By Jamie Taylor

Most people in sports coaching have little interest in research.

Additionally, one of the key challenges in coaching is that there is a world of evidence that can help practice, but most do not know about it.

At Dublin City University we are trying to subvert that attitude through our online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.

We have a community of around 100 coaches and practitioners who appreciate the capacity for research to enhance both theirs and their organisation’s practice in ways that have long been transformational in, say, S&C or medical.

In many respects, coaching is a discipline apart, yet sports performance has long-been reliant on other domains to pick up and apply research. More research can and should be done.

Below, I explore – drawing on insights from students across the doctorate and MSc programmes – the common barriers in coaching, before making the case for evidence-informed research that can meaningfully support practice. The programmes are delivered by a team of practitioner-researchers, including Áine MacNamara, Dean Clark, Robin Taylor, Rosie Collins, Stephen Behan and myself.

The common barriers

As a coach, you should be weaving research into your practice – it should not be additional.

“Last Friday, we protected two hours for some internal professional development with a group of practitioners,” says Ian Costello, the General Manager of Munster Rugby. “There’s 20 reasons not to do it, but if it’s important, it’s protecting the time in your diary, no matter how busy you are.”

Ian believes the programme has opened up new career options, potentially even beyond professional rugby union. He has now got into the habit of writing in his diary in three colours: black for operational matters; green for strategic issues; and blue for learning and personal development.

“Someone gave me one of those multicoloured pens – I hate them because of my bad handwriting and these don’t help – but it’s brilliant for my diary,” he continues. “Learning and personal development can be anything from podcasts to light reading or heavy reading. It can be writing too – that was a good life skill and practical skill that a mentor shared with me.”

Additionally, coaches have not often been shown how to critically organise their thinking, even when they thought they were doing so.

Ian has been coaching for more than two decades, but still wouldn’t describe himself as the finished article.

“The first year broke me down in terms of questioning everything I know around critical thinking and reflective practice,” he says. “What the doctorate does is give you more structure to that process. It provides you with a more robust and applicable skillset to be accurate in research terms and then to think critically about the information you’re absorbing. As time goes on, you’re able to transfer that to your practice more readily and with a lot more clarity.”

He is not the only one to find the first year challenging. “It was quite confronting and shocking,” says Jamilon Mülders, the Performance Manager at the Royal Dutch Hockey Association. “You try to present where you’re coming from, what you have achieved, what you have done and why you have done things, and the staff at DCU will pose little questions like ‘where’s the evidence?’”

Jamilon has won Olympic and world championship medals as a coach, and yet, as he says, “I have to acknowledge that nine out of ten things we did worked for whatever reason at that stage, but there was no underlying theory, no evidence. There was nothing you could fall back on where you can explain it or also just make sure that you detect possible mistakes, issues, challenges, hurdles which might have happened or occurred in other areas.”

He sensed that something was absent. “I felt that something was missing in my personal education and growth,” he continues, further reflecting on that induction period at DCU.

Some coaches may never have set foot in an academic setting but, whether it’s our doctorate or MSc programme, we don’t need to simplify course material for coaches. We just need to make sure we are providing the right provocation.

“When we’re asked better questions it causes us to say ‘actually, I took that situation for granted, but I need to peel that back a little bit more’,” says Rachael Mulligan, the Athlete Support Manager at the Federation of Irish Sport. “It forces you to go ‘what is the best question to ask in order to get to a better outcome?’”

The most recent cohort of students on DCU’s professional doctorate and MSc programmes lines up for a group shot at DCU in Dublin.

The case for evidence-informed – not evidence-based – research

I hear all the time that ‘we need to quantify this’. It leads us to measure things that don’t really matter simply because we can count them.

There are different ways of seeing this and my view is that evidence should inform coaching, working alongside professional experience, theory, and context, rather than being treated as something on which coaching can be straightforwardly evidence-based.

“For anybody to be genuinely comfortable about their view of the world or their view on practice, it should be research-informed,” says Scott McNeill, the Head of Coach Development at the Premier League. “The risk and challenge of research is that sometimes things can go out of date very quickly. A body of research can be nearly out of date the day that it’s printed. So to keep that as a consistent and live way of engaging in practice would make sense to me, that suggestion that knowledge isn’t fixed, that these things keep evolving.”

“The first thing I said was my issue with research is I sometimes think researchers are almost in an ivory tower and very much removed from what goes on in the day-to-day field of performance sport,” says Rachael of the topic.

“That perception was completely quashed after a couple of weeks in the programme because there’s so much emphasis in terms of, yes, this is fantastic in the academia space, but how do we move this into real-life practice?”

“I used to always say I was evidence-based and a lot of coaches will pride themselves on that,” says Christoph Wyss, the Lead Physical Performance Coach at Red Bull. “But I think evidence-informed makes more sense because if a research paper comes out, being evidence-informed is taking that research, reading it, critiquing it, seeing what’s good and what’s not, and then applying that to your setting, because every setting is different.”

As he says, “with evidence-based you’re just transplanting it, doing exactly what they did, but then evidence-informed is more translating it.”

“There’s not necessarily one solution,” says Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.” The key for Eilish in her work is to ensure she and her colleagues are “making as informed decisions as possible when we’re designing learning activities” because “not everything from research may be transferable into a practical environment and, equally, every practical environment is going to be hugely different.”

“Being evidence-informed is probably more aligned with what we do on a day-to-day basis,” says Niall O’Regan, the Head of Education & Development at the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). “It is something that has helped me to understand how to be authentic, how to be creative in adapting what the research is saying is to suit the needs and the context and the environment that you’re in.”

Plus, as Scott says, “people sniff you out pretty quickly whenever there’s a gap between what you’re saying and what might feel real to them. Our job as people that work in this space is to either translate the messaging in a more accessible way or to admit that there probably still is a gap.”

And therein lies the opportunity to ask better questions.

Research should never be far from practice

While the programmes can be intimidating for coaches, we’re here to help in any way we can because it is important that research is not too far from practice. When they are close, the research finds practical application.

“This was a part I enjoyed from day one because you could immediately see the practical implications and make an impact,” says Jamilon of his coaching in field hockey. “So if I were talking with S&Cs about load management around our training, my new way of approaching them and asking questions really helped me to have a clearer view on the team and the environment.”

In some cases, research can help to highlight the current inadequacies in a high performance programme.

Niall, for one, thinks differently these days about coach development structures at the FAI; and it feeds into his practice.

“There are some experienced coaches that have so much knowledge and so much expertise in their fields that they may not need to go systematically through a certain set of steps,” he says. “They may have the ability to effectively communicate, empower others or share knowledge in a way which doesn’t require them to go through a checklist. They can get to the end with the exact same learning and sometimes even more learning.”

