In sport, we can get too bogged down with the roles and responsibilities of the coach. Sometimes we can get too academic or philosophical about what their job is. However, I think we can agree that they are responsible for helping an athlete get better (and we will all have diverging opinions of what "helping", [...]
Coaches – Empathy Is Vital When Working With Young People
Working in sport, I often see really good coaches who are really bad at working with young people. Some believe that content is King; that we can deliver the same training, in the same way, to adults and children and expect to see the same improvements in performance. To truly be a great coach of [...]
Sports Clubs – Why Do You Exist?
Over the past 9 years I have been so fortunate to work with a large number of sports clubs in a variety of different sports. Regardless of the sport, many of these clubs share something in common. That is, they don't know the answer to a simple question: Why do you exist? Now, I am [...]
Coaches – Stop Using Your Qualification As A Shield
"What are you doing to get better?" is one of my favourite questions to ask coaches. Most often the answer is based around the number of hours they are putting in every week, or the number of different athletes they are working with. Although time on task is important, it can often be a false [...]
Are We Recognising Talent Too Young?
I was once lucky enough to visit Everton FC's training ground, which was exactly as you would imagine a Premier League team's multi-million pound training facility to be - top of the range, innovative, with incredible attention of detail. It seems no stone is left upturned when it comes to developing talent. As part of [...]
Sports Clubs – Retention Is More Important Than Growth.
When it comes to involvement in sport, we are still using growth as the measure of success. Government and sports governing bodies will use the increase in participants as a badge of honour, to prove how healthy they are. We have increased participation by 10% this year, therefore our sport must be doing well. I [...]
Coaches – How You Make Someone Feel Is More Important Than What You Know.
A lot has been written about the impact of technology in society today, particularly smart phones and social media. One of the biggest changes has been that we now have the answer to any question we might want to answer in our pocket. All we need to do is Google it. For sports - and [...]
Role Models Should Not Be Perfect.
Last weekend, Tiger Woods won his first major championship in 11 years. It was undoubtedly an awesome sporting achievement -- a once great athlete, written off for over a decade due to various injuries and personal issues comes back to win on the biggest stage his sport has. It has been interesting to watch the [...]
How Might We Stop the Weaponisation of Coaching?
One of the trends that concerns me the most in sports coaching today is what a clever-person described to me as the "weaponisation" of coaching. By this, I mean the use of fancy terminology or acronyms that evidences how much knowledge a coach has. The more a coach can weaponise their knowledge -- the more [...]
Coaches Don’t Need To Have The Answer.
Bill Walsh, the legendary coach of the San Francisco 49ers, had a concise approach towards leading a successful organisation the 1980s. A successful Coach, or Leader, had to "Listen, Learn, Lead". Given how successful he was as a Coach (winning 3 Superbowls - the first less than two years after the team had only won [...]
