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By Joe Lemire

After Madan Rajagopal moved from his native India to the Netherlands, his first course of action was to find a local cricket club and register as a player. The club didn’t have a permanent year-round coach for its senior members but, rather, seasonal instructors from the Southern Hemisphere — Australia, New Zealand and South Africa — and inevitably each had a different opinion about how Rajagopal should alter his swing.

“I lost all my fundamental flow and feel for the bat,” Rajagopal recalls. He adds, “Coming from India, cricket is kind of in our blood, in my blood, and I could live without anything but not without cricket. But in 2018, there was a point where I literally thought about stopping cricket because I wasn’t enjoying the game anymore. I wasn’t scoring. I wasn’t playing well. My performance was very bad.”

Around the same time, Rajagopal was helping coach the club’s junior players and was surprised not to find any apps to help track their progress. In his professional life, he is a data scientist and AI engineer, so he set out to build his own solution.

That product is now Ludimos, a smartphone-based cricket tracking and training app that has been used by more than 19,000 players across 15 countries. Among the team clients are nine national cricket associations, including those in Scotland and the Netherlands, as well as Royal Challengers Bangalore of the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Ludimos can analyze video from multiple viewpoints and provide tracking data on ball and bat. An assessment of player biomechanics is in development. And the platform is also a communication tool that enables coaches to assign drills, evaluate them upon completion and return annotated videos with tips.

Ludimos can analyze video from multiple viewpoints, provide tracking data on ball and bat and act as a communication tool where coaches can assign and evaluate drills. (Courtesy of Ludimos)

“Our current core value prop is the ball tracking,” Rajagopal says. “So our ball tracking technology is good enough that it is already adding value to both batters and ballers, and in our roadmap, the next thing we have is to unlock the bat tracking and then the biomechanics. Then at that point, then we can merge everything together and have contextual analysis of the player in full.”

RCB, in fact, revealed this week that one of their newest additions — bowler Avinash Singh — was the direct result of its Hinterland Scouting program, a data-driven talent identification tool powered by Ludimos. Singh has never played professionally and mostly played tennis ball cricket until less than a year ago, yet now he is the first of more than 10,000 registrations to make the RCB roster through this program and has bowled 145 kilometers per hour (90 mph), an elite pace.

In a video interview, RCB head of scouting Malolan Rangarajan described Hinterland Scouting as a “very, very objective way of identifying talent where we don’t use human eyes” while likening the bowling action of Singh to Umran Malik, the IPL’s fastest bowler.

As part of an innovation contest in 2021, Ludimos earned second place in the competition hosted by Cricket Australia and HCL, with distinction for its player development tools. Ludimos is also a graduate of the Stadia Ventures accelerator program and is now raising a €1.5 million seed round, of which €300,000 was slated to come from a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs. (By mid-January, Ludimos had exceeded that goal and raised €314,511.)

The Ludimos homepage interface includes access to video analysis, drills and more. (Courtesy of Ludimos)

While other sports — most notably baseball — have seen great advances in the understanding of the sport via publicly accessible databases and research, cricket’s advanced data has been more closely held.

“We don’t have any open data set about what’s been collected and how it’s been used, which means that there are only a handful of companies in the world that actually do this,” Rajagopal says. “And we are the only one of them, which does all three, which is bat tracking, ball tracking and biomechanics.”

Video review helped remedy Rajagopal’s own swing woes. He asked friends on the team to record him for three weeks straight and reviewed the clips with a coach.

“Even though the exact same sentence was said to me by several coaches — ‘that your head is moving away, that your weight is actually falling off and not coming towards the ball’ — I could never visualize what that actually meant, how that would look like, until I saw him pointing on the screen where he said, ‘Your head should be here, but it’s few pixels to the right or to the left,’” he says, describing the experience as empowering.