Such an approach doesn’t necessarily sit right with the coach and it wouldn’t necessarily sit right with the coach developer. “There’s a grappling effect where those people probably feel like, ‘well, I’m being rigidly pushed into a checklist of things and being asked to do things that I naturally wouldn’t do myself’.”

It comes back to being research-informed. “The person in front of you is the actual start point, and then it’s up to us as the educators and developers to be able to link it into research. The practice comes first and then it’s a matter of layering in what research is out there that can inform the decisions that that person is making.”

If you would like to know more about the professional doctorate and MSc programmes at DCU please email Jamie Taylor at:

[email protected]

By John Portch

What do athletes need – both male and female – to be in the right place to perform?

Danny Kerry, the Head Coach of the Canada women’s field hockey team, answered the question at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance.

He cites renowned coach developer Nigel Redman in his response. “Nigel uses this phrase: men have to battle in order to bond, so we have to have gone to battle first. ‘You’re a tough nut so I’ll be around your nonsense’ – sorry – you can see my biases playing out there. Whereas [as Redman says] women have to bond first before they battle.”

Kerry, who led Great Britain’s women to field hockey gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics, is at pains to tell the audience at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium that this yardstick should only be used in general terms and may even be an oversimplification. It is, however, illustrative of the dynamics of which a coach must be aware.

He continued: “If you spend time and energy to understand the dynamics that are playing out within high-performing female teams, if you spend the time and energy to talk to those things, spend the time and energy to build the relationships between those players so you can understand what particular perspectives individual athletes carry, why they think as they do, what their life experiences are, that level of trust in the relationship goes up significantly and then they will literally run through brick walls for you. If you don’t do that, as soon as the challenge and threat comes they can be [slow] to it.”

He then reflects on the transition he made from coaching Great Britain’s women to the men’s programme in 2018. “I tried that approach, if I’m blunt, with the men and it was effective to a degree, but if I had my time again I would probably put them into some form of battle or get them to understand each other in that environment along with some of this other work.”

Kerry, who was joined onstage by Emma Trott, the former Women’s Junior Endurance Coach at British Cycling, spoke at length about his personal development as a coach three decades into his career and the evolving demands of his players.

Here, we highlight four factors that shaped the coach that took the reins at Hockey Canada in March 2023.

1. His self-reflection in the heat of the moment

“I was the classic coach. All about hockey and very hard-nosed. Very cycle and task-oriented, Xs and Os,” said Kerry. However, as he said, when it came to people’s feelings and relationships, “I received some pretty blunt feedback then tried – and failed – to adjust”. He quickly realised he was doing himself a disservice. “I say I failed but it’s still not my sweet spot. So my big learning, whether it was male or female, was around how relationships develop as an entirety and with individual athletes.”

It led him to adapt his behaviour and the most notable example was his pitch-side presence during the penalty shootout that followed the draw in Great Britain’s gold medal match with the Netherlands in Rio. “I always positioned myself high; the reason for that was, one, I was task-focused and, two, athletes pick up on your anxiety as a coach and, being pitch side, that’s not a great thing. You don’t want to add to their anxiety as a coach, so actually being up high helps with that,” he continued. This time, however, he reflected and changed his custom. “I remember just thinking literally ‘what does this group need from me now as a coach and what doesn’t it need?’ And so at that point in time, my ability to ask myself that question at that most pressurised moment, probably of my career, was to self-regulate. All they need now is a ‘we’ve done this, we’ve rehearsed this, our processes, all good?’ Everyone nodded and off they went. I wouldn’t have been able to do that previously. It’s still a struggle, but that was a good example of being able to regulate yourself to then help the athlete be in the right place they need to be to perform.”

2. His ability to grasp the balance of team and individual needs

As a male coach in a female environment, Kerry is aware of the need to afford athletes personal space when it comes to issues such as the impact of the menstrual cycle on training history, volume and conditioning, particularly as there is still “some debate and ambiguity about what the science is saying”. While working with Great Britain’s women, he would defer to the team doctor in such matters. “It was led by our doctor, a person seen to be on the ‘outside’. We didn’t want athletes to think we were encroaching on something so personal to them. That needs to be handled with incredible skill.” He discussed it in terms of “managing the bell curve and deviations from the group”. “It’s not a science, it is a sense, it’s a craft. What is optimum for this group of athletes as a whole can mean that some people adapt ahead of the bell curve, others struggle because that’s not what they wish for themselves, but that’s an optimum for the entire group,” he said. “All facets of coaching, whether that’s sitting in a meeting discussing the players, whether that’s discussing how we push collectively as a team, whether that’s what we’re going after and how we’re going after it. It’s understanding that you’re trying to find an optimum for that particular team and then helping those people below the bell curve find their value in that, finding what works for them. That is the craft of coaching and, in my experience, that doesn’t get discussed in coach development.”

3. He works to understand the psycho-social dynamics of a group

Kerry was initially taken aback by the Canada women’s often literal interpretation of his instructions. “There’s a lot you can unpack there,” he said. “You can unpack it from the angle of gender, you can unpack it from the angle of your understanding of what’s going on. How are they feeling? Is there literal interpretation because they don’t want to get it wrong? Are they doing it because of the way they’ve been coached all of their life? Are they taking it literally because of the dynamic playing out within that female group? [They could ask themselves] Am I trying to do that because I’ve got a 200-cap athlete next to me?

“There’s a whole raft of psycho-social dynamics playing out there. So based on the experience I’d had, just talking to that very quickly; almost trying to create environments where [I’m asking] does it require me to talk to them? Does it require me to remove myself from that room and get them to sort it out themselves? Does it require me to use data, which involves the assistant coach of the programme leading that? Making these decisions as a head coach requires identifying some of these dynamics that are going on.”

Kerry warmed to the topic and added: “Quite often when people talk about performance, they’re talking about a very objective domain, whereas I think it’s more about these aspects. What is the greatest burden of that environment? What environment are you creating to ensure the most optimum versus the learning curve? What’s your impact on that? How can you create an environment between your athletes that allows them that peer to peer conversation that Emma was talking about? How quickly do you set those things up because they are, in my experience, the single greatest inhibitor to the team and the acquisition of skill?”

There have been occasions in the past where he wishes he could have coached female players differently. “If I had my time again, I would definitely approach it in a different way, but at the time, I didn’t have that experience having been in hyper-masculine environments.”

