Not for DYFI yet. Anything in a dashed box needs Paul, and the Rachel paraphrase needs checking against the recording.
A home for coach certification at DYFI.
Rachel, you described wanting the mill to become a base that people travel to for a week and train. Our certifications run three to eight days and have never had a home in Britain. This is what putting those two things together looks like.
Written for DYFI Bike Park, and for nobody else.
What you already said you wanted
A base for coaching and camps, almost like a performance centre for mountain biking, where people can come for a week, train here in the mornings or the evenings, ride downhill, and start doing more coaching camps and multi-day things.
Rachel, on The Ride Companion, recorded in the mill
Dan does not wake up every morning wanting to run a bike park, and what we want to build here is bigger than the day-to-day of it.
Rachel, same episode Paraphrase, check the recording
Those two things together are why this is a partnership rather than a booking, and the shape of it is simple.
The terrain
The standard, and the coaches
We raise the standard of riding
| What you said | What partnering with GSMBC does about it |
|---|---|
| A base people come to for a week | Our Expert course runs five days and the advanced courses four, so candidates travel and stay for the duration. |
| More coaching camps and multi-day things | You run them under a certification that already exists, instead of writing one. |
| Something bigger than running the park | Coach education is expensive to produce and light to host. We produce it, you host it. |
GSMBC provides the curriculum. There is already a large base of education behind it, in use and being rewritten all the time, so you start from that rather than from nothing.
Coaches arrive, settle in and stay for the duration, which is the shape of thing you were describing from the other side.
What Britain has, and what we add to it
Britain is not a country with nothing. British Cycling introduced a gravity coaching module in December 2024 and it does cover jumping and drop-offs in uplift parks. The limit is what sits above it, and how little of it is actually running.
- Entry-level coaching awards, with two pages of dates
- A gravity module whose entry standard is riding a blue trail, with no dates scheduled anywhere in the country
- Above that, remote guiding: weather, navigation, trailside repairs, and no e-bikes
- A pathway that keeps climbing: Apprentice, Intermediate, Advanced Air, Advanced Coach FLOW, Expert Coach
- Mentors, assessment and candidate records behind every level
- Rewritten continuously rather than reviewed every few years
- The terrain the top of that pathway requires and almost nothing in Britain has
- The venue, the audience and the name on the door
- The first British home for every level above the module
So a British coach who wants to teach air properly, or to understand fear and commitment as coachable material, has to leave the country to do it. Enough of them do that British coaches turn up on the staff of our partner schools in Whistler holding our Level 4. Staff figures: Paul to confirm
Ten to twelve coaches, four or five days, assessed on terrain that matches the level they are being certified at.
Your hill is already written into our requirements
Our Advanced Air certification carries a written terrain requirement, because the coaching problem changes with consequence and you cannot assess somebody teaching a four-foot drop and call it a ten-foot drop. You provide the terrain, we have the requirement, and read next to each other they are most of the argument for doing this at DYFI.
| Requirement | Specification |
|---|---|
| Tabletops | 2 to 4 bike lengths, lip to knuckle |
| Drops | 4 to 10 feet |
| Terrain | Blue and black flow, with uplift |
Very little in Britain satisfies that, which is why there is no British air certification rather than a poor one, and it is the one part of this a competitor cannot answer by hiring better coaches.
Lift-served terrain is not a preference in the requirement, it is the condition the top of the pathway is assessed under.
What a coach standard does for the Academy
The Atherton Academy has been finding and developing young racers since 2013, and Dan Brown has said the plan is to take it beyond the UK. That is the part of the business this is really about, because an academy that leaves its home venue stops being a few people who know each other and starts being a name that other people coach under.
Rider development and coach certification are different products. The Academy makes riders, we make the coaches and the standard they are held to, and the standard brings in more coaches and lets you scale with confidence.
DYFI gets the world's most innovative coaching standard, and every coach you work with can certify against it.
Bigger than that, a curriculum hosted here gets taught here, by coaches who then carry it out into the rest of the sport. Get this right and the Atherton name is in the education of mountain bike coaches for generations, not for a season.
The method is written down, the mentors are trained in it, and the assessment is the same wherever the course runs.
What DYFI gets
- 01
First in Britain to offer the advanced certifications
Not a better version of something available locally. The only route, for coaches who currently fly to Canada for it, running on your hill.
- 02
A hiring pipeline you can watch work
A certification course puts ten coaches on your terrain for four days under assessment, and then you offer two of them a job.
- 03
The standard behind the coaching you already sell
Your own page says you only work with coaches you rate as friendly, approachable teachers as well as brilliant riders. The GSMBC standard is how you know that every coach you work with meets it, which supports a higher price and puts the park's name on the standard itself rather than beside it.
- 04
A curriculum you do not have to build
We bring the curriculum and we keep bringing it: twelve community webinars, eleven masterclasses, four new online courses and around forty articles in the last twelve months. You are current without employing anybody to keep you current.
- 05
Visitors who stay the week
Four and five day courses mean candidates book accommodation, eat locally and ride between sessions, and Corris Hostel is ten minutes away. Whether a course like that fits your operating week is a question for you rather than a claim from us.
A certification is not a classroom. Candidates ride the terrain they are assessed on, for the length of the course.
What DYFI holds
DYFI is named as our centre in Britain and gets first access to the top of the pathway, which is the part with real scarcity in it. The designation is held against written standards and looked at each year, so it stays worth having rather than becoming something we handed over once.
- Named as GSMBC's centre in Britain, and the official location for GSMBC certification in the country
- Exclusive, priority access to the advanced and expert curriculum, meaning Advanced Air, Advanced Coach FLOW and Expert Coach Scope and term: Paul to confirm
- First refusal on British course scheduling each season
- Most-favoured terms, so a later centre cannot be given a better deal
- Founding centre status, permanently
How many course weeks we commit to you each season follows a conversation about what you want this to become. Course weeks: Paul to set
Who does what
- The public face, and the marketing
- Bookings and the front end
- Terrain, access and uplift
- A coaching lead to hold the relationship
- Your own team's participation
- The curriculum, and its continuing development
- Collaboration on new practices and ideas, with your coaches in the room
- Mentor training and supply
- Assessment, candidate records and certification
- Access to our coaching education channels, meaning the blog, the podcast and everything else we publish into the sport
What is not included
There are things this partnership would not cover, and they are better named before anyone signs than discovered afterwards. Full list: Paul to finalise
Most of what sits outside the agreement is there for your benefit as much as ours, because a certification awarded by a third party is what gives it credibility. It carries weight with a parent, a club, or a coach who rides somewhere else, precisely because the venue hosting the course is not the one deciding who passes it.
Twenty years of curriculum, mentor training and assessment, carried by people rather than by a document.
What we work out together
This is a starting position rather than a proposal, so there are no numbers in it. What we would want from a conversation is three things. Placeholder, to be finished with Paul
- 01
Does a partnership make sense for both sides?
- 02
What could it actually look like?
- 03
Working out the detail
Which courses, how many weeks, who holds what, and what each side is committing to.
Keep Evolving.
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