Preview: 2023 ITF World Coaches Conference
The 2023 ITF World Coaches Conference – the theme of which is ‘player-centred coaching’ – gets underway today in Bogota, Colombia.
Held biennially, the ITF World Coaches Conference sees leading experts in all areas of player development share their knowledge and experience to help coaches meet the challenge of working with players at different stages of their career.
The conference, which regularly attracts more than 500 coaches from over 100 nations, delivers tailored sessions and workshops on topics such as tennis coaching, applied sports science and participation.
The 2023 conference will feature on-court sessions at the America Club each morning and lecture room sessions at the Casa Damn Hotel in the afternoons. The agenda for the conference, which runs from Tuesday 31 October – Thursday 2 November, can be viewed here.
To give a flavour of the on-court material, there will be sessions entitled ‘building the competitor by layering the drill’, ‘practical training for sustained performance’ and ‘the importance of playing/training in restricted area based on the theory of constraints-led approach’.
The lecture room sessions will provide significant insight on a broad range of subjects, including management, player development, psychology, sport science, ITF World Tennis Number, WISH (Women in Sport High-performance Pathway Programme) and methodology.
The conference agenda certainly reflects the range and depth of the expertise that will be on show in Bogota, with knowledgeable and inspiring speakers a key feature of a packed programme.
There will also be an added emphasis to this year’s conference with this being the first since 2019 to be staged in-person after the 2021 edition was held virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic. An in-person event will inevitably give rise to greater interaction and knowledge sharing.
It is also the first ITF World Coaches Conference to be held in South America for 16 years – since Paraguay hosted in 2007 – so excitement is very much building as the countdown continues.
Before the official start of the conference, the third National JTI (Junior Tennis Initiative) Coordinator Global Workshop took place yesterday (Monday 30 October) and was led by the ITF's development team and all 10 ITF Development Officers.
The JTI provides opportunities for children around the world to pick up a racket for the first time, encouraging them to play in locally-organised competitions and sessions within schools, the community and tennis venues.
The workshop facilitated engagement between National JTI Coordinators, allowing them to build new relationships and learn from shared experiences, so going forward they are further inspired to drive their domestic JTI programmes.
A fascinating few days await.