4. He embraces the coach’s role in developing leaders

Kerry believes that leadership skills are fundamental to performance. “You want people to lead even without the title,” he said. “[With Great Britain’s women] we had a discussion about that very early on talking about everyone has the capacity to lead in their own way that’s congruent to them. So if I were to summarise, normalising leadership as one of the fundamentals of performance is one of the key aspects of your job [as coach], so talking to that, raising awareness of what that is and how it can be done, part of that is raising self-awareness in the athletes, how they can influence others, is absolutely fundamental. It’s right up there with are you fit enough? In terms of female role models, I’d like to think the women’s hockey programme has some incredible female role models, someone like Kate [Richardson-Walsh] and others and now stepping into different domains whether that’s big business or sports. I’m very proud of that.”

He continued: “We have some stereotypical views of what it takes to lead, actually. Breaking that down and allowing these athletes to lead congruently to who they are is one of the things I’m most proud about. So Kate leads in a way that’s congruent to her, Alex [Danson] is a very different leader but still effective, and I’m now trying to do the same with field hockey Canada.

“There’s a moral dimension to having a team that’s well-led, there’s also a huge performance dimension to having a team that’s well-led and a depth and granularity to what leadership is. By the same token, whether we’re leading or following, we talk about that responsibility and what it means to follow well. The difference in my experience with male teams and female teams is the female teams seem to implicitly understand the importance and significance of that and really buy-in quite quickly”.

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By John Portch

How well are you serving your female athletes and what more could you be doing?

That was the question at the heart of Leaders Meet: Driving Step-Change in Female High Performance, our two-day event at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester.

On day one, speakers from organisations including Hockey Canada, British Cycling, High Performance Sport New Zealand, Harlequins and the UK Sports Institute all answered that question in their own way.

This is a snapshot of their responses, four factors pulled from the discourse to illustrate that while female sport has come on leaps and bounds in a relatively short period of time, there is still a long way to go before female athletes, coaches and practitioners achieve parity with their male counterparts.

1. Coaches: are you doing enough of the right things?

Male and female athletes are more similar than they are different, but there are differences, such as in bonding dynamics or the need to ask ‘why?’ on the training pitch (this is a trait more widely noted in female athletes than male). The most astute coaches recognise this and adapt accordingly. Danny Kerry, the Head Coach of the Canada women’s field hockey team, has worked with male and female coaches and has, following considerable self-reflection, learned to tweak his approach to male and female cohorts. Emma Trott, an Academy Coach at British Cycling, has called upon her own experience as a rider to inform her work with Britain’s young prospects to develop her coaching style. Kerry and Trott arrived at the same conclusion: when trying to optimise athletes, it is the environment that gets the performance out and that comes down to the coach.

What they said

Danny Kerry on managing team vs individual dynamics:

“All facets of coaching [consist of] trying to find an optimum for that particular team and then helping people adapt to the bell curve, finding their value in that, finding what works for them in that is the real craft of coaching – and in my experience that doesn’t get discussed in coach development.”

Emma Trott on listening to athletes:

“People don’t listen all the time. We hear what we want to hear and we want to hear it because we’ve already made a decision in our head about how we’re going to impact something rather than listening to what is actually being said. It’s that question: ‘How are you?’ ‘Yeah, I’m fine’ – what does that really mean?”

Next steps

• Coaches need to be empathetic to the needs of female athletes and that often requires the coach to be mindful of their own conduct and adapt accordingly.
• The issues that arise from female biology are numerous and there can be limiting factors on performance. However, it is important to understand that gains can still be made when the athlete is not at 100%.
• The coach needs to understand what is required of them at any given point in time. Sometimes it will be heavy instruction, at other times they need only offer words of encouragement or a serene demeanour.

2. Is everyone on your team speaking up?

In 2017, Helene Wilson took the reins of a talented but under-achieving Northern Mystics side in the ANZ Premiership, the national netball league of New Zealand. Two years later, they finished bottom of the table but, in 2021, were crowned champions. Wilson, who worked concurrently as a mentor at High Performance Sport New Zealand [HPSNZ, where she works full-time today], realised that her playing group were skilled but their diverse backgrounds, rather than representing a strength, created division and hindered alignment in the pursuit of high performance. That needed to change.

What she said

Helene Wilson on the HPSNZ Te Hāpaitanga pilot programme [launched in 2019, it initially paired 12 emerging women coaches with experienced mentors, giving them guidance through workshops] and how it influenced her coaching at the Mystics:

“During this time the penny dropped for me. We were busy teaching the coaches about tikanga, the customary system of values and practices. I realised that space for ambiguity where we translate our different approaches and lenses to what really drives high performance was missing in my environment.”

Next steps

• Understand that everyone is a leader and leadership is defined by your actions and behaviours. Some have more responsibility in their role, but everyone has a role to play.
• Ensure that everyone feels included while also not fearing rejection, because they are the first to comply, first to be passive, and not speak up when you really need them to.
• Deploy yourself against a problem last. Lead from behind rather than from in front.

3. Removing the physiological barriers to participation

In the afternoon, Dr Nikki Brown, the Associate Professor in Female Health at St Mary’s University in London; Emma Brockwell, a specialist women’s health physiotherapist at PHYSIOMUM, a female pelvic health specialist clinic; and Dr Amal Hassan, the Women’s Team Doctor at Harlequins, took to the stage to explore issues in female physiology, from skill acquisition during the menstrual cycle, being able to show up as best you can, and the risks presented by fashion over function in the use of sports bras.

What they said

Nikki Brown on breast health:

“It’s important to recognise that breasts will impact participation. Half of school girls drop out of participation because of their breasts, with one in three adults seeing the breasts as a barrier to participation. Then there’s that performance aspect, with breast support, because [an athlete’s] breasts will move during activity, and it changes how they move, it changes their confidence, changes their breathing, changes their muscle activity and movement patterns.”

Amal Hassan on the impact of the menstrual cycle:

“Periods can be a barrier to participation, a perceived barrier to skill and technical development through a season, can have health implications that really impact their performance, and it can stop certain players from developing at crucial points.”

Emma Brockwell on issues related to female pelvic floor dysfunction:

“It’s understanding that pelvic floor dysfunction is not just in the perinatal population or the older population. In fact, it occurs in younger girls and female athletes.”

Next steps

• There is more work to be done in normalising the conversation around periods, breast health or other concerns. These terms cannot remain taboo.
• What is your ethical code? If you’re encouraging a practice you need to put in place a structure, decide who is leading the programme, who is driving the educational aspects, and who are your go-to people for answers.
• Teams with bigger budgets can fit out a sophisticated programme or offer bra-fitting assessments, but action could be as simple as putting up a bra-fitting poster in a changing room or on the back of the toilet door. Even little nudges can make a difference or spark a conversation about breast health issues.

