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By Luke Whitworth

Leaders Meet: Building Winning Organisations, hosted alongside the Toronto Maple Leafs, was our first physical North American event of the year. Throughout the course of the day, we engaged in case study sessions, an observation experience, roundtable discussions and skills-based learning centred around some key ingredients that contribute to building a winning or high performing organisation.

These are the highlights from the afternoon programme, which featured Dr Cheri Bradish, the Director of the Future of Sport Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University; Glenn Zujew, Chief People Officer at the world’s largest independent commercialisation partner for life science, Klick Health; John Bull, the Director & Lead for High Performance at leadership and organisation consultancy Management Futures.

[Already up-to-date with the afternoon? The morning takeaways are available here.]

Session 4: Designing the Environment & Innovating at Pace

Speaker: Dr Cheri Bradish, Director of the Future of Sport Lab, Toronto Metropolitan University

Innovation + Culture

• Innovation: the action or process of innovating. Innovation is crucial to the continued success of any organisation. Includes new methods, ideas, products, etc. Linked to technological innovation(s).
• Innovation economy: supports that knowledge, entrepreneurship, innovation, technology, and collaboration are the key drivers of economic growth. Companies can increase their value by creating new ideas which can be developed into products, services, and business models that bring us collectively into the future.
• Does innovation culture work: “we found a significant correlation between the ideation rate at these companies and success (growth in profit or net income): The more ideation, the faster they grew.”
• Sport innovation: proactive and intentional processes that involve the generation and practical adoption of new and creative ideas, which aim to produce a qualitative change in a sport context.
• Key growth areas: fan experience and player performance.
• Global sport innovation ecosystem: there has been increasing trends in innovation and additional technology.
• Designing a winning innovation environment: what do good organisations do who innovate effectively? “What gets measured, gets managed!”
• Open innovation: internal and external innovation. Resourcing and Collaboration.
• Decentralised innovation: internal labs, ventures, M&A, partnerships.
• Product development: design labs and studios.
• Project time commitments: 10-25% of time in the organisation dedicated to time to intentionally innovate and foster an innovation mindset.
• Maintaining a culture of sport innovation: it’s an extraordinary time for innovation. Technological change and industry disruption seem to be accelerating. And digital information networks are linking individuals, organisations, and nations as never before. Five themes have emerged in maintaining this culture:

1. Be comfortable being uncomfortable: both leaders and staff.
2. Be connected, build a strong network: what are other people doing in their space?
3. Prioritise good, committed and collaborative people.
4. Diversity of thought and team.
5. Stay curious.

• In those that do it well, there is a clear culture of innovation across the organisation.
• What’s holding sport back: we know that sport is an early adopter industry. A lot also depends on the culture of the organisation.
• Leading innovation: where is the support and leaders perspective in all of this? How open is your leader to being innovative and supporting your team in its development?
• Assessing cultures of innovation: do you have an innovation or growth mindset in the organisation?
• A lot of rich innovation is looking outside of the box.

Session 5: The People & Culture

Speaker: Glenn Zujew, Chief People Officer, Klick Health

• People that are good at culture pay a lot of attention to it.
• The culture: an extreme focus of Klick when it started 25 years ago was culture. Core principles were designed and then the organisation identified the people who were needed to achieve that. What type of person would be successful in our organisation? Culture starts at recruiting level and how you promote yourself in the marketplace. Even after 25 years, the organisation still considers themselves in ‘beta’.
• Recognise innovation in a company: the organisation likes to shine a light on those that have tried and failed. The organisation has ‘Breakfast Meetings’ that are designed to give positive recognition to those that have tried to innovate and failed – the organisation want to promote that behaviour. A lot of people experiment in the environment and the organisation even intentionally allocates hours to innovation.
• People-first #1: this can often be misconstrued as ‘me first’. Realigning on the goal you are trying to achieve is something that you need to keep an eye on. We don’t want to slip into ‘me first’.
• Cultural principles: in recent times, creativity and candour have come into the existing principles.
• Listening: the organisation has also prioritised listening in a big way. Not everyone communicates in the same way so the organisation has used a variety of communication tools to collate insight and feedback to cater for different styles.
• Feedback: aligned to the above, create different styles and numerous opportunities for feedback: bi-weekly calls with the Chief People Officer and President, fire-side chats, weekly one-on-ones, yearly polls – some people want to communicate verbally, others through technological tools. The Chief People Officer is basically a Chief Learning Officer, and the data that is collated has informed what the organisation does next.
• Collaboration: have you been intentional in asking your teams how they interact and what is working?
• Induct & onboard to culture: it starts with how you position yourself in the marketplace. At a recruiting level, there is clarity on what the organisation wants: there is a list that is stress-tested; identify individuals that will add something to the culture.
• Fit & add: Glenn shared that the organisation had almost too strong of a culture. There was a laser focus on looking for someone that would fit the existing culture seamlessly. This focus actually ended with the organisation having too many similar people. The organisation engaged in one small change: ‘fit to add’. The organisation wanted people to add to the culture, which in turn witnesses an increase in innovation and diverse thinking.
• New vs existing: we often see challenges in trying to combine existing versus new. In terms of culture, a large part is creating a safe place for existing individuals. Listen, talk and alleviate what’s on people’s minds. People want to be heard. Every environment has stewards who have a key role in connecting to what is important.
• Cultural champions: who are your cultural champions? Look to recognise where things are working well and make people aware of what that is.
• People-first #2: in trying to be a people-first organisation, you can get sucked into trying to be everything to everyone. In reviews and feedback opportunities, the organisation asks employees honestly about how things are going; is it what you want it to be?

