GAA Coach Webinar - Owen Mooney and Gerard O'Connor this week

To help coaches through this difficult period, the GAA, An Cumann Camogaíochta and the LGFA have created a series of coach development sessions to take place over the coming weeks. The sessions will run every Tuesday and Thursday at 7.30pm, and began on Thursday, March 26^th.

The sessions will be along two separate formats. Every Tuesday there will be a live Questions and Answers session with a coach. Any participants in the Q and A will have an opportunity to view the coach delivering a session from the GAA Games Development Conference over the last couple of years and submit their questions via the registration form for the coach to answer live.

Every Thursday there will be a live webinar presented by a coach or coach developer. The webinar will be a 30 minute presentation followed by a live Q and A with the presenter.

All sessions will be advertised through the GAA Learning site – learning.gaa.ie and across all of the social media channels.

We are using Microsoft Teams to host the event. You can access Teams through your web browser, or you can download the Teams application onto your device.

For full details of how to register, to review previous sessions, and for details on future sessions, click on this LINK. 

The latest session in the Coach Webinar and Q & A series continues tomorrow evening with a Q and A session hosted by Owen Mooney. Owen has recently taken up the role as Learning and Games Development Coordinator for Dublin GAA.

Before this role he was the National Coach & Sport Development Coordinator for Special Olympics Ireland. He spent time in the position of Games Development Officer at the Rockland Gaelic Athletic Association club in New York, USA. Before his move to New York, Owen was a Department of Education Physical Literacy Curriculum Coach and Development Officer with Ulster GAA, working with children from 4-8 years and he was seconded to the position of Ulster Ladies Gaelic as Provincial Development Officer.

Owen’ session is titled ‘Expression & Freedom for Learning & Development – Let Children Be Children’.  It is vitally important that we as adults allow each child to have the freedom to express themselves when it comes to their learning and development because learning is FUN. Children need to be treated like children and by facilitating a child’s imagination and creativity we are opening up a whole new learning experience for ourselves as coaches, as well as the children. During this interactive workshop Owen will be using his practical experiences of working with children to show how adults should trust children for their own learning and development. He will speak about incorporate different learning aids and tools that work extremely well in engaging children during his coaching.

Programme

The programme of events has been completed up until the end of April. Beginning this week, we have:

• Tuesday, April 7th – Q and A – Owen Mooney,
• Thursday, April 9th – Webinar – Gerard O’Connor, Games Development Manager, Dublin GAA
• Tuesday, April 14th – Q and A – Stuart Lancaster, Senior Coach, Leinster Rugby
• Thursday, April 16th – Webinar – Dr. Damien Young, Performance Analyst Tipperary Senior Hurlers / Cliodhna O’Connor, Coach, Dublin Senior Hurlers and Orlaith Curran, Athletic Development Coach, IRFU*
• Tuesday, April 21st – Q and A – Liam Moggan, Coach Educator
• Thursday, April 23rd – Webinar – Shane Keegan, former Manager Wexford Youths, Galway United
• Tuesday, April 28th – Q and A – Prof Wade Gilbert, Fresno State University, California. Coach, Canadian Olympic Softball Team
• Thursday, April 30th – Webinar – Johnny Bradley, Programme Director MSc Sports Performance Analysis, Carlow IT

* Note that the April 16th Webinar event will be two separate webinars. One involving Dr Damien Young, and the second involving Cliodhna O’Connor and Orlaith Curran focusing on The Female Athlete.

Registration

Please note that each new session involves a new registration period. Any coach that has registered previously must register for any individual session that they wish to attend. This is because each new session involves a new set of log on details that are sent out electronically on the day of each session.

Registration opens at 9pm following the completion of each session. A valid email address is required for each registration.

Registration for the upcoming session involving Owen Mooney, as well as details of the session to be presented are available at https://learning.gaa.ie/gaacoachwebinar2020

We hope that you are enjoying the series and that you will continue to attend over the coming weeks.