Main Image: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

Not too long ago, WNBA performance staffs were filled by transient and seasonal practitioners, noted Keith D’Amelio, who joined the New York Liberty as Chief Innovation Officer five years ago with the charge of “reimagining how we actually care for athletes in the W.”

With the backing of Owner Clara Wu Tsai and General Manager Jonathan Kolb, the Liberty – who won the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup in June – have led the way in that growth, tripling performance staff in the first year after D’Amelio’s hire. His background included stints with the Celtics, Raptors, Stanford basketball and Nike, where he was the longtime director of performance, working closely with its contracted athletes such as Ndamukong Suh, who played 13 NFL seasons without missing a game due to injury.

“One of the things Clara and Jonathan both expressed is they wanted to set the standard for the WNBA as an organization and force everybody else to try and keep up to raise the floor for how players are cared for and how organizations operate in the WNBA,” D’Amelio said.

D’Amelio has stayed close with Suh, who played for five NFL teams, was named to five All-Pro teams and won a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers. Suh, an active investor in the space, spoke at SBJ Tech Week in 2025. He and D’Amelio recently offered SBJ their insights from their varied team experiences on how modern organizations should operate.

Communicate with and empower players

When it comes to training plans and athlete monitoring tech, D’Amelio said teams most often fail when they are perceived as imposing it on the players. “Make it a two-way conversation as opposed to a one-way conversation,” he said.

Anytime data will be collected, it’s incumbent on the coach to explain the rationale behind it and the way it will be used so that athletes are comfortable.

“My job is always to make the athletes, teams, companies — whoever I’m working with — better consumers of information,” D’Amelio said.

Many top athletes also have a private fitness coach in addition to support from the team. D’Amelio has done both — worked for teams and served as the outside guru for Suh and others — and emphasizes that collaboration is best.

Differentiate

Sports is often a copycat industry, but the innovators are the ones who tend to rise to the top. “A lot of teams are afraid to be different — lean into that,” Suh said. “When folks are open to it, they start to unlock the great things about their organization.”

Teams too often worry about keeping up with the Joneses, D’Amelio added. Trying to mimic what works for another club often falls short because the other roster has players with different skills, and that staff has likely put a lot of thought and planning into the system. He also cautioned against overvaluing any one particular tactic.

“You can’t just go replicate what they’re doing,” D’Amelio said. “It’s impossible. It’s another pet peeve of mine in the sport world when people are like, ‘Oh, it’s our secret sauce.’ No, stop. Your secret sauce is management, the thought process, the coaching staff implementation and players’ skill sets, but also it’s the uniqueness of that organization that makes things successful, not just the idea.”

Ndamukong Suh, who played 13 seasons in the NFL without missing a game due to injury, remains an active investor in athlete performance tech. Photo: Getty Images

Incubate

Take time for R&D, ideally formalizing an innovation program like an accelerator for startups, akin to what the Dodgers and Thunder have.

“There’s so much technology that’s coming out there,” Suh said. “So why not build an incubator where you can have this band of people or advisers that sit in the middle between experts in sports and in technology?”

That can be especially powerful in multiteam ownership groups, where the sample size of adoption is higher — even if, hypothetically, it’s a group like Kroenke Sports & Entertainment that has teams across multiple sports. D’Amelio says that interdisciplinary approach can be very beneficial.

“It really boils down to, how fast can we accelerate our organization’s ability to learn?” he said.

Bifurcate daily and focus on long-term planning

When D’Amelio joined the Liberty, the team put in a five-year plan to implement change over time rather than all at once, he said, so it wouldn’t be overwhelming for the players and the organization.

That tiered and structured approach should be overseen by someone removed from the grind of preparing the athletes for each practice and game; that staff typically doesn’t have the bandwidth to think on a five-year plan.

D’Amelio likened the separation to the dichotomy described in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

“You have to [balance] what are some things that we can do to address immediate problems, innovate and problem-solve in the moment, but also having that long-term view,” he said. “It’s sometimes hard to do when you are in it on a day-to-day basis. This is the role that I serve with the Liberty, who’s not really in the weeds on a day-to-day basis because when you are, you’re just putting out the fire of today to try and get to tomorrow.”

Main Image: Getty Images

By Ethan Joyce

I regret to inform you that I am not very clutch.

Normally, it’s my colleague Joe Lemire who experiments with new tech for our recurring Sandbox Series. But this week, it was me dipping my toe into the test zone — and I recoiled with a wounded ego.

When it comes to human performance, clutch is still a polarizing topic. Is it even real? The analytical stat heads say no, but anyone who’s seen a game-winning shot or a career-defining performance by a star athlete may beg to differ. So, what if you could evaluate people based on their likelihood to perform in high-pressure situations?

NTangible has figured out how to measure it.

The platform, which provides mental scouting assessments for athletes for multiple sports, was created by President/CEO Dan Connerty. Its testing, which features open-ended and multiple-choice answers, uses AI to analyze things like thought process, perspective and wording.

Connerty has been on this startup adventure full-time since 2024, with NTangible now in use in 40 NCAA programs (including Boston College and Florida Atlantic). Last year, the company became the official mental fitness partner of RFK Racing to evaluate and support its pit crew members.