With small changes, Rajagopal dramatically improved his batting results, regaining his confidence and triggering his pursuit of Ludimos to create similar opportunities — with greater tech-driven features — to everyone. (Ludimos is an amalgamation of Latin words that try to capture the process of improvement: self-reflection, practice, habit formation.)

Rajagopal says Ludimos was designed for all age groups of cricket, recognizing that most club coaches might work with 11 year olds on up to 40-somethings. The older bracket will seek more detailed analysis; youth players will seek a different experience. “For 11- to 15-year-olds, it’s more about having fun and feeling for the game,” he says. “It’s more about gamification, so we turn our data and AI into a way that they can use as challenges and leaderboards.”

Ben Ferbrache, the cricket development manager for Guernsey, manages and coaches the junior programs for the small island state situated in the English Channel.

“It’s a really good way of tracking a player’s progress, especially with a lot of our guys that are going from one age group to the next,” he says. Ferbrache notes the ease of use, both for the players and for the coaches to record and assign their own practice drills. “What we find is kids love technology,” he adds. “Everything is on a phone or an iPad these days. So that’s where we were like, ‘Why don’t we just embrace the technology, and the kids will actually start using it?’”

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.

Speakers:

Andrea Furst, Sport Psychologist, England Rugby and Surrey County Cricket Club

Helen Richardson-Walsh, Performance & Culture Coach, Tottenham Hotspur FC

At the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium, we had a peer-to-peer interview between Andrea Furst and Helen Richardson-Walsh, who worked together as psychologist and athlete to win Rio 2016 Olympic Hockey Gold for Great Britain. The pair talked us through how they were able to create a winning team environment and the importance of the role psychology can play in performance.

• Fostering trust between the psychologist and athlete is key. The athlete trusting that they are having a confidential conversation has such a positive impact.
• Allowing the players to sit down and set the culture helped to get player buy-in straight away, and it was credit to the head coach to allow that to be the starting point.
• When your vision is ‘winning’ it can leave you with a very empty feeling or feel very disappointed even if you’re on the podium. There is something more than just winning.
• The biggest thing a head coach can do with regards to culture work is give it time. To have the whole staff and players group involved and integrate it into every day behaviours.
• ‘How do you want to be remembered?’ It is about what can you do on the hockey pitch, but also who can you be off it. To be role models for women in sport, to stand up for what you believe and use your voice for good.

GB Women’s Hockey Vision:

• Be the Difference; Create History; Inspire the Future.
• The vision, values and behaviours make you accountable. The language was everything everyone had bought into and would use regularly. You knew what was expected of yourself and of one another.

Individual mindset: Knowing your ‘A Game’

• It is so important for every individual to understand their performance mindset before they go out to play and take responsibility for this.
• Knowing this allows you to understand how to be consistent.
• This is a skill and it can be learned.
• You then share your A game with the rest of the team, and the team understand you better plus they know how they can help you to stay on your A game. It is for a team work on; and it normalises it.
• If it matters to the head coach, it matters to the athletes. The head coach sets the tone, if they disregard psychology or integrate it, it filters through to the players and makes a huge difference.

By Sarah Evans

We were delighted to be back at Twickenham Stadium for our Sport Performance Summit for two days of insights, learning and connecting. Day one saw us hear from Britain’s fastest woman, Dina Asher-Smith, Head Coach at Collingwood FC, Craig McRae, and the Director of Football at the Premier League, Neil Saunders, to name just a few.

Session 1: The Lessons I Learned: Rebuilding After Setbacks, brought to you by our Main Partners Keiser  

Speaker: Dina Asher-Smith, Team GB Olympian

Moderator: Jeanette Kwakye

To kick off the two days of insights, we had the incredible Dina Asher-Smith talking us through her journey as an athlete and how she overcame some of the setbacks she faced along the way.

