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.

What to read next

10 Ways in Which the Best Environments Support their Pathway Athletes

Main Image: Getty Images

By Rob Schaefer

Main Image: San Francisco Unicorns

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.”

What to read next

Skill Acquisition: Tension, Challenges and Opportunities

Main Image: NBA / Theia

By Joe Lemire

The SBJ Tech Sandbox series is where we share our experiences testing products, gear, solutions and more in the sports tech space.

I first dunked a basketball during a JV game on my 16^th birthday. Following a steal and a breakaway, I rather gently placed the ball through the rim, but the varsity team happened to be watching, earning me what was some scarce social currency at that point in my life.

Over the next few years, as I got stronger, my vertical inched up further, and I could dunk with a little bit of style — no one was inviting me to dunk contests or narrating my And1 mix tape, but it was still an epic feeling.

You certainly wouldn’t know it now.

The NBA recently invited me to participate in the same quarterly biomechanics screening that all its athletes started doing this season — the first league-wide program in pro sports. It’s a series of jumps and lateral moves, with some closed-eye, one-legged balancing mixed in.

The video may double as my audition for Blue Man Group — the cyan skeleton is part of the Theia software processing to evaluate joint angles and motion. But it also shows my diminished explosiveness as I move along the aging curve.

Each task has been carefully selected by a collaborative group of NBA and NBPA movement experts to gain insight into individual athlete movement patterns and hopefully build normative standards that can be used to help prevent injuries and improve performance.

One note the league makes clear is that biomechanics usually can’t answer questions in isolation — rather, it’s a notable piece of a larger performance puzzle.

“Biomechanics tells you how someone is moving, but it doesn’t tell you why,” said Courtney Chaaban, NBA Sr Manager of biomechanics and engineering. “So I really like to look at it alongside of lots of other information: how strong they are, what their range of motion is, how they’re moving on the court, what their demand is on the court, what their injury history might be.”

I’ve detailed my injury history in these Sandbox stories before — broken bones in my feet, sprains of muscles and ligaments, etc. — and I’ll share that my knees were oddly sore the day of my evaluation. (Of course I have an excuse ready… )

My single-leg jumps were paltry, just 3.7 inches for my left and 3 inches for my right. My two-legged jumps were a bit better. The countermovement jump (CMJ) — in which I started on the force plates, bent down and then leapt straight up — was 11.8 inches, good for 56^th percentile in the sample of non-NBA players. My drop vertical jump, in which I step down onto the force plates and immediately spring up, was 13.2 inches, at the 49^th percentile.

I was hoping for better. Image: NBA

There were diagrams showing how much I use my ankles, knees and hips to absorb forces as I jump or land. Of particular note was my landing strategy: I know my hip flexors are weak due to a previous Springbok Analytics scan, and my knees were achy that day, so it’s little surprise that my ankles worked overtime to mitigate force.

“It’s not to say it’s good or bad,” Chaaban explained. “Maybe that’s just how you move.”

I didn’t skip all of leg day, just the hip and knee lifts. Image: NBA

While recently chatting with Warriors superstar Stephen Curry about a different topic, we started talking about his recovery routine and the notion of career longevity, when I volunteered that I underwent the NBA’s biomechanics protocol.

“You did all the testing?” Curry asked with a bemused smile. I shared the verdict of my data, which is that I’m very much a suburban dad these days. He laughed and then added, “There’s a lot more data available, but the real art is to figure out how to make that useful, right?”

My testing was done at the Nets’ first-rate facility in Brooklyn, but the experience is intentionally universal and would have been the same in Oklahoma City or Sacramento, too. All the same tech vendors are involved: Qualisys motion capture cameras, Bertec force plates, Theia biomechanics software and Breakaway Data for player and team access to the data.

My primary differential: I received a pdf report (rather than the Breakaway Data dashboard) that largely mirrored what the players get but had a few alterations, mostly because I had no historical data from other assessments. My datapoints were compared not to other NBA players but to a handful of team and league staff who underwent the tests.

The reports convey what each metric represents, which is helpful, such as noting that deceleration during the CMJ is “similar to stopping when coming around a screen.”

That CMJ deceleration was my highest asymmetry: my right side produced 20.5% more force than my left. Asymmetry is generally thought to be a problem and a possible injury risk, but there also need to be some allowances for individuals having their own movement signature.

