Max Lankheit of the San Jose Earthquakes ponders a question that has helped shape his career in high performance.
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The duo are discussing the traits needed when stepping into a leadership position for the first time.
“The important thing that people need to understand, in my opinion, is that you can only hunt one rabbit at a time,” adds Lankheit.
“So either you can work on your skills or help others work on their skills.”
Max, a former youth athlete and acting student, talks to Dave at EPP about his non-linear journey to the top of elite sport amongst other topics.
EPP are a performance consultancy and search firm highly regarded across sport and, for this episode, Dave poses the questions that cover:
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The Leaders Performance Institute asks Joe Montemurro how coaching in both the English and the Italian languages has influenced the way he thinks about football.
“It hasn’t changed my ideas and the way I think about the game, it’s probably more how I deliver the message,” says the Head Coach of Juventus Women.
Montemurro has more than two decades of coaching experience under his belt, including successful spells at Melbourne City in his native Australia and at Arsenal Women in the English Women’s Super League.
Then, in the summer of 2021, he jumped at the chance to take the reins at Juventus Women in Turin, Italy. It offered Montemurro a return to his family’s homeland, a place where he has deep roots and a strong affinity.
“It was just the right job at the right time, I felt, with family here, my ability to culturally understand the day to day aspects of living in Italy, which was important. And like I’m an Arsenal fan I’m a Juventus fan too, so it’s another string to the bow.”
Learning the landscape
How has going from Arsenal to Juventus changed how Montemurro coaches? “I’ve coached in English and Italian since my arrival, probably some days more in Italian. It’s finding that happy balance,” he says. “So while my ideas haven’t really changed there’s a lot more design, even in my training session structure, as it might get lost in translation so it’s better that I show it on the park. It’s probably even made me better as a coach because I’ve been a lot more detailed and a lot more thorough in terms of organising the sessions so that everyone understands them and feels they can be part of it. I can adapt if I see something is not working. It’s obviously harder with the communication scenario but it’s probably made me grow as I’ve been more detailed in making sure we’ve got all the options covered.”
Bringing clarity to his communication has been Montemurro’s most obvious coaching challenge, particularly given the high level of existing understanding amongst his largely Italian playing group. “Their base education is quite astonishing,” he says, “and there seems to be a lot more focus on structure, on tactics, and ideas of the team.”
He explains that there are cultural contrasts too, such as in the ways that Italian players express their passion compared with their Australian or English counterparts. But, as he says: “In the end, the leader has to be clever in ensuring the messages are clear and translated in a balanced and sincere way.”
There are also differences in the work culture. “The culture is very hierarchical. There’s the head coach and the assistant coach and you sort of have to go through a process to get to me, which hasn’t sat well with me – I open the door to my office so you can come in all the time – they’re very hierarchical and respectful, which I think comes from the typical Italian family setup.
“The other thing that’s quite interesting is that I am one for saying if you’ve finished your job you should go home and get out of here because obviously football isn’t a nine to five job. But a lot of them would stay to simply show me that they’re here and I’ve tried to change that.”
Montemurro is also honing his ability to manage upwards. “I wanted to learn the political landscape of football in Italy and that of Juventus. I need to know who the people are who will get things done. It’s understanding the mechanisms of the way it works politically,” he says. “But I haven’t changed my style or ideas, it’s just having that understanding of where things fit in, and where things are, and understanding historically where we’ve come from so we don’t make those mistakes again or so we can use those things for the betterment of the group.”
Instilling belief
Juventus Women was founded in 2017 and has won Serie A in each of its five season’s competing in Italy’s top tier, including an unbeaten campaign last season. The next step is maintaining that dominance at home as the teams around Juve strengthen as well as competing and making further inroads in the Uefa Women’s Champions League.
The club’s Sporting Director, Stefano Braghin, saw Montemurro, whom he met when Juventus played a practice match with Arsenal during their WSL title-winning 2018-19 season, as a missing piece of the jigsaw.
“It’s a different project here” says Montemurro, who spent four years at Arsenal. “Juventus is a project of growth in Europe, but it’s also a project of growth in Italy. Yeah, the club still wants to maintain that level in Serie A, but now it needs to be doing what it needs to do in Europe.”
He also wants to play a role in the growth of Italian women’s football, the top tier of which is fully professional for the first time during this 2022-23 season. “I want to create something that a lot of clubs can use as a template to say ‘this is how we will grow and get better so the game grows’.”
Last term, Montemurro’s team dominated at home and emerged from a tough group in the Champions League that contained English champions Chelsea and German side Wolfsburg, both of whom would go on to claim their respective domestic titles last season. Juventus drew at home to the Germans and claimed a famous victory in Wolfsburg. They also held Chelsea to a goalless draw in London, another eye-catching result that would help to secure their route to the quarter-finals.
Eventual champions Lyon would eliminate Juve over two legs but it was a creditable campaign, especially given that Juve shook off an early defeat to Chelsea in Turin to progress from the group.
