Our Story
We are athletes. We are women. We are men. We are non-binary. We are people who have experienced safeguarding issues in the past. We believe our experiences have enabled us to create this course which could be very beneficial as part of your organisation’s staff training, directed towards protecting your athletes. Our futures. SELFguarding is a new course founded by Yourlance B. Thomas MBE. SELFguarding aims to introduce a new step in preventing abuse in sport by minimising the occurrence and need for rule-based safeguarding protocols. It does this by equipping people with the appropriate tools to spot and report inappropriate behaviour, in a safe and child-friendly manner.
Yourlance Thomas MBE
CEO and Founder of SELFguarding
I’ve always been in love with sports ranging from Football, Cricket, Hockey and Athletics.
I chose Athletics to be my main sport because it was the only thing that gave me a sense of freedom in my life.
I was raised in a strict household with 4 other siblings and playing outsidewith friends wasn’t allowed, so I did almost every sport there was, after school, just to get my freedom and my own peace of mind.
As both an athlete and athletics coach, Yourlance witnessed a number of inappropriate, upsetting and abusive behaviours from coaches at all levels – from grassroots to elite. Realising that existing safeguarding courses were only aimed at coaches, not children, she started to realise that a fundamental change needed to be made. Using her extensive experience, Yourlance began writing a safeguarding course aimed primarily at children, (but also useful for adults). The fundamental principle was teaching children to look after themselves – hence SELFguarding was born.
Hayley McLean
I’ve been an athlete for around 15 years now and I wish to share with you something that happened to me, in the early stages of my career.
Something that I did not understand.
Around the age of 16, I began to be groomed by someone of an authority status and by someone who I should have been able to trust the most.
Not being able to identify the symptoms of grooming, or spot the red flags, I was unfortunately groomed for quite a few years, until somebody else noticed and pulled me out of that situation.
I feel very strongly, that if I had been educated by something like The Hayley’s Course, I would have been able to identify the red flags earlier, been able to spot the cross over from a professional relationship to a personal one and also help other athletes from following the same path I did.
We felt that It was important that we engage the very people we you trying to help and to get their prospective in creating our courses so we created the Ambassadors of SELFguarding.