What Curry also told me about applying such high-tech evaluations is the need to surround himself with “as many experts as possible to understand what the data means and then figure out what that is going to do to impact my routine.”

So, kind readers with advanced degrees and extensive pro sports experience, I ask: Who’s going to help me dunk again?

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

Iván Gil-Ortega, a former principal dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet and the Dutch National Ballet, remembers his ballet teacher smoking in class.

“She used to ask us to hold her cigarette while she was lifting your leg and then putting you in the right position,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: Australia in February.

“The pianist was smoking too,” he added, “and we were called names.”

Gil-Ortega, who is approaching two years as the Artistic Director of the Queensland Ballet, was responding to a question from moderator Keith Sharpe, the Head of Coaching & Leadership Development at British Cycling, on the cultural shifts that have occurred in education since Gil-Ortega himself was a student.

Though neither an advocate of smoking in class nor bullying children, he nevertheless believes that the teacher-student relationship has shifted “a little too much”.

His views are of interest because Gil-Ortega oversees an academy of more than 200 students who are aged anywhere between seven and 18 (the company also has a pre-professional programme currently made up of 16 students).

“I think we went from one extreme to the other and what I try to do is find that middle way.” Though his criticisms are never personal (“everything I do is to get the best outcome for them”) there can be a tension between Gil-Ortega and his students. He attributes this to expectation management. “They want to get there immediately and, when you do something like this, there is no way of avoiding the actual path you need to go down to get there.”

To Sharpe, it speaks of kindness. He said: “I’m a big believer that the next competitive advantage is kindness; and kindness wins. So the courage to trust, the willingness to listen, the openness to just succeed and learn together is really important. Kindness isn’t nice, is it? It’s not about just being nice. It’s being honest.”

Gil-Ortega concurred. “Something that I found when I got here is they kept on saying to me: ‘you’re very direct’ and I said, ‘no, there is no “very direct”. There is “direct” or “not direct”. I try to avoid the bullshit. I try to be honest with them so that they know what is expected; and the more honesty you can have with your dancers, with your team, in the long term, that’s the best outcome for them.”

The Queensland Ballet is, he believes, a good environment, “but it doesn’t mean that we’re all hugging and we love each other because we don’t. Let’s not forget: it’s a cutthroat job.”

You may not wish a fellow dancer harm, but the simple fact of the matter is that you are vying for their job. “So that’s your competition; you’re competing within your team.”

Nevertheless, “we have to have an environment where everybody can work and have opportunities.” It begins with honesty, which is rooted in care rather than cruelty. “I try to be honest because the more honest you can be then there is no false expectation.”

Over the course of 30 minutes, Gil-Ortega explained his efforts to help students navigate the cutthroat environment of a ballet academy.

Below, we pick out four factors that define his approach.

1. He tries to balance individual ambition with collective learning

“Every single dancer is thinking of themselves. They’re not thinking of the person next to them,” said Gil-Ortega. Yet ballet is still a collective endeavour and individual flair must serve the company. The principals rely upon the soloists, corps de ballet and junior dancers etc.

“Even if I have the best Romeo and the best Juliet, unless everyone else plays their part, you won’t see the performance,” he continued. “We’ve had great dancers where the company wasn’t really into the whole process. So it didn’t really matter how great they were because the show didn’t come up to that next level.”

Therefore, “if you’re giving feedback to someone, the person beside them needs to listen; it is not just personal feedback, it’s for everybody.” Nevertheless, this can be a difficult experience for students, which is why Gil-Ortega must be careful to balance challenge and support.

2. Psychological safety doesn’t mean lowering standards

Gil-Ortega asserts that ballet is “not a job and it’s not a hobby – it becomes a lifestyle”. He said: “The dancers are dancers from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed; and even in our sleep we’re dancers because you’re twitching, because your body is.” He tailed off while trying to find the right words to end his sentence. “I mean, it’s horrible.” And to top it off, ballet is a short career; and not the kind that can set you up for life through lucrative contracts or brand endorsements. “You come to a certain age towards the end of your 30s where you’re considered an old person and you just started.”

This is a world in which Gil-Ortega admits he risks offending some students. “But getting offended doesn’t mean that you’re right,” he said. His tone was strident, but the simple fact is that uncomfortable feedback is sometimes necessary to ensure progress.

As for finding that balance, his feedback is “never personal”. He seeks that aforementioned “middle way” that inspires development but does not bully or belittle. Self-directed learning is critical in this regard.

