019, Coach Bowls was launched as a stand-alone organisation owned by Bowls England and EIBA Ltd, with contributions from British Crown Green Bowling and English Short Mat Bowling (writes Sian Honnor).
In 2010, Bowls England and EIBA Ltd decided to withdraw funding from the previous coaching scheme and requested the BDA develop a new coaching structure for the sport.
At the time, there was no recognised qualification and training lacked consistency across the country with regards to deliver and content.
In October 2011, a coaching manager was appointed and work began on a standardised approach to training across the country with nationally recognised qualifications and specifically trained tutors
and assessors.
The aim of Coach Bowls is to improve the consistency and quality of coach education across the country, developing high quality coaches able to deliver at all levels of the player pathway, from beginners to international bowlers.
Coach Bowls also aspires to support every club to have a qualified coach who is both trained and insured to help clubs to recruit and retain members.
The organisation makes deliberate use of the term ‘coaching craft’ as a nod to the premise that a good coach is certainly a craftsperson.
The belief is that individuals have spent many hours developing their skills, knowledge and delivery of their craft and should be rightly recognised as such.
Coaches can be the backbone of a club’s volunteer workforce. They are often the first person a new member links with.
Each year, Coach Bowls completes approximately 500 qualifications in addition to safeguarding and inclusion courses for around 00-500 people.
There are three different qualifications: level one courses for coaches working with beginners and level two courses for coaches working with players who are developing their performance.
There is also a level three programme, which is for coaches who are working with high performance players and takes over 12 months to complete.

MEMBERSHIP

Coach Bowls has approximately 1,500 active members each year, 80 per cent of who are level one qualified coaches or coaches who gained their certificates from other organisations prior to 2019.
Of the remaining 20 per cent, only two of these are level three qualified.
While Coach Bowls is fairly well represented when it comes to gender split, there is not a large number of young coaches.
Therefore, recruitment is underway for a position on the Coach Education Advisory Group (technical experts across the sport in coaching) whose main remit is to look at the content of courses and the suitability for younger coaches.
In addition, there is a category for Young Coach of the Year (sponsored by Bowls International in 2022) and bowlers as young as 16 can begin training at level one and from age 17 can take level two.
The courses not only help young people as bowlers but also qualify as UCAS points and help to encourage other young bowlers to get some coaching.
Coach Bowls coaching manager Amanda Scriven-Purcell said a coach often wears many hats.
“Knowledge of HOW TO coach is a key skill,” she added.
“Coaching is about empowering bowlers. It is not about standing and lecturing people, but about getting them active, letting them have fun, acting as a role model, showing empathy and patience. It is about understanding the needs and wants of the person in front of them and designing sessions and programmes to meet those needs and wants.
“Coaches are trusted, motivators, organisers, communicators and most of all they should be encouraging, enthusiastic and knowledgeable!”
Amanda said that coaches are important to encourage and support new bowlers to learn the game, but it is important to remember that bowlers who have been playing for years can also benefit.
“Coaches are there initially to ensure that new bowlers learn the sport as technically without fault as possible,” she said.
“But once players develop, we often hear, ‘I don’t need a coach. I’ve been bowling for years and am doing well’. However, coaching established players is about ensuring that no unconscious bad habits in technique are forming. It is about ensuring that decision making and discussions on the green are well thought out and appropriate, it is about looking at tactics and shots.
“Once you start to work with high performance players it is about marginal gains through a wholistic approach to the player such as lifestyle impacts on the player; ensuring the body is as fit as possible; psychology; tactical play; position specific implications of play; long term planning and programming to ensure peaks of performance are hit at the right time and so on.”
The level three qualification, which was written pre-Covid, was brought in to ensure that coaches were developed who understood the demands of high performance players and had the skills and knowledge to support them.
“It is not about teaching new technical skills,” Amanda said. “After all, the majority of high-performance players can already play these shots! It is about looking at areas where players have certain weaknesses, it is about ensuring the players have sound tactical knowledge, providing psychological support and also knowledge of laws.
“We are planning the next course in 2023 and have a large waiting list already. The coaches who have successfully completed the qualification have commented on how much it has helped them to work with county teams and individual players at a high level. It has helped them to develop academies, work with international bowlers and really begin to understand cycles of performance.”

THE FUTURE

Coach Bowls took the opportunity to review its courses and ensure that the content for the theory side of its work to be delivered online which means that people are no longer having to travel miles to do a safeguarding course, or travel multiple times to complete a level
one course.
This also means that meeting in person is solely for practical skills, learning the
‘coaching craft’.
Underway is the development of a national network of mentors for coaches. These established coaches are not only improving their own coaching craft but are supporting local coaches to develop their own high-quality coaching. Coach Bowls regard these people as vital linchpins in the plans to support coaches locally and welcomes any established coaches onto the mentor workforce if they
are interested.

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