The City Of Leeds Basketball Club is proud to announce that starting this season, Dr Dave Piggott will be leading the club's new coach development programme.
The goal of the programme will be to recruit and train new coaches to work across the club, whilst also offering bespoke support to our experienced coaches. In short, the aim is to develop more coaches and better coaching, with robust succession plans and supportive pathways for coach development.
This is the first programme of its kind in basketball in the UK and follows a model of coach development popular in professional football academies. Dr Piggott has many years of experience as a coach tutor for Basketball England, and has also trained and supported coaches and coach developers in Olympic sports and professional football, with the FA and Premier League. The programme will also see the extension of the University partnership by creating pathways for sport coaching students and graduates to gain experience and qualifications in basketball.
Dr Piggott looked forward to getting this unique new programme off the ground:
"I'm really excited to get this programme up and running" said Piggott. "There is nothing like it yet in the UK, but we all recognise the need to do more to recruit, train and support coaches at a higher level. Research and experience in other high-performing domains has taught us that the best way to do this is by embedding coach development and support in the club context, so that's what we're doing. We hope that over the next 3-5 years we will have a thriving and sustainable system in which coaches can get qualified, develop their skills and access ongoing support, whatever their level or experience."
Enthused by the potential scale and impact of this project on a local and regional level, COLBC Director Matt Newby commented:
"In committing to this project, we hope to create a template for other clubs and programmes to consistently develop quality basketball coaches. Co-opting the expertise of Professor Dave Piggott and the faculty of sport at Leeds Beckett University, we hope to forge a more complete scaffold for coaches to evolve through quality education pieces, evaluation of coaching practice and high-order mentorship, which in turn will complement and enhance the existing coach development certifications. The ability to instil a high-quality coach developer and provide annual wrap-around support for both our club and community coaches, will directly impact the quality of delivery and teaching at a community, development and performance level."
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