Twenty-three years in elite sport, fifteen of them working with Great Britain’s best Olympians. In October 2019 I left the UK High Performance System to work for myself. There were two reasons.
The first was wanting to be present at home. My daughters were young, and I was starting to miss the things I would never get back, the festive school productions, the ordinary mornings of taking them to school. The job had been giving me everything in one column and quietly taking it in another.
The second was something I’d been thinking about for years. I wanted to take the learning opportunities I’d spent my career designing inside the UK High Performance System, and make them available to people without privileged access to them. From the outside, high-performance sport can look like a black box. From the inside, I spent a decade and a half designing the mechanisms of learning and development that sat behind it. The knowledge wasn’t proprietary. The access was.
Inside UKSI (formerly EIS)
At what was then the English Institute of Sport, now the UK Sports Institute (UKSI), I spent five years as Head of Strength and Conditioning. That meant growth, development, support and safeguarding for the 60+ S&C coaches working across 35 sports in the Great British Olympic and Paralympic programmes.
For the following two years I was Head of Learning, which widened that responsibility to the full 400+ staff, every discipline in the performance science and medicine pipeline. I led the design, development and delivery of each of our flagship practitioner programmes. Some of that work is still being run, under different names, across the UK and beyond.
What I noticed
The same gap, over and over again. Between what graduates learn in a sports-science degree and what they need to survive in a performance environment. Between the technical content of S&C and the non-technical skill set that actually determines career progression. Between the practitioners who were getting seen and the ones who were quietly doing great work that no one was helping them articulate.
I’m a trained and experienced facilitator, coach educator and mentor, and what I kept seeing was that education providers weren’t teaching those things. They were teaching content. Context, and the ability to deploy knowledge in context , was being left to chance.
Why SCA
Strength and Conditioning Academy is my answer to all of that. I’m building credible, accessible, and affordable learning for practitioners at the early stages of their journey, and offering mentoring and consultancy for the ones further along. The standard is the one I was held to when I was inside the system. The door is open.