At the outset, however, Montemurro noticed an inferiority complex in his players. It may have been born from the collective memory of heavy defeats in the past. “My players just felt inferior,” he says. “It was just ‘we’re not good enough, we’re inferior, we’re just not to that level’. Slowly it was just about helping them to believe. I would say, ‘you are at that level, you can do the same. There will be games that you lose and games where you win, that’s just how it is, but the reality is that we did it on the park’.
“We did it every day on the park and what I would do is, in the introduction of the way we wanted to play, the things we wanted to do, I would just show them, ‘you’ve done it. You’ve played out from the back. We’ve created these goal-scoring opportunities’ and it reignited the idea that ‘you are Juventus, most of you are playing for your national team, why are you so scared of Chelsea or Wolfsburg? They are in the same position as you’. I made them believe, ‘hey, we’re going to go out there, we’re going to play our style of football; the style’s going to be important for gauging where we’re at and you’ll see that you can be competitive with the likes of Lyon, Wolfsburg and Chelsea’.”
It remains a work in progress but he can see the difference, even in training. “In pre-season, just to give you a simple example, just doing rondos. When I got here last year that ball’s going out and people couldn’t even put two passes together; a simple 5 v 2 or 4 v 2 in a square. Now it’s second nature like they’re drinking a coffee. They’ve seen it themselves, they’ve seen the improvement, technically, tactically, but also mindset and believe going into these games.
“The good thing about it is that Serie A this year will be very competitive. Inter have invested, Roma have invested, Milan have invested, they’ve all brought in some big players. So we’re going to be up against it.” It is going to make Juve’s life harder at home but, as he admits, it will also force Montemurro and his players to ensure they are good enough to stay ahead of the pack. “It has to go that way.”
Balancing challenge and support
Montemurro explains that the strong links between Juventus’ academy and its first team have smoothed the transition of his younger players into their first-team environment. There are, however, steps he can take as Head Coach to ease that process even further.
“The first thing to do is to give them the opportunity to make mistakes,” he says. “So it’s OK that you made a mistake, you can make errors. That’s fine. They shouldn’t feel overawed. So get them to find a level of comfort to be who they are, that’s the first thing.
“The second thing is that it takes a bit of time to get used to the high tempo rhythm. The rhythm and intensity is just a little bit higher and that’s when they start to shine. Once they get used to the tempo and the rhythm of the way we do things, then usually they can relax and start to play. So one of the first things I told them is that it’s going to take time to get used to the tempo and you can make mistakes.
“The third thing is then getting used to the attention to detail, whether they’re in the gym or on the park because maybe in youth or academy level they were able to get away with things, the attention to detail is very important whether you’re doing a squat in the gym or you need to receive the ball so that the next pass is quick. That attention to detail is difficult and the problem is they focus so much on the detail that they probably make more errors because they’re not up to the tempo. It works hand in hand. You’ve got to assess it in a realistic time frame. If you expect young kids to come in and kill it straight away it doesn’t work like that. It’s about understanding where they’re at. It’s an exciting time for young players because there’s a lot happening and there’s a lot of talented players out there.”
How does he get to the bottom of what makes them tick? “That’s the job of the leader and coach, to find out what triggers them – what are the words or the phrases or the visuals that they need? The funny thing is that it sort of happens organically by just going up to a player and asking, ‘how did you find it?’ Some of them will say ‘yeah good, no problems’ and you know they’re the ones that you probably have to back off and give them more visual info. And during a session, you might go and ask a player ‘how did it go?’ and it’ll start a discussion with you and you work out, ‘OK, maybe I’d better show her some visuals, we’d better just get down to the heart of a couple of bits and pieces’.
“I think that’s one of the most important jobs in modern sports leadership. Just to understand what communication level is needed to affect the player and what they want. They’re all different. Some are on the pitch learners, some of them just don’t get it and need visuals on the computer screen drawn, some of them don’t even want to be spoken to.”
The growth of the women’s game has seen the demands on the players away from the pitch increase concurrently. “We’ve got all these things now which, unfortunately or fortunately – I’m not sure where to go with that one – is starting to take precedent, starting to take focus off what our core work is and that’s why there’s this return to football. ‘Is that related to the way we want to do things? That’s not related to the way we want to do things. Let’s park that and get back to what we need to do’. It’s a difficult one because we don’t know where all this other stuff is going.”
Nevertheless, Montemurro wants Juventus to be in the vanguard. “I hope the game continues to innovate, I hope we coaches continue to innovate, be creative and challenge each other and I want to be challenged by coaches, I want to be challenged by everyone around me, and I hope we keep challenging each other instead of being a little more guarded about what we do.”
Brandon Stone of the Toronto Blue Jays explores four factors to promote buy-in.
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“If it’s true but useless,” he told the gathered media. “I don’t really share that with our team.”