Image: SBJ Tech screenshot

Based in Canada, Connerty spent most of his time in the baseball development space as a former collegiate and pro athlete. He was the principal director of Baseball Development Group from 2017 to 2019, and during that time, he got to know industrial psychologist Ed Levine. And it started this ongoing pursuit.

“At the time I go, ‘We’re going to reach a point where we cap out what we can measure physically — it’s going to happen,’” Connerty recounted to me. “Mental has always been this black box … nobody wants to touch it.”

Enter the Clutch Factor score, which evaluates mental performance in clutch scenarios. In roughly 20 minutes, I ran through a handful of pictures depicting various scenarios. (I did a basketball test since it’s the sport I played the most.) One was an image of a player shooting a free throw, the next was a ball handler staring down a full-court press, and others were similar in-game scenarios. I had a chance to pick my perspective of the play, who I would be and what I’d be planning to do next. I also shared my past experiences of higher-pressure situations.

When I finished the test, I was given a score of 663. That figure is out of 1,000, which placed me in the average category. Connerty said the scores can be quite predictive of college success (NTangible can test athletes as young as 13). The athletes who score in the 750-799 range are twice as likely to play a Division I sport. Above 800? We’re talking a potential all-conference or All-American honoree. Example: Texas freshman P/UT Hannah Wells produced the highest Clutch Factor score in the country. She helped the Longhorns win their second consecutive College World Series softball championship earlier this month.

After sharing my lack of clutchness, I could tell you about my days as a newspaper college football reporter. I was constantly combating the harshest deadlines, filing stories that squeaked in just early enough to make the next day’s edition, some of which I won national awards for. But I won’t do that.

The good news for me (and other users)? Because my clutchness can now be measured, I can also improve it, according to Connerty.

“Our psychologists have said, at minimum, if you wanted to redo it, six months,” he said about retesting. “Usually, this should be an annual test just to see where you are. If you think of the Clutch Factor score as your capacity to perform at your top range, not every day are you going to be there.

“This is something where your score can fluctuate based on experiential parameters.”

That’s totally it! I had an off day. I’m sure of it. Case closed.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch

Rachel Vickery is a high-performance specialist who helps teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure.

These teams tend to ask two questions. Firstly, “What are some techniques that we can use in the pressure moments to be able to handle pressure?” and, secondly, “How do we replicate pressure so that we can train our people to be able to be comfortable with it?”

Neither is the right question, as Vickery explained. They are “looking at the wrong part of the evolution of how pressure comes about,” she told a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable. “Probably 90% of the time, when I’m seeing an individual or a team not executing well in the pressure moment, it’s usually got almost nothing to do with the performance arena itself; it’s more to do with what’s going on everywhere else.”

Success is less about teaching people in-the-moment coping techniques and more about ensuring they arrive at the pressure moment with sufficient physiological and psychological buffer to absorb it.

“The reality of the environments that we all operate in is pressure is the constant,” she continued. “We shouldn’t be surprised that it shows up and that people feel elevated and escalated.” However, “we don’t do a good enough job of explaining to people that that’s normal and it’s really okay and ‘here’s how it could potentially impact your performance if we don’t give you the skills and the techniques and the ways to handle that’.”

Allostatic load and ‘buffer’

Vickery explained that performance under pressure starts with an understanding of an individual’s allostatic load – the accumulation of stressors and demands over time that push a person into a heightened state of physiological arousal.

“What they end up seeing in finals is not a sudden, unexpected failure of performance,” she said. “It was something that was actually built because of that accumulation in the system as a whole.”

Stressors can include:

• Relationship breakdowns
• Family illness
• Financial concerns
• Major life challenges
• Ongoing personal worries
• Poor physical foundations
• Sleep deprivation
• Constant organisational pressure

Any combination of these factors can push an individual over their threshold for coping effectively; and, on the last point above, Vickery said: “unfortunately, most organisations are unknowingly creating organisational allostatic load.” They create a constant background level of pressure that steadily consumes the buffer of athletes, coaches and staff long before the critical performance moment arrives. One participant also noted that mundane organisational barriers (or simple “inertia”) can become a chronic source of frustration, uncertainty and stress.

The goal should be to increase ‘buffer’ – the spare capacity between a person’s current arousal level and the point at which performance starts to deteriorate. When someone has plenty of buffer, the pressure can rise naturally, their arousal can increase, and they can still stay below their threshold.

Vickery argued that many organisations make a fundamental mistake by treating sleep, recovery, relationships and gratitude as wellbeing initiatives rather than as performance interventions that create buffer.

From there, the discussion turned to the ways buffer is most commonly depleted in high-performance environments. Vickery and the group identified five recurring challenges and a series of practical solutions.

1. Pressure first reveals itself through communication breakdowns

Leaders should treat communication breakdowns as early warning signs that people are operating close to their threshold. When pressure mounts, athletes and coaches withdraw, communication deteriorates; assumptions replace curiosity; body language changes, eye contact disappears and conversations become more directive and defensive. These behaviours are not personality traits but predictable consequences of the threat response.

The solution: When teams encourage open conversation, curiosity and honest dialogue, they are better able to identify pressure before it becomes a problem. “We’re feeling beings that think, not thinking beings that feel,” said Vickery. “Our thought processes are actually more driven by our physiology than the other way around.”

