[email protected]
Stuart Owen is a teacher and sports coach in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. He has an outstanding record of developing young people and sporting talent, primarily in football (137 of the young people he has taught at his soccer school have signed contracts with professional football academies) but in a number of other fields too: former students include a UK powerlifting champion and Europe's strongest man, British men's 1500m champion and a world-class football freestyler.
In 2011 Stuart’s playtime with his youngest son, then aged 18 months, started to incorporate some basic coaching ideas which were picked up surprisingly easily. This evolved into lots of fun challenges for pre-school and then primary school children. It’s the videos of the primary school challenges (all performed by his youngest son and daughter) that are the basis of PE Challenges.com.
The other trigger for creating the service was Stuart’s realisation that throughout his children's time at primary school they had never been given PE activities to do at home. This seemed a big omission – it’s a way to help families spend quality time together, and a chance to develop sports skills and love of a challenge at an early age.
So Stuart created PE Challenges.com to help schools fill this gap.
Colin Wooldridge
Co-Founder & Head of Operations
[email protected]
Colin manages the day-to-day operations for PE Challenges, including setting schools up and producing the participation and benefit reports. He has a background in operations, IT and data analytics in both the public and private sector. His oldest son attended Stuart's soccer school from a young age, which gave Colin the chance to see how good coaching, fun challenges and regular practice developed every child's skills. Friendly discussions with Stuart evolved into an opportunity to work together on PE Challenges and to make those core ideas available to all children, building skills, confidence and good habits for life. Colin is also a qualified FA football coach and Harrogate Town fan.