4. Bridging the gap between innovation and research in women’s sport with practical application

The UK Sports Institute [UKSI] has a major aim: to develop a nationwide programme to advance the science, medicine and application of female athlete health and performance support. However, as Richard Burden, the Co-Lead of Female Athlete Health & Performance at the UKSI, explains, there is a gap between innovation and research and delivery in female high performance environments.

What he said

“When delivering education sessions you can’t assume that because you’re talking to female athletes they know about the menstrual cycle, they know about bra fit – they don’t all know about these things. Even when it comes to female coaches, you can’t assume they know how to prioritise for female athletes.”

Next steps

• It is important to find ways to increase the translation and applicability of research.
• You have to bring athletes and coaches on a journey through knowledge generation, education and the delivery of a programme.
• Ask yourselves: are we giving them a reason to engage? How can we be resourceful? How can we create more time? How can we improve practicality?

By John Portch and Sarah Evans

When it comes to performance, the current generation of athletes are, on the whole, better informed and more inquisitive than their predecessors.

But what can a practitioner do when an athlete doesn’t ask ‘why’?

“There’s a few options,” says Ben Rosenblatt, a physical performance coach who has worked with the England men’s football team, GB and England women’s hockey teams and Olympic Judoka amongst others.

“Do you know them well enough to understand why they don’t want to know? If it’s because they just want to get told, they’ve got trust, and they don’t want to know ‘why’, they just want to crack on with it and say ‘go on then, give us the programme’, I’ll commit to it, we’ll give it a crack, and then afterwards we can work out how well that worked.

“Do they not want to know ‘why’ because they’ve disengaged? If so, then you might just see them floating around a session or trying to disrupt others.

“The other one is that they’re just not that interested in physical conditioning and preparation because not everyone is. Most people take up sport or play high level sport not because they love doing press-ups and sit-ups, it’s because they love their sport.

“So you’ve got to try and understand the reason why they’ve disengaged and you’re also trying to find out, as a consequence, how they’re best going to receive information. So you can just ask some really simple questions to ascertain that. If it were you and me working together I’ll ask: ‘what’s the best way that we communicate with each other? What do you need from me? what’s important to you physically? what’s worked in the past?

“You might say: ‘I just need a programme and to crack on’. That’s absolutely fine and that’s what you’re going to get. But then we can also ask the athlete ‘can we review it every six weeks?’ This will give you both the opportunity to learn more about each other.”

This is the second part of our interview with Rosenblatt, who discussed behavioural mapping in the first instalment.

The conversation takes a turn into nudge theory, which is defined by Imperial College London as: ‘based upon the idea that by shaping the environment, also known as the choice architecture, one can influence the likelihood that one option is chosen over another by individuals.’

“This is where you bleed into the gamification of training and environmental nudges to encourage people to engage in stuff they might not necessarily want to,” says Rosenblatt, who in 2021 visited the Behavioural Insights Team (commonly known as the ‘Nudge Unit’), which previously operated under the auspices of the UK Government but is now run independently. It has informed his approach, as have visits to University College London, the University of Bedfordshire, and the Design Museum in London.

Returning to nudge theory, Rosenblatt says: “The basic principle is called EAST, which is making things: easy, accessible, social and timely.

“If you can make anything align with any of those four things, if you can make something really easy to engage in, really accessible, so it’s at the right time and the right place, it’s part of the social environment and it’s timely, it’s at the time when they should be doing it, then you’ll absolutely get the behaviour change.”

He cites an example from his time with the England men’s football team. “One problem was how we get the players to go in the pool immediately after training on a particular day with the physical performance team. Using nudge principles we decided to nick the players trainers and put them in the pool area! This meant, to walk back to the hotel, they had to go to the pool first! We also put recovery shakes in there and scattered some balls and some inflatables in the pool. So when they went to get their trainers, it was easier to take a shake and then jump in the pool with their mates rather than leave! They ended up staying in for half an hour or so.

Gamification can be a useful tool in training environments. “If it’s a group that does want to engage a little bit more, like the hockey girls, then you do things like have a synchronised swimming competition. Again, if you’re saying we’re going to do a pool recovery session, then the players will come in knackered, they’ll go up and down the pool for 10 minutes and get out. If we say we’re having a synchronised swimming competition and you’ve got 15 minutes to come up with a routine, they’re in there for 40 minutes working out what the routine is, hanging around the pool to play afterwards etc. Those are ways you can get players that just aren’t interested or who don’t want to know. Rather than giving them full autonomy, you create an environmental nudge that means that they have to dive in there literally.

“There’s other ways of doing it. One other idea is to play with the schedule. OK, so let’s say you’re trying to introduce a new form of training to the group (like strength work). Rather than make the session an additional training session, make it part of the original training session. So if they’re coming into the gym before going onto the grass, start with a familiar warm up, something they’re comfortable with and then you introduce the new activity as a competition. If it’s aligned to something you want them to get better at and want them to improve at; because it’s a competition everyone’s automatically engaged in it.

“Again, this is more relevant to athletes who aren’t as engaged with their physical preparation. But if you do a familiar warm up and there’s some little competition then they’re automatically going to engage in it.  If it’s aligned to the physical outcome that you want, then they’re going to improve! The best way I’ve found of organising competition for maximum engagement is 1 1v1 competition in a team v team scenario… essentially you stack up points for your team by winning individual competitions against your opponents.

“You can then start to make it fun. We had an ongoing jump squat competition throughout the Euros where the players would compete for boxing belts based on how fast they were moving the bar. Training intensity and enjoyment went through the roof! All the athletes have noticed is that they’ve had a bit of fun and they’ve enjoyed themselves whilst being really physical. But if you start stacking that up over a course of two, three, four or five weeks, you’ve got a really strong physical conditioning response there.”

Ben Rosenblatt is the Founder of 292 Performance.

Want to discuss environmental nudges with Ben?

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @ben_rosenblatt

By John Portch and Sarah Evans

What causes athletes to develop self-defeating behaviours in a high performance environment?

“My starting point is that no one is trying to do it,” says physical performance coach Ben Rosenblatt.

“As a high performance athlete, everyone’s got the intent to go and win. No one turns up to training every day thinking ‘I’m going to be difficult today’. You can turn up and say ‘I don’t really fancy it’ because that’s what humans do, but no one has the intention to be bad.”

Rosenblatt was the Lead Men’s Physical Performance Coach at the Football Association between 2016 and 2023 and was part of Gareth Southgate’s staff at two Fifa World Cups and one Uefa European Championships. He has worked across a series of sports and has worked at both the English Institute of Sport (now UK Sports Institute) and the British Olympic Association.

