04 April 2010

Earlier this year, UKA unveiled 2010 as Year of the Coach with a view to celebrating, recognising and communicating to and about athletics coaches in the UK to highlight their expertise and hard work to bring success to athletes across the country.

Throughout 2010, coaching will be brought to the forefront of all activity and the profile of athletes will be dovetailed alongside the coaches who have helped them achieve their performance goals to ensure that come 2012, the athlete coach pairing is a natural part of the knowledge and storyline of our sport.

UKA’s commitment to coaching has been already been supported in recent months with the launch of the dedicated coaching resource website uCoach  www.uka.org.uk/coaching and a restructured coach education process so that every coach has the opportunity to develop and grow their knowledge base.

To continue that overall promotion, monthly coach and athlete (Futures Programme) interviews will be now published on uCoach, and, where possible, in Athletics Weekly.

In the first interviews of the 2010 series, Futures athlete Andrew Pozzi talks about breaking the UK under-20 60m hurdles record earlier this season and looks ahead to a summer which he hopes will peak with the IAAF World Junior Championships in July and a move south to University and to train with Malcolm Arnold’s hurdles group in Bath.

Pole vault specialist Julien Raffalli, coach to Futures Programme trio Andy Sutcliffe, Katie Byres and Holly Bleasdale, is the first coach to be featured in 2010. The monthly coach profile, which is recognition of the work of an accredited coach, will be available exclusively in Athletics Weekly on Thursday 8th April prior to appearing on the uCoach website.

Click here to see the uCoach interview with Andrew Pozzi