Volunteer Coaches

I wanted to give you the prospective new coach a brief introduction to how you’ll be spending your days with us. 

To start with, you need to be a reasonably competent coarse angler, with the skills you’ll be teaching of using an elasticated whip for starters, then onto the waggler and quiver tip rods. We carry them all! If like me you’ve never even seen a whip, no worries, I hadn’t ever looked at one before we started ACI and they are very simple to use. If you don’t currently use the above a lot, more carp fishing in fact, you will very quickly pick up the rigs and tactics we use for these. We try to reach them all they will need to know to be knowledgeable lifelong anglers, from knots through to safe fish handling, we are proud too of how well they take to this. Carp fishing techniques come later, though we do take plenty of carp along the way on conventional tactics, the fish below went 27lb exactly back last summer, and was landed on a 12’ float rod using a 3.5lb hook link.

We have 20 events a year, over the May to October period. Most are still-waters, and our days on these are donated by the clubs that support us, KDAA, MAS, CAPS, CAA, Colne and CPS. All lovely venues, with a wide variety of swims and species to go for. To see the full list, have a look at last years venues on https://anglingcoachinginitiative.co.uk/venues  The same Information section also gives you loads of information about us, including the basic rigs we often use. Also detailed directions to every venue are shown, so no-one gets lost. Most students are accompanied by a parent or grandparent and some of these also pay to be coached as well. For many of the younger participants, they will rely upon a parent to take them fishing outside of the coaching scheme, so for us coaching the parents is equally important.

So what is involved in coaching? You can select as few or as many days a year to help us, that is entirely up to you once you have seen exactly what is involved. All I ask is that once you commit to a day, you attend, or your colleagues will have more students than they are really able to handle. The first day you are with us every new coach will be paired with another more experienced volunteer, you’ll set up in adjacent swims so he’s there for advice and help. Collect your name badge from the table to pin on, then I’ll introduce you to the person you’re paired with. I’ll hand you a sheet showing the details of the students you’ll all have and advise where you’ll be fishing. First day you’ll have one student only, after that usually two each.

Your partner will show you to collect a float rod and quiver tip rod for every student plus a 4 metre whip if they are newcomers, then there’s a whole line of everything else you’ll need of tackle boxes (one for every student), rod-rests, a whole variety of baits, everything you’ll need in fact. There’s large carrier bags available to put all these in. Make you way round to the allocated swims and start making sense of it all, setting up ready for the students. For more experienced students they have to set the rods up themselves.

Complete newcomers start on the 4 metre whip to get some fish coming, and for those that need lots of action too, perhaps stay on the whip for the interest value. A waggler rod and learning to cast is next, but you can do the casting to start with. Final option is a method feeder but preferably only the last hour or so, it’s too easy to chuck out anywhere and wait for the tip to shoot round, self-hooked!

Also on the handout sheets you’ll see against every name where they are on the CAST scheme, which tracks their angling learning curve, so for instance a new angler will have really easy tasks like name four fish they’ve seen, Level 1 might be they can set up a rod, Level 2 accurate baiting casting - there’s a full list attached, so it shows items you can concentrate on, but follow whatever seems appropriate with them. L2 coaches test them on these tasks in due course.

About 8.45am you’ll hear a whistle, please come to the base area for a coach briefing. That’s followed at 9am for a student briefing, often that is repeated for different arrival times of students. As soon as you have your allocated people go off to your swims with your partner coach to start fishing! Official times for this are 10am-2pm, but fine to start when ready.

During the events one or two Level 2 coaches including myself will be coming round during the day to see how everyone is fairing. 

On all aspects of our coaching, if there’s anything happening that you’re concerned about, ask for advice from your partner coach or speak to a Level 2 coach, there will be a number of us at every event, including Welfare Officers now too!

2pm the whistle goes to finish fishing, meet up back at the base point with the students and parents to have a short conversation about the day. There’ll be some small tackle prizes handed out, CAST certificates, plus we’re going to start giving away some second-hand rods and reels to the more advanced ones, to encourage them to go fishing by themselves.

Lastly, help please on packing it all away. Bring it all back to base, note some rods normally get packed away made up ready to use next time, please see how we do this so they go away damage free. Then some help carrying back to the car is appreciated, but if you need to get away promptly on occasion that’s fine.

We encourage coaches and parents to take photos on the day to upload to the ACI website for use in the website Gallery and on the ACI Facebook page. Angling Coaching Initiative - Chelmsford | Facebook

There’s much more to get used to but this at least gives you a brief outline. Most importantly all the students need to catch and we all need enjoy themselves!

I fear this piece could ramble on for a very long time, I hope this gives you some idea at least of what we do. We have a team of 30 volunteers and qualified coaches on our Team, usually about 5-9  9 of those are available for each event. With more coaches being available this will help us meet the student demand for places.  I’d be very happy to fill in any missing details!

Chris Burt

07917781299

anglingcoaching@gmail.com