UK Sport Chief Executive, Liz Nicholl, has welcomed the launch of a campaign to get more women involved in coaching.
Reach, launched today by sports coach UK, aims to raise aware of coaching as a career option for women and to encourage current women coaches to develop their skills further.
“Coaching is a unique career path that can be incredibly rewarding,” said Nicholl. “I would encourage women considering coaching at any level to find out more through sports coach UK’s Reach campaign, as it’s an incredible time to be involved in British sport.”
Reach was launched because women are currently under-represented in coaching despite research showing women do want to coach, providing the environment is right.
However, sport is still regarded as a gendered activity which strongly favours men. By creating greater diversity in coaching, Reach will begin to address this and participants will benefit from having a choice as to who they are coached by.
“Coaches like Melanie Marshall and Paula Dunn are fantastic role models for the next generation, but unfortunately they are rare in British high performance sport,” added Nicholl.
“While females make up almost half of our Olympic and Paralympic athlete population, just 10-15% of our high performance coaching workforce are women. This tells us we are missing out on a huge amount of potential coaching talent, and this needs to change for us to be a truly world leading sporting nation.”
Targeting women of all ages and backgrounds Reach reinforces the messages that coaching keeps you active, can be a sociable activity and is a way of giving back to your community and sport. All this whilst being a role model to encourage others into sport.
To join the campaign or find information and tips on how you can get involved in coaching, visit the Reach website.