COACHES CORNER… Derek Sharpe and Shane McCabe
AN INNOVATIVE online coaching website, the brainchild of two Fermanagh sportsmen, aims to provide a community for coaches to interact, share good practice and develop coaching from grassroots to professional sports.
‘Coaches Corner’ was created by Derek Sharpe, Enniskillen, and Shane McCabe, Belcoo – and the pair see no limit as to its potential for growth throughout both the county, Ireland, and wider afield.
“I’d probably started thinking about it two years ago – from using other sites that weren’t user friendly – and what I’d do differently,” explained Derek.
“I decided to bite the bullet and it was about a year ago that we got in touch with a programmer and started working on the site.”
The pair have extensive experience in sport: Derek is the manager of Ballinamallard U18s, while Shane plays Irish League football with Glenavon, and has played gaelic football for Fermanagh.
He became involved after working with Derek, who was manager, as his understudy in this year’s Milk Cup.
Derek’s full-time occupation is a teacher, while Shane is insurance business development manager at Towergate Insurance.
The basics of the website, which can be used across all platforms, mobile, desktop and tablet, are that it provides coaches with a online base from which they can plan training sessions, share and download from the session library.
Shane explained: “It’s an online facility. What we’re primarily trying to do is making coaching a lot easier for people that are doing it voluntarily from the gaelic and soccer perspective. You have people who are going out of their way to coach kids, underage, senior – and a lot would be done with a pen and paper. Those days are gone now. It gives you a facility where you go on and can have a session or a drill done in ten minutes sitting on your lunch break.”
He added: “It also gives a centralised station where people can watch and keep track of their club as a whole from U12s, to U18s to senior level which is something that a lot of coaches and teams don’t do. But it’s coming into a lot of the Irish Football Association (IFA) development, the GAA development that it has to be progression from ground roots up.”
It has taken the pair close to a year to fully develop the product – and they are to host a launch night on September 22 in the Westville Hotel. Promotional work has included offbeat interviews with football and gaelic teams – as well as a competition to guess former Tyrone GAA star, and former Fermanagh GAA manager, Peter Canavan’s top 15.
Shane said that while he expects some difficulty in converting the ‘old-school’ coaches, that the move into digital is an inevitable.
“We want to show the benefits of this as opposed to paper and pen. One thing about coaches is that some can be ‘old-school’ they have their own philosophies that they pull out of their pocket on a wet wintry night. It’s just trying to get them into the mindset of using it. It’s like when you went to older people: They didn’t want to use iPhones, they didn’t want to use laptops – it just takes time for people to come round and get the understanding. The ease of using it is very simple.”
Since it went live, the sight has amounted 40 users and with heavy promotional pushes, including its launch night week, the pair are targeting close to 1000 members in both soccer and gaelic football over the next three months – and could even spread it further afield, having already had contact outside of Ireland.
Shane said: “There’s no real limit to it, people have contacted us from Canada and New Zealand and we’ll hopefully get to the stage where we have it translated to French and Spanish – it’s in the pipeline at the minute.
Derek added: “The greatest thing about Google analytics is you can see where people are coming from. We’ve had people from Macedonia, Italy, Sweden, Turkey – it’s a universal thing.”
You can follow Coaches Corner on Twitter (@coachescorneruk) and on Facebook.
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