In the first part of our interview, Rosenblatt makes the case for a framework that enables a practitioner to bridge performance gaps.

‘Things didn’t match up’

Rosenblatt explains that his approach when entering a programme has evolved, although his principles remain unchanged. He says: “It is a case of identifying what the team’s ambitions are, seeing how resonant they are with what they’re trying to achieve, and then identifying the behaviours that should be in place to deliver that.”

He recalls an example from an Olympic sport where those two were misaligned. “One team wanted to be the best in the world and the most physically dominant,” Rosenblatt continues. “For me, those things didn’t match up, particularly when I spoke to the athletes and coaches and heard a different narrative.

“When I dug into it with the athletes and coaches and asked ‘what are the hallmarks and successful traits of teams you think are going to enable you to win and how are we going to do it?’ Then I quickly realised that their ambitions around being physically fittest and the most dominant were probably not the thing that was going to help us win in the Olympics.”

A gold medal-winning performance did not require a well-executed 30-15 intermittent fitness test or bleep test. “There were problems with basic things like stability and robustness and just being able to train frequently enough. We can go and chase all the sexy stuff, which physical conditioning coaches really want to do like speed and agility, strength and power, but what we really need to do is keep the players playing consistently and increasing volume and intensity for their sport-specific training because that’s what will make them a better team.”

‘How does that individual learn?’

Why might a team fall into a poor behavioural pattern in the first place?

“It typically comes from a gap in capabilities, knowledge, skills and experience,” says Rosenblatt. “It can also be their opportunity, so the social environment they’re in; and then their motivation.”

He explains that a coach’s understanding of athlete motivation may be flawed. “A coach might say ‘they just don’t want it enough’ or ‘they just don’t know enough’ then you can end up in a fight with an athlete who says ‘what are you talking about? I’m doing everything I can’ or you can try to bamboozle them with knowledge that they don’t really know how to receive,” he continues.

“An example might be: ‘I’m going to give you some detailed information about why strength training is important’ and they’re like ‘I don’t really care’ or ‘I don’t have the framework to understand what you’re telling me’. You’ve got to identify where those gaps in behaviours and opportunities are. So if it is around knowledge, skills and experience, then you’ve got to ask the question ‘how do they learn? How does that individual learn? How do they best receive and retain information?’

“That might be different as a head coach compared to a young athlete or even a seasoned athlete. They’re going to learn and experience physical training differently. They’re also different generations; they’re going to have different social values placed on them as well. Understanding the individual and how they learn and receive knowledge is really important.”

‘Not everyone had seen Rocky’

Rosenblatt’s understanding came from a growing appreciation of motivation science, which he had previously overlooked.

The penny dropped prior to the 2016 Rio Olympics, when he worked concurrently with GB judokas and women’s field hockey players. Whilst the Judokas wanted to receive a training programme and be told what to do, this approach didn’t work with the women’s hockey team.

“I tried to understand the motivational science behind it,” he says. “I assumed my generation, my background, I was brought up in a boxing gym and I assumed everyone had watched Rocky and that’s what kind of motivation meant to everyone else. But actually, it’s about the athlete needing to have autonomy and feel like they’re making a decision; is there a connection between the work they’re currently doing and what they’re aspiring to achieve and do they feel like they’re getting better?

“So if you really want to make sure an athlete is motivated to commit to the programme and commit to certain behaviours that are different to the ones they’re currently engaging in, is there a connection between what they’re trying to do and what they’re trying to achieve? The tangible – can they see it? Have they had a choice in the path that they’re taking?

“They might not have the skills and experience to write the programme or to take all the direction, but there still has to be a choice somewhere along the line. ‘Do you want to train at 3 or 3:30?’ If there’s some level of choice it makes people feel more connected to it.

“The other one is progression. Do they actually feel they’re getting better and it’s achieving the things they’re really interested in? I think that was the biggest mistake I made with the hockey group when I came in.

“That comes back to helping the players connect and recognise what’s important to the things they’re trying to achieve. I think that’s always a tricky one when people start introducing strength training, in particular, into team sports or any kind of training for athletes.

“I’ve certainly had that experience in football. There’s a big disconnect between lifting weights and performance. Particularly when the first thing you experience when you lift weights for the first time is that you get sore and you can’t move for two or three days. There’s a real disconnect with that. So I think you’ve got to recognise the experience that the athlete is actually living. That’s really important. Also, work out the different solutions and strategies that are available for that player at that particular time.”

Ben Rosenblatt is the Founder of 292 Performance.

Want to discuss performance behaviours with Ben?

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @ben_rosenblatt

By John Portch

Ireland’s women stunned field hockey observers in reaching the 2018 World Cup final in London, England.

The team went into the tournament ranked 16 in the world and few observers expected them to put together a run that saw them oust India, whom they also beat in the pool phase, and Spain via penalty shootouts.

Ireland lost the final 6-0 to the Netherlands but in claiming silver earned their first-ever World Cup medal.

Lisa Jacob, who currently serves as High Performance Director across the women’s and men’s programmes at Hockey Ireland, a role into which she stepped in September 2022, watched that success from afar and reflects on its impact in the second part of her interview with the Leaders Performance Institute.

“The impact it had is kind of two sides to the same coin,” says Jacob, who previously spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute about her own career path.

“On one side, you’ve had success and you have realised your potential to mix it with the best when it matters most. Then, on the other side of it, that implicitly created an expectation that when it comes to another major tournament or the next one, they would be in the mix for medals again.

“In reality, the team have been in that ranking zone between eighth to fourteenth; and eighth is probably a jump when they won the medal based on the points, but in reality, Ireland’s current ranking of 13 is probably accurate enough. You’re fighting in that 10-14 space,” she continues.

At the 2022 World Cup, co-hosted by Spain and the Netherlands, Ireland were unable to progress beyond the pool phase. “In some ways, it’s illogical to think that you win the silver medal and all of a sudden you’re in the top two nations in the world, but I think some part of that created an expectation in the player group that they should be doing X, Y or Z afterwards and I’m not sure that it supported them to be their best,” says Jacob in reflection.

“It’s taken quite a few years to work through that; and part of that has been realising consistently ten games out of ten where they actually sit in the world rankings. But what I think is great is the combination of some really experienced old heads who were at the World Cup and have achieved that success. They know it’s possible and how they did it in terms of replicating it, but you also have people who were coming in and haven’t got that so they just have to work hard to mix it with these other nations when they’re playing them.”

