Melanie Timberlake is up for national coaches award

Ikkado head coach Melanie, who works at Stoke Mandeville has overcome post natal depression, a troubling childhood and brain surgery to inspire others to take up the sport.
Ikkado head coach Melanie, who works at Stoke Mandeville has overcome post natal depression, a troubling childhood and brain surgery to inspire others to take up the sport.Ikkado head coach Melanie, who works at Stoke Mandeville has overcome post natal depression, a troubling childhood and brain surgery to inspire others to take up the sport.
Ikkado head coach Melanie, who works at Stoke Mandeville has overcome post natal depression, a troubling childhood and brain surgery to inspire others to take up the sport.

Included in the list are South East coaches Melanie Timberlake, Craig Morris and coaching initiative Project 500, who are finalists for the 2018 Disability Coach of the Year, High Performance Coach of the Year and the Transforming Coaching through Technology awards, respectively.

Ikkaido head coach Timberlake, who is based at the Stoke Mandeville National Centre for Disability Sport and manager of a further three disability football teams, has shown phenomenal resilience to overcome a troubling childhood, post-natal depression and brain surgery to inspire others through a shared love of sport.

UK Coaching Awards finalist Timberlake said: “Being a mum to two boys with disabilities, that is the driving force and the reason why I turned to disability sport, and then myself going through what I did also added to that.

"I never wanted my children to turn around and say that they couldn’t do something, I wanted them to do what all their friends at school were doing.

“What this award nomination does for me is it recognises that I am making sport accessible to people that it may not have been originally accessible to, and that’s the way I work, I want them to do what their friends and peer group are experiencing.”

Emma Atkins, Director of Coaching at UK Coaching said:

“Great coaching takes place across the UK every day and the UK Coaching Awards is our chance to formalise our recognition, congratulations and thanks to coaches for all their hard work.

“Last year, over nine million adults received coaching in the UK, with the majority of participants enjoying a positive experience. To celebrate this, we hosted our first ever Coaching Week and got our great coaching message out to over 50million people across the UK. In the same week we launched our Principles of Great Coaching designed to help people recognise what great coaching looks like.

“The UK Coaching Awards has been staged for over twenty years, and we are confident that this year will be the biggest celebration of great coaching yet.”

Want to join the stars of the show? Tickets and table sales can be found here:

https://www.ukcoaching.org/about/our-awards