Jennifer Patricia BanksOAM is an Australian athletics coach specialising with Paralympic wheelchair athletes.
She was born inPerth, Western Australia.[1] She has completed a Masters in Education at theUniversity of Western Australia where her thesis was titled 'Psychological factors in sports injuries among elite hockey players'.
In her early sporting career, Banks was a field hockey goalkeeper and she representedWestern Australia and Australia.[2] She retired due to a serious knee injury just after she started representing Australia.[3] In 1991 she was anAustralian Institute of Sport Satellite Coach inPerth where she coachedLouise Sauvage andPaul Wiggins, amongst others (includingFabian Blattman andGreg Smith) .[4] Banks oversaw much of Sauvage's development as an elite wheelchair athlete, from her first international success to her best ever medal tally at the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Atlanta in 1996.[5] She was an athletics coach on the Australian team at the1994 Commonwealth Games.[6] Banks worked as the Director of Sport and High Performance Manager for theAustralian Paralympic Committee (APC) from 1994 to 2003. During this period,Australia finished second on the medal tally at theAtlanta Summer Paralympics (after finishing seventhon the medal tally at the1992 Barcelona Summer Paralympics), first on the medal table at theSydney Summer Paralympics and 4th on the medal table the2002 Salt Lake City Winter Paralympics. After leaving the APC in 2003, she established Creating Excellence Consulting that worked with many state, national and international sports organisations including theAustralian Sports Commission/Australian Institute of Sport,Basketball Australia,Cycling Australia,Triathlon Australia, theInternational Triathlon Union and theAustralian Sports Anti-Doping Authority.[3] She contributed to coaching resources published by the Australian Sports Commission.
She coached British wheelchair racerTanni Grey-Thompson to multiple Paralympic gold medals . Grey-Thompson commented that she would send "data including video clips and jpeg files with all my physiological details and Jenni's able to analyse them all, sending her comments and criticisms back via email".[7]
In 2010, she was appointed as the part-time handcycling coach with Cycling Australia Paracycling High Performance Program and was a cycling coach on the Australian team at the2012 London Paralympics.[3][8] Banks moved to the United Kingdom in 2012 to take up a five-year contract as British Athletics Institute Coach for Wheelchair Racing.[3] Whilst in this position she was responsible for all wheelchair racing aspects of theBritish Athletics World Class and Talent Development Programs and coachedHannah Cockroft to three gold medals at the2016 Rio Paralympics and eight gold medals at threeIPC Athletics World Championships.[9] She also coachedRichard Chiassaro,Toby Gold andStephen Osborne during this time.
Since January 2018 she has worked as a Consultant Coach with British Athletics and is coaching British Paralympic athletesHannah Cockroft andRichard Chiassaro[10] as well as mentoring other athletes and personal coaches.
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