Hey coaches, athletes and parents! My name is Brooke Enns and I absolutely love anything and everything related to skating... especially involving the sport of ringette.
This year I am coming up to my 10th anniversary of beginning my coaching career. I never intended to make a career out of coaching, it was something that just slowly started to take up more and more of my time.
I started my undergraduate degree in 2014, not really sure what I wanted to do, but knew that I loved sports and wanted to learn about how people develop these skills as well as become the best. So I went on to pursue a degree in Kinesiology. Whenever people would ask me "what can you do with a Kin degree?" I always would always rattle off a mundane list of things that I heard of people doing after their kin degree such as a kinesiologist, personal trainer, massage therapist, physiotherapist, etc. But I always knew that none of these career paths specifically interested me. It was not until I got more involved in coaching and got asked by my local ringette community to coach a power skating program, that I really found anything that sparked my interest.
I took power skating lessons myself from when I was 12 up until I was 18. I have always seen tremendous benefit in skating focused practice for ringette players because of my personal experience and improvement in taking these types of programs. I was taught by a figure skater (Melody at Strictly Power) and soaked up every single detail and technique she taught me.
In my last couple of years in my undergraduate program I got really interested in motor learning and control as well as exercise prescription and physiology. To me, this was the information that I could actually apply in my life and helped me coach ringette athletes more effectively. After finishing my degree and working for a year in the field, achieving my strength and conditioning certification, and working as a personal trainer/skating instructor using a skating treadmill, while also continuing to grow my power skating business, I decided that I wanted to be pushed to learn more. At this time I applied into graduate school and started a Masters program dedicated to education in coaching studies at The University of Victoria.
Currently in my degree, my final project is to make a valuable coaching resource. I have spent the past year and a half doing research to find information to put into my resource, combined with the 10 years of experience I have. My coaching resource looks specifically at how we coach. Most resources look at what skills to coach and why you want to coach those skills, but little resources look into how we actually achieve the result we want. My Masters degree project has been dedicated to this "how" looking at not only how you coach a skill, but how an athlete learns a skill, and how this skill will be replicated again during performance. This is a key area of skill development when looking at skill acquisition and retention in sport. Within my coaching resource I will attempt to close the gap between research and coaches by providing valuable, useful, and practical information to get the most out of your athletes.
(myself coaching at my first ever national level competition)
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