BRITISH FENCING DELIVERS ITS LARGEST TRAINING EVENT FOR PARTNER PGL

BF supports PGL Travel Ltd to bounce back from Covid-19 challenges and double down on their commitment to fencing, due to high demand from schools and guests. 

Each year BF delivers a re-licensing process for PGL, where selected PGL staff receive training from BF to become Licensed Coach Developers (LCDs) who can then deliver BF’s Core Coach course under license to their Activity Instructors. Fencing continues to grow in its popularity with staff and more importantly with the guests and schools that PGL delivers to. Last weekend, 40 PGL staff participated in this year’s annual event at PGL Liddington.

The partnership started in 2016 and has grown year-on-year.  In 2016, PGL started with eight LCDs and one BF Coach Developer. This year BF brought three Coach Developers and three other members of the BF team to work with six existing and 18 new LCDs. This year was the first time 12 PGL leadership/management staff also attended, to gain a deeper understanding of the partnership. Some staff even travelled from as far as France to make the event.

PGL has also seen BF’s recent launch of We Are Forging Futures and was eager to have us come in and deliver two workshops that all staff could attend across day two of the event.

James Craig, Commercial Director at BF reflected on the partnership and training weekend, “PGL has the biggest impact when it comes to fencing participation in the UK with pre-covid levels nearing 100,000 unique fencing participants per year. This shows a growth of 24,000 from 2016. The model BF offers is financially beneficial when you look at the scale of training an organisation wants to deliver and it affords an organisaton like PGL to train up more staff, so they can offer more fencing experiences. PGL tells us each year how popular fencing is, which has contributed to our strategic travel when it comes to the creation of assets like the newly rebuilt Explore Fencing App and our evolving work in education now under the identity of We Are Forging Futures.”

Jason Collins, NGB Course Director for PGL who attended both days, said, “One thing that has really stuck with me from the weekend was ‘Forget everything else. Fencing is about tagging people with a sword.’ Partly as it was just comical, but mainly because it was so well emphasised, around how inclusive fencing could become with good game-based coaching delivery.”

Marjorie Kuhne, Commercial Officer at BF, said about the event and the partnership, “PGL has been a key player in transforming young people’s experience with fencing, and it is great to see such commitment to the continuing development of their coaching workforce. Having the new and existing Licensed Coach Developers as well as the senior leadership team gathered for the weekend showed that PGL is aligned to BF’s vision for fencing in the community space. As BF continues to develop new products and services and to tailor processes to evolve our ways of working together, the partnership continues to grow stronger”.

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