almost exactly a year ago as it turns out...
THREAD - payment coaches
Our club now pays its coaches for running beginners courses. The coaches have to give up their own valuable shooting time to teach the beginners, but additionally to that, the coaches also have to support those beginners with the multitude of questions and needs that beginners inevitably have on their route from beginner to novice. As the club makes a tidy profit from hosting beginners courses, from which the membership naturally benefit financially, we felt it reasonable and important, not only to recompense the coaches for their time and costs of becoming a coach and maintaining their coaching license, but also to reward the coaches for the important work that those coaches do.
We also pay for training wannabe coaches to become qualified in return for the trainee coach delivering an agreed number of beginners courses as part of their training and shortly after qualifying.
The area we havent mastered yet is payment for the coaches working directly one to one with the archer. How to separate a "quick bit of help" here and there, which people expect to be free, from a more intensive round of one on one coaching which the archer should pay for.
We're going to experiment with having dedicated sessions for coaching which our archers will pay for, where the participants are specifically looking to improve their shooting. We feel that making a charge for the service and payment of that charge forms a more formal contract of expectation and delivery between the coach and archer. We're looking at "Boost Archery" as a stepping stone into this for the early summer.
Our coaches all agree that they get a lot of personal satisfaction and enjoyment from teaching and helping others, but in return we as archers should show our appreciation for their time and effort.
You dont get new equipment for free, you dont get to shoot for free, so why expect to be coached for free?