Q: What level are you currently at on the Cycling Award for Young Volunteers?

Q: What do enjoy most about volunteering?

Q: How do you think being a volunteer has helped you?

Q: Is there anything you would change about your volunteering experience?

Q: Where would you like your volunteering to take you?

Blog 1:

Sponsored London to Paris virtual ride

On the 3rd of February 2013 I took part in a sponsored London to Paris virtual riding event for my club Charlottesville CC. We got together with FCCC and the Jaguar dealership in Guildford to raise money for the charity CHASE a local children’s charity. A big screen was set up in the Jaguar show room and turbo trainers were already set up connected to the screen. The programme measured many different aspects of our riding performance and calculated how far we had cycled. Each rider cycled different amounts depending how much they wanted to do. There was a wide range of riders both young and old.

It was great fun and a great team event. It was fantastic to see everyone involved, doing their best and really putting in a lot of effort for their club and the charity but at the same time they were also having a lot of fun.

Members of the public could come in and watch the riders and learn about the cycling clubs. This promoted cycling, Jaguar cars and most importantly CHASE charity.

Blog number 2: 21^st  October 2013

Work experience

As part of my college course I was required to undertake one week of work experience. I was lucky enough to be accepted to work with British Cycling with Keith Reed. We had many tasks to do during the week and one of these was to set up and conduct a meeting with a local secondary school with the goal to coach cycling within the school. Keith does this with many schools in the local areas and so I was lucky to be part of this one. We made contact with St. Peters school where I attended for 5 years. I spoke to St. Peters and passed on their details to Keith so the meeting could be arranged.

One of the points we discussed during the meeting was young volunteers and so it was great for St. Peters to hear from myself how it works and the benefits of it first-hand because I have been a young volunteer for the last three years. The meeting went well and we managed to secure two future coaching programmes. There was a great sense of achievement and I was really happy that everything went well.

For the remainder of the day I was required to do paper work which included writing session plans for the next day’s session working for the “Wheels for All”. I have learnt that there is a lot of work to do other than coaching such as paper work and meetings which means a lot of planning. There are many aspects to being a coach which isn’t physically coaching. However I did enjoy doing these things and learnt a lot in the week which I would happily do again.

Blog Number 3: 23^rd October 2013

Work experience

On the Wednesday Keith and I were required to run an interschool race day between Hermitage and Brookwood which I was particularly looking forward to. However the day before it was cancelled due to Hermitage pulling out, after numerous emails were exchanged the head teacher and Keith decided to run a racing session anyway but only for people who went to Brookwood.  Keith emailed me the session plans for the race day and asked me to edit them for only one school and make any other changes I thought would be good.

The race day went really well and the children really enjoyed the day. I learnt a lot about coaching races and left with a better understanding of how to do timings and how events are run in primary schools. I was given the responsibility of coaching my team how to do the team pursuit and encouraging them as they raced round. I also had to give various bits of advice and help Keith to run the events.

I had a great time and really enjoyed the session. Today showed me how arrangements can change at the last minute and so you need to be prepared and adaptable for such events.

Blog Number 4: October 2013

Half term holiday course

For this blog I’m writing about the Half term holiday course which I helped Keith to run on two out of the four days. It was the quietest I have ever seen the half term courses, with only three riders, however this in some ways made the holiday course more enjoyable and easier to coach. It was also better for the riders because even though racing was limited it meant that in the drills and activities they were getting so much attention and therefore so much more coaching.

Over the two days we managed to get through four days session plans because there were only three riders. My role was to assist Keith coaching which entailed explaining and coaching various bike handling drills, skills and techniques as well as setting up equipment and being a race official. This meant timing and recording the races etc. We did many bike handling skilled based activities such as improving balance with the bottle pick up, limbo to improve bike control and slalom. We also practiced team pursuit and showed the riders how it works before going onto racing activities such as behead the snake which the participants really enjoyed and as always I enjoyed coaching it.

Overall both riders and coaches benefitted from this course.

Blog 5: 20^th-22^nd December

National Young Officials Academy

I was delighted to be selected to attend the National Young Officials Academy at Loughborough University. It was an amazing experience and I was able to meet some great people. Not only this but I learned a lot about skills I have, skills I can continue to develop and new skills I can learn.

After a long drive, I registered for the weekend but was not sure what to expect. Firstly I met the other representatives from British Cycling, they were all very nice. Officiating is not an element of sport which I thought I would do and enjoy. Even though I don’t think I want a career in officiating I want to continue doing it and this course has enabled me to improve my officiating skills and learn a lot more about it. This experience gave me a new insight into this important role.

I stayed in Loughborough for 3 days in which time we undertook many activities to improve our officiating skills and mentality, we were able to learn from other sports including swimming, athletics and tennis and what their officiating includes. This was so we could work in teams and so we could learn from other sports. At the end of the weekend we had to put all the knowledge that we had gained through the guest speakers, our team leaders and our National Governing Body representative’s to put together a presentation to show what we had learnt over our time at the academy.

It was an extremely valuable weekend and was hugely rewarding and useful. I would recommend people to apply to this in the future because you are able to learn so much about your sport and yourself and you get the chance to meet fantastic people.