Session 6: Debriefing Skills

Speaker: John Bull, Director & Lead for High Performance, Management Futures

“The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than the competition” – Peter Senge

STOP: for live debriefs during the event:

• Stand Back: take a helicopter view.
• Take Stock: analyse what is happening.
• Options: explore options around what you can do differently.
• Proceed: step back in and take action. Assessing what impact your new approach has.

• Aviation principles: there is a lot we can learn from aviation. They don’t look at human error, instead system first.
• People and organisations who are good at debriefing are really curious.

How Debriefs Help Create a Winning Culture

• Coaches only recall between 16.8% and 52.9% of events.
• Involvement in discussions builds self-awareness and ownership of learning.
• Fosters an openness to feedback.
• Builds relationships and team cohesion.
• Helps decrease negative emotional effects and remove emotional baggage.

Features of a great debrief

• Psychological safety: create a calm, positive and supportive space. Set people up to focus on learning, not to be defensive; and model your belief in their potential to create great performance. Do everything you can to reduce power differentials.
• Questions: use open, non-judgemental questions and a lot of follow up questioning. Focusing on learning more than results and allow time for reflection.
• Strike a good balance between focus on the positives and areas for improvement. Key insight: we learn quickest by reinforcing what works. Consider ‘appreciative inquiry’.
• Pay attention to group dynamics to get the best possible contribution from all individuals. Write the thinking down before the debrief. Who is well placed to provide feedback that isn’t in the current group?

Broad structure of debrief questions

• Reviewing where we are against our goals.
• Drawing out the learning around what has gone well.
• Exploring areas for improvement, and insights around what’s not gone well? Focusing on learning, not blame. Using root cause analysis.
• Getting clear on key insights, and how we are going to act on this learning.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the morning here.

By John Portch

Last week Roy Hodgson returned as Manager of English Premier League club Crystal Palace and, in doing so, came out of retirement for a second time.

With the south-east London club enduring a poor run of form, they turned to the man who led them between 2017 and 2021.

When Hodgson left Selhurst Park at the end of the 2020-21 season he indicated that he would be retiring from management after a 35-year coaching career that started in 1976 at Halmstads in Sweden and took in spells in Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Middle East over the next four decades.

There were numerous highlights. He won league championships in both Sweden and Denmark, achieved World Cup and European Championships qualification with Switzerland’s men, and one could even make the case that Hodgson’s finest work came in his homeland, where he led Fulham to the Europa League final in 2010 and helped Palace to consolidate their status as a Premier League club.

He had hard-earned laurels on which to rest. Yet eight months after retiring he was back, taking the reins at struggling Watford in January 2022. The club slid into the Championship that May and Hodgson slipped into retirement again,  seemingly for good this time. That is until last week when Palace returned to a familiar face, who has signed a contract until the end of the season.

In light of his appointment, Hodgson’s words, spoken at the Leaders Sport Business Summit in Abu Dhabi in February, seem prescient. He had been asked by Leaders’ Jimmy Worrall about his efforts to cope with the stress of management and indicated that it was more of an “obsession”, “a way of life”, than a mere job.

“To some extent, the adrenaline and the emotion and the passion, the excitement – that’s what drew us to becoming a coach in the first place,” he said with a smile while looking at fellow football manager Alan Pardew, who joined him onstage. “We signed up for it, we wanted it.”

Hodgson has a reputation for inspiring underdogs to over-performance, but no one can predict how his latest tenure will go or if Palace will preserve their Premier League status, and there are plenty of observers with reservations about his appointment, but there were signs in Abu Dhabi that he will be ready for the challenge come what may.

Bring players on a journey

Hodgson described his first days on any new assignment as a “classic leadership task”. He said: “You have to sell yourself and your ideas because what you’re going to need to have any success at all is to create the environment that you think is going to be conducive to producing the type of results and the type of football you want to see.

“I think that your first impressions are very important, I think you need a lot of belief, and that belief that you maybe have in yourself, in your methods and the way you think the team’s going to need to play in order to win matches, you need to be able to get that over to the players in a way; and that will involve to some extent a very clear-sighted but somewhat stubborn approach to the subject.”

He recounted his first spell at Serie A side Inter in the mid-’90s when he tried to shift the team away from the style to which the players had become accustomed.

“To get that, you’ve somehow got to bring the players with you. Your personality, your belief in yourself, your ability to sell the idea to them, and the ability to convince them that ‘if you do this, if you follow me, if we go together, there’s a chance that we’ll make this succeed’ and that’s how I went about it.”

Good and bad apples

Hodgson has held 23 management or head coaching positions (including two tenures at Inter and Crystal Palace) and experienced both success and failure along the way.

Worrall asked him how he reacted at those times where his approach simply didn’t take hold. Hodgson cited a lack of trust and the potential impact of negative public perceptions of his personality and work. “That is how it is and, if you’re going to do the job, or have any chance to do the job, you have to fight through those things,” he said.

Where he enjoyed positive results, Hodgson felt he had the backing of senior leadership. Fulham was a prime example. He joined the west London club in December 2007 and picked up just nine points from his first 13 Premier League matches. However, the results turned, with Fulham claiming 12 points from their final five matches. With Fulham’s Premier League status secure, the club had a springboard from which to secure the European qualification that led to the Europa League final.

“The first months were very difficult and I suppose it was fortunate that I came to the club after periods of success in previous jobs,” he said. Self-belief was important too. “Because if you start to lose faith in yourself, and your belief that what you’re offering is something that will help the players, then you really are doomed. That could easily have happened because, to be honest, we were doing so badly at the time and  people were expecting the new manager bounce and that certainly didn’t happen with me.