The Leaders Performance Institute cites that moment when speaking to Brandon Stone, the Sports Science Coordinator at the Toronto Blue Jays. Coach Kelly was referring to a game that took place two years earlier – but could ‘true but useless’ apply to the application of sports science as a team?
“If you walk into a room as a sports scientist and you feel that you have to say ‘the rate of force development is at the 50 millisecond epoch’ or ‘you’ve got to start an assessment with the upper quarter YBT’ – if you always have to be that technical and you can’t generalize it or apply it– to me that isn’t science,” says Stone, who previously worked in Olympic and Paralympic sports, college sports, and with the military.
“We have to bring the lab to the field and make sure it answers questions that are relevant to the work our coaches do every day. If it can’t be applied, it isn’t useful. I’m not going to get caught up in a term that would prevent me from connecting with coaches. If they use ‘workload’ and they don’t really mean work in joules, then use another term. It’s the same if they say ‘velocity’ and they mean ‘speed’. Instead of me getting hung up on that for six months I would rather connect with people and meet them where they are as that creates an opportunity to say: ‘when we say speed, then this is how we define it , and here’s how we’re seeing it’. The faster we speak the same language the quicker we can begin impacting players together.”
Stone is proud of the manner in which the different departments of baseball operations, such as scouting and player development, are willing to collaborate with the sports science department. “I would say that we’re dot-connectors,” he continues. “We understand the ‘benchtop science’ aspects of physiology, neurobiology and biomechanics, but then we also have the ability to apply that in a field setting. I think that’s what the backbone of sports science should be, can be, and is, in certain instances.”
He has also noticed the wider trend towards generalists in sports science. “We need to have a bit of depth in each domain,” he says, which includes a breadth of ‘soft’ skills allied to a deep practitioner knowledge and, here, Stone sets out four factors for sports science practitioners to consider when developing trust in their craft.
Stone argues that sports scientists have, at times, adopted the wrong approach when entering an organization. “We’re often coming into environments that have been there for a long period of time and, for me, it’s more about creating an environment of openness and a willingness to engage on both sides,” he says. “As long as we have a way we’re going to approach something internally that makes sense to everybody in the room – not just the scientists or the coaches – but it has to make sense to everybody and we work really hard with that. We’re going to make sure that the technology and verbiage we use fits that environment so that people don’t feel like they can’t connect and understand, because then they’re going to be unwilling to say anything. We’re going to be two ships passing in the night instead of getting on land together and making sure we’re taking the next step forward.”
Meeting the coach where they’re at – and gaining their confidence in your work as a sports scientist means listening. Stone says: “We can fall into this trap where you think you’ve got to come in and prove your value. ‘I will try to show you how smart I am and show you all the gadgets I have.’ But if you’re in the organization they already value you at some level, right? In my opinion, what creates that confidence in our coaches is my ability to just listen. I want to learn from them regardless of their age, their years in the field or the game. What ends up happening is that they’ll say things that I also see or resonate with. We already mentioned the challenge of the verbiage, the language that is unique to that culture. The ability for the practitioner to learn fast is fundamental and the best way to do that is to listen. Just little things. You get a sense for what they’re describing, and you end up saying ‘Oh yeah, I see the same thing’. That common ground can gain confidence and trust can grow from there.”
When it comes to building confidence in a dataset, Stone stresses the importance of routine for everyone involved. “You want to have as much rigor as you can in the field, but there’s a razor’s edge of knowing I can’t control everything,” he says. “It’s not going to be a sterile lab environment, but if we can keep the same repeatable things every single day then we have a higher likelihood of that being reliable over time. Simple things – simple but not always easy – like monitoring. We’re going to monitor at the same time or at least in the same time block every day at certain times of the year, knowing that when we have to switch, then we’re not going to compare morning to afternoon data. Research would support it, anecdotal information that we have in-house would support that too. Working in the United States military, working in college athletics, I can’t remember one place where people didn’t like a schedule. So we’ve tried to leverage that so that what we do fits into their day. It’s not an extra thing that they have to do.”
Pick the item that gains you the most buy-in. “That was the thing when we came in,” says Stone. “We picked the one thing that we were already doing that we could improve, and once we had that dialed in the other pieces could fall into place. Some coaches have that model for skill acquisition; ‘I’m going to start with one cue and one thing a day. We’re going to get really good at that and build upon that foundation.’ It’s the same thing with our scientific approach. Yes, it may not be perfect, and someone from an academic environment would come in and say ‘there’s seven things that aren’t right’. I would suggest that if we can fix one thing that helps three of those take care of themselves and I know that one thing can get more buy-in. I may have a lower confidence level on the validity and reliability of that data upfront, but I can also circle back with some key stakeholders and say early on ‘this is going to be a little bit rough but it gets us into our routines to know that these other three or four things are going to happen down the line.’ That’s what gives me more confidence now because those other things have started to snowball in a positive way where we’re getting to control those simple but not necessarily easy things.”
