Ian was the Manager of The GB Junior Lead Climbing Team from 2010 to 2017 and has been a GB Team Coach from 2008 to 2020. Ian has taken the Team abroad to many competitions and he has enjoyed working with them through the stresses and strains of competing internationally, as well as setting training plans and running sessions for them back home.

In 2003 Ian established Climb Rochdale and set up and started running the coaching sessions there. He has had many successes with several children making the GB ClimbingTeam and coaching Randy Roby to win the Arco Rock Junior and to become the youngest person to make an ascent of an 8a in the UK. Since leaving Climb Rochdale in 2011, Ian continued to coach on a freelance basis and eventually set up Coaching Climbing in 2012. The following year Ian became the first person to pass Mountain Training UK's Development Coach Award. Ian is a provider of several workshops for both the BMC Fundamentals programme and Mountain Training's coaching awards.

Ian worked for The British Mountaineering Council from 1983-86 as their Technical Officer and has served a number of BMC Specialist Committees for many years. As a member of the Training and Youth Committee he was instrumental in establishing the BMC’s National Academy’s looking at Talented Young Climbers and ran pilot academies at Climb Rochdale. He is also part of the Team developing the BMC’s FUNdamentals of Climbing Workshops and was invited to be part of the Mountain Training technical group working on establishing national coaching awards. 

The first BMC Coaching Symposium was another of his ideas; to share climbing coaching knowledge to enable coaches to develop talented climbers into winning athletes for the GB Climbing Team. Ian was also on the working group of The Association of British Climbing Walls that established the National Indoor Climbing Accreditation Scheme (NICAS) a five-level award scheme for teaching climbing skills.

Ian holds a CWI, CWIA, CWDI, RCI, RCDI and Development and Performance Coach Awards. Ian is fully insured and has an Enhanced CRB and is DBS checked. Ian has also undergone safeguarding training and holds the UK Coaching Duty of Care Award and is First Aid Trained.

Extremely passionate about coaching, Ian loves to see climbers both young and old achieving their full potential.