How women’s leadership programme empowered Naomi Folkard as an Olympic coach

On the shooting line, archery proudly has a long standing history as one of the oldest gender equal Olympic sports, with women archers first featuring at the St Louis 1904 Games, but behind it is where the sport is lagging behind. 

Out of the 156 combined coaches at the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, just 31 were women.

One of them was former archer – and five-time Olympian – Naomi Folkard who, since retiring from shooting after Tokyo 2020, has embarked a coaching journey she hopes to last a lifetime.

To begin with however, the vast current gender imbalance in archery coaching meant Folkard gaining the confidence to truly put her forward for positions was a stumbling block, something unfortunately many women face from a young age. 

“I think I would go to meetings with other people and feel a bit overwhelmed and unsure whether I should speak or not,” said the British coach. “That’s something I’ve had to work on and change my belief system a little bit whereas maybe for men there they don’t care so much what other people think.”

Folkard, along with Nicky Hunt and team manager Tom Duggan, led Great Britain’s six athlete strong quota at the Paris 2024 Olympics, roughly one year after graduating from the Women in Sport High Performance Pathway programme. 

An initiative based at the Hertfordshire Sports Institute, it aimed to empower aspirational women coaches to boost the number of female coaches for all Olympic sports and involved 120 graduates from 22 sports and 59 countries.

Folkard and Bhutan’s Yeshi Dema were archery’s two representatives, spending a residential week at the University of Hertfordshire in 2022 before online sessions every two months and regular one-to-one mentoring thereafter.

Both coaches have gone onto coaching roles within their national team’s setup.

“It’s just helped me realise that it’s ok to get things wrong and that everybody might have a different opinion,” added Folkard who represented her nation in Athens, Beijing, London, Rio and Tokyo as an athlete.

Folkard credits her improvement in leadership, psychology, communication skills as well as overall confidence in her coaching role down to the programme. 

However, it is one thing learning these skills, but it is another putting them into action.

Folkard did just that in Paris last summer using a case with Great Britain’s 16-year-old young star Megan Havers.

The youngest archer present at the Games used a brand new chest guard for the ranking round without Folkard realising but it severely affected her grouping as she seeded 49th. 

Once versed in the equipment change, Folkard “without any hesitation” urged Havers back to her old guard, which helped in her ninth place finish overall as she was eliminated in the third round by eventual gold medallist Lim Sihyeon.

Having now got the experience of being on both sides of the line, Folkard has learnt this constant communication is key for a successful Games campaign with all her athletes.

"The most important thing during the Games is to make sure you keep that contact, and you keep that relationship." 

"That can be quite difficult to manage the athletes if you’re not with them as well. You’ve got to have a quick catch up when you do see them to make sure you see what kind of state their mind is in and see, if you need to, quickly do something to help them out.”

Folkard was one of 14 female Olympic archery coaches at Les Invalides out of 85, making her one of the shockingly few 17 per cent, a slight decline from 19 per cent at Tokyo 2020.

To achieve sustainable gender equity behind the shooting line though, societal norms must be altered to give women coaches as fair a shot at roles like these as men.

Folkard points to these norms associated with traditional men’s industries like construction as automatic disadvantages for women despite being often being more knowledgeable than their male counterparts.

“I think from right in the beginning there’s a little bit of gender bias in that girls aren’t good at equipment,” explained the two-time silver world field medallist. “If coaches allow that to happen, then that’s going to continue whereas if you help everyone learn about equipment as part of the standard part of the journey, then they’re going to get more confident in it, they’re going to be able to express their knowledge a lot better as well.” 

“I think that’s something that I felt with technique, with equipment. I was a lot further behind in learning about equipment than male athletes and I think that probably makes it harder to become a coach.”

In Naomi’s case, her hard work, paid off in 2024 in becoming one of the 12 women from the programme who coached athletes at the Olympic Games, the pinnacle of archery’s four-year cycle.

Not only did she learn invaluable insight from her fellow graduates in Hertfordshire and guest speakers such as renowned diving coach Jane Figueiredo, but also about herself, her talents and what to do next in order to pursue a successful career she “loves”, whether that remains in the national setup at Great Britain or as a private coach. 

Clearly though, 120 graduated coaches once every Olympic cycle won’t change things overnight, but it is programmes like the Women in Sport High Performance Pathway which will help inch archery coaching to full gender equity. 

“Maybe programmes like [this] might get other countries thinking because I think within tennis and within canoeing, maybe other sports, coaches that have been on the programme have gone and done presentations at their annual general meet or equivalent about the programme and what they’ve been learning, talking about gender equity as well within coaching,” Folkard said. 

It is up to sport’s recognised federations, however, to make a difference for their own women coaches, she concluded.

“Programmes absolutely would help but something needs to happen within the countries as well.”