Three coaches announced as part of the UK Coaching Health Programme

Three swimming coaches and teachers have been selected to take part in the UK Coaching Health and Development Programme.

The trio have a vast experience in coaching and are all long-term members of the Swim England family.

Coach developer Nicola Bainbridge has been selected along with teacher Gail Foyle and open water coach and teacher Lindsey Prior-Mckie.

The programme is led by UK Coaching and aims at targeted learning and development opportunity for coaches working with participants who have Long Term Health Conditions.

The ambition for the programme is to take the coaches on a supported development journey to increase their confidence and competence.

Sport England are funding the project following insight from coach and participant focus groups which identified that learning and development opportunities for these coaches were needed.

Over 16-weeks, the programme will contain a blend of workshops, Communities of Practice and Coach Developer support and provides a year’s worth of free access to UK Coaching’s subscription resources.

‘A fantastic opportunity’

Nicola will be one of the coach developers for the course and has over 35 years of experience within the sport.

She started her swimming career aged ten at Kidderminster Swimming Club and has raced for Wyre Forest, City of Birmingham advanced training squad and won age group and open titles before retiring from the sport in 1990.

Since then she’s taken up coaching and also begun to take part in Masters competitions from 2003.

In 2021 she became head coach at Oswestry Otters Swimming Club and is a regular tutor for Swim England to both Teachers and Coaches.

She is also a director of swimming at a local school and the owner of a thriving learn to swim programme.

Gail is a level two swimming teacher who has been helping both children and adults to learn to swim throughout the last 20 years.

She does this at Brimhams Active who work throughout Harrogate where they focus on water wellbeing.

Their aim is to use the project to help them provide a more sustainable wellbeing offer to their clients and help get more people in the water.

Lindsay has been a swimming teacher since 2001 so brings over 20 years of experience to her role as a teacher.

She set up her own swim school, Super Swim Academy, in Scarborough in 2007 and began coaching open water swimming in 2020 due to the pandemic.

As a result, she fell back in love with ocean water swimming and is now starting a new venture in Soulful coaching in the open water.

As part of her application Prior said: “My personal goal is to always continue to learn and expand my knowledge and to become the best version of myself that I can be.

“Having something like this to help me on that journey would be a fantastic opportunity that I’d be very keen to experience.”

You can find out more about UK Coaching’s programmes here.