• “When you run really fast, it’s then expected you can do that all the time” – Dina had to find a way to run fast that was sustainable, and not having to then take time off after each really fast time.
• Her biggest challenge was getting a support team in place, and how efficiently that team worked. Especially managing this team as a young athlete, and how to effectively communicate with them and get the best out of everyone in the team was a huge challenge. People management is becoming a key skill for the modern athlete.
• Coming back from the disappointment of the Tokyo Olympics, Dina explained she only felt like herself after the 200m at the 2022 World Championships in Oregon. “I didn’t feel in touch with my normal aggressive self until almost a year after the Olympics.”
• Covid postponing the Olympics actually helped Dina. She explained she was able to optimise and make things better with the year delay. Having the time to rest, reset and build again was needed.
• Her Olympic semi-final post-race interview was very emotional. Dina highlighted that she had an injury going into the games and nearly pulled out. She was even in a wheelchair only four weeks before the games started. She had only been in spikes for seven days pre-Olympics and still nearly made an Olympic final.
• Dina explained that, “Tokyo shaped me so much”. She has been a big supporter of sports psychology. “I think at the elite level it is 80% mental. It comes down to mental resilience, mental toughness in that moment and who wants it more.”
• “The Oregon World Championships 2022 is my proudest achievement in terms of hard work. Psychologically I had never had to overcome so much to just be myself on that start line. Getting over the disappointment of Tokyo, plus enduring such a traumatic time as a family with my grandma being so ill, I had a disconnect between being physically fit and your emotional state. I’m an emotional runner and it takes a lot out of you. I was scared that if I ultimately let go of all my emotions, I would cry and I didn’t want to do that again. But actually, unless I broke down the emotions, understand them and go into my feelings, I would have broken down and not been successful.”
• You have to use these experiences to make you stronger, to grow and move on. “I have a new appreciation for the psychological power of sprinting.”
• Visibility is important for female sportswomen. It is important to be seen in certain spaces to help drive change.
• “I don’t think about legacy. I just think about ‘without limits’ on track and off track. I remember hearing ‘can’t’ all the time, but I think ‘why not?’ I see myself as someone who can open door for other people. I need to make sure I am not the last sports women to walk into certain rooms.”

Session 2: Accelerating Excellence: Elite Performance in the World of Trading

Speakers:

James King, Author of Accelerating Excellence: The Principles that Drive Elite Performance

Greg Newman, Chief Executive, ONYX Capital Group

For the second session of the day we heard from James King about his lessons from the world of trading and how they apply to high performance.

Ambition, talent and effort dictate success in every field. Performance is never a coincidence, and it always aligns with a specific set of principles.

There are four mechanisms, each of which contain principles to help our rate of progress. No one can predict success, but if you align yourself with more of these principles you stack the odds in your favour.

1. Perform from your sweet spot. To excel you need to pursue goals that align with your strengths, interests and values.

Three questions you have to ask yourself:

1. What are your strengths?
2. What are your interests?
3. What are your values?

We need move away from ‘you can be anything you want to be’, towards, ‘you can be more of who you really are’.

2. Acquiring Skill. Instead of the time spent training, it’s the time spent training under specific conditions:

1. Focus on the foundations
2. Learning by doing
3. It’s on you
4. You need challenge to change
5. Training must be specific
6. Create uncertainty
7. Variability

3. Emotional Control. To perform when it counts is the measure of elite performance. Luckily this is a skill, and like any skill with the right training you can optimise it.

4. Innovate to stay ahead of the rest. Danger is becoming a one-hit-wonder, how do you keep improving?

James then welcomed Greg Newman on stage to discuss how he was able to utilise these principles in practice.

• Negative feedback is crucial, and you have to be told when you need to do something better.
• This culture is described as Radical Transparency. Within this, accountability is huge. Everything is being said to make you and therefore the team better.
• It’s not ego, you have to have belief. It takes the ego to believe, but it takes deep humility to understand that everything is about learning.
• We have a formulaic approach to goal-setting, being objective about the obstacles you are going to face and how you are going to overcome them.
• North Star approach – you have to set a North Star and have it seemingly unachievable. Every time someone has a break through, it shifts the expectations of everyone else. The perception of potential then shifts.

