The Cricket NSW Foundation, the charitable arm of Cricket NSW, has announced a partnership with Coaching Unlimited to offer a First Nations Community Cricket Coaching Workshop.
The free coaching workshop will offer First Nations participants an opportunity to improve their coaching skills and improve players' knowledge, while deepening cricket's connection to the community.
Former New South Wales Indigenous representative Andrew Gordon will be facilitating the coaching workshop.
Gordon said he is excited to be involved in this coaching project and its approach to developing Aboriginal cricket coaches and opportunities to develop our future Aboriginal cricketers in all ages of the game.
"As a long time player and coach, I'm a strong advocate for this concept to improve opportunities, nurture great coaching methods and essentially develop our Aboriginal cricketers," Gordon said.
"Looking to the future, if we can strengthen the knowledge of our First Nations coaches we'll enable opportunities to develop Aboriginal cricketers and potentially inspire another generation to explore coaching," Gordon said.
The workshop is open to First Nations peoples 14 years and older, who after completing the workshop will receive their Community Cricket Coaching Accreditation through Coaching Unlimited - a national coach education program that provides sport-specific training to support First Nations Peoples to become accredited sport coaches.
Coaching Unlimited operations lead and co-founder, Andrew Bennie, said he wad delighted Coaching Unlimited would be delivering the first Community Cricket Coaching workshop in partnership with First Nations peoples and the Cricket NSW Foundation.
We recognise the crucial role that First Nations coaches play in encouraging sport participation and our ambition at Coaching Unlimited is to support First Nations coaches achieve their goals – be it reaching the highest level of their chosen sport or becoming a role model for their communities," Bennie said.
"The upcoming community cricket coaching workshop matches this intent by increasing access to sport coaching accreditation while also providing a mechanism to develop connections with other First Nations coaches where knowledge is shared, and relationships are built for mutual benefit."
The workshop will be held on Sunday February 9 at Cricket Central, Cricket NSW's home in Sydney's Olympic Park.
Cricket NSW Foundation head, Jake Balnave said the Foundation is looking forward to collaborating to support the development of more First Nations community coaches.
"The workshop in February is part of an ongoing commitment to Reconciliation by the Cricket NSW and the CNSW Foundation, who currently conduct dozens of free First Nations-focussed cricket clinics for children and adults alike every year to remove the barriers that prevent them from playing cricket to inspire everyone to play and love the game," Balnave said.
Registrations for the First Nations Community Cricket Coaching Workshop are now being accepted online.