3. He encourages self-directed learning

“I’m always open to being proved wrong,” said Gil-Ortega, who stressed that dance students have the space to change perceptions through their own hard work and development. “I think they have a lot of ownership.”

The steps will always be the steps in ballet, but the dancer can bring a unique artistry to their performance, which is where the space for development exists.

He continued: “I think it’s important when people come to me and say ‘I’d like to do that role and I haven’t been tested’. That’s entirely up to you if you want to be in the room; there is always another skill or another way of movement that you can learn on your own. That’s why I give them the freedom to see if there is something you see that you want to do, you want to learn. I’m always up for it.”

The choreographer may hold a different view, but Gil-Ortega will “try to empower them by saying ‘okay, they might not see you there, but you can prove them wrong’.” As he sees it, the worst thing would be that they meekly do what they are told. “Yes, you have to conform because the creative way is like that; the choreographer has the choreography in their head, they use a certain dancer; but then make sure that when the next one comes you’ve gained some more knowledge, so maybe you’ll be chosen then.”

Furthermore, to reach the point where talent and musicality meet the requisite luck (“you have to be in the right place at the right time”) requires hours and hours of repetition. “It’s all about doing it over and over and over and over.” Oftentimes it also means moving on.

4. He also provides exit routes

“There are people in our academy, in our school, that I know they’ll never make it to the company,” said Gil-Ortega, “but they will be good for other companies. So on that path, I try to tell them before it’s too late.”

It does not mean they lack talent; some may be better suited to other dance forms. Gil-Ortega tries to do right by them by suggesting a new focus in a manner that preserves their confidence and opportunity.

“Last year, we had a dancer that really wanted to stay with us; and I said, ‘I do appreciate the energy and everything, but I think it would be better for you and your career due to your physicality of the way you move and the way you dance to go elsewhere’.”

He actively supports dancers making such transitions. “I have contacted other directors when I say, ‘I have these people here, I think they would work very well for you, for the kind of work you do’. I think it’s just making that path accessible.”

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How to Work with Younger Generations (and by that we Mean Athletes, Coaches and Staff Members)

By John Portch

When we talk about the next generation, it is not just athletes but coaches and other staff members too.

“I work primarily with staff on a day‑to‑day and they are very young,” said a senior sports scientist working in Major League Baseball.

“They’d be Generation Z; and I think there’s definitely a difference in terms of how I have had to learn to communicate with them and include them in various decisions and thoughts along the way — and I’ll be the first to say I fumbled royally multiple times at first.”

This individual – whose experience is far from unique – was speaking at a recent virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members on the challenge of working with the next generation. Several in attendance spoke of the different beliefs, values and attitudes that can exist within a single environment.

Over the course of an hour, the table discussed how to better understand those generational differences in a way that meets the needs of all their young people.

The session host Luke Whitworth, the LPI’s Sport Performance Lead, challenged participants to move beyond generational stereotypes. He said: “If we’re going to manage these multi‑generational teams, it comes down to the leader’s ability to understand the behaviours, values and beliefs of younger people.”

A top-down approach, he argued, is not going to cut it; and he posed the table two questions:

1. How are we adapting and evolving our environments to meet those needs?
2. What do those environments need to look like?

The first question set up the second; and collectively the table alighted on five themes.

1. Pursue co-creation

The consensus is that athletes want to have a louder voice in their own development.

As an attendee who coaches at a Premier League academy said, even boys as young as 11 “continue to want instant information; they want more challenge; they want to know what’s next.”

He added:

“At the moment, we are searching for more autonomy and ownership from young players around some of their developmental needs. We’re sitting down with a young boy and having conversations around what are some of the things that you’re really good at; what would you like to achieve this year; what do you think you’re not so great at and could be working on.”

While the player is encouraged to express their views, they are still guided by their coaches.

“We will tell them: ‘whilst we understand that you feel you need to work on these developmental areas, there are definitely other areas that we need you to continue to work on.’”

In several cases, the priorities of younger staff members mirror young athletes’. A sports scientist from a different Premier League club said:

“The younger staff want quicker progression. They want to know what is happening for them to progress into more senior roles.”

A coach from the US system has observed similar ambitions in their context. He said:

“They won’t take ownership if they’re not included in the process.”

It’s a similar story in a military setting, as another attendee observed from their work:

“You have to be really intentional, really painfully deliberate with junior staff members to make sure that they’re engaged and they feel like they’re part of the process.”

