Jay Stone
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The CoachCoaching Background: I never set out to be a coach, it is something that happened along the way. The path to coaching began during the Armidale winter of 2001. With no formal coaching qualifications I began helping school age club athletes prepare for their competitions. Later that year along with inaugural members Angela Brown and Josh Atkins formed a squad of my training partners, the 'Viper Squad'. After injuring myself during the 2004 Oceania Championships, I studied to get my formal coaching qualifications and expanded the squad in an official coaching capacity. For the next five years, the squad size fluctuated. Some seasons I was coaching up to a dozen athletes, and some seasons I was coaching none. With little desire to continue to train by myself, in 2010 I began attending as many school track and field carnivals that I could, and offering to help talented athletes with free coaching. Using this process, I slowly built the group from humble beginnings into a squad which at one point in Armidale had well over 100 different athletes attend at least one training session in a calendar year. With an expansion of this nature, the time investment on my behalf to prepare sessions, monitor training, track data and improvements and analyse athlete performance became considerable, to the point where after 15 years I could no longer offer free coaching. Switching to a paid coaching model allowed me to invest more time into coaching the athletes, after which I was named coach of the Regional Australian Team at the Oceania Championships in 2016, assistant coach in 2018, and I was awarded Athletics NSW’s Club Coach of the year award in 2017. Outside of coaching the Viper Squad, From 2013-2018 I served as the President of the Armidale Athletics Club, and was a coach at the club from 2006-2020. Over the past 20 years I coached athletics in most schools in the New England region, and from 2017 until 2019 I was also a coach of the NIAS Athletics squad. After moving to Tamworth in mid-2022, I built up a squad base locally across the next 15 months, before in October 2022 the Track Taipans were officially launched. Coaching Qualifications:
Coaching Positions
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