British Cycling Doubles The Number of Go-Ride Coaches

 

News Posted: 18 March 2008

British Cycling has announced this week that it has doubled the size of its successful Go-Ride programme with the recruitment of 14 new coaches throughout the country.

The new coaches, who will spend the week undergoing an intensive induction programme at British Cycling's headquarters in Manchester, will provide 90,000 opportunities for young people to get involved in cycling in 2008.

Go-Ride is a national programme which teaches children essential bike handling skills and gives more young riders access to quality cycle coaching. The Go-Ride coaches are based around local cycling clubs and will visit schools in their area to teach cycling skills. Children are then invited to get more involved in cycling through the network of Go-Ride clubs.

Commenting on the recruitment of the new coaches, British Cycling coaching, education and development director John Mills said: "The new Go-Ride coaches are great news for cycling. Go-Ride has the ability to bring new young people into cycling and to encourage them to join cycling clubs. The new coaches will allow us to significantly increase the number of children who are provided with this opportunity."

Set up in 2005 Go-Ride provided nearly 45,000 opportunities for children to receive professional coaching in 2007. British Cycling now hopes to double that number in 2008 with the new team of coaches.

"We know that Go-Ride is helping to increase the level of interest and grow the sport," added John. "Go-Ride clubs have increased their youth membership by an average of 10% per year since Go-Ride was launched so it is really helping to improve the health of grass-roots cycling in the UK. Who knows - it may even help us find the next Olympic star."

Go-Ride also supports the creation of school-club links, which helps provide clubs with a constant influx of new young members and helps everyone work towards our shared vision of more young people, more active, more often in cycling. It allows children to pursue an interest in cycling once the initial sessions at school are complete. The success of Go-Ride is dependent upon partnerships between British Cycling, clubs, schools, local authorities and voluntary organisations.

Where no local cycling club exists, schools can also set up their own Go-Ride clubs. Once a school has a qualified teacher who is willing to train as a coach they can offer regular coaching sessions and establish an affiliated Go-Ride School Club.

Go-Ride is funded by Sport England and is supported by supermarket chain Tesco.

 

For more information on Go-Ride, click here