Session 3: Coaching Conversation: Coaching Mastery & Creating Environments for Talent to Flourish

Speaker: Craig McRae, Senior Coach, Collingwood FC

Moderator: Roger Kneebone, Director of Surgical Education, Imperial College London

The third session saw Roger pick Craig’s brain around his approach to coaching, how he works with his athletes, and the importance of coach wellbeing.

• Sport is often about survival, and you move from survival mode to living mode, then back to survival mode towards the end of your career.
• We often learn winning behaviours through losing. There is a formula to losing just as there is a formula to winning.
• When you experience something, you then build a level of comfort. So the more you can experience an environment the more you are comfortable in the pressure. Life is about experiences and putting yourself in positions to learn and grow.
• “I don’t actually like the term ‘mastery’ as it alludes to being full and I feel far from full. I’m always learning and wanting to grow,” explained McRae. “I never want to put a ceiling onto what I want to achieve, I learn things from different opportunities, and life takes you in different directions.”
• Craig explained the importance of planting seeds for future careers whilst he was still competing. When it came time to retire, it was then obvious where his passions lay and because of this preparation, it was obvious to him that it was in coaching.
• How do you go from being a master in playing to transitioning to being more of a novice in coaching?

“Having a mentor is key. I would video every session, so I could watch it back and reflect, and constantly look to get better. As coaches we review the game a lot but we very rarely review ourselves and the processes behind the programme.”

• Handling pressure is about the ability to be just present and be at ease with the moment. The inexperienced vs the experienced player is all about managing the moment. Execute and repeat the behaviour so that when you are under pressure, you don’t actually have to think about it, muscle memory takes over and you are able to execute.
• Our ability to stay in the moment and execute the next moment is critical. It’s like a windscreen wiper, you will make mistakes in games and then you have to be present to execute the next moment, wash away the mistakes and fix it for the next one.
• “We have a winners’ mentality – on a Monday morning you won’t know whether we have won or lost, we repeat the same processes over and over and stick to these, not changing things because we have won or lost. If you repeat those behaviours long enough they will be there when you need them.”
• “I don’t like players lying down at the end of the game, you have to do the same processes and go again. We lost but we’re not losers, we get up shake their hands, and get ready for the next game.”
• There are two kinds of pressure to consider: the impact of a mistake, and the impact that the mistake can have on you.
• You can be a winner even if you lose. You can learn from the experience and improve. It is perilously easy to lose that sense of who you are, and having a mentor and the support you need is crucially important.
• McRae highlighted that it’s so important to play in a grateful state. It’s so important to keep that fun element of play and gratitude towards performing.

Session 4: Case Study: The Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan brought to you by VEO

Speaker: Neil Saunders, Director of Football, Premier League

After the lunch break, Neil Saunders took us through the Premier League’s Elite Performance Plan, it’s successes and how the Premier League will carry this into the plan’s second reiteration to further develop the pipeline of talented players in English football.

10 years of the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP):

• The Best Football – How the Premier League drives success. Our virtuous circle:

• The Best Football
• Drives interest
• Generates value
• Revenue distributed responsibly

• The best football needs the best players, coaches and match officials.

• EPPP Elite Player Performance Plan
• ECP Elite Coaching Plan
• ERDP Elite Refereeing Development Plan

• Different managers bring about cognitive diversity within the Premier League and helping to drive the game forwards. What makes our league so successful is it’s diversity. We want to attract managers and players from across the world but also focus on our home grown talent.
• The EPPP was launched with the aim to develop more and better home grown players. Increasing the quality, improving the pathway and changing the narrative.

Elite Player Performance Plan:

Vision: To produce more and better home grown players

Mission: The development of a world-leading academy system

Focus areas:

• Players
• Staff
• Environment

Critical Success Factors (Goals)

• Increase number and quality of home grown players.
• Implement a system of effective measurement and quality assurance.
• Create more time for players to play and be coached.
• Positively influence strategic investment into the Academy System.
• Improve coaching provision.
• Seek to implement significant gains in every aspect of player development.

