Hi I’m Andre and I’m from West Yorkshire. From the ages of 14-16, I competed in athletics for Leeds City Athletics Club as a 400m sprinter, I later moved onto doing 400m Hurdles before I decided to stop.

After that, I was encourage by my teachers to coach athletics, so I got my Level 1 award in 2009 and now I’m working towards my Level 2. I’ve coached at Leeds City for 3 years and now I help coach the University of Birmingham Athletics Team.

I wanted to be in the YAG because I wanted to be more actively involved with the future of athletics. I felt that it was vital for young people to have a voice in the future of athletics as it’s us who will have to lead the sport in the future. Being able to voice certain things that we discuss in meeting is a great pleasure; it also allows UKA to hear what younger generation have to say.

I’m looking forward to the European Championships, 2017 World Athletics Championships, 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games and many more fantastic athletics events.

Andre’s Blog

Ohhhh heyyyyyy guyyysssss!!!

How are you all?

It’s Andre here!!! Hope all of you had a great summer and are now settling yourself down for school/uni work.

So I’ve entered my final year of university. Sad Times. I don’t want to grow up!!! I’m going to tell you about an interesting project that I was part of last month, which was an amazing experience to be a part of. So I was volunteering at the Sainsbury’s School Games 2013, which took place in Sheffield for the second time. At the games, I volunteered as an Athletes Village Leader (AVL), so I basically hung around with the young athletes in the village, which was a surreal experience. Me and other AVLers took charge of the setting up and breaking down of the village; played FIFA with the athletes; put up the medal placing’s on the medal board; were creative and played fun icebreaker games with them. Doing that was a lot of fun and hard work, but rewarding at the same time. If you can volunteer at the games, I definitely recommend it because it’s such an amazing, surreal experience; next year’s games is taking place in Manchester so keep an eye out for any volunteering applications on the School Games Website.

The YAG had our quarterly meeting in Birmingham last weekend and it was really productive. More will be revealed in due course about our future projects. At the moment, we have a few vacancies in the YAG so keep an eye out on the YAG or British Athletics website to see when the applications go live. Also, there is a National Young Coaches Academy in December, that encourages young coaches to go to Loughborough to improve their skills and get mentored my experts. I definitely recommend that you guys should apply for this, it’s phenomenal!

It’s been great speaking to you guys, looking forward to our next chat.

Andre