“But we kept faith and I could see on the training field that the players weren’t averse to what we were doing; they weren’t thinking ‘this is ridiculous and we’re never going to win playing like this’. We got the feeling they did believe and the results didn’t improve that much but performances did.”

At Fulham, the team kept the faith, and Hodgson’s work was supported by the team’s senior leaders, with forward Brian McBride and midfielder Danny Murphy cited onstage in Abu Dhabi.

“These two guys got so much behind the team and what we were trying to do, that their leadership on the field was an enormous bonus for myself and my coaching staff  because if you can get the leadership on the field from your players then your chance of being a good leader yourself can improve enormously.”

Hodgson also cast aside those he perceived as bad apples. “One of the things we had to do, quite frankly, was to move some people from the first-team squad. It was a big first-team squad and it was pretty obvious to us in that early period that these are not only not helping us, they’re hindering us because of their negativity. We wanted resilience and positivity. These guys were negative. We had to move those aside and work with the positive ones that we had left in the group.”

Work-life balance

Hodgson’s time away from the game left him with a realisation about the impact of stress. “You don’t sometimes realise what the stress and pressure is doing to you until you’re not doing it at the moment and you watch the television and you see the faces of the people who are out there; the last minutes of games, hanging onto a win or trying desperately to get an equaliser, and you see that tension there and you think ‘was I like that?’,” he said.

However his second spell at Palace goes, he gave the sense in February that although the pressure of Premier League management is real, his resilience would not be an issue should a club come calling.

“People would ask me, especially as I got older, ‘how do you cope with the tension, don’t you find the pressure is getting too hard for you, especially at your age?’ ‘No, I don’t really feel it, I think I’m OK’. But I think I was fooling myself because, looking at these people, I’m sure it was just the same because, unfortunately, the cliché about the coach on the side line [is true]. You’re kicking every ball, you are to some extent, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t know how you get away from that.”

Time, however, has taught him the importance of a balance, even if football management is “a way of life”. “The only way out of it is your balance,” he said. “The balance between your working life and your family life or time with friends and time with leisure activities, and of course your perspective.”

With perspective comes awareness. “The awareness that no one is really forcing me to do this, this is something that I’ve always wanted to do; and if I don’t feel capable any more of dealing with this pressure then it would be up to me for my own health and for the benefit of my family to move away.”

Whatever else, Hodgson has not reached that stage and there could yet be a successful epilogue to his career.

Main Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions

By John Portch

How is the video assistant referee (VAR) environment set up in the German Bundesliga to support optimal decision-making on the pitch?

It is a question the Leaders Performance Institute poses to Tom Janicot, the Director of Video Solutions at Sportec Solutions, who has invited us to RTL Deutschland’s HQ in Cologne on a January evening to explore the German Football League’s (DFL) Video Assist hub during a round of midweek Bundesliga matches.

“The DFL decided to come here because it’s a broadcasting facility in general,” he says. “From a technical perspective, it’s a place where we’ve got maximum redundancy and maximum security for our technical installations and connections to all the stadiums in Germany.” The centre provides both the comfort – much needed for referees when making high-stakes decisions – and the technical infrastructure.

The VAR system for the Bundesliga, known locally as ‘Video Assist’, was first used across the German top tier during the 2017-18 season. It joined goal line technology, which was introduced during the 2015-16 Bundesliga season, as a staple of the match day experience in Germany. Goal line technology provides an instant, accurate judgement on whether or not a ball has crossed the goal line, resulting in a goal.

The DFL Video Assist HQ is operated at a central hub in the city of Cologne. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)

Ahead of the 2022-23 season, in March 2022, the German Football Federation (DFB) appointed the Munich-based Sportec Solutions as the Bundesliga’s officiating technology partner for the next five seasons.

It is a pioneering development, as Sportec Solutions is a joint venture between renowned sports and entertainment technology provider Deltatre and the DFL, who operate Germany’s top two divisions under the auspices of the DFB.

Keeping the Bundesliga’s Fifa-certified VAR and goal line technology in-house affords the league overall control, as Janicot explains. “When it comes to changes in setup or innovative features, there’s a huge advantage to being in control of the road maps and the directions we want to take in the future. This also reduces development and feedback cycles. It is challenging for us but also good for our product that the DFL set a very high bar in terms of standards. It is relatively achievable to get everything to work 98% of the time, but that final 2% – that’s where it costs a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money sometimes to get to that stage.” Sportec Solutions achieves such accuracy using technology designed by its subsidiary, Vieww, which specialises in camera-based systems.

Earlier in the day, Janicot had taken the Leaders Performance Institute to inspect the match day setup at the BayArena ahead of Bayer Leverkusen’s meeting with VfL Bochum. In the Bundesliga, he explained, both VAR and goal line technology are set up according to two camera plans: 19 for some matches and 21 cameras for others. A prominent fixture such as Bayern Munich-Borussia Dortmund may have a camera plan of 23. Additionally, there are 14 ‘intelligent’ cameras within a stadium tracking at 200 frames per second in real-time.

A Sportec Solutions van onsite at the BayArena ahead of Bayer Leverkusen’s meeting with VfL Bochum on 25 January. It is one of 12 all-electric vans in the Sportec Solutions fleet. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)

Sportec Solutions will have a team onsite, both in the stadium and the TV compound outside, and will work to provide both images and audio to the VARs and operators back in Cologne. For each match, two match officials – a VAR and an assistant VAR – will work directly with two operators, who themselves are supported by an onsite backroom team.

