By John Portch

On Sunday the Northern Superchargers Women lifted their first Hundred title following a match-winning performance from a player who had been in England for just two weeks.

All-rounder Nicola Carey hit an unbeaten 35 runs at Lord’s to help the Superchargers chase down the Southern Brave’s first innings total of 115 for six.

“The whole group is amazing, so it was so easy to come in the middle of the tournament,” said Carey on the field at Lord’s in the aftermath.

“A couple of weeks ago I was back home in Tasmania, doing a cold pre-season,” she added, “so to get the call-up first of all was pretty surprising and to finish the couple of weeks with a win, it couldn’t have gone better.”

Head Coach Lisa Keightley and captain Kate Cross have pulled out all the stops to foster an inclusive environment, to which Carey’s compatriot, Phoebe Litchfield, alluded.

“The Northern Superchargers are my favourite team to play for,” she said, “and it’s just been a blast.”

Their human touch was in further evidence as the team carried a life size cardboard cutout of their injured and absent teammate, Georgia Wareham, onto the podium, then going as far as to place a medal around the cardboard Wareham’s neck.

Add this all up and the Superchargers’ approach appears to be simple: put your people first and they will deliver upon their talent.

This was a recurring theme across the Leaders Performance Institute in August.

Here is a snapshot of what was said.

Psychological safety… or psychological confidence?

This question was raised in a recent  Leaders Virtual Roundtable that explored the balance between challenge and support for athletes.

Psychological safety has long been a performance buzz term, but a team in motorsport is taking it upon itself to reframe its terminology. Their wellbeing lead told the table: “We’re playing around with the idea of creating psychologically confident people. In meetings, we make sure that we give everybody a chance to speak up… there’s also got to be challenge, to get [people] to that psychologically confident point.”

Words clearly matter, as a performance support coach in British varsity sport pointed out. “The language we use when we’re talking to the athletes, it’s not a ‘challenge’, it’s not an ‘adversity’, it’s ‘exploration’, ‘playing’, ‘responsibility’.”

Try to cut through the noise around the athlete

Athletes increasingly ask for support beyond their sport and performance, which means everyone must be on the same page.

“Do you think the modern athlete has changed or has it always been like this, but as performance staff, have we failed to notice it?” asked Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers at our Sport Performance Summit in Philadelphia.

“We think it is 50:50 as there is no denying that they are more informed because of more information being available,” he adds, “but this does create noise.”

The remedy requires trust as players in the modern era tend to ask for an explanation more often. The Sixers talk to their players and they talk to them early as they seek to understand what’s important to them. “Do not shut things down right away, work with them to find solutions.”

There is, however, a limit. “It is important to have your non-negotiables so they know where the line is too.”

Team planning, individual focus

Patrick Mannix, the Sports Science Senior Manager at US Soccer, set the scene for a roundtable presentation that centred on performance planning in the international game, specifically the development of camp training plans for players who join up from their respective clubs in the US and beyond.

The players as individuals are at the heart of their planning, with sessions devised two weeks out once player arrival times are confirmed.

“We will design things from a team level, but then we also have to look at matters very closely at an individual level when we’re trying to safely integrate players into our national team environments,” said Mannix.

“Most of the time, we are dealing with tapering strategies and figuring out how can we optimize players’ readiness going into competition,” he continued. “So it’s often an exercise in fatigue management when they’re coming into our environment and not necessarily trying to drive fitness adaptations, but, on the flip side, we’re also there to potentially facilitate a lot of those long-term physiological adaptations that are occurring.

Alignment and the ‘multiplier effect’

True alignment delivers a multiplier effect, as John Bull told a roundtable of Leaders Performance Institute members last month.

In an ideal world, each stakeholder’s efforts would multiply the others. “One person’s talent is building on and adding,” says the Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures. “The multiplication becomes exponential.”

If teams are to achieve the multiplier effect, Bull highlighted five critical considerations:

1. Who?

Who are you trying to align and what different talents can you bring to bear on a problem? Be sure to involve all relevant parties, including those who may be excluded for fear that they will be distracted.

