Latest News

First outdoors athletics session at Rockcliffe First School

John Renney, a member of North Shields Poly Athletics Club and member of the North of Tyne Athletics Network qualified as a Level 1 athletics coach through the Tony Blair Sports Foundation (TBSF).  After coaching at his local club John decided he wanted to take it further and enrolled on the TBSFs Coach Award Scheme which started in November last year.  When John receives his Coach Award he will be qualified to run coaching sessions on his own.  In the meantime John was so determined to set up more coaching sessions for local kids that he offered his time to help run sessions at a local school, which he has been doing since the beginning of November last year.

We asked John to let us know how he was getting on.  Here John tells us how he helped organise their first outdoor session this week.

John says:

“I’ve been volunteering my time helping the PE teacher at Rockcliffe School every Wednesday morning since the start of November last year.  It’s been a great experience for me and more exciting this week as we were able to hold our first outdoor session. What a difference additional space and fresh air makes!

We’ve made great progress over the last few months but I found that the children were much more enthusiastic this week than in previous sessions as working indoors with limited room to manoeuvre can be quite a challenge, especially with 27 of them.

This week’s session concentrated on their running technique, standing start position and acceleration phase.

We always start with a warm up.  The warm up basically consists of a few minutes jogging followed by several running drills.  A running drill is where we ask them to run with high knees or skip etc. for a short distance.  Dynamic stretching is its correct name.

One thing I noticed was that they didn’t actually understand what was meant by jogging!  Simply asking them to run a little quicker than walking pace didn’t work.  This is obviously something I need to work on!

The class split into 5 groups and coned out 5 lanes, 20m long for them to run in.  We warmed up for about 15 minutes and then moved onto the main session where they ran tag relays.  This was all about their standing start and acceleration phase.  The children completed this really well.  Some of the teaching staff got involved too, which the kids loved.

We moved back indoors for the final part of the session where they learnt how to perform a standing triple jump (hop, step and jump).  Most of the children were able to this.

We finished off with some static stretching and used this time to have a chat about the session, what they liked or didn’t like.   Everyone agreed they’d enjoyed another really good session.”

Karen Robinson a teacher at the school added:

“It’s been really beneficial for the children to have John come into the school and assist in Athletics training.  They have enjoyed their sessions over the last 10 weeks and it has been good to see how much they’ve improved.  It gives them a great introduction to Athletics basics but also to general fitness and health awareness.”