There are eight screens at every terminal. The two largest screens relay footage from the main camera above the halfway line. The others will relay a variety of angles and enable operators to assemble a quad-split for the VAR officials to review an incident from multiple angles.

While the Bundesliga employs the full system, Vieww’s tech could theoretically be rolled out in more modest circumstances. There are already versions in the Portuguese men’s third division and the Bolivian men’s league. “The system we have built here in the Bundesliga is extremely modular,” says Janicot. “You can reduce it to a bare minimum and you can have a functional system – the processes don’t go away – you’re still going to check a red card exactly the same way. That’s something that’s very important for us, to document all of that to make sure that we have the same standards no matter the size and capability of the competition.”

The system in Germany is refined through regular VAR and operator feedback. “What we want is better decision-making and then you break it down from there. ‘OK, this is what you want to get to, how do you build every single building block to make sure that you support VARs in making the best possible decisions?’” adds Janicot, who says referees are involved in review processes.

“We had a testing phase of about one year of putting a product in front of them, getting them to give us feedback on how they liked it, how it was being used, what they didn’t like especially, and then being able to change that.

“I think it’s a luxury we’ve had in building this product from scratch over the past few years after VAR had been introduced [in German football]. We didn’t create it and then put it live and then figure out we need to change this and that. We went in with a fresh mind having had three or four years’ experience within our team and then using that to build the product as it is now.

“And now, on a weekly basis, we’re still discovering things where we get feedback from the referees or from operators and think, ‘hey, maybe we can add this or change that’. That’s a continuously evolving thing and I think that working so closely with the refereeing department – that’s really the key.”

Sportec Solutions deploys its officiating technology across both divisions of the Bundesliga, the German Supercup, and selected matches in the national cup competition, the DFB Pokal. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)

This ongoing review process led Sportec Solutions to discard touchscreens for VARs. “If you put technology in front of someone then they’re going to feel like they need to use it,” says Janicot, who explains that VARs were initially able to zoom in on a shot for themselves without the help of an operator. “What we actually found is that it was detrimental to the operation because the operator actually had something else in mind but you had the VAR doing something else. So you had two people to control the system when actually we found it’s better to have just one person who is in charge and the VAR hands-off, simply communicating.

“That’s the thing where you can’t solve everything with technology, you need to think about what the strengths are with the different people that are at the table and what their ultimate goal is or what their role is in the operation and then make sure they have all the tools to be able to fulfil that role.”

Nevertheless, the system still looks complicated to the uninitiated and the Leaders Performance Institute was all at sea when called upon to rule on an offside decision in a trial match-based scenario. Yet any risk of information overload is offset by the VAR and operators’ training, experience and ability to communicate.

“Clear communication is the absolute key to reaching fast, precise decisions,” says Janicot. “The team needs to speak the same language, to trust each other to do their respective jobs, especially when it comes to a complex process like an offside decision.”

Sportec Solutions’ VAR and goal line technology is provided by its subsidiary, Vieww. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)

The DFB has brought in commercial pilots to work with referees and operators to help them to better understand how to engage in clear, direct communication techniques when issuing requests, commands and responses.

But what if the technology itself were to fail? “You need to make sure there are no single points of failure and that’s the whole way along the chain,” says Janicot. “All the way down to a single cable going to a monitor or making sure that you have a separate monitor going through a separate line, going through a separate converter etc. So making sure that you separate the work flows completely to make sure that there’s no one point where anything can fail. That applies to technology and also to people, right. What is your back-up plan if somebody gets ill the day before a match? Or if a van doesn’t make it to a venue the day before a match?

“About a year ago, we spent quite a few hours going through all the different scenarios. We called it a ‘pre-mortem’. Thinking about the absolute worst-case scenario. What happened? How can we fail? Then it’s making sure that you step back from that and going through all the different scenarios and you try as a team to cover as many as possible.”

An operator draws the lines during a trial run of the technology that enables VARs to rule on offside decisions. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)

What about imminent developments? Where does officiating technology go next? Janicot cites the potential for enhanced player tracking. “Do we at one point want to look at tracking more parts of the body than just the centre of mass?” He also refers to the use of balls containing microchips that support the use of VAR, goal line and semi-automated offside technology in Fifa competitions. “They showed it’s possible that it can be done and at Sportec Solutions we are of course having the discussion, if this is something that we need? What benefits do we get from it? And again, what benefits does it bring to the refereeing world?”

Offside decisions are another area where the DFL and Sportec Solutions are looking to further refine their process, particularly the length of time it takes to reach a verdict and the steps taken to get there. “We are looking at each segment of this decision tree and seeing ‘can we improve this? Can we improve this by work flows between the operators and the VARs or with technology?’ I think that’s something where we can make big steps forward.”

And if money were no object? “Informing the fans in the stadium, I think, is a real key part. Finding a way to do that in the best possible way. I think that’s key.”

He is optimistic for the future of officiating technology in football. “Top leagues have always had high requirements when it comes to precision and it’s also important to us because it’s an elemental part of the game. Afterall, it has influence on the decision-making process, so for us, along the whole way it was very important for us, at the end of this road, that we do get a world-class product where we have the chance to bring in our requirements in terms of quality and reliability but also our wishes and ideas for our future.

“We absolutely feel confident that we are in a very good position right now and in a very good position to develop whatever direction we might want to go in terms of the next years for refereeing technologies.”

By John Portch

What are the fundamentals of a good practice facility? For the Toronto Blue Jays, who opened their Player Development Complex in Dunedin, Florida, in 2021, those fundamentals were summed up in an acronym that pulls together their values: CLEAR. It stands for collaboration, learning, empowerment, achieve and respect.

