Clyde Street

Level 4 at Burleigh

I have an opportunity to spend some time with the RFU Level 4 coaching group this afternoon.

Al Smith is presenting this morning. We are both discussing skill acquisition and decision making.

It is delightful to be connected with Al in this way after years of corresponding remotely.

The coaching group are meeting at Burleigh Court, Loughborough. Over three days the group will be exploring:

Performing under pressure (with Matt Thombs)
Attacking play (Ali Hepher)
Coaching Skill Acqusition and Decision making (Al Smith and myself)
Performance analysis (Carwyn Morgan)

Some of the slides I hope to be sharing can be found here.

Photo Credit

The photograph was taken by D Sharon Pruitt. It can be found at Flickr here and is included in this post under Creative Commons 2.0 licence.

I thought it might trigger conversation about our choices as coaches.

ChangeMakers: Celia, Anita and Friends

The Anita White Foundation, the University of Chichester and English Lacrosse hosted a gathering at the 2017 World Cup to celebrate the life and work of Celia Brackenridge.

Mark Coups (English Lacrosse) and Mark Mason (University of Chichester) welcomed guests to the celebration.

The Anita White Foundation has established a website to aggregate, curate and share Celia’s work. It has involved painstaking research and design facilitated by the University’s information technology service and energised by Lombe Mwambwa and Lucy Piggott.

Elizabeth Pike provided the background to the project and to the impact of the Foundation in becoming a centre of excellence and a global reference point for women in sport.

The event was concluded with delightful presentations from Anita White and Diana Woodward. Both shared their stories of their learning journeys with Celia.

Diana, Celia’s civil partner, read out a message of thanks from Celia. The sad part of the day for me was that Celia was not there to see her friends celebrate her life’s work with awe and love. I think she would have relished seeing Lombe and Lucy present the website and the assurance two young women have in the nurturing environment that is the Foundation.

It was a day for Celia, Anita and friends to celebrate shared passions.

Photo Credits

Celia (Anita White Foundation website)

Anita, Lombe, Lucy and Diana (Keith Lyons, CC BY 4.0)

The AWF ChangeMakers team (Lucy Piggott, Twitter)

Goals scored in Pool A #RWLC17 after five days of play

The Women’s Lacrosse World Cup is being played at the Guildford Sports Park.

The official web site for the tournament has a Results and Stats page.

The six teams in Pool A of the tournament have all played four games.

Monday is a rest day in Pool A. The table going into the rest day is:

223 goals have been scored in Pool A.

Winners of games have scored 166 goals (86 first half, 80 second half) and losers 57 (30 first half, 27 second half)

I have been monitoring when goals are scored in five-minute time intervals. So far, the pattern is:

Note that winners are able to lift their performance at the start of the second half. In game 42, USA v Canada, USA scored six times in ten minutes at the start of the second half.

Photo Credit

USA v Canada (Nik Roberts, Twitter)