COACHING

ORIENTEERING COACHING IN AUSTRALIA – A Personal Perspective

I WILL retire from my official positions in Orienteering coaching and administration at the end of October. So this will be my last contribution as sub-editor of AO’s Coaching Connection. I want to use my life as a coach to illustrate how coaching has changed over the decades. Some older readers will be able to identify with the situations that I will describe below. Younger readers will probably think I’m going senile.

I have been a sports coach for 47 years of my life; an accredited Orienteering coach for the last 20 years, and a paid Orienteering coach and coach administrator for the last eight years. Coaching can certainly bring its rewards for the coach. However, it can also be very hard, unrewarding work – particularly at certain levels. At times in the last few years I have felt it was just like bringing up another family. Being one of the few Orienteering coaches in Australia who received payment (albeit very small) has added an extra burden. So I am very happy to be handing over my coaching responsibilities to others, to do things as they see fit.

How coaching has changed in 47 years! How Orienteering coaching in Australia has changed in 20! How perspectives on Orienteering coaching in Australia have changed in the last eight years!

Forty Seven Years Ago

Forty seven years ago coaches were not accredited. Most received no training because there were no coaching courses. There were no Australian coaching manuals, but some capital city bookshops sold UK and US coaching manuals (that often were no more than booklets – I’ve still got a couple on my shelves). We were almost all volunteers (although I will now confess to receiving one pound per week in 1958 and 1959 to coach a local Aussie Rules team – but the money was paid to my father to preserve my amateur status). We were skills coaches, although the most innovative devised tactical ploys. Franz Stampfl (who coached several leading Australian milers from a Wine Bar in Carlton) was probably the only coach in Australia using sports science at that time. With the notable exception of Stampfl’s great rival, Percy Cerutty, coaches didn’t have a clue about mental and lifestyle preparation of an athlete. If you did harbour such thoughts, you’d have been very brave to go public, lest you be made an outcast by those in authority (as Australian athletics did with Percy). However, I remember those times as being wonderful fun, not the least because my teams and athletes tasted success. Invariably my footy teams won every premiership they entered. Coaching was a ball, and I was invincible! With hindsight, it was predictable that expectation of success – on my part, and the parents of young footy and cricket players whom I was coaching 25 years later - led me to take “time out” from coaching and turn to the sport of Orienteering, of which I knew absolutely nothing!

Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago I went to a Level 1 Orienteering coach course being conducted for ACTOA by John Foster. I didn’t go because I wanted to be a coach – no way! I was running away from being any sort of coach. I went because that was the only way I was able to learn how to do the sport. I had found my running ability was as good as most of my peers in the sport, but I didn’t have a clue how to orienteer. I have often wondered if that is still one of the main reasons that parents will undertake a Level 1 coaching course.

Eight Years Ago

Eight years ago Bob Mouatt and I started the ACT Academy of Sport orienteering program. I’m sure that the orienteering public, most orienteering coaches, and most elite orienteers at that time didn’t have a clue what we were on about. One leading ACT orienteering coach of that time told me he didn’t know what we were going to do at a place like that. Well, in one sense, that made two of us, but Bob and I knew that every self-respecting sport in Australia was busting a gut to be there, and had found a way of using ACTAS resources. We – the athletes who had faith, Bob, and the coaches who put their hands up to help - did find a way. It took perhaps a year for ACTAS to get a handle on the sport of orienteering, and for the orienteers themselves to understand how ACTAS could help them (other than financially – they understood that immediately). The recipe seems to change every year because the circumstances are different in every year. Under the new Head Coach, Grant Bluett, the program is bound to change even more. That’s how it should be.

ACTAS – The National Training Centre

Because of an exceedingly generous gesture by the Manager of ACTAS, Mr Ken Norris, the ACTAS program can now offer support to the most talented and committed of orienteers who are able to get themselves to ACT, irrespective of which State they compete for in the NL. Until yesterday, full ACTAS scholarship holders had to run for the Canberra Cockatoos. At yesterday’s Joint Management committee meeting (OA, OACT and ACTAS), that was changed – for 2006 at least. Such scholarships will be competitive – but what’s wrong with that in high-level sport? ACTAS is now OA’s true National Training Centre.

Bye-Bye

An Air Force mate introduced Pam and me to Lawn Bowls last Saturday in Hobart. Neither of us had ever bowled before. After ten ends (40 bowls each for the uninitiated) he declared us better than half the players in his club, and invited us to join in the afternoon competition. We declined with thanks because we wanted to smell the roses at the Botanic Gardens (literally), but I will soon join a club in Canberra. And, no, I will not be doing a Level 1 Lawn Bowls coach course to find out how to play. There are coaching programs for that nowadays, run by accredited coaches, and plenty of good manuals in the bookstores.

So it’s bye-bye from him and bye-bye from me (with apologies to the late Ronnie Barker).

ORIENTEERING PUBLICATIONS

IOF Publications

International Specifications for‑Orienteering Maps .......... $11.00 Competition rules for IOF events ................. $11.00 Control Descriptions ............ $11.00 Simple Maps for Orienteering .... $11.00 Trail Orienteering (BOF book) ..... $30.00 Trail Orienteering (booklet) ........ $8.25 Trail O (leaflet) ................. $0.70

Australian Publications

Elementary Orienteering Instructors‑Manual $13.20 Level 1 Coaching Manual ........ $22.00 Level 1 Coaching Syllabus ........ $3.90 Level 2 Coaching Syllabus ........ $4.40 Level 3 Coaching Syllabus ........ $4.40 Among the Best Orienteers (video) $19.75 Sponsorship & Advertising, 1996 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . available from states

Club Guide, available on disc.

Prices include GST and postage within Australia for single copies. Prices for bulk orders available on request. Orders should be addressed to Orienteering Australia, PO Box 740, Glebe, NSW 2037, with cheques made payable to Orienteering Australia. Email: orienteering@dsr.nsw.gov.au