Claire Morrison was once turned away in her attempts to become a PE teacher. Now a boccia coach with Paralympic pedigree, she’s continuing to reach new heights in the sporting world.
With sights set on Paris 2024, Morrison has been involved in UK Sport's Leading to Perform development programme - a course for leaders in the high-performance community, designed to enhance leadership potential within elite sporting roles.
Despite being vastly experienced in her field, with three Paralympics under her belt, Morrison knows you can never stop learning. And in working alongside some of Britain’s best coaches, she feels elated with the progress she’s made, realising her value as an elite level leader not just in boccia, but in sport as a whole.
“The Leading to Perform programme really helped me to make another step up,” Morrison said.
“It allowed me to realise my voice has an important role to play outside of my own little world that I exist in, and that was really important.
“It's definitely helped me bring more strength into my voice and my opinions within this environment and feel much more confident about what I've got to say, that it actually means something. I started to appreciate the wider environment that I'm in rather than just my own little bubble.”
Morrison was always determined to shape her career around sport - but in her journey to coaching Paralympic champions, she initially faced difficulties in finding work.
“I got into coaching primarily through a love of sport, I played every sport growing up,” Morrison added. “It drove me to want to be a PE teacher when I grew up, but unfortunately PE teaching didn’t want me.
“I had to think about another career in sport and got into sports development. But at that point, I just loved being in clubs and playing sports and working with people.
“Because I was never going to be someone who was going to be an elite performer in any of the sports that I was doing, I got into coaching and helping other people within the clubs and the schools that I was working in.
“It was that passion to help other people and support them in other things which ultimately led me to boccia.”
With an integral role in disability sports, Morrison has emphasised how vital it is for people of all abilities to have access to sport - from both a physical and mental perspective.
“I think with so many barriers that people face, particularly in disability sport, it's a massively important channel and avenue for people to be able to get into,” she said. “Not just from a physical point of view and a social point of view, but from a mental health point of view.
“We talk so much about the challenges, about anxiety and mental health within young people. Sport is a phenomenal outlet for that.
“I really see that with a lot of the people that we work with, people with severe physical disabilities, who get to travel the world, who get to be full time athletes, who get to interact with other athletes with similar or different conditions.
“It opens everyone's minds up to what is possible.”
Hear more from Claire about her experiences in the video here.