The end of each calendar year brings an opportunity to look back at the past 12 months and celebrate some of the great achievements we have accomplished both personally and professionally during the year.
For Scottish Cycling, this will involve not only taking stock of their recent successes, but also taking the opportunity to officially recognise them at their annual Roll of Honour awards in early 2018.
Rewarding success
The Scottish Cycling Roll of Honour Awards will be entering its second year of existence, following a debut in 2017 as part of the governing body's AGM proceedings. This will be the first time the event has stood alone as a solo event, which has resulted in an increased attendance of up to 450 attending.
Struan Hope, Scottish Cycling’s senior policy and communications administrator, told Sport First about the experience of running the event for the second time.
“We at Scottish Cycling are delighted to be able to put on this event again after the great success of last year," said Struan.
"This event gives the cycling community the opportunity to come together to celebrate the achievements of our riders, who we know put in a great deal of work for their successes."
The Roll of Honour awards will once again be supported by last year’s sponsor Digby Brown, whose chief executive, Fraser Oliver, said: “This Roll of Honour recognises the achievements of cyclists of all ages who have literally gone the extra mile, whether for themselves, their team or their country.
"As a business, we might not be breaking world track records but we aim to display the same determination every day. We extend our congratulations to everyone featuring on this roll of honour.”
Supporting development
Scottish Cycling are very aware that the ability to celebrate and reward success does not come without putting a system in place to create it in the first place. From this, they have implemented a new system to help and encourage the coaches within cycling in Scotland to continue to develop their own knowledge and skills.
Craig McCulloch, Scottish Cycling’s coaching and education manager, said: “We noted that over the last two years the same small group of coaches were doing CPD (Continuous Professional Development) and while this was great in some respects, it wasn’t very representative or inclusive.
"We knew from our coaching surveys that the majority of club coaches were keen and bought into the concept of it. However, for many reasons they were not able to access the opportunities provided by Scottish Cycling.
“We decided to do something about it. We decided to bring the development to the coach rather than the other way round.”
In response to this new insight and ethos, Scottish Cycling created their new Club Coach Development Programme. This involves providing club coaches with their own specialised coach developer for a year. The aim of this would be to allow the coach developer to be utilised within the club environment to provide consistent and contextual advice and support to the coaches of these clubs.
The Club Coach Development Programme has now been running for six months and has been responsible for actively providing over 32 hours of one-to-one observation and support to more than 21 cycling coaches in Scotland.
The aim of this new project is to continue to lower the barriers of accessibility to professional development for Scottish cycling coaches, allowing them to reach the levels of success the Roll of Honour award ceremony simply couldn’t ignore.
Find out more
Visit the Scottish Cycling website.
For more cycling stories on Sport First, click here.
If you're interested in what other sports are doing well, see the other parts of the "Focus On" series here.
