COMMUNITY COACHING COURSE: "TRAINING THE TRAINERS COURSE"
Train the trainer, in the communityThe Ajax Cape Town Community Scheme has a compliment of 4 full-time coaches and 70 part-time coaches. To ensure that there is a legacy of continuation, Ajax Cape Town through their partnership with Charlton Athletic, the Metropolitan Police of London, the South African Police Services, British Airways and the British High Commission conducted a “Training the Trainers Course” in Pretoria recently.
This initiative was to educate a number of coaches presently working with the community to become empowered with the tools that will enable them to return to their Community projects and be able to train more coaches to a level of competence that will enable them to go out and teach the children.
So in essence this will ensure that when the current group of coaches completed their modules within the schools they will leave behind a trained coach to ensure that the same level of training will be continued while the Ajax coaches move on to the next school.
This will ensure that the club will be able to teach more coaches and have a positive impact on more kids as the project continues to grow.
The “Training the Trainers Course” was conducted by Sean Daly and Matt Parish from Charlton Athletic at the University of Pretoria’s High Performance Centre in Pretoria.
The course ran from Monday 18th January till Friday 22nd January 2010 with about 30 coaches’ participating. These coaches had previously undertaken the level 1 course.
The compliment of coaches present was 10 from each city i.e. Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban. The clubs representing their cities were Ajax Cape Town, Bidvest Wits, and Amazulu. The coaches were surprised to see some living legends such as Ashley Makhanya (Wits), Frank Makua (Kaizer Chiefs) and Botsotso Makhanya (Orlando Pirates) also present at the course.
Riyaad Khan the Ajax Cape Town Community Scheme coordinator said, “The “Training the Trainers Course” was extremely well presented with Sean Daly at his enthusiastic best. He provided all the participants with lots of new and innovative material. The difference between the courses was that we were taught how to teach coaches who in turn had to teach the kids.
The Ajax coaches were made up of the 4 full time Community Scheme coaches, 3 Police officers from Mitchells Plain, 1 Police officer from Khayelitsha, and two community members. Each participant was a credit to their club however the Ajax Cape Town coaches definitely set the bench-mark.
Unfortunately we lost one of our coach’s - Joseph Williams, on day two with a wrist injury. After a visit to a local hospital it was still unclear the extent of his injury so it was decided it best he return to Cape Town for further assessment.
At the end of the week we all did our assessments and passed with flying colours. There were two types of passes, either a tutor’s pass where you can perform a course on your own. The other was a co-tutor’s pass where you must be assisted by another colleague while presenting the different modules.
We managed to achieve 3 co-tutors and 6 tutors pass rate, an extremely impressive achievement.
We now look forward to conducting the Ajax Cape Town Community Scheme, where we can continue to set the trend in Ajax Cape Town’s Community upliftment projects, concluded Khan.
Last Year the Ajax Cape Town Community Scheme project was rolled-out in 120 schools with more than 8 000 children participating.
The next roll-out of the Ajax Cape Town Community Scheme will start in the first week of February 2010 when the community coaches return to schools in the Cape Flats, the Townships and the Cape Winelands areas.
Good day This is truly an amazing experience.I would like to be part of thsi project and would like to know how does one get involved in this project. Regards Joseph