From the Tennis Court to a Career Path: How Volunteering Led Iman to Community Sport

Volunteering has been incredibly important as the foundation that has helped me (Iman Mahmood) choose my career path. Volunteering as an assistant coach at my local tennis centre gave me the chance to learn my trade and build my confidence in coaching skills. It was also a brilliant opportunity to gain mentorship from the coaches I was helping and assisting. These connections meant I was invited to an LTA 'She Rallies' workshop that was being hosted at my local tennis centre. This workshop opened up the world of community sport to me, particularly sports for women and girls, identifying the disparity between the numbers of male and female coaches in tennis and how important it was to have a representative workforce, especially to encourage more women and girls to get involved. 

Inspired by 'She Rallies

I was inspired by the LTA 'She Rallies' initiative as they showed how volunteering can be a pathway into coaching which gave me the confidence to book onto my Level 1 qualification and become a paid assistant coach. One of the women I met at the 'She Rallies' workshop had also completed her Level 1 qualification as she, like me, was inspired to take the next step into coaching and was interested in providing accessible tennis for women and girls. We worked together to develop, manage and deliver a free women’s community tennis programme in our local area which started in January 2022. Two and a half years later there have been over 350 women and children, mostly from diverse communities, that have picked up a racket and joined in with the programme which also won the LTA National Tennis for All Award 2023 and was a finalist at the Sporting Equals Awards 2023.

It was this passion for tackling inequalities through sport that has led me to my role at Sport Structures, where I now get to work on projects designed to help people like me on their journey in community sport. Whether it’s organising 'Buddle' workshops to help volunteers engage with their local communities or supporting National Governing Bodies (NGBs) to improve their ED&I practice, my role allows me to engage with a wide variety of people and see how community sport is developing across the country.

Building Ground Knowledge Through Volunteering

Without the chance to build that ground knowledge and learn the basics of what community sport looks like at a local level through my volunteering experience, I would not have had the opportunities or confidence to develop into my further roles as a coach and now as a project officer at Sport Structures.