2. Make sure individualisation is rooted in identity and purpose

In several key respects, individualisation underpins efforts to co-create the development plans alluded to above, but sometimes, as a player development manager in Major League Baseball pointed out, the players need a helping hand to prevent them from “climbing the wrong mountain”.

He said:

“Over the last year and a half, we’ve really tried to dive in on the first question. And I think our feedback loops have changed because of that. The four things that stood out at the beginning were reflection, ownership, collaboration and impatience – four things that we feel like our players really struggle with.”

As for the solution:

“We’ve started to dive more into identity and their North Star. Why do they do what they do? What are their values? How can we help them? And they’ve really opened up to us just in terms of who they are, where they’re going, what they want to do. And that’s opened the conversation to their actual on-field performance things that we want them to work on.”

3. Be comfortable with digital delivery

Younger generations are digital natives and teams would do well to lean into this.

The player development manager from above said:

“We’ve actually had our coaches start to record 10 to 15 minute videos, send them to players beforehand, and then the actual talk becomes them being able to reflect and digest the information.”

He is not alone, as another attendee from a US NGB explained of her organisation’s approach to identity:

I’m not a coach, I’m not in performance, I’m in operations, but our data analytics team started talking in a really structured way with our 13 to 15-year-old athletes here at the training centre. They ask them what’s their preferred game style, what kind of player they want to be, who they look up to, and have them sit down and make a video of it. And that has been a really cool exercise.

Meanwhile, at the aforementioned Premier League academy, independent video learning is the norm. The coach said:

“We record training sessions and games that go straight onto Hudl for young players to go and watch. They can engage in it however they want.”

4. Promote peer-to-peer learning

Peer-to-peer learning is also essential. Another academy manager, this time in the world of basketball, said:

“The players have discussions internally between themselves and they come back to us with a conclusion as a group.”

At this juncture, he explained it is important to work out who are the key influencers in the playing group.

“We are living in an era of influencers, TikTokers, YouTubers. So who is the guy who has the biggest influence here in our team? And he’s going to be charged with talking to us and delivering the message to the rest of the group.”

Once again, this peer-to-peer dynamic is just as relevant to staff. A programme lead in the US spoke of their ‘zillennial’ staff i.e. those who could reasonably be classed as older Generation Z and younger millennial.

He said:

“When we have to make a big departmental decision, everyone has to bring a piece of paper. They have to write their own ideas down first before they hear anyone else’s and then walk it through as a group. By the end of it, we all come to the agreement like, ‘hey, this is what we’re doing as a team’. That way it’s everyone’s idea versus ‘that wasn’t my idea’.”

5. Re-evaluate staff reporting structures

A senior sports scientist at a Premier League club explained that his club restructured how staff members report to their line managers. He said:

“We added more layers in. Part of the reason for that was to allow some of the younger staff to get more regular feedback, more regular development. We’ve also tried to limit the number that any one clinician will line‑manage so that actually those conversations can happen more readily.”

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Four Questions those Working with the Next Generation Should Ask Themselves

By John Portch

The complex nature of skill acquisition was nicely summed up by Mo Bobat, the Director of Cricket at both Royal Challengers Bengaluru and London Spirit.

“It’s about how skills are practised within context, how they’re practised in an environment of graded exposure to challenge and pressure,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute when we caught up with him for our Trend Report.

“[It’s about] pressure-testing the skill, rehearsing it, with enough repetition for it to become and feel a little bit more instinctive and automatic. It’s also the right decision-making and execution and relationship with risk.”

The importance of skill acquisition is obvious when you spell it out, but often it is misunderstood or underappreciated.

Last month, we hosted the first of two virtual roundtables focused on the topic. The Leaders Performance Institute members present identified four common tensions and challenges:

1. Skill acquisition is multidisciplinary in nature: a weakness in terms of where it sits and where it resonates.
2. It is less visible and less tangible: it’s harder for coaches to see progress.
3. Training can be unrepresentative of competition: fail to capture competition demands and you fail to prepare your athletes.
4. Head coaches can feel threatened: they feel skill acquisition specialists are treading on their toes.

Coaches and practitioners have encountered each of these tensions in some shape or form and the solutions sit with everyone, not just those tasked with skill development.

Below, we bring you examples from the worlds of Formula 1, rugby union and netball that address those tensions that can hinder skill acquisition through a combination of environmental, structural and personal approaches.

