Inside Look at St Mary’s Community Sport Scheme, SIMMSport

St Mary’s community sport scheme, SIMMSport, offers weekly coaching sessions and holiday camps to children aged 5-11. In addition to engaging children with sport, the scheme also gives St Mary’s students the chance to develop their coaching skills by leading the sport sessions each week. Three current undergraduate students describe their experiences with SIMMSplitz, the gymnastics programme. Cammy Gregory As a final year Physical and Sport Education student, critical feedback from my assessment of the Community Placement module suggested I needed to develop my coaching skills and I was pointed in the direction of SIMMSport. SIMMSport has given me the opportunity to work in a well-established, professionally managed environment with trained coaches on-hand to aid learning and development. I initially had a limited knowledge of gymnastics, but over a relatively short period of time I have started to coach children key gymnastic skills on the floor, vault and bench during SIMMSplitz sessions and holiday camps. I feel this success and growth is due to the SIMMSpliz coaches and staff at SIMMSport, who have supported my learning by providing immediate answers to my questions and continuously installing confidence in my coaching ability. I feel SIMMSport supports my academic studies as I can put into practice coaching theory learnt within my degree programme to consolidate my learning. The SIMMSport leadership team have provided opportunities to continue my professional development. I attended the coaching clinic led by a Katie Richards a level four national gymnastics coach and level one and two coach tutor. Katie’s enthusiasm, skills and wisdom provided me with the expertise needed to lead my own gymnastics sessions.’ Thanks to this experience, I now have a new comprehension and awareness of warm up activities, basic gymnastic shapes, skills and progressions to the health and safety practicalities of a coaching session. The rewards gained from being a SIMMSport coach are vast. This was highlighted to me by the positive comments made from a parent of a gymnast at SIMMSplitz. She expressed her delight of her daughter’s enjoyment of SIMMSplitz, attributing this to the SIMMSport coaches’ specialist expertise, combined with their fun and friendly coaching approach. All of which has enabled her daughter to make new friends whilst becoming a more confident gymnast. I felt privileged to be a part of the SIMMSport coaching team. Sophie Hardy As soon as I started University I heard about SIMMSport and because I took part in gymnastics at school, I was really interested in coaching it. My confidence in coaching has grown during the year I have been coaching with SIMMSplitz, and my knowledge and understanding of the coaching strategies has developed even more. I enjoy coaching children as it is challenging and rewarding and it has helped me with my degree as I started as a volunteer and now I am looking to get my level one in coaching gymnastics. I have helped out in the summer camps were I took part in multi-skills sport, this has improved my coaching and my communication with other coaches. I enjoy coaching so I may look to this as a future career, because the good experience I have gone through at St Mary's and SIMMSports. Christina Hajittofis Studying Sports and Exercise science has given me a great insight into sport, although I didn’t know much about the coaching side until I joined SIMMSport. I joined SIMMSplitz with no knowledge of gymnastics and the coaches taught me everything I know and now I am a keen practicing gymnastics coach myself. It has allowed me to take a step further in coaching and help at the multi-sports camps that are run during the holidays. This has opened my eyes to different ways to coach sport and how to communicate with kids of different ages and abilities. Through joining SIMMSplitz I have realised that I love coaching kids and I would like to continue this for many years to come, it has helped me gain confidence in working with both adults and kids as the staff are very welcoming and warming. It fits in perfectly with lectures and helps towards my degree as it allows me to understand the coaching modules a lot better and those modules allow me to be a better coach.