2. What are you trying to achieve and by when?

Misalignment often arises not from disagreement on the goal itself, but on the timeline and resources needed to achieve it.

3. Alignment on strategy i.e. the ‘how’

The distinction between strategy (high-level direction) and tactics (specific applications) is not always understood.

4. Ways of working

Alignment is an outcome of agreed processes of communication, collaboration and decision-making.

5. Vertical and horizontal dimensions

While vertical alignment (e.g. between board and coach) attracts a lot of focus,  horizontal alignment between departments or teams underpins a truly joined-up approach.

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By John Portch

More than half of coaches and practitioners feel they could be better at balancing challenge and support for their athletes and other personnel.

That is according to a straw poll of Leaders Performance Institute members conducted at the outset of a virtual roundtable we hosted in late-August.

Some members – 42 per cent – rate themselves at four out of five, but everyone in attendance felt there was room for improvement.

With the scene set, members went on to highlight four factors that underpin a good balance of challenge and support, with reflections on how these look in practice in their environments.

1. Psychological safety… or psychological confidence?

The idea of psychological safety was raised several times. Psychological services are a key offering in the provision of safe spaces. A member who works in a senior health and wellness role in a major US league, spoke of their organisation’s success in providing confidential counselling services that support individuals in their pursuit of performance goals.

Psychological safety has long been a performance buzz term, but a team in motorsport is taking it upon itself to reframe its terminology. Their wellbeing lead told the table: “We’re playing around with the idea of creating psychologically confident people. In meetings, we make sure that we give everybody a chance to speak up… there’s also got to be challenge, to get [people] to that psychologically confident point.”

Words clearly matter, as a performance support coach in British varsity sport pointed out. “The language we use when we’re talking to the athletes, it’s not a ‘challenge’, it’s not an ‘adversity’, it’s ‘exploration’, ‘playing’, ‘responsibility’.”

Another idea proffered is to take steps to reduce the fear of (inevitable) failure by creating a low-support, high-challenge environment. “We’re trying to make our training environments more intimidating and challenging than the game would be, so that’s not only going to make those game environments easier and normalise failure, but it also allows them to fail in front of their peers and get more comfortable in that space,” said a coach from American baseball. “Then what the support side looks like to that is not just coach to player but player-to-player; figuring out those challenging environments and finding different solutions with each other.”

2. Set standards and expectations first

This provides clarity and should remove doubts. “The places that do this really well, without exception, spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a training block or at the beginning of a year discussing what the priorities for that thing are and what the standard is,” said a performance science advisor from the Canadian Olympic system.

With those standards in place you have a framework on which to build trust. “When you get to work with a player that you might not know as well, that’s just going to help you get to the trust piece faster and be able to challenge each other in that way,” the baseball coach added.

“One of the things that I see,” said a performance science advisor based in Canada, “is when it’s not just the coach that’s holding athletes accountable, it’s the athletes holding each other accountable as well. That’s much easier when there’s been some time spent talking about what the expectations for the standard are.”

The idea, as a wellbeing lead in motorsport said, is to create “better challenging conversations because it really is a massive coaching benefit. Just creating that space for challenging conversations, practising it, scripting it, and it becoming a natural part of our every day”.

3. Customised support

An attendee with experience of coaching in English football argued that challenge and support is more about the individual than the environment. They said: “Individuals need different things at different times, so if we understand an individual’s needs, then we, as a group, are best placed to cater to individual needs based on where somebody is.”

This is reflected in the psychological services provided by teams. “We are mainly here to navigate and help them navigate their career progression on an individual level,” said the aforementioned health and wellness lead. These services are increasingly integrated and perceived as a part of a holistic offering. “The fact that we have this space in and of itself is really hitting the nail on the head in terms of how much just caring on an individual level really does impact performance.”

It is also incumbent on coaches and staff to know their athletes. “I was reflecting on an athlete who’s getting three buses in order to just get to training, and is just struggling to feed himself,” said the coach in English football. “Lots of that wouldn’t be known unless we were properly getting to know somebody.”

