This is the first in a series of articles, where we talk to people in various roles who contribute to the success of runningsports. First under the spotlight is Senior Tutor Simon Kirkland, who has been involved with runningsports since its early days in the 1990s.
He became a runningsports tutor because, having a lifelong passion for sport (which includes being an Aston Villa season ticket holder and coaching basketball), he enjoys finding out what is happening “at the heart of sport”. This includes finding out about volunteers’ experiences in community sports clubs and helping them to succeed. Simon says ”the most rewarding parts of the job are first of all knowing that every workshop I run is going to be different and secondly the interaction with and between workshop attendees, where the learning really happens.”
Four years ago Simon became one of runningsports’ select group of Senior Tutors, which means he is responsible for supporting new tutors. He will run a workshop alongside a prospective tutor, guiding and assessing them, and also undertaking their final assessments, - the last step for a tutor before they are allowed to tutor workshops on their own. He enjoys working with the tutors, and seeing them start out equipped with everything they need to ensure runningsports’ reputation for high quality tutoring is maintained. He points out that in the past most tutors were ex-teachers or lecturers, whereas now they are from a variety of different backgrounds (including sports development officers) and believes that this enhances runningsports’ tutor workforce. The only aspect he doesn’t enjoy is people assuming he knows everything about tutoring, as he feels he is still learning, gaining useful insights from new tutors as well as the more experienced ones.
Simon tutors the full range of runningsports workshops and gets a real buzz from catching up with people and finding out how they have used their new knowledge and learning to develop their club and volunteers. “Trying to convince someone to invest three hours in their own learning can be difficult, but the benefits far outweigh this investment”, he says.
Having played sport himself, mainly cricket, he sometimes finds that he has played against someone who comes to one of his workshops, and has to hope that he didn’t upset them on the pitch!
Simon has also contributed to the runningsports’ portfolio, his most recent work being the development of the Role of the Volunteer Coordinator workshop. He is currently working on some e-learning products relating to volunteering and equity.
In terms of his future involvement with runningsports, Simon would like to become a national trainer, training new tutors, so that he can be involved in a different part of the process.
Simon’s contribution to runningsports was acknowledged recently when he was one of the tutors that received a special award for consistently going ‘above and beyond the call of duty’.
Finally we asked Simon how he thought the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games would benefit volunteering, and he is cautiously optimistic about the potential benefits for community sport. His fear is that the organisers will not develop the volunteering strategy early enough. He would like to see providers start to give accredited volunteering opportunities to volunteers so that those people who are making a valuable contribution to community sport in England can be rewarded by the opportunity to be a part of London 2012.
We will just have to wait and see...
