UK Coaching and British Rowing launch nationwide recruitment drive in response to post-pandemic health challenges

UK Coaching Week runs from 6-12 June and is a great way to spotlight our coaching community

UK Coaching – the UK’s leading charitable organisation for physical activity and sports coaches – is leading a nationwide recruitment drive to expand the coaching workforce. The initiative will see the organisation engage with several of the nation’s leading sports over the next ten years, to create and advance more coaches and ensure the nation has more opportunities to be active.

The partnership will see UK Coaching joining forces with British Rowing to support them to overcome their specific challenges around coaching recruitment and retention, with a view to significantly increasing the coaching workforce over the next ten years.

The announcement comes at the start of UK Coaching Week – the annual national awareness campaign which empowers athletes, coaches and the public to celebrate great coaching.

Despite individual challenges, common themes have emerged around the need to inspire and create more opportunities for young people into coaching, as well as those from diverse communities. The collaboration will ensure coaching becomes more accessible, inclusive and innovative than ever before.

Coaches encourage people to be more active, more often, and positively influence lives and communities. A total of 6.6 million people (14% of the adult population) gave up their time to support others to be active from November 2020-21. However, this is a fall of more than 3.1 million people compared to the previous year*, and follows a drop in numbers in the years prior to the pandemic.

To support the recruitment drive, UK Coaching has launched ‘#Born2Coach’ – an initiative that aims to significantly boost the coaching workforce by inspiring people to become coaches and empowering current coaches to enhance their skills.

Mark Gannon, UK Coaching CEO said: “As we learn to live with COVID and seek to recover from the challenges of the last couple of years, we want to play our part in supporting more people taking part in physical activity and sport. Coaches will be an important conduit for engaging a broader range of people from more communities in physical activity and sport, which will improve the nation’s health and happiness.

“We are proud to be spearheading this industry-wide partnership to provide deeper insight into the life of a coach, and what great coaching looks and feels like. With the help of our network of physical activity and sports organisations we will empower existing coaches and recruit the next generation of coaches.”

Alastair Marks, British Rowing CEO said: “Coaches are crucial to the success of our sport and are key to introducing rowing to more communities up and down the country. We recognise that our coaches need more support and opportunities to continually evolve and learn, so we are delighted to be supporting UK Coaching as they promote #Born2Coach.”

To find out more about how you can get into coaching, visit UK Coaching here.

*Sport England’s Active Lives data for Nov 2019-20