Have you ever heard of boccia? There is no one better to tell you all about the sport than our member Archie. Here he shares his infectious passion for boccia and how he mastered his journey from being a successful player to founding his own coaching business.
Hi there, my name is Archie ...
I am 23 years old and I have MPS IVA (Morquio). My passion is the sport of boccia - a target sport played at the Paralympics where you propel your red or blue balls to land closest to the white target “jack” ball. This is my story of how I got involved with boccia and where it has taken me.
I started playing Boccia about 14 years ago when Mum found me a small club in the Forest of Dean where I could learn the ropes.
I really enjoyed it initially, as I felt I had finally found a sport where I was on a level playing field with my peers.
Fast forward to 2012 when I was moving up to secondary school and within a week of starting, I had already found myself on a trip to go and see some boccia at the London Paralympics! This was my first real experience of competitive boccia and it lit a spark inside me that I have yet to extinguish.
I really enjoyed playing and competing with the Dene Magna School Team as it gave me many opportunities to grow not only my game with increasing difficulty of tactics and technical shots, but also as a person by first being captain of the team in Year 9, and by Year 11 I was doing a little bit of coaching of the team, helping the next generations to build on the successes that our team had.
Competing and winning
Whilst I was playing with the School Team, my family also found Cotswold Crusaders Boccia Club, a dedicated Boccia Club that meets in Cheltenham every Friday evening for 2 hours of boccia coaching. I first joined as a player, then my parents got drafted in to run the club and now I coach there too!
By 2015, I was starting to search for competitions in order to test my skills and further my aim to become the best player in England.
We started off by going to the Dwarf Sports Association (DSA) which holds a yearly competition and whilst this was fun, it was an event aimed more at occasional players than those training at the top level in the country. We then found a relatively young organisation called Boccia England which is the National Governing Body for all of Boccia within England. To my joy, they hold a competition called the Heathcoat Cup for players in my classification (BC5) to compete against other top BC5s across the country. The Heathcoat Cup works by holding 5 regional qualifiers where players can attempt to qualify for the National Finals.
In the first year I competed I was waiting for hip surgery and somehow got through the competition with some respectable results despite being somewhat spaced out on pain relief. It proved a good distraction to my health situation and confirmed my love of competing at boccia.
In my second year of regionals, I won, qualifying me to the finals where I finished sixth which is a fairly respectable finish in hindsight for my first ever comp. But I wasn’t satisfied with that and to date, that is the lowest I have ever finished at the finals.
Becoming a coach
Across 2017 and 2018, I had found out that my classification was potentially going to be introduced to the Paralympics, maybe for either Paris (2024) or for LA (2028).
As a result, I increased the intensity of my training, determined to be able to bring success to ParalympicsGB in the future.
As part of Boccia England’s talent pathway and getting ready for BC5s to be introduced to the international stage, I was invited to be a part of the Gloucester Gladiators Academy which was once a month and was a full day of getting top level coaching that I could then take into competitions such as the BE Cup, Boccia England’s top tier competition where every player is competing for places on international squads. I only competed in the BE Cup for one season, gaining myself a silver medal, as in 2019 I was told the World Boccia, the International Federation, had decided not to introduce BC5s into world competition as the running costs would have been too high.
I was truly gutted at this decision but I was determined not to let my passion and talents go to waste. Later that year, I qualified as a Level 1 coach and my journey into coaching had truly begun.
Unfortunately, a small matter of a global Pandemic put a slight dampener on my plans to get into coaching and so despite having qualified in 2019, my first coaching job wasn’t until 2021 by which time I was well into my second year at University studying Sports Coaching with Disability Sport.
By 2023 I had all but finished my course and I set up my coaching business, Archie Eaton Boccia.
I currently run a mix of regular and one-off sessions for people playing for fun or trying out boccia for the first time as well as some one to one coaching for players who want to compete at the highest level. In early 2024 I embarked on doing my Level 2 coaching course, which on completion, will make me the highest qualified coach in Gloucestershire.
Future goals
My goals for the future involve a variety of things but first and foremost, I want to get Gloucestershire as a county and by extension the South West into one of the biggest boccia hubs in the country, I'm aware this will take a lot of time and effort but I truly believe that this goal is still achievable.
My second goal is to build up the profile of boccia in schools and other mainstream education places as I think that boccia can be one of the biggest sports in the world due to its inclusive nature and that anyone can play regardless of age, gender, religion or sexuality.
