Local swimming coaches Stephanie Baker and Georgia Baker have won Women in Swimming Coaching scholarships that will help them to pass on new skills to local swimmers.
Stephanie has been awarded a $1,110 scholarship to cover the cost of travel and accommodation to complete a Bronze accreditation program.
Georgia will receive $500 to help her complete her Bronze accreditation and a babies and toddler course with renowned swim coach Laurie Lawrence.
Stephanie said they will head to the Gold Coast early next month to train with Australia’s best coaches.
“It also involves completing a list of modules online – throughout the online course we will need to prepare a season program that we will take to the face-to-face workshop for evaluation.
“The face-to-face workshop will be delivered by a Gold level coach (Raelene Ryan) and we will be doing practical race analysis with Doug Frost (Ian Thorpe’s former coach).
“After Georgia and I have had our programs evaluated and tweaked we will be able to put it into practice next season for the swimmers of Cobar,” Stephanie said.
To be successful in attaining her scholarship Stephanie needed to show evidence of prior learning.
In addition to teaching swimming in Cobar for the past eight years, Stephanie had already attained a Swimming Australia Teacher of Competitive Strokes qualification, Austswim certificate, has a Certificate III in Fitness and a Bachelor of Education (Health and PE).
“I’m really excited to be able to expand my knowledge by working with some of the world’s best coaches and share this knowledge with our swimmers,” Stephanie said.
