Coaching Column

G DALE National Coach

Bio information

I’ve been lucky enough to be appointed as the National Coach by GNZ. This is a new role, and the principle behind it is quite simple but worth explaining. It’s quite obvious to all of us who’ve been involved with gliding for any time that the membership – worldwide, not just here – is steadily declining. There are many reasons – which I don’t want to go into right now. However, one thing is within our control: the quality of our training regime.

Welcome to the coaching column

It is reasonably straightforward to teach somebody to fly a glider. They are generally easy enough to handle, and if one can drive a car then one should have the ability to learn to fly an airplane, or a glider, or a balloon... up to a point. Of course, with gliding it doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) end there.

Our sport is soaring – we choose to use sailplanes instead of hang gliders, models or parachutes – and once we’ve learned to fly a glider then we need to learn to soar. This is far more tricky and it’s not generally taught much around the clubs.

The new role of the national coach is to promote the sport of soaring by setting up and maintaining a network of volunteer coaches at club level. These coaches in turn will work with pilots up and down the country to try to get them across “the hump” – the transition from new solo pilot to seasoned cross country enthusiast. It’s early days: the new coaching manual is online at the GNZ web site, and I’ve run a couple of weekend courses in the North Island to gather interest and start the coaches off. At present, we’re choosing a couple of volunteers to head up the Northern and Central regions.

Gerrard Dale, known simply as G, was born in 1958 in the UK. He trained as a pianist and worked in that field for ten years before ‘retiring’ at 31 to go gliding. At age 20 G learned to fly, and started working at Lasham aged 31. He had one year of ab-initio course instructing before starting as a soaring coach at Lasham. G later became CFI of Nympsfield (the Bristol and Gloucester GC), National Coach for The British Gliding Association (BGA), Deputy CFI and then CFI of Booker GC before returning to Lasham as Deputy CFI and Soaring Coach. He started with Glide Omarama right at the beginning and when he finished with that operation in 2016 he was head coach for the mountain soaring.

G is currently flying for GB team in Club Class, and coaching worldwide – Australia, France, USA and NZ this year. He is the author of the Soaring Engine series of text books.

He holds UK 750, Gliding Federation of Australia (GFA) 750 and NZ 1,000 km diplomas.

This will take some time and the average club member may not see any results from this initiative for a while however, I think we are on the right track so be patient and watch this space.

[Unfortunately G had to return to the UK for family reasons and will not be back in NZ this season so planned coaching sesions for the South Island will not be taking place. – Ed]