2. Outcome supersedes process

Too often success is linked to winning, with people pulled towards KPIs, rankings and results. One participant described an environment in which almost every meeting ended with the message: ‘we just need to win this week’. The danger is that a constant focus on outcomes increases allostatic load and elevates pressure long before competition begins. The result is an environment where people become fixated on consequences rather than execution.

The solution: Clear plans, role clarity and process-based language serve as anchors when pressure rises. The stronger a person’s connection to the process, the more pressure they can absorb without becoming overwhelmed.

3. Personal stress follows people into performance

There is a persistent belief that high performers should be able to leave personal issues at the door but, as Vickery observed, people may compartmentalise mentally and emotionally, but “we can’t compartmentalise our physiology”. Sleep deprivation, family pressures, financial concerns and relationship difficulties all consume buffer. She illustrated the point through the example of an elite military operator who missed a critical threat after a sleepless night following a relationship breakdown despite being regarded as one of his unit’s most reliable performers.

The solution: Individuals must address their biggest sources of allostatic load rather than ignoring them. Leaders must also provide support and understanding.

4. Neglect of the fundamentals

Several participants reflected on how neglecting sleep, recovery and self-management had eventually caught up with them despite operating successfully for long periods.

The solution: As Vickery said, “do the common things uncommonly well.”

5. Fear-based thinking narrows performance

When pressure rises, performers become consumed by consequences, avoiding mistakes and protecting themselves from failure. In this state, people hesitate, become defensive and interpret feedback as criticism rather than information.

The solution: Reframe pressure as an opportunity. Gratitude in that moment redirects attention from fear towards problem-solving. Vickery said: “It turns the fear brain off and it opens the [part of the brain] that’s going to be much more into curiosity and ‘how do I solve for the problem?’”

Vickery then shared her framework for managing pressure across an entire season:

Off-season

Pressure audits: Organisations should identify where performance broke down under pressure and then reverse-engineer the causes. The objective is to uncover where pressure was created, accumulated and left unchecked. It is not about apportioning blame. Vickery said: “Often what we see is where the pressure was set up is actually quite a long way away from where it actually showed up.”

Intentional design: Once the pressure points have been identified, systems, communication practices and organisational habits can be redesigned to preserve buffer rather than consume it.

Mid-season

Big rocks: When competition is underway, teams should not try to fix everything at once. Instead, organisations and individuals should identify and address the largest contributors to accumulated pressure and allostatic load.

Post-season

Add pressure analysis to your after-action reviews: Too few AARs examine the role pressure played throughout a season. Discussions should reference arousal state, allostatic load and buffer alongside technical, tactical and operational reviews. The real challenge is whether individuals and organisations have preserved enough buffer to absorb pressure when the moment arrives.

What to read next

Athlete Performance Under Pressure: why Systems and Culture Matter

Main Image: Getty Images

By Rob Schaefer

By John Portch

How does a talent pathway ensure effective transitions for its young athletes?

If your programme is too standardised, you risk producing technically proficient performers that struggle to adapt when confronted with new challenges. At the same time, an overly fragmented pathway can create confusion and hamper development.

“I don’t think anyone’s solved this. That’s why we’re still talking about it; we’re still trying to work out how to do it most effectively,” said Iain Brunnschweiler. “However, I’m sure there are certain systems who are doing this more effectively.”

Brunnschweiler, who has held coaching and pathway leadership roles in football and cricket, recently led a virtual roundtable on the topic.

He kicked off with reference to the 2016 work of Vincent Webb, David John Collins and Andrew Cruickshank titled Aligning the talent pathway: Exploring the role and mechanisms of coherence in development.

Drawing on their paper, Brunnschweiler illustrated three contrasting approaches to talent development.

1. The ‘copy and reproduce’ pathway

This, Brunnschweiler explained, “is a pathway where it’s very similar as you transition from one age group to the next. Things are kept incredibly tight. The methods are very similar.”

Athletes encounter the same coaching ideas, training methods and expectations throughout the pathway. Transitions are smooth because little changes.

“The implications of this sort of pathway are that there can be quite fast progress, but it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to adaptability, independence or resilience.”

2. The incoherent pathway

This is completely at odds with the first.

“There are major differences one year to the next. There is not really any handover. There isn’t much communication between coaches, sports scientists, support staff etc,” said Brunnschweiler.

Athletes bounce from one training or coaching methodology to the next, which can hinder progress and cause confusion. However, “for those players who do manage to make it through that sort of pathway, they become very self-motivated and adept at reflection; and actually it can lead to high levels of adaptability, independence, resilience.”

3. The Goldilocks pathway

“Having some variance in how a performer experiences transitions can be a really good thing,” said Brunnschweiler while sharing the following slide:

“The coaching would be different, but not too much. The training environment would be different, but not too much. The sports science methods and performance staff methods would be different, but not too much. The challenges players are facing would be different, but not too much.”

The variety athletes experience is built into the system. “One of the key tenets of this model is it is logical, intentional and progressive,” Brunnschweiler continued.

This led him onto five considerations:

1. Coaching / staff structure: Are athletes experiencing planned or random variation as they move through the pathway?
2. Development / performance principles: What remains consistent as athletes move through different environments?
3. Athlete autonomy: Are we developing athletes who can think and act for themselves?
4. Feedback mechanisms: Are key stakeholders receiving coherent and aligned messages?
5. Handover processes: Does knowledge transfer effectively when athletes transition between stages?

