Each month, What's the Score? will shine a spotlight on a specific department within England Lacrosse, giving details of the work the staff in that department are doing.
May's spotlight is shining on the Education team consisting of Nik Roberts and Ryan Griffiths.
What is your job title?
Ryan Griffiths: Officiating & Competitions Coordinator
Can you give us a general sense of what your role is?
Ryan Griffiths: It’s pretty much everything to do with officiating and has started to include a lot more of the disciplinary side as well recently. I deal with anything to do with getting people qualified, the CPD for officials, liaising with heads of workforce, helping officiating coaching leads to make sure that people who have taken courses get signed off, and making sure our international officials get the right amount of coaching, but then also looking at how we can up-skill the entry level officials and what opportunities we can provide to those people.
And the same question for you, Nik. What is your job title?
Nik Roberts: Regional Education & Skills Officer
And can you give us a general sense of what your role is?
Nik Roberts: My job is to set up and initiate courses mainly at the bottom end with the Fundamentals and the Field courses. I'm about to take over the Talent course to try and move that forward as well. A lot of my time is spent trying to get the right people on the right course at the right time and to organise appropriate venues for the courses with good tutors. I make sure people get through the course, which has been damaged hugely by COVID, obviously, and that the course is fit for purpose. It’s just little tweaks here and there at the moment and I think the Fundamentals and Field courses are in a reasonably good state of health, but we're always adding on and tweaking.
Nik, what are the big projects you work on every year?
Nik Roberts: Well, the the thing is, except for redesigning courses, which I work on with Richard Gartside, it's not really project driven in the education and skills department, it's more process driven. So we're constantly reviewing the courses to see if they're fit for purpose. I'm looking to get new courses online: a Tutors course and bits and pieces like that, but it's just it's not project driven, it's process driven so putting on courses every quarter in each region, making sure tutors are up for it, it's not a project, so there's no real project involved in the coaching side of things. I do get involved in the other departments in the provision of coaches and making sure the coaches up to the right skill level because the Academy coaches and Triple Arrow Camps coaches all come through the course system - that’s an ongoing thing.
And the same question for you Ryan. What are the big projects you work on every year?
Ryan Griffiths: A lot of my projects are sort of calendar based. So we have National Schools, we have The Fly, we have certain events that are our flagship events and they’re always in the calendar and we know what we're going to be dealing with. But then for the rest of the my job role, it’s a little bit like Nik’s and it becomes a lot more process driven; rather than event based, it becomes about preparing for the next season and getting our database and paperwork sorted for the next year.
Nik, has or did your job change during the pandemic? And if it did, how?
Nik Roberts: Well, the big change was having to move all the theory in the courses online, which has actually improved the course in my eyes; I think people get more out of it and it does have its difficulties but I think that's that's the biggest change since the beginning of the pandemic. More recently, we've had the opportunity to go back to classroom based courses which gives us a bit more interaction with the people on the course and they find it easier to ask question when they’re at an in-person session.
And Ryan, has or did your job change during the pandemic? And if it did, how?
Ryan Griffiths: I’ve had the same experience as Nik really but my opinion is that the courses do benefit from being delivered in person because if you're talking about more complex theory you can go through it more easily. Certainly in our Level 2 and above officiating courses you need that face to face interaction because the topics that you're discussing aren't as simple. In terms of my role during the pandemic more specifically, it is significantly different from before. Because we operate in such a large geographical location, I used to spend my time driving around to different places to meet different people and it’d be a four or five hour round trip to get to our lacrosse hubs, so you end up spending a lot of time in the car and this is where the convenience of doing a lot of stuff online comes in. We've now got people on committees and engaging with us who would not have had we not been doing meetings online.
And finally, if you were stranded on a desert island and you could take one item with you, what item would you take and why?
Nik Roberts: I need two items: a ball and a lacrosse stick. That’s all I’d need!
Ryan Griffiths: If I could take my full game set-up in one box as one item then I’d take that but if not then it’d just be a football.
Nik and Ryan have nominated the Kasey Allen to be interviewed for June’s edition of Spotlight on…