The perception before the EPPP was that we didn’t have any high quality youth players. There was a milestone moment of age group teams winning major competitions, and at these three tournaments our players won player of the tournament across the board. The narrative had shifted from we are lacking talent, to we have some of the best talent in the world. These players are now playing en mass in the Premier League and thriving in that environment.

What has the EPPP achieved?

• Number & quality of players – young English players ranked first in market value, number of minutes in UEFA competitions, and independent assessments of player quality.
• More time to play and be coached – a 52% increase in the number of coaching hours.
• Coaching provision – 3x increase in the number of full-time coaches.
• Gains in all aspect of development – 55k fitness tests delivered over the PL and Category 1 clubs.
• Strategic investment – 1.94bn of central and club investment into the academy system across the pyramid.
• Measurement and quality assurance – a new professional game-owned audit and assessment established.
• Acknowledging that what the world looked like 10 years ago is very different to today, so we are always looking to develop our plan.

The Strategy for the Academy System:

• Creating an unrivalled development environment.
• Supporting young people who are aspiring footballers to maximise their potential on and off the pitch.
• Developing this through elite player development and personal growth.

We care most about:

• More and better players
• A life-enriching experience
• The health of our game

Our building blocks:

• Talent ID
• Player Pathway
• Duty of Care
• Workforce Development
• Government & Quality Assurance
• Innovation & Insights

Reflections:

• It takes years to become an overnight success.
• Celebrate achievements to demonstrate progress.
• People Development – the ripple effect.
• Diversity & Inclusion as a competitive advantage.
• Beat the Sigmoid Curve – how do you go again?
• Stay resilient and focus on the end goal.

Session 5: Athlete Meets Actor: Practice, Performance & Cross Industry Learnings

Speakers:

Montell Douglas, Athlete, Team GB

Dom Simpson, Actor, The Book of Mormon

Moderator: Jeanette Kwakye

To round the day off, we had a fascinating discussion between Montell and Dom where they delved into the challenges of having to adapt to ever changing environments, consistency within high performance and over coming setbacks.

• Dom explained that “Yes, you are an actor, but your job is an auditioner, you are always looking for the next job”. At times it can feel like knock back after knock back. You have to have self-belief and self-determination and also a love for it.
• You have to learn from your setbacks. No matter how much you prepare, sometimes there are the uncontrollable factors. You are not defined for that one performance. You can always learn, set new goals and go again, whatever that now looks like.
• Determination and desire to always do my best and give my all put me in good stead for what was to come. Be the best you can be, don’t settle for mediocracy. All you can do is focus on you, explained Dom.
• Because of the strain of performing eight shows in six days, there is a high physical strain (1300 calories burnt per show) you have to take ownership of your prep/recovery otherwise you wouldn’t be able to sustain it. Self-awareness of what your body/mind needs is therefore crucial.
• Montell – a history-maker going from Summer to Winter Olympics. There is transferability of skills from athletics to bobsleigh, yes, but there are also so many huge differences. Going from an individual sport where you are completely in control of your performance to a team sport, where you are depending on one another. There are completely different physical demands from the different sports, mentally being on tour for five or six months of the year in freezing conditions, contrasting from the heat of the Beijing Olympics, and to be able to perform in those differing environments is a big challenge.
• Another huge challenge with bobsleigh was balancing having to have a job whilst competing to help fund yourself and still to perform at the highest level. Understanding how to best prepare yourself, for Montell this meant reducing the volume but keeping it at the highest quality.
• Adaptability is key. It is a daily challenge. Dom explained how as an understudy it was difficult to balance how to stay in physical shape whilst not needed for the show vs getting called up mid-show and being prepared to go in that moment, physically and mentally. This was a huge learning curve.
• It is about consistency. What’s important now? Montell explained her acronym, W.I.N – this is all I can do today – this is still going to have an impact to my performance, if that’s only 40% of your best available today then that is the best you can do today so that can still be banked. That 40% is your 100% that day. Managing your own expectations around your training and performance and what is best for you in the long run.
• Breaking it down to manageable chunks, the song, the scene, the act, the show, the week etc, and not focusing on the end goal is critical for this consistency, Dom highlighted. We are doing the right thing if we’re looking at the processes, and breaking them down.
• Having mental resilience around setbacks is key. Yes at the time it feels like the biggest thing in the world, but you have to step back, say we can’t change it, so how can we learn from that? How can I better myself next time, in the knowledge I have done everything I can to get the best out of that situation?

