Sean shares his experiences from his recent Moderate Water Endorsement Training…
The background
Moderate Water Endorsement training is the second step after becoming a UKCC British Canoeing Level 2 coach. The first is British Canoeing Four Star Assessment in the chosen discipline. Getting to this point fells like a maze of bureaucracy and red tape but once you get here it all seems a little clearer and the hoops you’ve jumped through to get to this point all seem a little more aligned than they at first seemed.
More paperwork, planning and pleading
After the paperwork involved in getting through my Level 2 coaching qualification, I felt it was time to get on with some actual coaching. Yes, there is a lot more of actual coaching this time round but there’s still the inevitable paperwork and keeping my paddling log up to date. I registered with British Canoeing for my Moderate Water Endorsement (MWE) Training and was issued with another half a tree of guidance, assessment criteria and course materials. It’s a lot of reading and preparation.
I had originally planned to do my MWE with my friend Jess but unfortunately she moved on from this world and I had to take the next step on my own. I wish she could have done the training with me as it was such a fun weekend and having done our 4 Star Assessments together, I knew we would have had a blast together.
The weekend was originally meant to take place in Mid Wales but due to the lack of water, it was moved last minute to the Tryweryn in North Wales. A quick beg and plead to Clarissa and I managed to squeeze into the cottages she’d already hired in Llangollen for her peer paddle weekend.
The course itself
The weekend started with a briefing and talk about what to expect from the two days. Our first session was a peer paddle on the Upper Tryweryn (aka in Regents’ folklore as the “Upper Upper”) – we had to come up with very quick sessions demonstrating our coaching and observational skills. Surprisingly, we then ran the rest of the Upper down to Cafe Wave, each taking turns to run sessions on the way down – lots of fun but slightly weird turning a peer paddle into a coached session – it felt weird coaching fellow paddlers of similar paddling ability. It was also a little odd to be coaching in an over-remit environment – it kept us on our toes but was most definitely a valuable learning point. We then learnt some more on feedback and observational skills including use of video feedback. We finished the day with being handed out homework – I had not expected homework and was knackered already from eight hours of learning and paddling. We each had to write up a 30 minute lesson plan incorporating coaching skills, observational and feedback skills.
The Sunday started bright and early. First up was handing in our homework for review – thankfully I got positive feedback on the lesson plan. Next up – onto the river! We were going to run the Lower Tryweryn each incorporating some leading time and then “park and play” sessions as we went to deliver our prepared sessions. The day was long. We did some safety and rescue recap over lunch and each delivered our sessions with some great feedback from each other and from Matt, our head coach.
The end of the day came and I was prepared for a lengthy debrief and a hefty action plan. Maybe I shouldn’t be so tough on myself as my action plan was pretty much to just get on with the assessment. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome!
I learnt loads about how to apply the various coaching techniques on moving water and had a great time on the water at the same time. I’m looking forward to my assessment but not the paperwork pre-work that needs to be done first!