Each was explained by Angus Mugford, who served as the Jays’ Vice President of high Performance at the time. “We want to have a highly collaborative environment where different departments and people are close to each other,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2019. “The open spaces are more attractive for people who want to come together. It’s the same thing with the high performance offices and space. It’s together and unified and it’s also physically and metaphorically in the centre, so that the ease of communication and collaboration is right there, but it’s also a space for players and coaches and other staff can be together easily.

“‘Learning.’ You don’t have to be in a specific room to learn but we want to create some specific environments where learning is enhanced. One of the critiques other teams were telling us about were in auditoriums, how easy it was for guys on the back row to close their eyes and switch off like a movie theatre, so we’ve leaned towards more a business school lecture theatre, which is less about lecturing and more about having a pulpit in the middle and more of an inclusive, collaborative environment between whoever is leading the discussion and everybody who is in that audience.

“The E is ‘empowerment’ and that goes for staff and players. That people can take the initiative, that we want players to be at the centre of that ultimately. So creating spaces where people have the autonomy and ability to create discussions; open meeting rooms. When we toured Google, that was a really good takeaway, they have this idea of ‘collision spaces’; so creating spaces where people can organically meet.

“Then the A is for ‘achieve’. Not just winning but really just more about a process of excellence and really trying to be consistent and thoughtful about the details. I think with the details that we’re trying to get into with the design and setting up, we also realised that in this process of moving in we’re going to screw some things up. Or people are going to have even more ideas that we can think about until they’re actually in the space so I think that whole process of moving in, taking feedback, and saying what people need and want to make that space even more functional is going to be a priority once we do actually move into the space too.

“Finally, ‘respect’ is the R. Not just for each other and the team but our environment and our physical space is an element that can be a thread throughout our team.”

Here, we explore six more themes that define a good training environment.

1. Flow and efficiency

Efficiency is essential and that comes from frictionless circulation of athletes and staff. “You have everything on one level when it comes to training, preparation and recovery,” said Martin Buchheit of Paris St-Germain’s Ooredoo Training Center in 2019. Buchheit served as PSG’s Head of Performance between 2014 and 2020. He now serves as a high performance consultant with LOSC Lille in France’s Ligue 1. “Everything is central and everything is connected. From the locker room you enter straight into the mobility, stretching and warmup area, which is chronological as well. You get ready, you get changed, then you go for functional work. Afterwards, their recovery, the stretching and mobility area is connected to the locker room, the hydrotherapy area is connected to the locker room; it makes it very efficient to get those recovery routines straight after training.

Flow is also crucial to an aligned, interdisciplinary approach. “One of the things I’ve found historically is that people gravitate towards their own space,” said Mugford, who now serves as the Senior Vice President of Player Development & Performance at the New Jersey Devils. “The strength coaches may want to sit together and the trainers may want to sit together. People gravitate towards their own discipline and what we really want to make a commitment to doing is sharing that space so that we’re really maximising the collaboration. We’ve already made that shift over the past few years, but something as basic as that is really fundamental when we have affiliate staff and groups sitting together so that natural exchange happens as we’d like it to.”

2. Touchpoints for collaboration and creativity

The Jays’ upgrade made Mugford the ideal man to talk with Phil Cullen, the Senior Director of Basketball Operations & Organizational Development at the San Antonio Spurs, ahead of the team’s move to its $510m Human Performance Campus at The Rock at La Cantera, Texas. Cullen told an audience at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London that the facility will boast human-centred design characteristics that promote collaboration and creativity. “A lot of times it’s focused on the coaching element, which is extremely important, and player amenities, but how do you facilitate those casual collisions?” said Cullen. “The people that would be in your facility the most and have the most touchpoints are probably not who you think they are. For us, it was our equipment guy. Very often you’ll go back and the players are hanging out with the equipment guy. Why? Because they can just hang out. It’ll be the athletic trainer, it’ll be the guy who’s taping his ankles and helping the guy rehab.” This has been uppermost in the Spurs’ thinking, who have even installed TVs close to the ceiling of their current facility to help take players eyes away from their phones.

Cullen added: “How can we make sure we have the best possible experience so that we’re actually giving them opportunities in their career development; giving them all the resources they want to advance? So that when we go into the marketplace to recruit these guys to have elite talent in our building, we’re not only attracting elite basketball players and elite coaches, but also the staff around them. That’s where collaboration is key. For us, the human-centred design piece is really trying to break down those interactions and it starts when the players pull up into the facility; what’s that experience when they enter in, get out, walk into the parking lot? Who are they walking past when they go to the locker room?”

3. Create a pleasant work environment

Beyond upgraded modalities, modern practice facilities need to be appealing destinations and Art Horne, the Director of Organizational Growth & Team Development at the Boston Celtics, speaks with a sense of awe about the 40-foot glass windows that overlook the city of Boston at the Auerbach Center, which opened in 2018. “Natural light is a huge plus in Boston when it’s cold and dark,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute the following year. “It’s an inviting place,” added Jay Wessland, the Celtics’ Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, who sat next to Horne. “All that natural light and the city skyline; we needed a place that people are encouraged to go and work out in; that they didn’t think it was a chore.” Such considerations were uppermost in the minds of PSG, who plan to move into their Paris Saint-Germain Training Center later this year. The complex is to include the Club House, which the club’s official website says is: “Entirely glassed at ground-floor level to provide views out into the surrounding landscape and create an illusion of levitation. Inside, a shape entitled ‘The Blue Flight’ rises skywards, symbolising the ultimate goal of all of the Club’s athletes.”

