Introduction
This year has been a significant year for development within the Coach & Volunteer Academy which saw the launch of a brand-new strategy for 2020-2025. We have continued our mission to offer high quality sports-based opportunities that enhance personal and professional development, and despite the challenges we have all faced this year, there is a great deal of work that deserves recognition.
This report is shared with you to demonstrate the impact of our work supporting the volunteers and placement students within Loughborough Sport’s workforce this year. We are immensely proud of the students we are privileged to work with and want to share with you their successes and experiences.
A year in review
- 37,512 hours logged
- 645 unique volunteers logging hours
- Over 222 hours of workshop/ masterclasses delivered
- 38 Success Stories Published
- Brand new strategy launched for 2020-25
- First ever virtual CVA Awards
CVA Strategy 2020-2025
After undergoing a thorough review involving a huge range of staff and students through surveys, focus groups and meetings we developed our brand new strategy for 2020-2025.
Our mission to offer high quality opportunities that enhance personal and professional develop is at the core of every decision we have been making this year to ensure we are working towards our vision of providing life shaping experiences that develop the sporting workforce of the future.
Vision
To be the world leading HE institution in providing life shaping experiences that develop the sporting workforce of the future.
Mission
To offer high quality sport-based opportunities that enhance personal and professional development whilst supporting and developing a workforce for Loughborough Sport and the wider sporting ecosystem.
Objectives
Quality of experience
Ensure every experience is meaningful, engaging and developmental.
Recruitment
Identify, recruit and select a high-quality workforce that responds to the demands and needs of the sporting ecosystem.
Training and development
Develop and provide the workforce with the tools and support needed to succeed both in current and future roles.
Evaluation and feedback
Build a 'check and challenge' culture of reviewing the CVA, which provides the opportunity for feedback driven improvement.
Reputation and profile
Raise the awareness, profile and successes of the CVA by evidencing the impact on the Loughborough Sport ecosystem and wider sporting workforce.
Coaching
The coaching strand has maintained its focus towards recruiting, training, and deploying coaches to support the whole Loughborough Sport offer. Our relationships with the performance programmes have grown significantly with bi-weekly discussions on coach development during coaches’ breakfast and close collaboration with the head of coaching to provide outstanding CPD opportunities.
Our work with the Athletic Union has massively improved with our newly formed bursary scheme to support coaches in the AU to gain their qualifications as well as working closely with clubs to support their coaching needs.
We have also integrated the coaching strand into the SCaPE degree working closely with our academic colleagues to provide over 70 students with coaching opportunities, learning and opportunity to network and observe our performance coaches.
Whilst maintaining a high quality of coaching standards in Loughborough Sport, the coaching strand has used the newly formed strategy to shift our training towards environment specific coaching. This training is divided in 2 formats:
Training formats
- Generic coach development – support to all coaches looking to coach at any level.
- Environment specific development – specific support to coaches looking to coach either in performance, competitive club level or recreational/participation level.
Coaching success stories
Officiating
Officiating at Loughborough has been improving steadily and has focused a lot more on the quality of experience as well as recruiting more officials to help within our rugby, football, and netball programmes. In total, we recruited, qualified, and deployed over 40 officials to support the mentioned programmes mostly in IMS. Not only this, we have supported Athletic Union clubs to upskill their members to become officials so they can cover their competitive games.
Through our volunteer Hub Managers for football, rugby, and netball, we have successfully provided improved organisational structure, fair officiating opportunities and the chance to offer paid work off campus.
Key developments for the officiating strand are to maintain the high quality of officials we recruit yearly and to provide support to the hub managers to deliver outstanding training and personal development to all the volunteer officials.
Officiating success stories
Performance support
Over 120 volunteers and 17 placement students gained significant applied experience within our performance programmes this year across six areas (Performance Analysis, Nutrition, Physiology, Strength & Conditioning, Performance Lifestyle and Psychology). These students are progressively given more responsibility until they are ready to operate independently as practitioners, often contributing fresh and insightful perspectives to performance questions.
This year, three previous volunteers/placement students have secured full time staff roles as S&C coaches with Loughborough performance programmes. This is a testament to the work and progressive attitudes the S&C team show toward developing high quality practitioners.
Performance support success stories
Media, marketing and communications
This year saw us drive the recruitment of 37 volunteers to form sport specific MMC teams across several of Loughborough’s performance programmes. Brought together at termly meetings, students had the opportunity to share best practice and reflect on their goals of raising the reputation and profile of the programmes.
To support those volunteering in these programmes, and media reps from a range of committees, we hosted 8 workshops delivered both in-house by some of Loughborough Sport’s Marketing Team, as well as external guests such as Red Bull and BBC’s Ben Croucher. Towards the end of the academic year during lockdown we were also fortunate to have Chicago Bull’s Manger of Digital Content, Joe Pinchin, to deliver an online masterclass with Q&A.
The Media, Marketing and Communications strand is seeing continual investment in creating and sustaining high quality opportunities for students. Building on feedback from this year we will be working with the Performance programmes to provide more tailored support to their programme needs, and work with the Loughborough sport marketing team on exciting new volunteer intern roles within their team.
Media, marketing and communications success stories
Event management
2019/20 was set to be another incredible year of events on campus, not only hosting the annual Loughborough International Athletics and Loughborough EAP competitions, the University was set to host a youth national circuit series cycling event, 2020 School Games and ParalympicsGB Tokyo 2020 Kitting Out event to name but a few.