More than Equal: the search for Formula 1’s first female world champion

More than Equal, which was co-founded in 2022 by former F1 driver David Coulthard and philanthropist Karel Komárek, is a global talent identification and development organisation that has set itself the task of finding and developing Formula 1’s first female world champion.

You can read more about the challenges that face any young female driver here. Skill acquisition is certainly part of it. “The idea of identifying talent based on building a whole profile of a driver, physiologically, cognitively, psychologically, that hasn’t really existed to date,” said Fran Longstaff, the Head of Research at More than Equal, at Leaders Meet: the Talent Journey in 2025. That goes for all drivers. “We don’t know what a racing car driver should be doing and look like at 16 versus 18.”

Such profiles – for male and female drivers – would be multidisciplinary in their scope, help make the vague tangible, and enable coaches to design training scenarios more representative of a racing environment.

More than Equal also commissioned two PhDs; one to research the impact of hormones on performance, particularly cognitive function; another to build “physiological, psychological, cognitive training and anthropometric profiles from drivers all the way from karting to F1.”

More than Equal, as Longstaff explained, is “building the road as we walk”. As more and more useful datapoints emerge, those different threads will have to be woven together to help paint pictures of progress (or stagnation) for each athlete.

England Rugby: how progress is tracked from talent pathways to the senior team

England Rugby’s coaches and performance personnel can call upon a range of objective and subjective datapoints. It is partially the role of individuals such as Kate Burke, the Lead Player Development Scientist, to draw them all together in a meaningful way.

“Everyone has a different role to play, from our coaches and medics to strength & conditioning and the psychologist. Having those people in the room to talk around everyone’s IDP is key,” Burke told the Leaders Performance Institute.

Rugby is a world where the outliers – those destined for great things and those who aren’t perhaps good enough – stick out.

Burke was particularly keen to help those who occupied the middle ground; neither outstanding nor struggling. “Typically, pathway staff have tended to spend time talking about the players that are doing well or the players who are not doing as well. How do we ensure that we are talking about the players who are just staying constant? What do they need for their development?” she continued.

“We’ve got a lot of data in this space, but the pathway especially is hugely context-driven around where the player is in a lot of areas – technically, tactically, psychologically and physically.”

Again, it’s a multidisciplinary concern; and if Burke and her colleagues can find the metrics that matter, there will be implications for training design.

“We also need to look at where they are, where they’re playing, what their playing programme looks like in order to monitor and plan for the player effectively.”

Leinster Rugby and the Northern Mystics: self-reflection for athletes and coaches alike

Longstaff, a chartered psychologist, and Burke, a sports scientist, illustrate the importance of the athlete experience in skill acquisition, but it is not always something that coaches clock.

Too often with coaches, as Simon Broughton explained, “everything’s been delivered, the meeting’s happened and then we’re straight outside.”

The Academy Manager at Leinster Rugby was speaking at Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching at Millfield School in 2024. “We don’t actually give the players the space to reflect.”

The implications for skill development can be significant. “Reflective practice helps with recall and then planning for what they want to get better at next.”

Reflective practice is vital for skill development; and it’s not just critical for athletes either.

Helene Wilson, during her time as Head Coach of the Northern Mystics netball team in New Zealand between 2017 and 2022, organised reflective sessions with her players and staff that enabled the group to reach a consensus (known as ‘wānanga’ in Māori).

“My orientation as head coach was always what do others know first rather than bringing my expertise to the table. I needed to be the last one talking in the room,” she told the audience at Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance in 2023.

“It could look similar to a team meeting but it can take many forms and wānanga happens in many ways,” she continued. “I put a concept on the table, a picture of performance that I may see as a head coach, or someone else may put it there depending on who’s taking a lead that day, and the wānanga takes the form of questions, from multiple perspectives, and we keep going until we get some sense of alignment. It doesn’t come with any level of expertise or experience, it comes with everybody’s level and everybody contributes.”

Wilson had cultivated an environment where neither she nor anyone else in the Mystics setup felt threatened. They would also go on to win the ANZ premiership in 2021.

“My learning was to sit at the back and know that my knowledge was not sufficient; that the knowledge was in the room and I was there to sense the problem and the wānanga would sort out what that problem was.”

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‘Ultimately, Skill Is Technique Performed Under Pressure’

By John Portch

Performance gains, as Dr Damian Farrow explained, tend to be rooted in movement, coordination and skill refinement.

