Teens progression and Achievement Award 2025

Hi all, I thought it might be of interest to you, to know how we're determining the Teens' Achievement Award this year. The last two years it was based only on training session attendance and participating in 'Club events', e.g. Junior Sizzler, XC league races and Open track and field events.

Awarding Joe the Teens Award in 2024

Although the basis of the children's athletics progression is still attending the sessions and challenging themselves through competition, we can better challenge the children through measuring how they get on in some key underpinning aspects, such as strength and mindset, and events, e.g. are they better at sprinting, jumping, throwing or running? So, this year we have added a Performance element to the "Teens Achievement Award", as it has synergies with how the children progress.

We're already recording performances by the children, either at the 'Club events', or at the training sessions on the track, and indeed we're measuring certain athletics related activities, as well, e.g. vertical jumps. With the performance monitoring we are able to determine how effective the sessions are at developing the children's capability, and therefore how we need to adjust the sessions' design. It also allows us to better communicate the rationale of why we do what we do with the children so they can all see the benefits of, say, the strength and conditioning exercises.

Teens Achievement Award winner 2023 : Caitlin

There are three elements to the performance monitoring and assessment:

1. improvements in key athletic activities and events

2. development and demonstration of physical capability through key strength and conditioning exercises

3. Behaviour - does the child's behaviour demonstrate they have the right mindset to progress in athletics

The latter two elements will be assessed from judgement by the coaches on what they see and hear during the sessions.

The first element will be assessed using measurement, with points awarded for:

1. improvement in time or distance achieved for the event or activity

2. for significant achievements, i.e. achieving a level within the new England Athletics PB Awards standards, or breaking an existing club record.

Obviously, we won't be doing measurements of every event each week, so it's important that children attend as many sessions as possible, so that they can post a performance at one session and then a few months later an improved performance, in addition to getting the session attendance points, of course.

We have decided for simplicity and logistics reasons to have a mixture of actual athletics events and other physical activities relevant to the development of the underpinning capability for other events, especially some jumping and throwing events. The events we'll be monitoring this year are:

• outdoors : - 40m, 100m, 300m, 800m, mile*, Howler Throw

• indoors : - CMJ, SLJ, Shot put, Bleep test

The events in bold have values for PB Awards values for Under 13s and up.

* there's no PB award for the mile but there is for the 1500m so we will pro rata their performances in that.

Communication

We intend to feedback the children's performances to them periodically, especially when we do the repeat so they can see how they're progressing. We would also like to share, periodically, with parents and guardians their children's progression.

Other Benefits

Lastly, the performance measurements also will enable us to determine when we should consider introducing some degree of specialisation to the individual child's training, while ensuring we maintain a focus on the Athletics' ABCs (agility, balance and coordination). Specialisation of the more "mature children" will be through the allocation of children to the Titans or Giants groups. Where children have more all round strengths then they would be in the Vikings group. The less mature children will be in one of two "Foundation" (an England Athletics' programme) Groups : Seahawks and Lions; who will have similar but subtly different activities. NB There are significant risks in early over-specialisation, which I will share in another article, so there's no reason to rush children into the Titans or Giants groups.

Award Determination

If you read how we will score the Performance element (below), it's obvious that there are many more points available for this than those for the training session attendance or representing the Club in events. For this year, we will factor the performance element total score to make it no more than 40% of the points awarded, so it does not dominate the Award assessment, but the intention is to increase this % in future.

For completeness, the Club events that will count to the award this year are:

Track & Field : Low Key Open Events, other Open events, e.g. Midsummer Open Games, County Championships, representing the County in inter-counties, etc.

Off track races : Junior Sizzler (2 or 3km), Coln Valley 2km Trail, Junior Parkrun (to be specified), 5km Parkrun (to be specified)

Cross country races : 4 Glos League matches, incl County championships, representing the County subsequently.

Dorian

Addendum : How we will score the activities (April 2024 - March 2025)

1. Training session attendance : each attendance at a weekly session is worth 0.2 points (attendance measured using Spond register). [max about 10-12 points for the year]

2. Participation in Club events (see below for list) one point per meeting or race [max about 12-15 points]

3. The measured performance element will be scored as follows: [max about 30 points]:

   1. improvement in event / activity performance at training session is worth one point per event, unless large where it will be worth two points (what constitutes large is activity dependent, but will be based on % improvement)

   2. achieving level 1 or above of an EA PB Award standard is worth one point, increasing level is worth an additional point

   3. breaking an existing Club age and gender record is worth three points

4. The coached judged elements will be scored as follows:

   1. For S&C exercises, the S&C coach will assess whether the child can do the exercise with correct form for the number of reps (2 points) or is very close to achieving it (1 point). There are some core exercises that we will do each week so the children can become proficient in them. [max about 10-16 points]

   2. For the behvioural aspect, we will use a list of demonstrated attributes with what constitutes a pass and a fail. The scoring for this is up to 10 points, but more importantly feedback to the children will hopefully create a mindset focused on doing the right things to progress. Although this is for athletics development, it's useful for life!