BSI share lockdown positives

While negativity surrounds the global pandemic, coaches and students at Balderstone Sports Institute (BSI) used the time wisely to bring out all of the positives that sport has to offer.

At the announcement of the initial hard lockdown in March, the school was ready.

“In the months before the lockdown we implemented elements of remote learning. Our students were already learning from laptops and submitting their work online. Integrating to remote learning and teaching was therefore effortless,” said Michael Balderstone, managing director of BSI and PGA master professional.

Additionally, when most sports came to a grinding halt, BSI students and coaches found new creative ways to train and keep each other motivated and disciplined.

“Our coaches utilised videos calls, coaching apps and Zoom to interact with students. We also kept to students’ regular schooling routine. We start a normal school day at 7.30am with an energised exercise sessions. We kept doing that over video calls and apps.

“We then moved on to schooling from 8am to noon as we would normally have done. This was then followed by the afternoon sport schedule,” Michael said.

He added that the students were able to reap the rewards of focused training during the lockdown period.

“We saw unprecedented technical changes in our golfing students. The remote lessons forced students to focus on their technique. And they returned to school as better technical golfers and we could then focus on other aspects,” Michael said.

He said BSI would consider implementing lockdown type training for students to improve their technical abilities.

Michael said football was a little more difficult for training.
“The students are used to training as a group. Coaches would schedule group runs where individuals would run their own route in their own area and such activity became quite competitive. It was a good way to keep the team spirit strong.”
Michael said keeping students motivated and disciplined was the hard part.

“Some students were really motivated some of the time and lacked motivation at other times. We all had our ups and downs during lockdown. We tried hard to teach our students about self-discipline, self-reliability and self-responsibility”.