“It literally is just needs analysis,” a member added. “I think just really understanding the individual, because there’s just so much variety and meeting them where they are in the correct language.”

4. Foster autonomy

This is critical in an era where, as one attendee put it, “we’re observing that student-athletes are almost afraid to try new things.”

“Getting athletes to engage in ‘what does this need to look like in order for us to have success?’ really helps foster autonomy,” said another member whose work brings them into regular contact with younger athletes. “They’re an active part of the process of deciding what’s going to happen next, what went wrong, how do we fix it.”

“Getting them to buy into their own responsibility is critical,” added a race engineer when reflecting on drivers in their motorsport. “They have to be ready to leave here with the ability to be responsible for their own actions.”

Another participant spoke of an idea they had while working in English football: “We put constraints in place that meant that the athlete couldn’t revert to his normal type. He had to go and find a new way to execute the same outcome.”

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By Ethan Joyce

Athlete mental wellness continues to gain traction, both in the guidelines being established by leagues/governing bodies (such as the NFL and NBA efforts at the dawn of the decade) and the companies pitching in to support schools and franchises, as seen with  Peak Ai.

Outside of just being the right thing to do, there’s a straight line from holistic support of athletes and business success. Wellbeing begats better performance, which begats results, greater fan interest and, ultimately, a product fans will pay for.

Last year, the NCAA released the latest version of its mental health best practices, outlining obligations for all member schools (regardless of division) to create a healthy environment for athletes. Components of that plan included support via resources and connections to mental health professionals, as well as a screening tool to monitor athlete wellness.

The NCAA required D-I members to provide this by last August. And this November will be the first deadline for schools to prove they’re doing so. With that mile-marker approaching, The Zone is gearing up to test a new feature in its athlete wellness platform: the Mental Readiness Score. The metric will provide insight into an athlete’s mental state.

Knowing the score

In a walkthrough with SBJ, The Zone CEO and Co-Founder Ivan Tchatchouwo showed a series of check-in questions that help create the score. Prompts focused on physical essentials like hydration and sleep but also considered ratings for categories such as confidence and energy level. The quick series produces a score (scaled from 0-100) that a coach can see for each player, while the individual student view will show tiered descriptors (such as ‘Fully Ready’ or ‘Needs Attention’) to take away the pressure of potentially seeing a poor numerical score.

Tchatchouwo said the feature, which The Zone will pilot with select schools as part of its premium platform offering before a future rollout, came as an idea from numerous conversations on different campuses since the company was founded in 2021.

The Zone has a client base of roughly 200 teams at various levels of the NCAA, offering three tiers of its platform: basic, premium and enterprise.

“The biggest thing, and we’re seeing this in all sets of industries and technology in college sports, is how do you harmonize this data to drive value for the athlete but also to drive value for the administration?” Tchatchouwo said.

Coaches will be able to see Mental Readiness Scores for each athlete and a collective score for a team, allowing for responses at the individual and group levels in their teaching and preparation. The Zone’s athlete experience also offers support via breathing and visualization exercises that cater to the user’s preference.

One of The Zone’s biggest triumphs of 2024 came through validation from its own data and research. Tchatchouwo said that athletes who used The Zone 15 times saw their moods “significantly” improve, and that was especially true for women who used The Zone’s platforms. He also added that client schools see up to 3X more access to their athletes via The Zone platform, meaning an increased understanding in what their athletes are collectively experiencing on the mental side.

“What we’re seeing is the athletes that are stigmatized, that don’t talk about it, are getting help from The Zone,” Tchatchouwo said.

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

Are you a team of experts or an expert team?

As you reflect on your team or department, you may be moved to ask a question of your own: what’s the difference?

According to John Wagle, in a ‘team of experts’, “everyone has their job, they do it well, and the execution of their role doesn’t directly impact another person”. He cited a Formula 1 pit crew as an example.

An ‘expert team’, on the other hand, refers to groups where “the work of an individual may directly impact that of another person”. Wagle’s example was a US Navy SEALs team.

In illustrating this distinction onstage at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, Wagle, the Senior Athletics Director for Sports Performance at the University of Notre Dame, highlighted the distinction between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary.

