At Vector Health we have always prided ourselves on our junior athlete development program. Last year, we were pulled away from what we started on, and I would like to personally announce that we are looking forward to 2017, and to getting back to what my initial dream was, when I started Vector Health in 2010.
Rockhampton has plenty of offer when it comes to athletic talent. Just thinking of the many athletes we have helped develop over years and especially the younger athletes, who have now grown up into young adults, who continue to impress me with their athletic pursuits across the globe. To me, its more than just developing national champions. Its about teaching young people the value of hard work, discipline, and being able to walk away in grade 12, with a good foundational knowledge of how to move, and how to walk into any gym and confidently use equipment.
Over the last few years I have been lucky enough to work with some great athletes, young and old. We have reviewed our system of coaching over the past months to look at all the tools and coaching strategies that we use, and others use who are successful, and we have decided to go back to the model we started with with a few adaptations.
The big changes that may be made are:
1. Testing – every 4 weeks in the program – athletes will be tested on their ability to perform movements that we are practicing in the program. This is a qualitative scoring system and we will provide throughout a term, a report back to parents based on these tests performed.
2. Behaviour Management Guidelines – to ensure that your child is receiving the highest quality coaching, we are asking parents to work with us to talk to your children about what our behaviour expectations are, so that everyone has a good time and gets results.
3. Movement based coaching. Our value in our coaching system will be: Mobility leading to Core Stability Leading to Strength and Power.
The three levels of Junior Coaching are:
1. Beginner Level and under 12 years of age.
This program is for athletes who are just coming into our program, and who are under 12 years of age. We have set movement qualities for the completion of this program and our athletes must prove through good work ethic that they are ready to be challenged some more. We have cut down the time to be a 30min session. Some of the research and feedback I have received is that by shortening the session, it makes it more focused and this will lead to less down-time for our athletes. We will get in, work really hard with your children and get back to you in a shorter time.
There are set movement criteria that we are going to work towards and we will have each athlete in the program monitoring their ability to move and some will be provided with homework to improve their foundation skills faster!
Times of Sessions:
Monday and Wednesday afternoon – 3:30 till 4pm and 4-4:30pm
Tuesday and Thursday 7-7:30am
Intermediate Program
The next level of programming is for athletes who are 12-14 years of age. We should have seen the level of skill now have improved. For this level, athletes must pass through a minimum of one term of this group training to be considered for higher level programs. We focus really heavily on movement skill, and the ability to move bodyweight in all planes with good technical ability before moving to more complex strength and power exercises.
The group size in this program will be between 4-6 students as the emphasis on technique and skill development in this age group is critical, in my experience to performance in later teens. Particularly there will be a lot of work on flexibility in this program. We start to work on educating our athletes on the importance of daily flexibility routines and this is an expectation of participation in this program.
Class times for this program are:
Tuesday and Thursday 3:45-4:30pm
Tuesday and Thursday 6:00-6:45am
Advanced Program
This program is for athletes who are 13 and over who have passed the movement quality testing, plus have demonstrated they are able to work more independently in the gym. For this level, we group athletes into a group of 4. Each athlete is assessed for movement competency at the start of their program, and we start to look at performance testing for strength, power and speed.
Each athlete is provided with a program that is best suited to them, and we work really hard to identify personal weaknesses and address them throughout the coaching program.
Our focus still is on mobility, stability and strength to power, however we expect more out of our athletes in terms of homework and warm up and cool down independently.
We provide a 1 hour coaching session per week in a group of four athletes and each athlete then has to do between 1-2 extra sessions at the gym partially supervised at agreed times during the term.
The times for these sessions are usually released close to term however they are usually:
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at 3:30, 4:30 and 5:30pm
We do offer some morning sessions and we try to group athletes in age, sport and ability relevant groups.
Signing up for the Program
Please click HERE to sign up for the program
Please call 4927 8190 if you are in doubt about what program your child will be best suited for. We are happy to meet with you for 20mins first with our head coach to help you decide, or talk on the phone with you to help get your child the best value from our program.