Brunnschweiler wrapped up his presentation with a final provocation inspired by his experience. It focused specifically on young athletes called into senior or first team environments:

At the upper end of the talent pathway, the highest potential athletes can get the ‘worst’ programme.

As he observed, an athlete may look as though they are receiving the best possible opportunity because they are training with senior professionals, yet if that exposure comes at the expense of match minutes, individualised development, physical preparation and psychological support, they may actually be receiving a worse developmental programme than peers lower down the pathway.

“They were being utilised more as a training mechanism for senior performers rather than a really high potential young player,” said Brunnschweiler, who worked with his colleagues to find a solution.

“One mechanism we did put in place was having a transition coach whose specific role was to go with that high potential player or group of players when they went into the senior training environment.”

His story raised a further question: are we designing programmes around the needs of the athlete, or around the needs of the system?

At that point, Brunnschweiler asked the members at the table to share their experiences. Their contributions covered several areas:

The step up to the first team

“Young players generally had no chance of playing, but we just felt that understanding the cognitive load and pressure load and all those things was really advantageous,” said one attendee with experience managing at a successful international rugby programme. Another member, a performance lead in the world of cricket, agreed on the value in exposure. “They will be around some of the best players to have ever played the game, and picking up the conversation, seeing how they go about their training,” he said.

The ideal approach offers the best of both worlds. As Brunnschweiler noted, “there are examples where the club as an organisation have decided that development is a part of what they do and therefore they will recruit managers or coaches based on a deliberate intention to get players through.”

Then, as one pathway lead noted, his job is to develop athletes who are better than the previous generation. “We deliberately say we don’t want to play the game the way the first team play the game,” he said. “If you imitate, you’re never going to be able to be the best version of yourself.”

The challenge posed by tradition

The risk is assuming athletes should simply survive because previous generations did.

“Creating the sink or swim environment is so dangerous when you’ve invested so much in it,” said a national talent manager working in international cricket. Challenge should increase, but support should not disappear. A team, he continued, must find “the right balance between having some of those support structures in place, some of those systems and processes, in order to inevitably allow them to fail, but catch them before they hit the floor.”

Athlete autonomy

Systems risk producing athletes who are adapted to one environment rather than adaptable to multiple environments.

“Sometimes we create athletes for one system versus [preparing them for] any system,” said a head of performance pathways working at a national level in Australasia. Her work with athletes focuses on “creating the conditions for them to have that autonomy, self-management and real sense of ownership”.

Similarly, a pathway leader working in an individual sport observed, “we need an individualised approach of being able to have flexibility and adaptability to what that player needs”.

Pathway misalignment

Another risk is the dangers of different parts of the pathway pulling in different directions.

One participant reflected on having worked in programmes where different stages of the pathway were ‘philosophically miles apart’. This led to players being rewarded for behaviours at one stage and criticised for them at the next.

The key, as Brunnschweiler said, is to ask: “How do we as a system create a combination of player engagement and autonomy and support and appropriate challenge so that as they move through each stage of the pathway, they’re ready to go in and survive and then thrive?”

What to read next

Five Common Tensions on Talent Pathways… and Five Solutions

By Dr Benjamin Kelly

In the high-stakes environment of professional rugby union, where tactical nuance and brutal physicality collide, decisions made under immense pressure can define careers and determine championships.

My previous articles have explored behavioural biases in the individual contests of golf and tennis, and in the team dynamics of football and the Ryder Cup. Rugby presents a unique synthesis of these challenges, where individual decisions occur within a complex team strategy.

The same fear that causes an investor to sell at the bottom of the market can cause a team to abandon a winning strategy. By examining rugby through the lens of behavioural finance, we can decode these irrational decisions and develop frameworks to mitigate their impact. This article dissects four core biases—loss aversion, overconfidence, confirmation bias, and anchoring—using high-profile case studies to provide actionable insights for coaches, analysts, and business leaders.

1. Loss aversion: the fear of losing

Loss aversion has emerged as the most pervasive bias across every sport I have examined. Whether it is golfers playing conservatively for par rather than attacking for birdie, tennis players serving safer on break points, or football managers delaying tactical changes to avoid admitting their initial plan failed, the pattern is universal: the pain of a loss is twice as powerful as the pleasure of an equivalent gain. In rugby, this manifests as the dreaded shift from “playing to win” to “playing not to lose.”

Consider the 2011 Rugby World Cup Final. Burdened by a 24-year drought, the All Blacks entered as favourites but played a “grim, pragmatic and joyless” game to scrape an 8-7 victory over a spirited French side [1]. Paralyzed by the fear of losing the unlosable final, their attacking style was replaced by a turgid, risk-off approach. The same psychological mechanism that causes tennis players to reduce their ace rate by 15-20% on break points, and golfers to putt more successfully when avoiding bogey than when chasing birdie, caused the All Blacks to abandon the very style that had made them favourites.

• Correction strategy: Mitigating loss aversion requires a conscious shift from outcome to process. Coaches should develop and train “positive aggression” protocols for when the team is leading, pre-committing to maintain an attacking mindset regardless of the score. Scenario training focused on extending a lead, not just protecting it, builds the mental resilience to counteract loss-averse tendencies.
• Business parallel: Market-leading companies often fall into this trap, focusing on protecting market share rather than pursuing innovation. This opens the door for more agile competitors. A culture that rewards intelligent risk-taking is the corporate antidote.

