Highland coach receives lifetime achievement award from Scottish Gymnastics
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LIZ Danby has helped thousands of youngsters get involved into gymnastics over four decades of her coaching career in the Highlands.
Her work in the north is being recognised as she is set to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Scottish Gymnastics Awards.
The former PE teacher received the award at a ceremony which took place in Edinburgh last Saturday.
Danby (74) says while it was a huge honour for her to receive the accolade, she says she never got involved in coaching for awards.
She says helping a youngster realise their potential and help develop as a person has always been her biggest award in the sport.
Speaking about receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award, she said: "I think it is quite nice. I have discussed this with people when we do lots of stuff.
When you do a lot of training and spend hours you don't think about it.
"When you get an award, you are almost speechless and that is nice. But I can't say the award makes all the hard work worthwhile as I would have done it anyway.
"It is super though and it takes getting used to receiving accolades and people saying wonderful things.
"Parents have said to me with your enthusiasm I have helped children get so much confidence. But I didn't think much about it at the time, I just did it. But the outcome is they are still doing sport because I helped give them confidence. It is nice."
Danby started working as a physical education teacher in Sussex in 1970 and started teaching gymnastics in school when she worked with renowned British gymnastics coach Mitch Fenner.
She relocated to the Highlands in 1984 and got involved with Inverness Gymnastics Club which was run by Louise Martin at that time.
Danby went on to become head coach of Inverness Gymnastics Club in 1990 and spent 13 years in the role before concentrating on Scottish Schools Gymnastics in 2003. She worked with introducing gymnastics into school for 17 years before the pandemic hit in 2020 and saw the program suspended.
Danby said she looks back with great pride introducing gymnastics into schools across the Highlands during a time it was non existent.
"In 2003, I was in primary physical education and at that point as we did not have schools gymnastics at all.
"I said to Scottish Gymnastics if I could do a school gymnastics programme so I did .
"In 2018 we had 400 children from 36 schools across the Highlands and 14 display teams. There were only 24 teams in the Scottish School display and we had 14 from Inverness.
"It became really huge. but Covid messed things up in 2020 when everything has to be put on hold."
Danby has helped gymnasts from Inverness compete in national and international events.
She has been part of an Inverness squad which has take part in four Gymnaestrada events which took place in Amsterdam in 1991, Berlin in 1995, Gothenburg in 1999 and Lisbon in 2003.
She has also been part of North District and Scottish squad which have been taking part in competitions.
She has also helped train current Inverness Gymnastics Club chairman John Humphries when he was coach and Hazel Finnigan who is a coach at the club.
Danby also takes part in judging at gymnastics competition and in choreography too.
As she prepares for retirement, Danby says the great pleasure of being a coach is introducing a sport to youngsters which they can help them develop as better individuals.
"The greatest thing about being a coach is inspiring the next generation of children to give them pleasure out of the sport," said Danby.
"To help give them confidence into their lives.
Watching their faces when they achieve something and making them think they can do this.
"Giving them the encouragement to achieve that they can go on to do better things.
"Parents come up to me and say to me do you realise giving them help in gymnastics gave my child confidence to do better in school.
"What I was doing was to giving them confidence in gymnastics would give them confidence to do everything else that they do in life."
