Coach of the Month: Kel Walker
Coach of the Month: Kel Walker
Kel Walker, founder of My Run Team and assistant coach at Trinity Grammar School, has been coaching since 2015. He guides athletes of every generation to personal bests, prioritises injury prevention and builds a lifelong love of the sport. Known as his athletes’ biggest cheerleader, he blends technical skill, event specific training and individual needs to create a safe and supportive environment that inspires belief and resilience.
Meet Kel, a passionate athletics coach driven by a desire to serve.
How did you get into coaching?
I started in athletics back in 2005 with the City2Surf and went on to complete 10 of them, along with countless fun runs, half marathons, marathons, parkruns, and masters middle-distance events at State and National level. After 20+ years in Defence and Law Enforcement, my drive to serve inspired me in 2015 to give back to the running community by completing my first Athletics Coaching Course, the Level 2 Recreational Running course, while still working full-time as a Sports Administrator.
I started out coaching adults to run 5K to the marathon on a casual basis. Then as COVID hit Australia I started to get busier with children wanting to improve their running and be active during COVID. Then it progressed to more performance based coaching with athletes going on to State and National Championships and being competitive. I am hoping someday to have athletes that represent My Run Team at the Olympics.
What is your coaching philosophy?
My philosophy is guiding athletes to achieve their personal best and have a desire to remain injury free with lifelong passion for the sport. I am my athletes’ biggest cheerleader and supporter. Training sessions are about having fun and I generally take videos to show progression and to share with parents, to show them their child in action.
What does creating an environment where athletes feel safe, supported, and challenged look like in practice?
So with my training sessions they are varied in order to challenge them to get the best performance I can from them. I will not make any athlete do anything in training or in races that I don't feel that they are capable of and as I said I am their biggest supporter. I will encourage them through what I say and remind them of the challenging things they have done in their training so that they can get the best out of themselves. An example was two years ago one of my 12 years old boys was competing at State in the 100m and he had never made the podium and beaten the boys that have. He said that he was the fourth best. I had to change his thinking in order for him to reach his goal of competing at Nationals. I showed him the difference between his time and the winner’s time in the heats physically, so that he realised he was so very close to winning it. In the final with this new belief he made the podium and went on to become the National Champion.
How do you tailor your coaching for athletes at different stages of development?
All my athletes are different and some come from ball sports. For me it is imperative that we start with the basics - good warm-up, drills, acceleration skills and then a variety of sessions from speed, speed endurance, lactate thresholds etc. to get the best out of them in their specific events. One very important thing for me is to find out about all the other activities the athletes do in their lives and adjust training accordingly to ensure that they are not overtraining and likely to end up injured. Each session is also based on the athlete’s age and experience. The young one is more about technique so that they learn the correct running form for their events or sport. As they get older I introduce more event specific training and tougher workouts to challenge their systems. I also introduce more event specific drills to improve their technique as well as a number of mental skills to help them in their events.
What has been one of your proudest coaching moments?
I have a lot of athletes that inspire me every day with their training. From Steph who gets up at 3am to do her training before coming home and getting her family organised before going off to her own full-time insurance sales job, Maree McLachlan who at age 60 qualified for the Boston Marathon at the Gold Coast Marathon in 2024 and then ran in the Boston Marathon this year despite her remoteness in South East Queensland and the health issues of her family members with her mother passing away most recently. To Pippa Lloyd-Shepherd and Ben Proszenko who both came to me as Zone and Regional athletes and worked hard and consistently at training for a couple of years making it to State and Nationals in both middle distance and cross country.
This might sound cliche, but just seeing the smile on my athletes’ faces as they run a PB is some of the proudest moments of my coaching career so far. Others are watching athletes hit targets they never dreamed possible until they did consistent performance based training. For specific tangible tracked moments it would have to be Jack Spencer becoming the Under 12 boys National 100m Champion and Maree McLachlan qualifying for and running the Boston Marathon at age 60 after giving up on that dream until she started working with me.
