Walt Missingham from MAIA, The Martial Arts Industry Association, shares insights about the COVID Safe Martial Arts Instructor Course.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
Removing fear and ensuring safety with a COVID safe return plan for your martial arts school
What MAIA’s COVID Safe Martial Arts Instructors Certification Program is
How to get certified and the benefits martial arts instructors can reap
How does it differ from the courses provided by the government and other institutions
And more
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TRANSCRIPTION
This is a coming together of a range of people in the martial arts industry to put out a course that people can educate themselves and then go to their respective local government and state governments, because as many of your listeners will know, they are being asked to provide a COVID safe return plan. And that is beyond the administrative capacities of many of our martial arts teachers.
GEORGE: Good day, this is George and welcome to the Martial Arts Media business podcast. I’m joined today by Walt Missingham from MAIA, the Martial Arts Industry Association. And at the time of recording this, we are talking about the pandemic and COVID-19 that has drastically obviously impacted the martial arts industry community. So I want to talk about a few things that they have put in place to basically give some assurance to the public in regards to legalities and so forth, with running your school and with all the restrictions and everything that goes with that. So welcome to the call Walt.
WALT: Yes, thanks for giving us the opportunity to speak with you George.
GEORGE: Fantastic. So if you could just give us a 2-3 minute introduction of who you are and what the focus is of what you're doing?
WALT: I really don't think I need to introduce myself, anyone who doesn't know who I am is probably not in our industry. I'm the president of the peak body for Martial Arts in Australia, the Martial Arts Industry Association. We deal with all manner of problems and programs associated with martial arts. But the key focus, as you correctly said at your introduction, is the COVID-19 pandemic and again, as you correctly said, that's impacting not just the industry here in Australia, but globally. And so like many organisations, that's been our key focus for the last several months.
GEORGE: Gotcha. Now, with everything going on, you've put together a COVID safe martial arts instructor certification program – what is that about?
WALT: We identified a number of key problems, by reaching out to different people in the industry, liaising not just with people from martial arts, but people from the board of coaching community. You may not be aware, but we liaised with the Australian Coaching Council for the construction of this certification program. And a sister certification program for non martial arts coaches: swimming, football, etc. has also been released and that's only been released three days ago and we're just passing 4000 coaches have gone through that program, the coaches and officials.
So one of the problems that we very early identified is that it's perfectly reasonable, but most instructors had a concern about when we can resume and what we can do when we resume. And it's a fair comment to say that a lot of the information from the government has been unhelpful, confusing and ambiguous. So we put together a certification program that just cuts to the bone in terms of what information a coach or an instructor needed. There's an education component to it and there's also a procedural component to it about what to do and what not to do in teaching martial arts classes under the various phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 conditions.
But we also identified through polling companies that the return date is not the biggest problem that our industry faces; that date will occur at a point in the future…
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