St Albans woman gets children skateboarding (From St Albans & Harpenden Review)

St Albans woman gets children skateboarding

8:50am Thursday 6th May 2010 in News By Alex Lewis

A ST ALBANS woman is encouraging local schoolchildren to get active by teaching them archery and skateboarding in a commercial project.

Lynda Regan of Hatfield Road has been offering a variety of holiday activities through her business, Wild Child, for the last three years, but is now being paid to provide coaching officially through schools.

She and her husband Kieran are both trained archery tutors, but they have a pool of about 20 self-employed coaches to teach skateboarding among other activities and skills.

Under a deal with St Albans District Council, Wild Child has been providing hour-long coaching sessions as part of physical education lessons at Beaumont Secondary School in St Albans and St Luke's Special School in Redbourn.

The deal covers the next 12 months and will include sessions at more schools in the district over that period, with the aim of boosting health through inculcating the habit of exercise.

Each pupil volunteering for the project receives an weekly hour of skateboarding coaching for four weeks followed by four weeks of archery.

Lynda said: "It is aimed at the less sporty children, or perhaps the semi-sporty ones.

"If they fall out of playing sport as teenagers they may never come back to it.

"A lot of the children don't really think of skateboarding as sport, but by the end of the session their hearts are racing.

"It is coached in the same way as other sports, involving balance and co-ordination.

"A lot of parents aren't very keen on skateboarding - they see skateboarding parks as rather intimidating places, but once they see it is being properly coached, they are a lot more positive about it.

"The kids really enjoy it, and they are getting a lot of exercise without quite realising it."

Ms Regan says her business is growing so fast that she is thinking of converting it to a franchise, charging people to run similar operations in other areas using her Wild Child name, materials and methods.