Olympians, sprint­ers Em­manuel Cal­len­der and Re­yare Thomas, along with 2013 IAAF World Cham­pi­on 400m hur­dler, Je­hue Gor­don, have had dis­tin­guished ath­let­ics ca­reers and are now tran­si­tion­ing in­to coach­ing, hav­ing re­tired from ac­tive com­pe­ti­tion.

They are among 22 as­pir­ing coach­es, who re­cent­ly com­plet­ed the World Ath­let­ics (for­mer­ly IAAF) On­line The­o­ret­i­cal Train­ing for Lev­el 1 Coach­es, and par­tic­i­pat­ed in a prac­ti­cal ses­sion on Sat­ur­day at Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Mu­cu­rapo, Port-of-Spain.

The ses­sion was host­ed by the Na­tion­al As­so­ci­a­tion of Ath­let­ics Ad­min­is­tra­tion of T&T (NAAATT) and was the first of four to be con­duct­ed, ex­pos­ing par­tic­i­pants to the more prac­ti­cal el­e­ments of coach­ing.

It al­lowed the as­sess­ment team of IAAF-cer­ti­fied Lec­tur­ers – Ian Carter, Na­dine Hamid and Dex­ter Voisin – to ob­serve the abil­i­ty of the par­tic­i­pants to ap­ply the the­o­ry in a prac­ti­cal set­ting.

Dur­ing Sat­ur­day’s prac­ti­cal ses­sion, the young coach­es were ex­posed to var­i­ous drills and ex­er­cis­es de­signed to de­vel­op and im­prove ath­lete’s per­for­mance. Al­though fa­mil­iar with some of the ex­er­cis­es and drills giv­en their own ath­let­ics ca­reer, the as­pir­ing coach­es were now be­ing re­quired to demon­strate and to in­ter­pret ath­letes’ re­sponse from a coach­ing per­spec­tive.

Cal­len­der was one of them, show­ing his ex­per­tise. He is a mem­ber of the men’s 4x100m re­lay team that re­ceived gold medals, up­grad­ed from sil­ver, for its per­for­mance at the 2008 Bei­jing Olympics at a Re­al­lo­ca­tion Cer­e­mo­ny, ear­li­er this year.

At the end of the four planned ses­sions, as­sess­ment re­ports will be sub­mit­ted to World Ath­let­ics for com­ple­tion cer­tifi­cates to be is­sued which the NAAATT will be look­ing for­ward to wel­com­ing the new coach­es up­on their grad­u­a­tion.