BEHIND every good athlete lies a great coach.

Yet while the stars bask in the glory, the backup teams are left to applaud in the shadows.

But today one of the best coaches in the business will step into the limelight herself.

Southampton Diving Develop-ment officer Lindsey Fraser will be awarded Female UK Coach of the Year 2004 after being a key figure behind Britain's first diving medal at this summer's Olympics.

The silver medal won by synchronised diving partners Peter Waterfield and Leon Taylor was the country's first diving medal in 44 years.

And Lindsey was a key factor in their historic success.

She has been involved in the sport since she was 11 years old, competed over 31 times for her country, including in two Olympic Games and now has almost 19 years of coaching experience under her belt.

Over the years she has built up an entire catalogue of achievements both as coach and competitor, while seeing the sport change dramatically from the days when she was competing.

"The sport was totally different, it was almost completely amateur, although I took a years sabbatical before the 1980 Olympic Games because I couldn't really be at University and train the required amount," she said.

"The main difference now is it's a professional sport, where the paid athletes are able to completely dedicate themselves to it.

"This means it's much more of an even playing field, so in competitions like the Olympic Games you get far more countries winning medals because more people get the opportunity to train appropriately."

"It's never really been about the coaches not being good enough, it's been about not being able to train for enough hours."

When Lindsey first started coaching she was also holding down a full time job as a Maths teacher, but this eventually got too much and at one point she considered stepping back from diving.

"In 1997 we had just gone to the world juniors and all my divers had performed really badly because I wasn't able to give them the time and commitment necessary for them to be able to compete on the world stage."

At this point she questioned their future and discussed it with both the athletes and their parents.

"I wanted to give up. I wanted to stop coaching because I felt it was completely wrong to only be able to give those performers only half their just desserts.

"They were really good athletes - European winners - but they couldn't go to the worlds and win because I couldn't do that for them."

But luckily for Southampton, this coincided with The Quays swimming and diving complex being built and the opportunity to be involved in the sport full time and Lindsey applied for the job as Diving Development Officer in the area.

When offered the post Lindsey not only had to move but she also had to give up her job as a teacher and take a pay cut of one-third of her salary.

This move proved to be the start of her ongoing success as a coach, as that same year she took two of her divers - Pete Waterfield being one - to compete in the Junior Europeans and came home with gold, silver and bronze medals.

"This would never have happened if they would have been doing their ordinary training when I had finished teaching and whatever else," she addeed.

This year's Olympic medals is among the success Lindsey has brought to the sport of diving but there is still one more achievement she is looking for.

"One of the highlights of my coaching career is having my athletes achieve medals at all levels - junior Europeans, junior worlds, European cup, senior Europeans, World cup, Commonwealth games and Olympic games.

"But we still haven't got a world championship medal so that's the target for next year in Montreal."

Despite continuing to aim high Lindsey is very much looking forward to receiving her award tomorrow and spending the day with other great athletes and coaches. She believes it's a great honour to be recognised as a coach and an even better honour to be recognised as a female coach as this is something that doesn't happen very often.

But the main reason Lindsey is delighted to win is: " It is a Helen Rollason medal and at the start of my career when I was coaching I also did commentary too and I worked alongside her.

"Helen was just the most perfect role model for anyone as to how to behave and how to act and she taught me so much, just about living an appropriate life as much as anything else, so it means an awful lot much to me because of that."

The award ceremony will be taking place today at the Caf Royal in London when other coaches including Simon Jones (cycling) and Jurgen Grobler (rowing) will also be picking up awards.