4. If you’re building a new facility, be sure your architect listens

Cullen explained that San Antonio had an issue with the sports-focused architects whom they consulted. “They try to give you the best rendition of what they’ve just completed,” he said. “They’ll kind of tell you what you want rather than really listening to what you need.” The solution was to partner with an architect that had experience of other sectors. “All of us now are becoming small tech companies; the technology’s integrated in everything we do. Why aren’t we looking at technology companies and how they work to see how it can impact how we’ll work in the future?” The Spurs were left pondering aspects and thinking points they may not have otherwise considered.

5. Does your building have agility?

Training facilities need to allow for the preferences of head coaches and PSG’s Ooredoo Training Centre, even as it comes to the end of its life cycle, has that covered – quite literally. In line with numerous clubs in European football, PSG have a 45x14m tent, which covers a pitch of synthetic turf right next to one of their main training pitches. It is a useful tool for group work. “A lot of work can be done outside,” Buchheit explained. “A portion of the group can be training outside on the pitch and the other half can be doing some strength work or some other exercises in this area – they don’t need to go back inside to take their boots off and a coach can do rotations. It offers efficiency and it also offers flexibility; depending on the coach, we’ll be using the tent a lot or not. It’s about being able to allow all staff and coaches to run their programmes as they wish. The agility of the building today is a legacy of the different coaches who worked with us in the past and so these adaptations are the fruit of a collective process involving the current and past backroom staff.”

6. Future-proof your facility – leave some space free

It can be tempting to throw the kitchen sink at a new facility but the Spurs and Cullen are wary of doing so or being locked into one type of technology. “We’re trying to be intentional about not designing a space for one specific use because it can very quickly become a closet if it can’t be used for more than one thing,” he said. “By far the No 1 thing people tell us is make sure you have enough space. You may not have all the nice designs and be able to finish it all out, be able to brand it, be able to story-tell the way you want, but make sure you get the space because you want to future-proof and you can’t move around in it.”

By John Portch

In 2022, the Premier League, Football Association (FA) and English Football League (EFL) celebrated ten years of its Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP).

The EPPP was launched in 2012 to overhaul the English boys academy system and ensure the development of a higher quantity – and better quality – of ‘home grown’ players at a time when English talent pathways were widely considered to be lagging behind their counterparts in nations such as France, Germany and Spain. The EPPP was adopted across the academies of the English men’s football pyramid from the Premier League to League 2.

Today, the top line numbers released by the Premier League, FA and EFL indicate that the EPPP has had a positive impact. For example, there are 762 more academy graduates with professional contracts in the English leagues than there were during the 2012-13 season. There has also been progress at international level, where the England youth and senior men’s teams have enjoyed considerable success in recent years. The EPPP faces the constant challenge of trying to satisfy all its stakeholders, but English football is better at transitioning home-grown talent than it was in 2012.

The plan is overseen by the Premier League’s Director of Football Neil Saunders, who spoke about the progress made in the last decade at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium.

Saunders’ appearance came shortly after the publication of the EPPP’s first 10-year review and, here, the Leaders Performance Institute highlights six ways in which the initiative seeks to address some of our members’ most pressing concerns around talent pathways and player evaluation.

1. The predictors of success

What are the best predictors of success in youth and academy football? No club or organisation claims to have all the answers, but the EPPP has been designed to maximise the opportunity for those who enter talent pathways from under-nine and upwards. The approach is based on the Four Corner Model for long-term player development. The ‘four corners’ – technical, psychological, physical and social – were applied to the FA’s Future Game Plan in 2010, which according to the EPPP review, ‘has been adapted and tailored by each club according to their own playing and coaching philosophy.’ All clubs have developed an Academy Performance Plan in line with its vision, philosophy and strategy. These Academy Performance Plans also integrate ‘core programmes of the EPPP, such as: education, games programme, coaching, and performance support.’

2. The value placed on coaching expertise

In the discourse around talent pathways, some have bemoaned the fact that coaches have not always been credited for their inherent expertise, that they are too readily dismissed for not being objective. The EPPP works at a systemic level to underline the value placed in coaches and, since its inception, there has been an increase of approximately 50% in the number of coaching hours available to young players at English clubs. ‘Changes to the coaching offer since the EPPP have been led by three key factors,’ says the review. The first is ‘quality’. The EPPP set standards that focused on elements such as ‘different aspects of the game as a player progresses, including age-specific coaching and coaches.’ Then there is ‘access’, which is where the EPPP tried to bring coaching hours ‘in line with leading practices across multiple sports and disciplines’. Finally, the question of ‘development’, which is the effort to offer coaches ‘new individualised programmes and qualification requirements, tailored to each phase and Academy category.’

3. Collecting varied and valued views when player profiling

Through the aforementioned Academy Performance Plans, the EPPP enables multidisciplinary player profiling. ‘Performance support staff work closely with other key Academy staff groups to aid and inform player identification, development, and transition along the pathway,’ the review says. ‘Academies have increasingly taken an integrated and holistic approach to delivering individual programmes, tailored for age and stage of a player’s development’. ‘Generally, [the EPPP] has led to more informed discussions and a genuine appreciation of the capacity an individual player can express given the physical and mental limitations imposed by their stage of development,’ wrote Edd Vahid, the Head of Academy Operations at the Premier League – and Leaders Performance Advisor – in 2021 while still working at Southampton’s academy.

4. Combatting biases and underrepresentation

The fear of biases undermining decision-making in talent development and evaluation is universal. For its part, the EPPP has taken steps to abate the effects of relative age effect. ‘As a global phenomenon,’ says the review, ‘a higher proportion of boys in the Academy system are born in the first quarter of the academic year’. The system has organised festivals for children born towards the end of the academic year, but ‘analysis has shown that this bias does not necessarily translate to the likelihood to succeed in the professional game’. Indeed, the provisions of the EPPP understand that the transition to senior football is not one-size-fits-all, that player journeys are unique.

