It's back to school for teachers

A DECENT number of primary as well as secondary school teachers turned up for a Level One Athletics coaching course which ran from Thursday up to yesterday.

The course was conducted by Zimbabwe Teachers Association (Zimta) in association with the National Athletics Association of Zimbabwe at the Praise and Worship Church.

According to the Naaz facilitator, Tawanda Mutero the aim of the programme was to empower the teacher with the necessary basic skills needed to conduct athletics training at their respective areas of work that is at grassroots level.

"The course is technical in that it is meant to equip aspiring coaches to have basics for coaching athletics and the development of the athlete up to performance at national level.

During this course we covered the aspects of athletics from the training programme, how you design it, develop, then also shared the latest trends in athletics training," said Mutero.

This being the first course after the end of the third school term ZITSA interim chair, Nkosi Sibanda was impressed by the turn out of both male and female teachers.

"I am happy with the turnout seeing that this is our first coaching clinic that we have organised as an association, teachers responded positively to our call. More courses of this nature will be held to help teachers master the important aspects of training so that they can go back to their respective schools where they will effectively conduct sports training in various disciplines,'' Sibanda said.

Asked why they decided to look at sport only on that particular day he had this to say: "Objective number six in our ZITSA Constitution is that we are going to conduct coaching clinics so that we equip teachers to then pass on the correct skills to the children. We thought it wise to start with athletics since according to our schools sports calendar it is the first discipline of the year."

At the end of the course all participants were awarded with Naaz Athletics Level One coaching certificates.