As the sun sets on our return to in-person events after a two year hiatus, for all of us at the Leaders Performance Institute, it’s fair to say that we’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing so many familiar faces, and meeting some new ones too. With the knowledge shared, the new connections made, the conversations witnessed and the fun and drinks along the way, we’re already looking forward to our first event of 2022. We hope you are too!

Day one set the bar high and we looked to carry that energy and momentum into day two. We began with a deep dive into the performing arts, looking at talent development at the Royal Ballet School and Royal College of Music before exploring the theme of diversity, equality and inclusion with Brentford FC and British department store Selfridges. We then checked in with performance coach Owen Eastwood before turning our attention to extreme adventurer Adrian Hayes in the afternoon. Aspetar then had the honour of bringing down the curtain with a fascinating look at rehabilitation and recovery.

A big thank you from the Leaders Performance Institute team and our main partners Keiser, Abu Dhabi Sports Council and Aspetar, for joining us for two days of total high performance.

For those of you who couldn’t make it – or those wishing you refresh your memories – here are the key takeaways from day two.

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Full Day 2 programme:

Talent Factories: How the Performing Arts Develops & Nurtures World Class Talent

• Christopher Powney, Artistic Director, The Royal Ballet School
• Dr Terry Clark, Research Fellow for Performance Science, The Royal College of Music

Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness

• Owen Eastwood, Performance Coach and author of Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness

Diverse & Inclusive Leadership: Exploring How Diverse Workplaces Positively Influence Organisational Performance

• Melisa Clottey, Chair of Diversity Board, Selfridges
• Shona Crooks, Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Management Futures
• Kevin Yusuf, Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Brentford FC

Lessons from Extreme Adventuring: Adaptability & Resilience in Adversity

• Adrian Hayes, adventurer, polar explorer and author

Rehabilitation & Recovery: The Latest Thinking to Support your Performance Strategy

• Jamal Al-Khanji, Chief Patent Experience Officer, Aspetar
• Khalid Al-Khelaifi, Orthopaedic Surgeon, Aspetar

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What is the best way to approach problem-solving in a team context heading into 2022?

By John Portch

Coaches and practitioners will have their own thoughts on the matter but an increasing number of teams are following the practices of the business world in empowering their athletes – their people – to find their own solutions.

With more people engaged in their own problem-solving, more options and, therefore, more creative solutions, are likely to emerge across a team.

In October, the Leaders Performance Institute hosted a Virtual Roundtable for members titled ‘Approaching Complex Problem-Solving’, which underlined the trend for allowing practitioners to develop as individuals by affording them the opportunity to problem-solve, reflect and refine their practice.

At one point, a participant highlighted their use of David J Snowden’s Cynefin Framework. The framework, which is based on concepts of knowledge management and organisational strategy, enables people to place situations into one of five domains: ‘complex’, ‘complicated’, ‘chaotic’, ‘obvious’ and ‘disorder’. Where your problem fits depends on assessing its cause-and-effect relationships.

Perhaps the most common situation in both the business world and sport is ‘complicated’, where a problem may have several suitable solutions, though the relationship between cause and effect is evident only to a limited number of individuals.