Jacob explains that a sense of enjoyment has been essential. “The majority of the girls know that if everything gets too serious and too intense that it doesn’t facilitate their best performance. The group is probably 70% new so what might have worked for those guys who won the medal and what now works for the overall balance of the current group might be different.”

The power of people

Jacob, who contributed to the Leaders Performance Institute’s recent Special Report, Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions, describes the importance of the work done at home in Ireland, particularly given the programme’s tight budgets.

“It might not be as glamourous as going away to play Argentina, but it’s really about making the home-based activity really count, being clear about what you want to get out of your training blocks,” she says.

Home-based work also provides the players and staff with opportunities for team-building through constructive engagement and feedback. “It’s something that Ireland have always been excellent at,” adds Jacob. “It’s making sure that you have really good people involved and not just good professionals. And we’ll find a way to go the extra mile. There’s always a bit of good humour despite whatever adversity or situation you end up in. The programme is in a good place now and what I would say is that the athletes and staff, when they travel, it’s not that they’re in five-star hotels, but they’re in very good places. It’s a far cry from having no money.

“What’s really good is that you end up in a position where things aren’t perfect and nearly every time you travel or go to a competition, you have situations where a bus doesn’t turn up or the food they planned it for that time but, actually that’s Irish time, not Spanish time or whatever. I think the power of people to deal with those things in a really good way is something we’ve been good at in Hockey Ireland.”

The programme’s work in the field of performance psychology has also been instrumental in fostering an open team culture. Says Jacob: “The group that are there now, the team is much younger. There’s been quite a lot of transition since that 2018 World Cup and, thankfully, there are still some of the players who are there; so you have some connection to the possibility of succeeding at that level but you also have a lot of people who aren’t connected to it and in some ways have no baggage either because as much as the lows come with baggage the highs also shift expectations, it does a lot of things to you. What’s good now is the people and the culture, the psychology, the directness of dealing with the things that really impact performance that are not really the first ten things that go on the page but are things that make the biggest difference to the players and staff.”

Jacob admits that providing a smooth integration for younger players is a work in progress. “One of the things I’m taking a look at is how we’re aligned from pathway to senior and how we actually support people to transition; and that’s in lots of different spaces but obviously that development squad to senior transition is key.

“What works really well in the women’s programme is that there’s normally like a squad of 30 and, every year, between five and eight of those would be development squad athletes. So they would do the majority of their training with the seniors but they wouldn’t have any expectations around selection or whatever but they’d still have access to all the team’s support staff. They’re in a lot of the team meetings, they’re in all of the databases. There is real integration, but the next step for us, even though they’re embedded in the team, is to be more personalised about how we push them individually to transition really well.”

Cohesion and connection

Jacob explains that physical preparation no longer provides the performance edge it might once have, as the world-leading teams are all so finely-tuned. However, “Ireland has always been a nation where that kind of passion comes out in physicality. The first thing is making sure that that box is ticked because I think it underpins a lot.”

Beyond conditioning, Ireland’s focus for 2023 – a year in which there are a series of qualifying tournaments for the 2024 Paris Olympics, including the EuroHockey Championships in August – is set pieces, particularly penalty corners.

“There’d be a huge amount of opportunity that comes from penalty corners,” says Jacob. “Reflecting on the last two years in the women’s programme, they’ve had a lot of opportunity but the conversion rate hasn’t been high enough in those key games to get over the line. I think it’s the smallest thing that will make the biggest difference; if you do nothing else, this is what we’re looking at.

“The last thing for me is the cohesion and the connection within the squad. It’s not necessarily a gender thing, it’s not specific to women, but that feel factor within the group and that belief of possibility and being on-track, seeing progress, and, I suppose, confidence in a sense. They’re going in the right direction. You can be ticking all the boxes but if that one is missing then there’s probably a bit of an empty shell ready to perform.

“That doesn’t just come from being positive about everything; I think really reflecting upon things genuinely and authentically, and having hard conversations about what we’re going to do about it and all that kind of stuff, breeds a sense of confidence that we’re doing the right things, we’re having the right conversations and this will bring us to where we’re trying to get to.”

That place may not be the podium in Paris. “Bearing in mind that the profile of the team is younger and in transition, you’ve probably got a large cohort of that group peaking more closely to 2028 than 2024,” says Jacob.

If Ireland’s women or men are to reach the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, they will have to navigate a path through field hockey’s most competitive continent.

“Part of what’s so great about being in Europe, even though it’s arguably the toughest continent to be playing hockey in, is that you have a very good measure of where you stand. If you look at the world rankings and the European rankings at the same time, you’ll always have four Europeans in the top six in the world; so how are you mixing it with those groups? Are you getting close to them? Are you breaking into that top four in Europe?

“We’re playing those nations all the way through the pathway from under-16s. So in Ireland, although we’re planning for our peak to be at senior level rather than the Germans who win everything at under-18s or whatever, how are we making those gains relatively speaking from where we were four or six years ago? It’s also important just as a signpost to go ‘yeah, we’re on track or we’re doing really well or whatever’ but, yeah, it’s mission critical to get into that top six.”

Lisa Jacob is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Hockey Ireland, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Welsh Rugby Union. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year, and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By John Portch

Lisa Jacob has worn several hats during the course of her sporting career.

She is a former dual international athlete, having represented Ireland at both field hockey and rugby sevens. In hockey, she accrued 139 caps and scored 17 goals between 2006 and 2014 and, upon retiring from hockey, took an 18-month contract to play sevens.

In her post-playing career, she returned to hockey and coached the Ireland girls’ under-16 and under-18 teams. She also worked as a coach developer. Then, in 2019, Jacob was appointed to Hockey Ireland’s board of directors and she became the organisation’s Strategic Director later that year. It began a run of several swift transitions.

In 2020, Jacob became the women’s programme’s Team Manager, in charge of logistics and operations – “the glue that gets things moving” – as she puts it. “I had no career plan – I just ended up as Team Manager perchance,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“I did that into the Tokyo Olympics and then we had a couple of coaches who finished up after the Olympics, but the team had a World Cup qualifying tournament maybe eight weeks later. So I went from Team Manager to an assistant coach. I knew the group and I had a coaching background anyway.

“I had that critical choice of ‘do I go towards coaching or do I go towards something else?’”

Her decision was ‘something else’ and she became High Performance Director in September 2022. It is a role she discusses in the first half of a two-part interview with the Leaders Performance Institute.

“I sit overarching all of high performance over the men’s and women’s programmes and the pathway,” she continues. “My role is trying to support the head coaches to enable them to focus on their role and take away some of the stakeholder management and fight for resources, and go between the institutes.”

