Just a short piece of news pertaining to Women’s Skateboard Coaching development, here!

In essence, World Skate is now part of the WISH program, supported by the Olympic Solidarity that has been developed to target women and sport development, according to Recommendation 6 from the IOC Gender Equality Review Project (March 2018).

The WISH (Women In Sport High-Performance Pathway) Programme has been developed in cooperation with the IOC/Olympic Solidarity, ASOIF, AIOWF and several International Federations already engaged in projects to increase opportunities and pathways for high performance women coaches. Cycling, Tennis, Triathlon and other IFs are already part of the programme.

From skateboarding, Eva Niedielzska (Italy), Daniela Suarez (Argentina), Lisa Schairer (Germany) and Melissa Williams (South Africa) were identified by World Skate as coaches who could benefit from the opportunity, and once their interest was established World Skate then proposed them each as candidates for the WISH Programme.

The WISH courses drill down into each candidate’s sport-specific needs and develops plans alongside the candidate to address them; focuses on leadership competencies and behaviours, thereby aiming to develop the confidence of a generation of female skateboarding coaches in order that they can advance to the very top echelons of national and international skateboarding within their own chosen aspect of coaching.

The course itself totals 21 months and mixes a hybrid learning style of mentoring and online tuition with a residential section in the UK, which is held in conjunction with the University Of Hertfordshire’s Females Achieving Brilliance initiative. 

The strongest graduates identified from the course will also be offered an additional top-level coaching programme for which scholarship funding may be applied for via the Entourage Unit.

We are pleased to say all four have been approved to become part of the Programme, with World Skate contributing to covering the costs of this initiative alongside Olympic Solidarity.

The support provided for the participation to WISH is part of the World Skateboarding Support Program and represents part of our comprehensive push toward increasing and elevating the participation of Women in Skateboarding. This process begins at grassroots level with Gender Equality Commission's Women in Skateboarding Technical Courses which take place all around the globe with the organisational support of the Olympic Solidarity movement.