Tennis Apprentice Josh Day attends Youth Sport Trust National Talent Camp

East Glos Tennis Apprentice Josh Day was one of 350 coaches, athletes and officials selected to attend this camp at the end of last year.

Here is Josh’s account of his experience.

We first had the opening ceremony where sprinter Dina Asher-Smith along with Sue Campbell helped open the camp up. Dina explained what it takes to be the best and how she became Britain’s fastest 200m sprinter in history.

We were then split up into groups of 12 and separated into three different strands of coach, athlete and official. I met a lot of different coaches from different sports, and I learned how other coaches philosophies, ethics and morals differed between sports. It was really interesting to find out how other coaches deal with different situations and learning from each other was a really great experience.

We were woken up at 6am every morning to do morning circuits which was horrible at the time, but got us up and ready for the day. We watched a live high performance badminton session being delivered, which had some of the top athletes, coaches and officials in the UK displaying how a really well run session should look like. They had one court doing strength and conditioning, and the other three courts had drills that the other coaches were running. The session was professionally run and had everyone involved all the time. Some of the drills they did gave me ideas that I can apply to tennis lessons, as they were really relatable.

We had a number of workshops including a journalist speaking about how to deal with social media situations and how to ‘brand’ yourself to others. The camp in a whole gave me a really good insight into more of my own coaching ability and gave me some good ideas of how I can present myself and drills into a coaching lesson. 

Photo: Josh with the other delegates and coaches at the Talent Camp

Josh Talent ID Camp