Hockey Ireland identifies, develops, trains and selects players from across both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, which means that Jacob works closely with Sport Ireland, Sport Northern Ireland, the Sport Ireland Institute, the Sport Institute of Northern Ireland, as well as the Olympic Federation of Ireland.

“They would all be big stakeholders with whom I work directly and my piece is as a kind of advocate; planning; doing all of the policies and proposals.

“The performance director’s role is important because that fight for resources always exists, so there needs to be somebody who’s always separate, who can oversee everything and go ‘hold on, if we join these dots we can get more bang for our buck’ or ‘this is more important than this space, even if you don’t like it, and this is why’, ‘this is the bit that’s important for you’ etc.”

Working under the programme’s head coaches (Mark Tamilty on the men’s side and Sean Dancer on the women’s) is a mixture of Hockey Ireland employees and institute service providers.

“There’s a lot of staff around the team, which can be great, but it can also cause a disconnect,” Jacob says. “I see my role as checking where everyone is at. I feel by listening that you really get a feel for it, where things are at, what might need to happen. It might seem small but I am helping people with their performance challenges as they see them.

“I also have a role in working with the athletes. By and large, I work with the leadership group to address any issues. In some ways, I need to be separate enough but also connected enough to understand if there are issues or changes of direction needed. I need to be approachable enough for those to come to the fore.”

What have been some of her reflections on her first six months in the role? “I’ve learned that the role is quite hard to define,” she says, adding, “there’s more than one way to do the performance director role, certainly in Ireland. You take the piece around how you can position and engage yourself and engage everybody in a way that you can shift the dial.”

There is not always unanimity. “It’s certainly not always an easy one but there’s a lot of really good people in the programme and my job is to get the best out of them, make sure that things are working well, so they can do what they’re best at.”

At the time of writing, both the men’s and women’s programmes are placed thirteenth in their respective FIH World Rankings (“that’s probably accurate enough”) but the women’s team exceeded all expectations to finish runners-up at the 2018 FIH World Cup. It was a breakthrough moment for the women’s game in Ireland and, in the subsequent time, the programme has enjoyed an increased range of, and access to, service providers. “That has allowed us to professionalise the programme for the girls. They get more direct support to be able to commit to hockey as well as pursuing work or study. They’re not scrambling to make things work.”

While that silver medal provided a watershed, there have not been wholesale changes, and there will not be any on Jacob’s watch.

“The programme is in place and has had a really clear plan over the last four years or so,” she says. “We’re now in 2023, which is a key year for qualifying for the Olympics. You might sit down and look at something with the coach but it’s really now small tweaks with a few key questions such as ‘are you going to go on a warm weather tour?’ So I’d work with the coach to set the direction of the programme but it’s not from a blank page or throwing out everything we’ve been doing.”

To wrap up the first part of her interview, the conversation turns to social support for athletes and staff and how Jacob can make an impact. She discusses her role with regard to the Ireland women’s programme, stating that the squad is a “really good group of friends” and “sometimes that can be good and sometimes that can make it harder to have honest conversations in the performance space.”

This is why the team have placed an emphasis on building relationships in the truncated time between the Tokyo and Paris Olympic Games. “When we have lunch, we need to sit together, you need to be asking your mate what’s going on in their life proactively rather than just hoping it will happen just because we’re in the same training base for two days a week.”

Players and personnel may not always talk about themselves but they may tell other Hockey Ireland staff about a teammate or colleague. Jacob explains that the work of Hockey Ireland’s head of performance services is invaluable in that regard. For her own part, she is sure to have contact points within the staff.

“I have realised in the last six months that there’s one or two people who sit very naturally in the space of supporting people through performance challenges.” She must ensure the right person is available for each challenge. “If you’re on the ground observing, you can send the right support towards someone or even follow up with them yourself – but there’s so many people I that I literally cannot do it all myself – with me, there are key people I try to keep across because I tend to be the glue for everybody else and it’s made me think quite a lot about how you structure and support people’s wellbeing and mental health in a high performance environment.”

Lisa Jacob is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Hockey Ireland, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Welsh Rugby Union. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By John Portch

What makes for a great training facility? It is a question the Leaders Performance Institute posed to a series of athletes, coaches and practitioners, including Kate Warne-Holland, the Under-14s Girls Captain at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA].

“You have to bring the energy. Don’t come in if you’re not ready to come in,” she says.

“The players need to know exactly what the expectation level is of them and we have to challenge each other to bring the energy and the right attitude. When I ran my own environment as a coach, everybody in the team would have clear roles about where they would be that day; leading the session, assisting the session, hitting in the session. If, as a coach, you’re hitting in the session then you’re a player so you’d better behave like a player. You’re a real role model. Communication with the players in the session has to be pitched to what is in front of you that day.”

We spoke to individuals in American football, bobsleigh, rugby union, swimming, tennis, field hockey and athletics to glean their views on what makes a training or practice facility great. Here is what they told us.

Jack Easterby, NFL performance coach:

The flow is the number one thing. How does it flow and does that flow match the work flow of the operation? For example, I’ve had people walk into a locker room and it’s the first thing you see, which is great, but you’re spending more time in a meeting hall or in a study area than you are in the locker room. The second thing is unified technology. I think that technology creates behaviour. And so I think if you have a flow that’s really well done and you have unified technology around the building, it’s going to create the behaviours that are needed for the people inside.

Montell Douglas, British Olympic bobsledder and former Olympic sprinter:

The ideal is to have everything you need in one place. If you wanted to make the best athlete, you would give them everything you need in that realm to perform, but that’s rare. In transitioning into my newer sport, I realised that things aren’t always ideal and the best training facilities came from the times where I thought outside the box. A lot of times in my sport, I was training out of a garage with free weights. I would never imagine in sprinting that you could do that and still perform, but when you think about facilities, it’s not about the quality, although that’s hugely important. It’s always about: what is required and am I able to get the same desired outcome with what I have?

Ioan Cunningham, Head Coach, Wales senior women’s rugby union team:

The biggest thing for me is: how much does an environment help a player to learn? When you set up the environment, when they walk in, what triggers are there for them to learn? Is there signposting? And then out on the field it’s very similar. Is there an opportunity with us to get live feedback on a TV on the side of the field; ‘we’re just going to play this and then go and look at it’, ‘that was really good’ or ‘you didn’t run your line there properly’. We’re lucky we can do that at our level, but it’s also creating an environment where we will stop the session, give them 30 seconds to discuss it as a group, and then come back with two points. No more than two points. ‘How are you going to win the next minute?’ Those are the type of environments and learning environments – because learning leads to motivation, in my view. If you’re learning, you’re motivated. If you stop learning you become stale.