The Cynefin Framework recommends that complicated situations be assessed, then analysed with the help of experts before deciding on the best response using good practice. One caveat is that leaders can be over-reliant on experts in complicated situations when others may be able to provide creative solutions. This thinking is also central to beliefs in the value of cognitive diversity.

Moreover, people like to solve their own problems, as Kim Wylie, the Global Director of People Development at the online luxury fashion platform Farfetch, told an audience at Leaders Meet: Total High Performance in 2020.

“When people solve problems themselves, they get this nice little bump of dopamine, which is a positive legal high and people feel really good about themselves and it brings really positive energy to the group and to the individual,” she says. “The point here that’s really useful to make is that by solving other people’s problems for them, we’re robbing them of this opportunity to feel good.

“Even if, as a leader, you do know the answers to things as a manager or a coach, getting people to solve their own problems is a really good thing to do. Obviously not all of the time, you need to work out the right situation, but not being the problem-solver for everything; get people to solve their own problems – it will do them the world of good and bring some positive experience to what’s going on.”

This approach to problem-solving underpinned Jayne Ludlow’s work with the Wales women’s national team, whom she coached between 2014 and 2021. Both staff and players, she believes, have the capacity to find their own solutions.

“There’s lots of collaboration between staff and players or between the players themselves,” she told the Leaders Performance Institute in April. “There was a focus within our national team camps to make sure the players could check their understanding with each other and our thought processes.”

Often, this was easier for the younger players coming into the national setup. “I’m not sure if this is because we were working with them as youngsters and we had a specific style and way of working,” said Ludlow, who also served as Wales’ under-17s and under-19s Manager. “If I think about the group of 17, 18 year olds I had with the seniors, in the last few camps, they’re growth mindset players. They want to step on the pitch and learn. It is OK if they make a mistake, they’ll adapt and they’ll learn from it.”

Why was it different for some of the older players? “That’s to do with the environments they’ve been in. How over many years and generations we weren’t coached that way. I hardly had any feedback and they were similar, whether they were in pro or semi-pro clubs. Then suddenly you were bringing them into our environment and every day they’d have a development area.

“You’d notice in presentations. The majority of our younger ones are very different in their approach. They look at training and games as a learning opportunity, whereas the older ones were still defensive in learning moments.”

How can you lower those defences? “My general approach to feedback is: goal, then highlight what you’ve done well, then highlight what the next step is to develop it. There’s the positive aspect but then there’s a development moment. With some players, I’d take a slightly different approach. It’s a bit of sandwich approach at times so there’s more positives than development; but then you’ve always got to be careful, do they actually take the development information from you?”

Ludlow observed that older players needed more support in her social constructivist approach to problem-solving. Often, it is a question of providing the right environment for athletes to feel safe to explore a problem in a safe environment with the attendant opportunities for collaboration and developing a shared language.

Matthew Mott, the Head Coach of the Australia women’s national cricket team came to a similar realisation after taking control in 2017, particularly during the post-match debriefs.

“I do think that’s probably the thing I’ve learnt the most with this team,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in January. He found an environment that diverged in significant ways from those found at the male teams where he had previously played and coached.

“I’ve come from a male environment where you tend to be able to just debrief the games straight after. They get quite emotional about the games and call it out for what it was.” He took this approach to the women’s team and, like coaches who work with both female and male teams, realised things needed to change. “Certainly, throughout our journey, we went into team meetings where it was basically only the coaching staff talking and I quickly realise that it wasn’t a safe space and players needed smaller groups.

“So we got into smaller groups and we gave them tasks to feed back into the main group to create that safe space. But it’s interesting that we’ve gone through that and we have that complete trust in each other that you can now say things without fear of upsetting people and looking at it objectively and dissecting the game for its good parts and the areas to improve.”

He admitted that it is still a work in progress but the difference these days is profound. “Now that we’re actually in our full group meetings, the players are the ones talking all the time now and coaches are directing and starting and facilitating but, essentially, the players are the ones talking about the game and I think that’s a great space.”

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition

Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.

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