2. Overconfidence: The hero play syndrome

Overconfidence often follows exceptional performance, leading to a dangerous underestimation of risk. This is the “hero play” syndrome: the ill-advised, low-percentage gamble born from an inflated sense of capability.

The 2019 Rugby World Cup Final provides a stark example. England arrived after demolishing the All Blacks 19-7. Yet, in the final against South Africa, that confidence curdled into overconfidence. They attempted a high-risk, expansive game plan ill-suited to the Springboks’ physicality, making crucial errors early on. South Africa absorbed the pressure and won 32-12. Springbok flanker Pieter-Steph Du Toit later remarked, “I just thought, ‘are you guys crazy? This a World Cup final, you don’t play like this’” [2]. England’s success against New Zealand created an illusion of control that proved disastrous against a different opponent.

• Correction strategy: Counteracting overconfidence requires grounding decisions in objective reality. As outlined in my article on managerial biases, a mandatory “devil’s advocate” review of game plans forces a re-evaluation of assumptions.
• Business parallel: Overconfidence after a major success can lead to reckless expansion or a failure to anticipate competitive responses. A structured “pre-mortem” analysis, where a team is forced to imagine a project has failed and identify the reasons why, is a powerful tool to inject realism.

3. Confirmation bias: seeing what we want to see

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek and interpret information that confirms pre-existing beliefs. In coaching, it leads to flawed tactical plans and an inability to adapt.

The All Blacks’ 2019 World Cup semi-final defeat to England is a textbook case. In the quarter-final, a brilliant tactical plan dismantled Ireland’s rush defence. The All Blacks’ coaches, convinced of the plan’s genius, used the exact same strategy against England. However, England had adapted their defensive structure, neutralizing the attack. As former coach Wayne Smith noted, the plan was “stuck in the brain,” and the team was unable to change course even when it was clearly failing [3]. The initial success created a powerful confirmation bias that blinded them to the new reality.

• Correction strategy: Leaders must actively seek out disconfirming evidence. Fostering a culture of psychological safety where assistants can challenge the head coach is crucial. Mandating “opposing viewpoint” sessions in preparations, where a team member argues against the proposed strategy, forces the group to identify potential weaknesses.
• Business parallel: Confirmation bias creates echo chambers in leadership teams. Actively seeking data that contradicts your strategy and hiring for cognitive diversity are essential mechanisms to combat this pervasive bias.

4. Anchoring: The tyranny of first impressions

Anchoring occurs when we rely too heavily on an initial piece of information when making subsequent decisions. This “anchor” can distort judgment, even when it is irrelevant.

Consider the substitution decisions made by All Blacks coach Ian Foster in a 2022 loss to Argentina. Hooker Samisoni Taukei’aho was one of the best players on the park, yet he was replaced early in the second half. Foster’s reasoning? When replacing his two props, he also replaced the hooker because “that combination was something that worked for us [against South Africa in Johannesburg]” [4]. He was anchored to a successful front-row combination from a previous match, causing him to ignore the compelling real-time data that Taukei’aho was his most effective forward.

• Correction strategy: To counteract anchoring, decision-makers must consciously “reset” their thinking. Coaches should use dynamic substitution checklists that assess current performance, fatigue, and tactical need, rather than relying on pre-planned timings or past combinations. Before a key choice, ask: “Am I making this decision based on what is happening now, or on a previous outcome?”
• Business parallel: Businesses are frequently anchored to historical pricing, outdated structures, or legacy technologies. Regularly conducting “zero-based” reviews of budgets, strategies, and teams forces a re-evaluation based on current needs, not historical anchors.

Conclusion: a framework for better decisions

My work has taught me that you cannot overcome biases by simply trying to be more rational. The optimal path is to create processes that prevent us from succumbing to them. In trading, a stop-loss order removes emotional discretion from a critical decision. This same principle of structured intervention can be applied to rugby and business.

By understanding how these biases manifest, leaders can design and implement structured processes to counteract them. The journey to mastering the mental game is one of discipline and a commitment to process over outcome. The critical insight is not to eliminate bias, but to build systems that account for it. For any leader, in any field, that is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Dr Benjamin Kelly advises investors and professional athletes on decision making strategies in high stakes environments. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By John Portch

We know the best junior performers seldom become the best senior performers, but why is that?

“Maybe it’s the coaching and the experiences that we give the highest-performing athletes that under-prepares them for senior success and negatively impacts their conversion,” Dr Áine MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “It isn’t because early success isn’t an appropriate foundation but maybe we don’t present those early achievers with appropriate developmental challenges.”

MacNamara is an Associate Professor in Elite Performance and Co-Lead of the Coaching and Expertise Lab (Co|Ex Lab) in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University. Her research on talent pathway environments has long been underpinned by the question of appropriate developmental challenge. It makes her an ideal candidate to discuss how teams can better meet their young athletes’ developmental needs.

She suggests that the best pathways recognise that there are development and performance considerations at all stages of a talent pathway; their shared long-term objective is to prepare young athletes for the demands they will face as they move through the pathway.