Rohan Taylor, Head Coach, Swimming Australia:

For me, there’s three really critical components that you look at across any high performance environment. These are almost non-negotiables. The facility needs to be accessible. Sometimes [swimmers] get kicked out of the pools or lane space, so we’ll secure access to facilities to be able to do the basics, the training. The second one is the coaching and the level of coaching expertise, not just elite coaches but the coaching group; I’m talking about the sports science. You need to have that and if it’s just one person they need to be really good, if it’s two people they need to work collaboratively together. And the third part is that you need that administrative support, that dry side support, to ensure those coaches are coaching, those athletes are training, and somebody’s supporting the structure around it. Whether it’s a large, professional football club or it’s a small swimming club, it needs those three components to be operating and working together. And if you take one away, it becomes a problem.

Kate Warne-Holland, Under-14s Girls Captain, LTA:

Hard work also has to be fun. I work with under-14s and there has to be enjoyment throughout the session, with the amount of volume and intensity the kids are undertaking. I think there also needs to be respect for the effort the players are putting in, respect for the parents, and the coaching staff. And walking in each morning to a nice, clean space. No litter, no balls everywhere, everything is nicely tidy and the baskets of balls are ready to go. Often the session will start at 6:30 or 7 o’clock in the morning. You don’t want to be walking in to a messy chaotic environment. After every single session we would quickly reflect at the end; assistant into lead, player into assistant, and then lead into player. I might say: ‘I thought you were really good at bringing the energy, you behave like a player, you had high expectations of the other person’. Each person says a couple of things and it just keeps everyone on their toes around the idea that ‘this is important and we care about the quality of the sessions’.

Lisa Jacob, High Performance Director, Hockey Ireland:

It’s a feeling of ‘home’ and I think it’s somewhere you walk into and it makes you elevate your thinking. It’s very hard to describe what that looks like and, at the moment, we’re in conversations with Sport Ireland around what we want the hockey facility to look like going forward. I’m pretty sure if we started off with ‘it’s a feeling’ – Jesus, the architects can’t work with that! It has to have the basics [such as pitches and gym facilities onsite or nearby], but the one critical thing that would differentiate it for me is what the team room is like. In some places you won’t have couches and bean bags or graduated steps where you can watch videos or movies, but a place where a team can actually make it their own and create what empowers them most [is important]. There are a couple of facilities that have got it right.

Victoria Moore, Head of Performance Support and Solutions, Athletics Australia:

I see resources of people as far more beneficial than resources such as equipment and or a building. I’ve seen athletes absolutely flourish when they’ve got people to help them make informed decisions. I think you can make a lot with the right people. That’s why I’ve put resources and dollars into investing into building people’s capacity. A nice building might look great, but you should invest in people and make them feel valued and that they belong; and that’s when you’re going to get the better outcomes.

German national team player Christopher Rühr, pictured here, says the Kromaskin stick is “perfect for forwards” because it provides both power and consistency.

(Image courtesy of Hypetex.)

A Data & Innovation brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, a competitor to Thomas Edison for the creation of the first incandescent light bulb, invented carbon fiber to help with that pursuit back in 1860. For more than 150 years, carbon fiber was refined and improved, yet retained its natural blackish-gray hue. Attempts to infuse color corrupted the material’s mechanical properties.

Not until a decade ago, in 2013, was the chemical code cracked. Composite specialists with experience in Formula 1 devised a process for coloring carbon fiber while preserving its structural integrity. That work laid the foundation for Hypetex, an England-based company whose first major foray into sports is the Adidas Kromaskin field hockey stick. Other partners include New Balance, Jaguar Land Rover and, until 2021, Formula 1 itself.

That stick, adorned with Adidas’s distinctive three stripes, was a visible part of the Men’s Hockey World Cup 2023 in India, especially during the final, where Germany beat Belgium on 5-4 on penalties following 3-3 draw.

“I started using the Kromaskin stick the moment it was released,” said German national team player Christopher Rühr, an Adidas-sponsored athlete who also won an Olympic bronze in 2016. “It’s perfect for forwards like me. It has the ultimate power for goal shots but also a soft touch for when you’re receiving and dribbling.”

What Hypetex offers is more than the aesthetics benefit of infused color replacing an outer lacquer on sticks, which is prone to chipping. In combination with a micro-cell core that is inserted into the head of the stick, the Kromaskin outperformed eight premium hockey sticks, according to testing conducted by the Sports Technology Institute at Loughborough University.

The Adidas Kromaskin stick — a finalist in the Sports & Leisure category of the 2022 JEC Innovation Awards, a prestigious honor within the composite materials industry — had a 16% higher coefficient of restitution (COR), which is a measure of power transferred into the ball, and 70% less variation in COR.

Even though modern field hockey sticks are generally made of synthetic materials such as fiberglass, aramid and carbon fiber, they are prone to similar variation in performance the way wooden baseball bats are.

“What [hockey athletes] were finding previously, which was their pain point, was that there was a massive inconsistency in the performance of one stick versus the other because the production process was really dependent on the user,” said Hypetex CEO Marc Cohen. “By creating this micro-cell core, what we ended up doing was standardizing the process very much, leaving it and moving it away from the production risks that come with individuals or labor. That in itself created a much, much lower variance across sticks to the point that there was insignificant. Every stick turned out like the previous one.”

Hypetex maintains its own manufacturing facility in the southeast of England, which enables tighter quality control and longer-term competitive advantages.

“We moved production away from Pakistan, whereby a lot of probably the top 10 brands all get produced from the same factory,” Cohen said. “So any IP that gets brought out in one season for one brand, very quickly finds its way into every other brand. So when Adidas had an idea around designing a new stick and developing new solutions, they were very keen to ensure that value didn’t get diluted directly into other people’s manufacturing.”

Though the core IP around colored carbon fiber was first created 10 years ago, Cohen acknowledged that finding the best product-market fit and implementing the necessary processes for volume manufacturing took time for a pioneering process of colorizing the carbon fiber.

“So that’s where the trickiness has been, is how do you create something that is, in essence, a layer between layers, that doesn’t affect the layering system?” Cohen said. “So there’s a really interesting equilibrium that’s looked for by using fibers and using what’s called the matrix. The matrix is like a glue system that goes within the fibers and enables the structure to actually exist in the form that it’s been designed for.

“Now, by adding something, what we do — the color — to the fibers, you’re creating a layer that could be a resistance or an issue when fabricating or laminating or creating that product. So that’s where the design of the chemistry was necessary to be very tech-orientated to enable those same mechanical properties.”

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.