Wagle was hired by Notre Dame in 2022 to lead an athletic department that was unable to consistently deliver an interdisciplinary approach despite the best intentions of all staff members.

“We needed a catalyst,” he continued. “The challenge as a performance director is to set the stage to solve a problem at scale in your environment.”

‘Constraints push you into new places’

Student-athletes continuously juggle their sport, academic studies and lives on campus – a situation Wagle described as “suboptimal”.

However, as he said, “these operational constraints push us into new places. They push our boundaries of how we can create solutions and I believe the best way to do that is to bring together two largely opposed ideals: knowledge and belief.”

Knowledge v belief

Knowledge, as Wagle explained, stems from a practitioner’s formal training as well as any external and internal research. He said: “the more common terminology for people in this room is evidence-based practice”.

Belief is different. It is an aggregate of a practitioner’s experiences from working in the field, athlete values and preferences, and the matter of risk tolerance and uncertainty management. “There is an element in belief that you’ve got to harness and steer into uncertainty.”

“These don’t need to be opposing viewpoints,” Wagle added, despite admitting that people “gravitate towards their tendency”.

“This is the true power of interdisciplinarity and, if we don’t bring these pieces together, we run the risk of being blind to what a lot of our athletes are experiencing.”

He spoke of the student-athlete being in a “complex adaptive system” where the interaction of different elements leads to either a health or a performance outcome, with the ‘gold standard’ somewhere in the middle.

Sleep = the catalyst

Wagle admitted that Notre Dame’s athletic department oscillated between knowledge and belief despite concerted efforts to bring both together.

“There were members of our team that no matter what the problem was were always on the knowledge side and there were members of our team who were always on the belief side,” he said. “It did not necessarily manifest in conflict – it manifested in avoidance – because I think every problem we tried to solve was inherently biased towards a discipline and it was easier to run away from that problem.”

They needed a catalyst to underline the power of interdisciplinary work and alighted upon sleep.

“We chose sleep because it is inherently lacking a discipline,” Wagle continued. “It can be owned by psychology, by nutrition, by strength & conditioning, by medical. There’s no obvious lead person in that.”

Everyone was able to meet the challenge that Wagle set: to be the best sleep support ecosystem in the whole of college sports. The knowledge people combined their data-driven approaches and devised a sleep screening tool. “We were able to get more granularity on our sleep habits and behaviours.” The belief people “brought to the table the ebbs and flows of the academic year.”

Remember: you could be part of the problem

Notre Dame’s approach to sleep has proven a game-changer in their approach to interdisciplinary work. Staff members recognised their biases, let go when necessary, and committed to collaboration.

Wagle said: “If we don’t acknowledge that ‘we could be part of the problem’, that’s where culture and alignment suffer; and resources fail to be allocated properly.”

Not a member and want more content like this? Speak to our team.

A Gambling Harm Prevention Podcast brought to you by our Partners

“You can watch the room change from that lived experience approach,” says Marc Williams, a programme facilitator at gambling harm minimization consultancy EPIC Risk Management.

Marc, a former professional footballer who suffered the consequences of gambling harm, will speak to athletes and teams with a view to educating and informing them about the pitfalls and trigger associated with gambling harm.

“They can see what we’ve been through, where gambling took us, and from that they can really relate to it themselves and think ‘wow, this could be me’,” he tells John Portch on the Leaders Performance Podcast.

Marc is joined by Rachael Jankowsky, the Head of Player Care & Well-Being at Major League Soccer’s Chicago Fire, to discuss EPIC’s work with the club, which included Marc presenting in front of young players.

On today’s special episode, we discuss topics including:

• The beginnings of the Fire and EPIC’s collaboration [6:30];
• The difference between ‘textbook’ education and an in-person presentation [10:00];
• Marc and EPIC’s post-session support services [15:30];
• Overcoming the challenges of low base knowledge and the language barrier [18:30].

For those seeking more information on gambling harm prevention, check out EPIC Risk Management’s white paper review from February 2023.

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

Main Image: Samford

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Ethan Joyce