To that end, MacNamara proposes that these athletes must develop and refine psychological characteristics of developing excellence [PCDEs] that enable them to navigate the challenges they face (for example, the ability to cope with setbacks, reflect on performance and take ownership of their development).

“Athletes are not born with loads of resilience or determination – these are psycho-behavioural skills developed as part of being in a pathway that they can use to navigate the different challenges that they’re facing as they move from foundation to youth to senior.”

Over the course of half an hour, we spoke to MacNamara about the importance of PCDEs and their place at the heart of aligned efforts to ensure better pathway transitions.

Experience as a good process marker

MacNamara explains that one fundamental problem is the conflict between how academies are structured and the individual needs of their young athletes. “Of course a system has to have a structure that caters to most people, but some people won’t fit into that,” she says. “We know that moving between different stages of development is one of the most turbulent and discombobulating times for young athletes because the demands on them and the outcome markers of those stages change.”

Similarly, what a foundation-stage athlete needs when transitioning into the youth development phase will be different to what a junior needs when making a senior transition. “Different things become more or less important as athletes navigate between stages.”

As such, MacNamara encourages people to view pathway transitions not as an event but as a process which requires athletes to be supported coming into, during and out of different stages. “It’s something that starts way before the transition and happens as they progress through it.” She places a premium on how well different parts of the pathway connect to one another, the extent to which there is coherence and alignment, as important elements of ensuring athletes are progressively prepared for what comes next.

There is also evidence that time spent in an academy is a good indicator of progress. “Having under-nines in your academy may be a poor indication of who’s going to become a senior professional – very few will make that eventual conversion, but in another way, one of the things that we understand about transitions is that cumulated experience is actually a good process marker of who’s going to progress through transitions.”

In other words, “athletes who manage and navigate those transitions have more time in the system, have more opportunities and exposure to different challenges that give them a toolbox of skills to be able to navigate upwards.”

The importance of ‘big bumps’ in the road

Broadly speaking, athletes on a pathway have the same physical or physiological skills; the biggest distinction lies in their ability to face a range of challenges and opportunities.

“I mean ‘challenges’ in a really positive way – things that help them get better,” says MacNamara. Athletes with good PCDEs will be able to ask themselves ‘how do I make sense of this experience? What do I need to get better? How do I implement that?’”

Often, the greatest transition pinch points are from foundation to youth and then from junior to senior; and when such transitions become turbulent, an athlete’s PCDEs act as their “armbands” that allow them to manage that experience and learn from it.

To illustrate her point, MacNamara cites her 2016 research paper with Drs Dave Collins and Neil McCarthy titled ‘Super champions, champions and almosts’. The ‘super champions’, as one might expect, are the elite of the elite; the ‘champions’ are accomplished athletes; the ‘almosts’ are those who showed early promise but didn’t make it.

The super champions and champions had had opportunities to progressively develop PCDEs in a low-stakes setting as they moved through the pathway. As a result, they had a toolbox to call on when it really mattered.

The almosts, on the other hand, “would look back on their career as pretty smooth until it wasn’t” and, as a consequence, “they hadn’t had the opportunity to develop those PCDEs to cope with that big bump that generally came later in their development”.

It took one athlete in MacNamara’s study years to succeed at senior international level. The athlete in question “hadn’t developed the skills that allowed him to navigate the transition when his early advantages plateaued out against everyone else.”

When it comes to early achievers, a coach must ask of themselves how they can “make the road more rocky” as MacNamara puts it, not to just present the athlete with a challenge but to provide an experience to develop skills for the long-term. “There’s repercussions to that because the athlete might now not win the under-ten national championships, but actually that experience might give them the environment to develop those skills they need for later on.”

The implications for coaches and talent pathways

Coaches must be cognisant of their athletes’ PCDEs. “If I know you’re about to make the transition from junior to senior in the next six months, then part of the development process is the coach going ‘what are the PCDEs that you’re going to need to navigate that?’ And how well is the athlete prepared to deploy them effectively.”

MacNamara observes that pathway coaches will often make interventions in the immediate term to apply a “band-aid” but “the best pathway environments are proactive and ask ‘what do I anticipate is going to happen and what are the broad range of skills you need to navigate and to help you manage that transition effectively?’ Good coaches do that as part of their practice.” Each stage is about preparing athletes for the demands of the next.

There is a role for senior team coaches too. “It’s an important question because, in a way, the first team is just worried about the first team. If I’m the head coach, I really don’t have time or maybe responsibility for what happens down the chain, but I think there is a responsibility from an organisational perspective and a coherence perspective to make sure that there’s alignment as you go through.”

That may not mean first-team coaches becoming developers, but it does require clear bridges between environments (such as phased exposure to senior training and expectations) so athletes are gradually prepared for the demands they will face.

To help track the development of PCDEs, in 2011, MacNamara and her colleague Dr Collins devised their psychological characteristics of developing excellence questionnaire [PCDEQ]. Athletes are invited to self-report using the questionnaire and their answers will generate a PCDE-based profile.

“The PCDQ gives a guide to help coaches manage and guide practice at an individual level,” adds MacNamara. If an athlete is to progress from, say, youth to junior level, their profile will highlight any potential work-ons; by the same token, if an athlete’s future lies outside the academy, their profile will enable staff to manage their duty of care in a way that prepares them for life elsewhere.