Whilst restrictions may have prevented these events from taking place there has been a whole host of internal and external events that took place prior to lockdown, that our volunteers have been involved in.
Featured events
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The Big Match Series, including Fresher’s Big Match against Wolves FC at University Stadium which saw an attendance of over 2,000
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My Lifestyle FEST series participation events led and supported by volunteers 598 participants over the course of both semesters' 7 events
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19 students volunteering with Alan March Sport supporting the Sports Presentation of Loughborough Lightning Netball fixtures.
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20 volunteers recruited to support performance programmes at weekly fixtures and events including rugby, football, and basketball
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9 students supporting Loughborough’s Indoor Athletics Season events
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4 students coordinating the Tennis Alumni Event
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2 students volunteering at Swim England’s Winter Championship in Sheffield
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Students supporting LRS School Games Paralympic Sports Festival
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Red Bull Marketing and Events Masterclass
Event management success stories
Volunteer Zambia
This summer, 5 Loughborough students and 1 staff member were due to spent 6 weeks in Zambia as part of the Wallace Group’s long standing international sport development project ‘Volunteer Zambia’. This included our first Zambian student Stewart Luunga who has come through the ‘Sport in Action’ project in Zambia and this year joined Loughborough University as a first year student.
Due to the current pandemic, this unfortunately has been put on hold until 2021. However in preparation for Volunteer Zambia, the UK induction of all of the Wallace Group University students (40 students) took place at Loughborough University in February 2020.
Based in Lusaka and working alongside Sport in Action (the largest Zambia sporting NGO) the students will volunteer as Sport Development Officers within the newly formed Community Sport Hubs within one the 3 key sports of netball, basketball and football. This is all through the community led sports hubs whereby the students help to build capacity and sustainability by upskilling local sport leaders, coaches and volunteers.
Leadership programme
The CVA Leadership programme is designed to develop the skills of high performing students to use in their sports leadership roles in a practical and applied way.
This year, we continued to work alongside IF Development to deliver over 25 hours of specialist CPD as part of a brand new, bespoke package of workshops designed to raise self-awareness, understand leadership styles, and apply leadership techniques to their roles. This year for the first time, the students had the opportunity to use this learning to achieve a Level 2 Institute of Leadership & Management qualification, and 100% of them passed!
Rachel Caverhill, previous participant of the CVA Leadership Programme and current Athletic Union Clubs Officer:
I've not only been able to develop my communication and confidence, but also the ability to analyse and reflect on my own and other people's leadership styles. Through the year-long programme and with the continuous support from the CVA, I have learnt of several leadership styles and qualities, goal setting and various communication methods to improve my own and my club’s performance. I’ve also had the opportunity to build valuable relationships with those on the programme and my team members because I was a lot more confident in socialising with those around me.
CVA Alumni Engagement
Whilst students are at Loughborough, they have the opportunity to enhance their personal and professional development through being part of the CVA. When they leave Loughborough, we keep in touch to see how this development has helped them to gain employment. We are continuously blown away by the successes of the students and this is reflected in the graduate destination survey.
- Graduates that reported volunteering with the CVA developed their ‘communication’ and ‘interpersonal skills’:
- 93%
- Graduates reported that volunteering with the CVA enhance their overall university experience:
- 91.9%
- Graduates currently in some form of further education or employment:
- 94%
- Graduates employed full-time:
- 70%
We will continue to keep in touch with those who have been involved in the CVA to track their journeys. In turn, we can then set up opportunities for the graduates to ‘give back’ to the current Loughborough students, now that they have begun to build professional networks.
Support programmes
In addition, to the strands that we directly deliver, we also support other programmes within the Loughborough Sport offer to recruit, train and deploy an appropriate workforce that then goes on to deliver an exceptional student experience. This has included attending sessions such as the Sport Sec training day to raise awareness of the opportunities and support available from the CVA, and supporting 20 student leaders across the AU, Competitions, and Recreational Sport programmes through the CVA Leadership Programme.
This year we have also worked as part of the wider development team to support the planning of their ambition to host brand-new committee training week to increase the quality and impact of annual committee training conference.
Success stories
Recognition
A key part of our objectives Quality of Experience and Reputation and Profile focuses rewarding and recognising individuals for their contribution and celebrating the successes of the workforce we support.
We have introduced a number of changes to ensure our volunteers are feeling valued for the work they do. This has included introducing ‘Out and about week’ where our team and colleagues have been encouraged to go out and to both thank and gain feedback on their experiences. We have refreshed the way we deliver our Reward & Recognition package to students who’ve hit their milestone and published over 40 success stories sharing students’ experiences.
This year also saw us host our first ever virtual awards evening to 120 attendees following a record number of nominations to recognise the incredible contribution volunteers had made throughout this year.
Follow us
We recognise the challenges ahead for 2020/21 but are looking forward to supporting more volunteers to unlock their potential through the high-quality opportunities at Loughborough University.
Stay up to date with our activities, opportunities and the stories from volunteers by following us on social media.
Contact us
If you are interested in working with the CVA or getting involved, please contact us at cva@lboro.ac.uk. For more information on the CVA, please head over to our website.
Get involved with the CVA