How do influence the athletes beyond performance?
I like to lead by example in my own racing. I am not an elite endurance runner by any means, but I get out there and give it my best no matter what happens on race day. This year I went into the Gold Coast Marathon with an injury to my right ITB. This limited the training I could do. I went out with a run/walk plan at the start of the race, but soon ended up in a dark place mentally about whether I would actually finish the race and how I would be letting my athletes down. I dug deep and kept pushing on one step at a time and crossed the finish line. Whilst this wasn't a PB it was a good example to everyone of resilience and mental toughness to push on. The easy thing to do would have been stop and walk off the course, but I am not built that way. If the injury had become much worse and jeopardised future training and races then I would certainly have DNF.
Have you had any mentors in your coaching journey?
One of my first mentors was Sean Williams as my first athletics coach. He showed me what being a coach is all about. Then there is Dani Andreas and Matt Wade, both coaches at Trinity. I have learnt a lot from both of them over the past four years at Trinity Grammar School and look forward to their friendship and mentorship for many years to come.
What challenges have you faced as a coach and how have you overcome them?
I guess my biggest one is the 'Imposter Syndrome'. I see many coaches out there getting amazing results, and I look at myself and think, I am not as knowledgeable as they are. How could I possibly be as good a coach as they are? Then I think about the results that my athletes have achieved. Like I said earlier not just the podium finishes or the Boston qualifying times, but the personal bests of all the athletes that I have helped guide towards their goals. Also listening to other coaches and my athletes speak about me in such positive ways helps overcome that Imposter Syndrome.
What role has coach education played in your development?
The coaching education through Australian Athletics and other international organisations has certainly help my coaching with confidence building as well as the skills necessary to relate and help guide my athletes. I am always learning and researching for the most up to date information to be able to help my athletes achieve their goals.
How do you stay up to date with new ideas in coaching?
I am always on the internet, listening to coaches from around the world on podcasts and YouTube, I study research papers, listen to social media trends from influencers and evaluate them critically as to whether it could be beneficial or not. Then one of the biggest sources is other coaches at meets, school, course etc. just having a chat can sometimes help you with an idea or issue that you are facing as a coach.
Doing my Level 3 Performance Coaching course also gave me more confidence, especially being in the room with the other coaches and hearing that they are having similar issues as I am, and then finding out that my input into the conversation certainly helped other coaches. I want to continue growing my education and experience level with a Level 4 sometime in the near future.
What advice would you give to a new coach just starting out?
Don't be afraid to give it a go. Get in there and try. Too many young coaches are scared that they don't know what they are doing and will often stand back. But seeking the advice of more experienced coaches will help you learn and grow as a coach. We are all here to help each other.
How to contact me? Where I coach and what I coach?
In April 2022 I decided to make Coaching a full-time profession. I have a business called My Run Team based in Sydney's Inner West. I coach sprinters, middle distance and endurance athletes. The sprinters are mainly Primary aged children in Little Athletics or just wanting to get better for the school athletics carnivals. The middle distance group are older in their teenage years and wanting to progress from Regionals to State and Nationals Championships. The adults are mainly online clients with the majority based in South East Queensland. They do anything from 10k to the Marathon. So generally I coach athletes of all ages from 8 to 50+ in Sprints and Middle Distance to Endurance events. I also coach at Trinity Grammar School in Summer Hill as the Assistant Coach for Cross Country and Middle Distance at the Senior School as part of the dominant championship winning team in the CAS Athletics Championships. Training sessions are about having fun, but also skill based to create improvements so that they can progress towards their athletics dreams.
Find me here:
📱 Instagram: @myrunteam | @kel.walker_athletics_coach
🌐 Website: myrunteam.com
📧 Email: coach_kel@myrunteam.com | info@myrunteam.com
📞 Phone: 0401 762 285