Balancing Work & Netball Coaching

Julia Trapp – Marketing Manager.

Sport has always been an important part of my life. As a child and throughout school I was a gymnast. Heading to university I found trampolining and competed at national level – those skills I had spent years trying to do on the floor or beam were a whole lot easier on a bouncy surface.

Next came running (possibly my least favourite pastime and one I am truly awful at) followed quickly by half ironman distance triathlon, distance swimming (I highly recommend the Dart 10k as a fantastic race to compete in), and then SwimRun, a crazy multisport discipline where you are tied to a partner, swim with your trainers on and run in a shorty wetsuit, googles, hat and pull buoy tied to your leg; swim then run then swim then run, to a combined distance of 10km of swimming and a marathon of running usually somewhere like Glencoe, Snowdon or Loch Lomond.

I moved to Market Harborough a good while ago with a pre-school daughter, not knowing a soul, so my obvious route to make friends was through sport. I saw an advert for Back2Netball and headed along. Since then, I have played constantly (except for a short rest with a broken ankle) and started coaching as my daughter joined the youth division at the age of 8 in 2012.

Since then, I coached an age group squad from the age of 8 through to them turning 15, which was in rotation rewarding, exciting, fun, and challenging through those tricky teenage years. The squad’s 1st team reached the club national u14 finals in 2018 and took the 4th place spot – to the surprise of the significantly larger and national level stalwarts around us. I also coached at this time alongside the County Head Coach for Performance Academies on the England Pathway for u15s and in a club setting, lead a competition squad team who played regional level league netball in the Midlands. I have recently moved to another area and have taken on the Performance Lead role for a club and am Head Coach for the County U13 and U15 Performance Academies on the England Netball programme.

Coaching certainly keeps me busy as alongside the numerous weekly sessions, I am a year and a half into a three-year course to complete my ‘Level 3’ which is the highest qualification for coaching in netball. My course-mates are mostly fulltime netball coaches or teachers – one is even a professional super league player/coach, which provides a totally different paradigm through which to view coaching.

The sport has moved at pace even in the decade or so that I have been coaching and the skills involved in creating sessions for two hours in which there is constant ‘game based learning’ and ‘game sense practices’ is a challenge. The theory proffers that if you learn a skill – think kicking back and forth for football, or passing back and forth for netball, in isolation, then when put into a game scenario, the skill is alien and you as a player, lost and ineffective.

We learn much better from experiencing the skill within a playing environment than in a set position on a specific part of the court. There is also a school of thought that defines boredom as standing in line waiting for your turn to try a skill in a training session, so no standing still in lines either. Perhaps the biggest challenge to a more traditional coaching method of tell-show-practice is the athlete led development mindset.

Give a brief introduction and then let the athletes play. Ask a carefully crafted question that drives discussion or change in behaviour and stand back once more. Let the players learn through action rather than direction.

Presently, I am 42% signed off on the coursework, with much of the hard work ahead. The next task is to benchmark the performance squad against England Netball criteria, create a specific baseline testing and analysis and follow two players through a twelve-month programme to include pre-season, competition peaks, recovery phases and off season. Only 40% of those who undertake the course complete it successfully but as you can probably tell from the kind of racing I have undertaken in the past, I am quite a determined individual.

What my netball coaching roles give me in the workplace is the headspace and need for efficiency that means I can work well at pace. The endorphins that sport provides mean that I sleep very well and come to work ready and focused. I hope that some of the coaching skills I learn also help me to support my colleagues and that the communication skills required to work not only with athletes but their parents, league officials and organisers provide me with an increased level of patience and understanding of another person’s point of view than maybe I had previously.