Soon after receiving my grant I quickly booked onto the initial stage of my level 2 coaching course. The course I had managed to book onto was in London over four days and I did this from the 28^th to the 31^st of May.

The main aim of this course was to introduce coaches on all levels of experience to the British Rowing standards on coaching techniques, behaviours and skills.

On the first day I was nervous as I wasn't quite sure what to expect but shortly after meeting the other people on the course and one of the tutors and seeing how friendly they all were I relaxed and started to enjoy the course and looked forward to learning as much as I could. The focus on the first day was our coaching behaviour and what made a good coach, this is important as I got to hear other coaches and their experiences which made me think about ways, I could improve myself. Another part that I learnt more about was warm-ups and cool-downs around sessions and I realised much more the importance of making time for them and how it could help my rowers improve.

The second day was more focused on how we plan our sessions both ahead of time and being able to adapt due to the weather conditions or the condition of the rower. So, we learnt more about how to plan our sessions properly giving time for a briefing, warm-up, main session, cool-down and a debrief. This also really helped me as I didn't often give the time to brief and debrief my rowers about the session and making sure that they understood fully about what they did and how they felt everything went.

The third day started off more with what we had done on the previous day but had a focus on how to set goals for the rowers that were individual and were achievable in different time frames. Also on this day I was finally able to learn for the first time much more technical ways of rigging the boat in the correct way so that it is optimised for the rower using that boat which was really helpful and opened me up to the ways of adjusting the boats. To finish of the day, we started to prepare ourselves for the final assessment of this part of the course which was to plan a fully thought out session for a rower.

On the final day the focus was purely on doing our individual sessions so that the tutors could see we were competent in every aspect of what we learnt. I am delighted to say I passed on all areas and I am now able to do the final components of my qualification, updating my safeguarding and completing my emergency first aid course and complete my assessed coaching session at my club by an independent assessor.