She then tells the tale of a young female athlete cohort who collectively registered an ‘adverse response to failure’ when completing the questionnaire. It led to an intervention, not with the athletes themselves but their coaches. “Coaches were inadvertently putting huge emphasis on being good right now,” says MacNamara. “On the face of it, they were saying ‘this is a development environment and we want people to get better’ but their messaging was ‘we’re going to select you based on these things’. So when the girls were filling in the PCDEQ it was clear that they were scared of failing.”

Six months later the team filled in the questionnaire again. “The scores had changed, not because of any intervention with the girls, but because the coaching was starting to emphasise that, actually, we want you to push hard and fail because that’s where the learning happens.”

Transition processes must be developmentally-designed

MacNamara advocates for an integrated curriculum of PCDEs that starts young. “It’s not that you’re going to get a bunch of eight-year-olds in a room and teach them goal-setting, but it should be part and parcel of coaching,” she says. “So when decisions are being made, when young athletes are moving from one stage to another, the PCDE curriculum that underpins that transition should allow them to manage that transition.”

Used in this way, PCDEs provide a common thread across the pathway, linking early development to the demands of senior performance.

By the time the athletes reach the ‘pointy’ part of the pathway, “the PCDEs have been purposefully integrated into the curriculum to allow them to cope with the challenges ahead of them. They’ve had input on all the PCDEs and opportunities to test and refine them.”

They will have developed a sophisticated behavioural skillset that stands them in good stead for managing the range of transitions that exist on a pathway.

Pathway coaches, MacNamara says, should ask themselves: “How am I supporting athletes not just to be the best performer today but with an eye on what they need later on?” That might mean slowing down someone who is excelling in their age-group and exposing them to adversity and setbacks.

“That level of integration, of system coherence, is really important; recognising that athletes need to experience the transition as a process, which means the academy needs to be structured to manage those incremental changes as they pass through.”

By the same token, “if an athlete is moving through a football academy, for example, and they get released at a stage of the pathway, because inevitably most of them do, that toolbox of PCDEs will allow them to navigate that exit as well and would allow them to manage that transition out of the pathway.”

As we wrap up the conversation, MacNamara stresses that PCDEs are not a selection tool. “We wouldn’t select on them but we would use them to drive development.”

She emphasises that “this isn’t something extra that you do in your pathway – it’s just part of a holistic approach to developing athletes that can navigate those transitions as they move forward”.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of any pathway depends less on how well it identifies early talent and more on how coherently it supports athletes as they move through its different stages.

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By John Portch

“We know it’s hard to measure learning, but also, how do you measure challenge in this space?”

That observation and question, posed by a skill acquisition specialist at a recent Leaders virtual roundtable, neatly captured the challenge of optimising athlete skill development.

“I think we can say with confidence that it’s actually hard to measure all of these elements,” she continued. “Coaches can see changes in athletes over time, but how do we know that it’s actually stuck?”

To illustrate her point, she spoke of a recent university research project in Australia where athletes were asked to train within a set of fixed constraints. As part of the project, both the athletes and their coaches were quizzed on their perception of the level of challenge.

“One athlete found it harder, one found it easier, and it was the same constraints, same drills.”

There is nothing unusual in that fact, but it does highlight the importance of coherent, context-specific approaches if teams are to gain a handle on skill acquisition in sport.

Last month, members of the Leaders Performance Institute – all skill acquisition specialists or coaches with decades of experience in elite sport – shared their views on the challenges they face and the potential opportunities to pick “low-hanging fruit”, as another participant put it.

Challenges

Skill acquisition is fragmented

“We’ve got pockets of really great work, but there’s not necessarily a systemised approach to being able to embed that knowledge across coach development, across coach education,” said another skill acquisition specialist working in the Australian system. He added: “We need to take a systems approach and be able to influence all those different pieces. At the moment, they probably don’t talk well to each other.”

Unclear understanding

The aforementioned fragmentation is a direct consequence of the way skill acquisition is perceived more widely.

“Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is help athletes become more skilful,” said a coach development specialist based in the UK and Ireland. “People are doing things so differently; we use lots of different words in this area to describe much the same thing.” He then hinted at the solution. “What I think would be really useful for everybody is just going ‘what is it we’re trying to achieve?’ And then be clear; ‘what is it we actually mean when we say these things?’”

Overstated certainty

“One of the things that I see is that I think that often the concepts that are associated with skill acquisition get stated with too much certainty; that there is really clear, solid evidence that everybody should do a certain something,” said the coach development specialist. “That worries me because I just don’t think that there is the strength of evidence to support some of the statements that are made.”

One of his skill acquisition-focused peers concurred. “We can probably have confidence that the research often doesn’t reflect the complexities of the environments that our coaches actually work in,” he said. “I spent 10 years with Paralympic sport in Australia, and I remember the first time I went in. I was young, keen, had all this knowledge, all these ideas; and I remember going into the environment for the first time and thinking ‘I’ve got nothing because nothing from my academic background translates directly here’.”

Cultural barriers

Of all the challenges discussed thus far, the coach development specialist cites cultural context as perhaps the most significant for coaches. “We can probably have confidence that coach education in this space is mixed at best,” he said.