There are, however, three broad player ‘archetypes’ found across English football, according to the review. First is the ‘fast-tracked’ player, such as Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold, who broke into the senior team as a 19-year-old; second is the ‘focused development’ player, such as Harvey Barnes of Leicester City, who took targeted loans (temporary transferral of his registration from his parent club to a loan club) before making his Premier League debut; third is the ‘tiered progression’ player, such as Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins, who had extensive lower league experience (including some targeted loans) before making his Premier League debut at 25.

There is also the question of underrepresentation of players with Asian backgrounds in the academies of English football. During the 2021-22 season, and within the auspices of the EPPP, the South Asian Action Plan was launched in partnership with the anti-racism football charity Kick It Out. Says the review: ‘It aims to ensure that every player has the opportunity to achieve their potential in football through the delivery of research, staff training and Emerging Talent Festivals focused on equal access and improving pathways through the Academy system.’ It states that 648 players attended an Emerging Talent Festival during the 2021-22 season and there has been a more than 60% increase in academy scholars from black, Asian, mixed and other backgrounds in the last ten seasons. There is, however, much work still to be done on that front.

5. Self-evaluation for players and coaches

The EPPP provides a uniform structure to academies, who then issue players with bespoke individual development plans (IDPs). IDPs are useful for assessing how a player is developing against the principles set out on an academy’s talent pathway. The resulting contrasts can often validate the methods being used, one of which is self-reflection. IDPs provide the space for players to self-reflect with increasing emphasis as they progress along the pathway. The review says IDPs aim ‘to be aspirational and provide the right level of challenge to encourage the individual to maximise their potential as a player and as a person’.

Teams also place an emphasis on player and team analysis. ‘Academy players fully understand the demands of the game, with a deliberate focus on performance analysis education to equip them with the skillset to drive their own development, underpinned with a unique club philosophy and data-driven approach.’

The EPPP also supports a player’s academic progression and seeks to provide both life skills and what the review terms ‘life-enriching experiences’. According to the review, more than 20,000 players have attended the academy life skills and personal development programme since its introduction.

As for coaches on the EPPP, they are invited to join a ‘community of learning’ as part of English football’s Integrated Coaching Strategy, which is ‘a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver and sustain world-leading coach and manager education, development and career pathways across English Men’s and Women’s professional football.’

6. Continual reviewing and updating of the plan

During its ten-year existence, the EPPP has never stood still. Tweaks have been made across the board, whether it’s the academy games programme, which was redesigned and enhanced during the 2013-14 season or the creation of the Professional Game Academy Audit Company, between 2018-19 and 2020-21, which provides ‘an independent and comprehensive audit of rules and standards to clubs.’ Competition rules will continually be updated, new processes introduced, and priority areas identified.

Images courtesy of Q-Collar

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Tom Friend

Perhaps the most dangerous play in the contact sport of soccer — and, yes, soccer’s a contact sport — is the sky-high goalie punt.

Meghan Klingenberg of the NWSL’s Portland Thorns FC cringes at the thought of it. She has been taught, as a defender, to circle under even the most towering kick and head it away from her goal, which is basically tantamount to getting kicked in the skull.

“Have you ever stuck your face in front of a ball that’s going 60 miles an hour?” Klingenberg asked Wednesday. “That’s what it is.”

“It’s spiraling down out of the top of the stadium, and you know it’s going to suck, but you have to [head] it. It feels scary. It feels like shit when it hits you, and it’s not something anybody wants to do. Like the worst thing ever. I get so mad at those goalkeepers.”

That, in a nutshell, explains why Klingenberg is practically on a crusade to promote the Q-Collar, an FDA-approved [US Food and Drug Administration] device worn around the neck that gently compresses the jugular vein to increase blood flow to the skull — theoretically limiting the brain from shifting around dangerously on contact.

The Q-Collar, a neck-worn device that provides stability to protect the brain from head impact, has gained popularity among the Portland Thorns as Meghan Klingenberg along with teammates Emily Menges and Rocky Rodriguez.

During the NWSL championship game in late October — when Portland defeated the Kansas City Current, 2-0 — it’s no coincidence that Klingenberg’s teammates Emily Menges and Rocky Rodriguez also wore the Q-Collar. The technology, developed by Q30 Innovations and first available on the US Market in September of 2021, is being deployed in physically volatile sports such as football and lacrosse. Dallas’ running back Tony Pollard and tight end Dalton Schultz are among those wearing it this season in the NFL, and every player from the men’s Premier Lacrosse League has been equipped with the device, as well.

But Klingenberg, who organically heard about the Q-Collar while watching a biomimicry special on Hulu about five years ago, is taking it all a step further. She wears it proudly during games, dives on the field like a banshee and will advocate the device to anyone and everyone who asks.

“We block shots with our heads, we go up and take elbows to the face to try and get a header before another player — it’s a very physical sport,” she told SportTechie. “And so whenever I’m defending in the box, I might not head a ball, but I might be bumping attackers and making sure they can’t get to the ball. And you might fall over, you might run into the goalkeeper. It’s all of these things.”

“What I like most about the Q-Collar is I don’t have to worry about that ever. I just throw it on, and then I know that I’m protected, and then I can just go out and be me. And, honestly, that’s the most valuable thing it does is allowing me to be me. Because when I’m me, I kick ass. And when I kick ass, my team does well.”

