This weekend saw the delivery of the second European Athletics High Performance Conference
held in the beautiful city of Warsaw, Poland.
The conference brought together over 60 delegates from the majority of European Athletics Member Federations, all with the aim of learning, supporting and networking.
Following welcome messages on Friday from European Athletics first Vice President Dobromir Karamarinov and Poland’s two-time Olympic shot put champion Tomasz Majewski, who is now a Vice President of the Polish athletics federation, the first day sessions for the coaches, coaching managers and federation officials focussed on creating a successful high performance environment and preparing athletes in the coming 18 months ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
The FCN founder Vicky, was invited to discuss how to achieve gender equality in high performance coaching in athletics in Europe. Using the “Ecological Model of the Barriers and supports for female coaches” paper written by Nicole M. LaVoi and Julia K. Dutove and published in 2012, Vicky facilitated the discussion of what the perceived barriers to women coaching at the higher levels within each country and what could each federation do to make changes to a lack of women coaches.
Following a panel discussion alongside Swedish athletics federation head coach Karin Torneklint, Poland’s deputy head coach Krzysztof Kęcki and Polish athletics federation sports director Piotr Hazcek, Vicky delivered one of the four available workshops to continue the discussion around coaching gender equality.
“What was really interesting was to learn how different each member federation views gender equality in coaching and the mixture of progress and difficulties taking place across the continent. There was a lot of passion for the need of female coaches and I hope to work alongside some of the nations to support their aims in recruiting more women at the elite ends of the sport.”
Vicky – founder of the FCN
Other female speakers included:
- Karin Torneklint – Swedish Athletics Federation Head Coach
- Sabrina Skorksi – Sports Scientist for Sportmedizin, Saarbrücken, Germany
- Bijana Danicic – PR and Communications Activity for European Athletics
A big thank you to European Athletics for putting on a fantastic conference and we look forward to working alongside many European Nations in their development coaching gender equality.
For more information about the Conference, please click here: https://www.european-athletics.org/news/article=high-performance-conference-enhances-high-level-coaching-skills/index.html