“Coaches are very often taught to think in a different way than what might support skill acquisition,” he added.

This is a problem because, as a coaching lead in the British system observed, “the expectation for coaches to be exceptional in this domain is not what it should be.” He then went further. “I think even the phrase ‘skill acquisition’ may put people off. No one wants to feel incompetent in the domain in which they’re employed.”

He also spoke of the challenge of managing athlete comfort, beliefs and expectations. “If they want to do something and you’re not giving them what they want to do, you’re on a sticky wicket.”

A skill acquisition coach admitted there were times when “we would have lost the athletes; they wouldn’t have been ready; it was too quick, too far away from their norm, it made them too uncomfortable. We had to continually iterate and play at their challenge level.”

Practice design

The coach development specialist cited challenge point theory – essentially pushing athletes beyond their current ability – as useful but limited in isolation. “The deeper challenge there is, well, when do we use more of it? When do we use less of it?” he said.

Is an error-strewn session better than one where athletes sharpen their existing skills? “I’m not sure we’re at a point where we can say we understand the value of repetitive drill-like practice,” he added. “If we introduce this level of variability, what’s going to be the impact? If we dial it back, what’s going to be the impact? I think that’s probably the next frontier, not just for research, but for coaches.”

Opportunities

Coherent systems (and language)

“It doesn’t sit with one group,” said another skill acquisition specialist. “We need to take a systems approach and be able to influence all the different pieces. At the moment, the different disciplines probably don’t talk well to each other.”

It requires a shared understanding and sharper definitions. ““What is it we’re trying to achieve?” asked the coach development specialist, “and then be clear, what is it we actually mean when we say these things? We use lots of different words in this area to describe much the same thing.”

He added: “I think that we might be better off going, ‘well, to what is it that we can actually anchor?’ What are the things that we could consider to be good practice rather than saying ‘do this all the time and everything will be better?’”

One trend is for skill acquisition to be implicit, as a coach working at a major European football club explained: “skill acquisition is a little more hidden and less explicit here – I don’t know whether I’m cheating the system by not trying to shout from the rooftop.”

A skill acquisition lead suggested there may be an opportunity in some instances “to be a bit more explicit and reflect back on how do we actually design the best skill-learning environment?”

As if to underline the complex nature of the problem, the UK-based coaching lead responded to both by saying: “I like the concept that it’s hidden, it’s implicit, but equally, I like the idea that it’s really transparent. There’s some solution somewhere between those two things.”

Better transfer from training to performance

“The more contextually relevant we can make the skill development, the more likely we are to get transfer into performance environments,” said a skill acquisition coach.

The coach development specialist then built on this point. He said: “I think we ignore the context around an athlete and a coach. If we’re going to make an impact with this work, we need to zoom out and look at the context around the coach and athlete rather than saying ‘do this all the time and everything will be better’.”

The coaching lead felt there was some “low-hanging fruit” to be found in this area. “We don’t do systematic analysis of training sessions to understand stimulus and response,” he said, while admitting he has yet to find the right tools or metrics.

For all that, athletes must have some agency too. The All Blacks of the 2011 and 2015 Rugby World Cup-winning vintage were a prime example of a mature, player-led approach to the transfer of training to competition, as their former GM told the table.

“We had players that wanted skill acquisition,” he said. “We had a mission as a group that come game time, we needed self-reliant athletes. And the only way we could build that was through them getting themselves ready to play. So coaches became the support rather than the lead. Skill acquisition was built into every session, but the player would design how they utilised that period of time.”

There is, of course, a balance to be struck. The coaching lead noted how frustrated his players once were with a monotonous session, yet “the transfer 36 hours later was unbelievable” (he also noted that his observation was “non-scientific”).

Improve how coaches think, not just what they do

“There tends to be a frustration that some of these ideas aren’t adopted more,” said a skill acquisition specialist. “I would encourage people to think about, well, what are the systems that we’re putting around coaches? What are the environments we’re creating to actually enable coaches to be more open, more curious, and make it more accessible? And what are the multiple nudges and ways in which we can do that?”

He also noted one coach lamenting the fact that there was little coach education in this space two decades ago (even if he admitted he might not have been receptive in the early 2000s). “How do we actually create systems so that more coaches more often can start to access these ideas and get support in this area?”

He added: “What we want to do is help coaches become good decision makers and designers of that environment and have a rationale and intent for why they’re making those manipulations.”

Connect training, data and performance

The coach based at the European football club spoke of their work with analysts to ensure better transfer of training to performance. “We have a database of all of our training sessions, logged what we’re doing, and then the analyst gives me a monthly report of like, ‘you’ve covered this, you’ve covered this, you’ve covered this’,” he said while emphasising that his club is only at the start of its development in this space.

“We also have a research and innovation team that feed back to us on our game performance and highlight any dips or trends such as ‘actually your counter-attacks are down in the last month’. Then I go back to the training library and go ‘okay, we’ve not done enough counter-attack practices or actually we’ve done loads of counter-attack practices, but they’re down, so why is there not a transfer?’ And so we’re trying to attack it that way.”

He then reflected on his ability to influence his coaches. “When we break off and do unit or individual work, I’m constantly trying to nudge them into making the practices a little bit more relevant, game relevant and asking themselves how that is transferring to what we’re doing.”

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