“In general, the most positive experiences I’m sure anyone on the call has had are where a group of people come together and they just keep chipping away and asking questions,” said the AFL’s Football Innovation Manager, while co-hosting a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable, the first of two to explore the theme of skill acquisition.

Farrow, also a renowned Emeritus Professor of Skill Acquisition at Victoria University, enjoys such conversations with coaches, who bring their own set of experiences to the conversation.

“The magic happens when you’re leaning on both sides of that equation,” he added.

The ‘magic’, as Farrow put it, was nicely captured by his co-host Dr Lyndell Bruce, the Director of Sport at Deakin University, who spoke of the sense of pride she feels when a training tweak pays off.

She said: “Whether the athletes pick things up quicker or that they just all of a sudden get it or we change something slightly and it just clicks, whether it’s for the individual or the group, we can then see the impact in what we’re all striving to do with our athlete cohorts.”

However, despite the centrality of skill acquisition to performance, it is often hampered by a range of systemic issues.

“It takes considerable time to improve skill,” said Farrow. “I think sometimes we just keep going around in this cycle going ‘oh, did that really work? I don’t know.’ But we probably, a lot of the time, didn’t give it sufficient time; we didn’t periodise it like we might do a strength training programme.”

Over the course of this first session, Farrow and Bruce led a cohort of Leaders Performance Institute members in a discussion about the challenges, tensions and opportunities in skill acquisition.

Beyond the time it takes to acquire a skill, the table noted several other challenges and tensions:

• Skill acquisition is multidisciplinary in nature. As Farrow said, skill acquisition’s “multidisciplinary nature is a weakness in terms of where it sits and where it resonates.” This can confuse decision-making rights and responsibilities.
• It is less visible and tangible. “I think one of the challenges for skill acquisition is it’s harder for coaches and athletes to see exactly what we do,” said Bruce. “If you go to a physiologist, they’ll tell you they could do their VO₂-max test. You go into a biomechanics space, you see the Vicon systems; they’ve got very tangible things that a coach and athletes can see.”
• Training can be unrepresentative of competition. Training too often fails to capture competition demands. “I had a student that looked at the representativeness of a particular aspect of Australian football and measured it two different ways,” said Bruce. “So we looked at the total frequency of counts and how often they were occurring in a specific training drill, which was designed to improve this aspect of performance versus looking at it as a proportion of outcome; so different technical and tactical measures. If you looked at frequency, it told one story, but if you looked at it from a proportional perspective, it told a different story.”
• Coaches can feel threatened. “There’s always been that issue and perception where coaches feel threatened sometimes by skill acquisition specialists; that we’re trying to take over,” said Bruce. One attendee, another skill acquisition specialist, added that their discipline “aligns really closely with some of the core roles of what coaches do in terms of session design, instruction and feedback – and that sometimes creates a perceived threat.”

Some opportunities sit at training session level:

• Ask athletes for their feedback. “Coaches may think a particular drill is challenging, but what are the athletes seeing?” said Bruce. “We’ve started to take in the player’s voice a little bit more. We’re looking at how challenging players perceive training to be.”
• Coach-centred reflective practice. “How do we embed some of these ideas better in coach development?” asked one attendee. In response, Farrow shared an idea. “We’ve adopted the term ‘game slicing’ to really talk about representativeness,” he said. “Take a slice of a game and then get the coaches to reflect on how they represent that within a training exercise, and look at the disparity between the two. It’s a really great exercise to do and it goes in all sorts of directions.”

Other opportunities sit at a system level:

• Earlier education for coaches. “We’re not meeting the coaches at the right point in their development to open them up to some of these ideas,” one attendee commented. “We need to expose people to these ideas earlier in their coaching careers.” They recalled a recent conversation with a coach on the topic of skill acquisition. “I remember asking this coach, he said, ‘in fairness, I probably wouldn’t have been open to it before now; the conditions weren’t right for it’. I said, ‘when would you have liked to have had the chance to explore this area?’ And the response was ‘20 years ago’.”
• Amplify success stories. “There are some practitioners that have had some great wins with coaches and do some great work, and it’s really trying to find a way to amplify those stories,” said Bruce. “Make sure they’re authentic, delivered by the people who are affected or impacted in a positive way by them.”

What to read next

‘Ultimately, Skill Is Technique Performed Under Pressure’