Manly Warringah Gymnastics Club
-Term Unit Plans and Class Templates Background
Manly Warringah Gymnastics Club is a community based, non-profit sporting organisation, which has served the community for over 30 years. Offering both recreation and competitive gymnastics programs in Women’s and Men’s Artistic Gymnastics, they provide an opportunity for all abilities.
The club have over 30 accredited coaches plus trainees. MWGC identified that each coach had a different interpretation of setting up activities and equipment for the classes, leading to inconsistencies in how classes were being run. The club identified that a program plan was needed to address this issue.
Aim
The aim of creating and distributing unit plans and class templates to coaches was to:
-Maintain consistency throughout all recreation classes
-Uniform approach to gymnasts skill development
-Allow for efficient running of the club; any coach is able to run the class on short notice
-Assess the risk of each skill being taught, provide guidelines for safe coaching techniques, for example coach positioning
Actions
At the beginning of 2012, term unit and class templates were created and implemented within the club across all kindergym, juniorgym and recreation programs. The floor plans provide details about the skills to be taught in the class each week as well as risk assessments and photos of equipment set-up.
-Photos are taken of equipment set-up for all kindergym, juniorgym and recreation programs and then uploaded to a spreadsheet, which contains all templates for that term
-Individual lesson plans are developed by the Head Coach and distributed to all relevant coaches
-Copies of the program are also filed in a convenient place for all coaches to access
Outcomes
Since the implementation of the floor plans, the club has experienced a noticeable difference in their recreation programs. The consistency across all classes allows for a uniform approach in the development of the young gymnasts. The club has since developed and implemented unit plans and floor plans for its holiday and school programs. Due to the flexibility of the class templates, they have been successfully used for both small and large recreational programs.
