Welsh Amateur Boxing Association

As the newly appointed Performance Director for WABA I wanted to use this blog to introduce myself to the boxing community in Wales and use it going forward to keep you all up to date with what I’m up to.

Boxing is a sport that I have always admired and love to watch, and the chance to work in Wales, where I have been living for nearly 10 years was too good to miss! I think it’s a great time for sport in Wales and amateur boxing really has the chance to make its mark at the 2012 Olympics and the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. WABA already has a history of success and that is something I want to build on over the coming years.

A little bit about me; I’m originally from North Yorkshire, yes a Yorkshire-man (someone has to be!) My sporting life was all around Rugby Union, I started playing at 11 years of age and progressed reasonably well, representing Yorkshire and England at youth levels whilst playing in the premiership for Leeds Tykes until a nasty ankle injury resulted in a far shorter career than I hoped for! I then started working in top level sport. I began by running one of the largest TASS Scholarship schemes in the UK at the University of Bath, working with athletes from a number of sports including: Judo, Rugby and Bob Skeleton. I then moved into Welsh Athletics setting up various Talent Development programmes and most recently working with the Paralympic Sport, Wheelchair Rugby, to set up their performance structures for success at 2012 and 2016.

My first week in the role has been pretty hectic; I’ve been setting up the new boxing office at the Sport Wales National Centre which will be a fantastic base for WABA, especially with the Performance Centre on site. We really have a presence here now. I then travelled to Baku on Wednesday for the latter stages of the World Championships. I had the pleasure of  watching some fantastic performances: Andrew Selby winning a silver medal in a bout that was too close to call and Fred Evans gaining Olympic qualification; a fantastic result for Wales and GB. Congratulations must go to the their clubs, Splott and St Josephs ABC.

The next few weeks back in Wales will be just as busy, I’m really keen to visit some of the clubs throughout Wales to gain more of an understanding of your needs and how we can improve performances at all levels. I have already booked in visits to a number of clubs including:

• Prince of Wales ABC (Cardiff)
• Premier ABC (Swansea)
• Splott Adventurer ABC (Cardiff)
• Red Dragon ABC (Holyhead)
• Deva Boxing Academy (Saltney/Chester)

The interviews for the National Coach position will take place over the next week and it will be a really important appointment for the future of the WABA. We then have a number of important competitions on the horizon:

1. The Womens European Championships in Rotterdam take place between 17th – 23rd October and will provide a real test for the four selected boxers (Lyndsey Holdaway, Rebecca Price, Charlene Jones and Lauren Price)
2. The GB Championships will be taking place at York Hall in London on 11th & 12th November, so please keep an eye out for the team selection announcement and get down to London to cheer on our boxers!

I will then be looking to identify the talented boxers we have in Wales that can become successful on the international stage, through a series of assessment camps, further information will be sent out soon. I will be working closely with GB Boxing to make sure our talented boxers have the opportunity to progress onto the Olympic programme as they hold a number of assessment days in November too.

I’m also keen to see how other successful performance programmes  in Wales work, so I will be visiting the Welsh Cycling performance programme at the Newport Velodrome and the Swim Wales programme in Swansea. They both have excellent records of Commonwealth success and also feeding athletes into the GB programmes, so I want to see what works well, what doesn’t and what can work for boxing.

Thanks for taking the time to read, I’d love to hear from you so please do leave a comment below and I will post an update over the next couple of weeks.

James