Angie, who joined HPSNZ at the end of 2024 as a Coaching Consultant from her role as coach of 2020 Olympic trampoline medallist and 2022 World Champion Dylan Schmidt, will lead Core Knowledge as it starts its fourth year delivering coaching programmes in partnership with NSOs.
A busy year lies ahead for Angie and her group of presenters and facilitators as numbers for all measures of the programme continue to increase.
“I feel incredibly humbled to lead a great programme and continue the amazing work of previous leads, Craig Palmer and Lyn Gunson, both of whom are coaching legends,” says Angie.
“I aim to build on the foundations of what has been done, and also to have an increased focus on coach wellbeing and care for the coaches.
“We know that it is imperative coaches create challenging yet supportive environments for their athletes and teams, and that they feel supported in doing this while also ensuring they keep their own wellbeing as a priority.”
The 2025 programme and intake of coaches reflect the increasing importance NSOs are placing on coach development and the benefits they and their coaches are seeing.
Feedback from NSOs is very positive says Craig Palmer who led Core Knowledge from 2022 to 2024 and now moves into a Coaching Consultant role working with Olympic and Paralympic coaches.
“Two of the most important pieces of feedback we received after the 2024 programme is that NSOs have seen an increasing level of confidence in their coaches and that they are having better quality conversations with athletes,” says Craig.
One piece of NSO feedback especially makes Craig smile – “Core Knowledge is the best thing that coaches on the other side of the world don’t have.”
Similarly, feedback from coaches is not only very positive but is also important to the programme facilitators as they continue to evolve the programme. “We get strong feedback that participants want face to face delivery so we have increased access to that style of learning by ensuring a greater spread of workshops around the country,” says Craig.
“Coach connections through cross code learning, the skill and experience of our facilitators and an environment that allows everyone to express ideas in a positive and supportive way is very powerful.”
While there is a great deal of satisfaction in the coach and NSO feedback, the growth in numbers is also testament to the need for a programme for coaches in the early part of their high performance pathway.
“Our registrations for 2025 are extremely strong,” says Angie. “The number of overall registrations is 445, up 60 from last year, registrations from women coaches is at an all time high of 169, an increase of 22 percent from 2024 and representing 38 percent of the registrations, coaches from 42 sports have registered and the spread across our regional network means workshops will be held in Mount Maunganui, Auckland, Christchurch, Cambridge, Hastings, Dunedin and Wellington.”
A statistic that gives a lot of satisfaction to HPSNZ’s coaching development team is the number of coaches who have and will graduate from the full Core Knowledge programme over the next two years. Jonathan Black was the first graduate from the entire programme and towards the end of 2024 was joined by three of his fellow programme participants as graduates – Mark Harris (Athletics, Masterton), Alistair Riddle (Rowing, Rotorua) and Rhys Speirs (Surf Life Saving, Wellington).
“Course completion rates are extremely important and we now have 22 percent of coaches who have completed four or more workshops and we anticipate 87 coaches (15 percent) will have completed the full course in the next two years,” says Craig.
