Week 1 offered a chance to me as coach to gain an understanding of who may have participated in hurdling before and who may have never jumped a hurdle in their life. My main goal for week one was to give students an understanding of what hurdling looked like and to give them a feel of overcoming obstacles in the form of ladders, cones and small hurdles. One of the main challenges that was posed to me as coach was that students timing was not great and I had to come up with ways to help the students get timing. I asked the students to say 1,2,1,2,1,2 as they were going through the ladders and this helped greatly.

Week 2 - I progressed the students onto walking over the hurdles to help gain the confidence of the students. Some students felt embarrassed trying to get over the hurdles and some students took to it like ducks to water. The students were finding it difficult to use the same leading leg as they were differing their stride lengths between hurdles. I told the students to keep the same stride length between hurdles and to use same leading leg each time. I was happy with this lesson because the students were demonstrating that they were getting more confident throughout the lesson when approaching and clearing the hurdles.

Week 3 & 4 - These weeks were focused purely on the trailing leg when clearing the hurdles. A lot of students found this difficult due to stiff hip joints and overall a lack of doing the motion. The skill refinement of the skill by using one hurdle worked very well as it gave me a chance as coach to identify the faults they were making such as not accruing a high enough angle or not lifting the foot high enough to clear the hurdles. It was a great opportunity to provide feedback to the group also because they were all in a tight group.

Week 5 & 6 - Out of all the weeks of practice, this week proved most difficult to teach the students as they were struggling to find their stride lengths and kept changing their leading legs. For athletes used of hurdling this is no problem but for beginning students it can rupture their technique. I got the students to jog through the course to find out how many strides they were taking, remember what foot they started off on and to keep their head looking forward. The students slowly began to improve as they became familiar with how many steps it was taking to get to the next hurdle. Students also enjoyed the relay as it added a bit of fun and competition into the class. Although this was  challenging lesson, it was one of my favourite as coach because the students improved tremendously from beginning to end and were set up nicely for the final lessons.

Week 7 & 8 - The final two lessons focused on putting all skills we have learned into practice in an authentic experience of hurdling. Students practiced clearing the hurdles using either leg in week 7 and became comfortable clearing hurdles in straight lines. In week 8 I introduced a turn of a corner in week 8 to help students practice coming off a bend in a race. I told students to focus on stride length and frequency in order to sort their footing out before clearing the next hurdle after the bend. The students from previous weeks had learned about footing in take off and most students succeeded throughout the final practice session. Overall, this was a very enjoyable unit as i got to see the students progress from week to week and feel they learned a lot about hurdling in the 8 weeks to be a confident and competent hurdler.