SportTechie Daily: Subscribe to our morning newsletter for sports technology news and analysis.

Klingenberg’s quasi-campaign to inundate the sports world with Q-Collars is partly subtle, partly fear, partly — and this is her word — synchro-destiny. She is a vegan who drives a hybrid car or e-bikes, takes long walks through Portland’s Washington Park and has always been “environmentally conscious.” And when she saw on that 2017 biomimicry show that the Q-Collar was inspired by the odd behavior of woodpeckers knocking their heads against trees, she knew this was a science for her.

“I just don’t believe coincidences are coincidences,” she says. “I think they’re like little winks from the universe, and I try and like follow them whenever they happen. And this just seemed to be too great of a wink from the universe to pass up.”

Aware that she had been crashing on soccer fields since she was six and figuring she’d suffered a myriad of minor concussions throughout her journey from the U.S. National team to the pros, she “cold-called” Q30 Innovations for a demo of the device. Because it was still being researched in 2017, they told her: ‘sorry, another time’.

That time came approximately a year later when she wrapped it around her neck for the first time. She wasn’t sure if it would choke her, cut off her circulation or set her free. Turned out to be the latter.

“Well, anything around the neck feels weird,” she says. “We’re not used to that kind of pressure being around our necks. And I think for some people, at the beginning at least, can be a little triggering. Like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got this pressure around my neck. I don’t like that.’ But… after wearing it for about a week, I barely noticed it.”

“I haven’t noticed any concussions or any dizziness since wearing this, and, honestly, I don’t even notice that I’m wearing it at all. I actually notice it more when I don’t wear it now. When we have a run-through practice where we’re not kicking any balls and we’re just literally stretching and things like that, it feels weird to be on a field without it on. That, to me, is the best part — that I get all that protection without thinking about it for one second.”

It’s never been her plan to shove the product down (or on) people’s throats. But ever since she began wearing it, she’s found that a popular Google search query has become: Meghan Klingenberg’s neck. As for her teammates, they don’t have to Google her; they just started asking about the technology straight to her face.

“My teammates are like, ‘What are you doing? What are you wearing? And they’re very skeptical at first because anything new in soccer is like, ‘Nah.’ But honestly, the best analogy I give them is: if you take a plastic water bottle and you fill it up halfway and you put a marble in there and you shake it around, it hits the walls of the bottle really hard. But if you fill it up all the way and put the marble in and you shake it around, it doesn’t hit the walls as hard. And that’s what I tell people the Q-Collar does for my brain.”

“And the light bulb goes on immediately. And they understand. They’re like, ‘Ohh, that makes so much sense.’ So I just really encourage my teammates to try it in the offseason and see if they like it. Honestly, I say, ‘Give it two weeks. If at the end of two weeks, you’re still noticing it, then it’s not for you. But if at the end of two weeks, you haven’t noticed it, then this is definitely for you.’”

Her two teammates — the defender Menges and the midfielder Rodriguez — each wore the Q-Collar this past year, and defender Becky Sauerbrunn has promised to try it this current off-season. And that’s not to mention the dozen NWSL opponents who have sauntered up to Klingenberg to ask about the device, as well.

“Oh yeah, they’ll ask me in the tunnels, after games, when they’re just chatting,” Klingenberg says. “They want to know. Some people are like, ‘What is this?’ They’re like, ‘Is this a way for your coach to communicate with you during [games].’ I’m like, ‘There’s no frigging chance I would ever wear something like that. There’s no way I want somebody chirping in my ear in the middle of a match. No chance.’ But then I give them the quick spiel about the water bottle and just chat about that, and they seem really interested. I would say probably like 30 to 40 percent of people want it.”

“I mean, I would advocate this for every kid in the entire world who’s playing a sport. Because, I mean, I wish that I had this since I was 6 years old. I’m serious. It really bothers me that I have 20 years of experience of heading a ball without the Q-collar on.”

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

By John Portch

As 2022 comes to an end, there has already been some considered reflection upon the last 12 months – but what about the year ahead?

At this year’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium, the Leaders Performance Institute spoke to a number of our speakers to ask: what are they most optimistic about heading into 2023?

There answers were varied and spanned two articles – Part I can be found here – but learning and development kept creeping up in these conversations.

For example, Neil Saunders, the Director of Football at the English Premier League, spoke onstage about the league’s Elite Player Performance Plan. “We are 10 years since the launch of the Elite Player Performance Plan and we’ll be updating our strategy and setting new aims and objectives for the system moving forward,” he said. “And that’s really exciting because there’s a great opportunity to build on some of the amazing work that’s taking place already but also to address areas of opportunity and try to improve what we’re doing to make sure that our work in player development is not just fit for now but also for the future.”

Joel Shinofield, the Managing Director of Sport Development at USA Swimming, answered the question in a similar vein. “We just launched a brand new technology product, we’ve revamped it completely, we’ve revamped all of our coach education, so those are at their very early launch stages and seeing those become more mature, seeing coaches access the new data we’re going to provide to them,” he said.

“The idea behind our data project and our technology project was to make more resources available to our members; and so what I want to see is the utilisation of that because I know that’s going to be the value of the whole project is that our clubs, our teams, our coaches, our membership has access to data that will help them improve the sport and improve their experience.”

USA Swimming is one of the most mature programs in elite sport and stands in contrast in some respects to a newer sport, such as competitive climbing. “We’re in the process of putting a full-time coaching team in place, seeing them evolve and develop in support of those athletes, and really just continue the learning,” said Lorraine Brown, the Head of Performance at GB Climbing.

“We’ve got a huge amount to learn, not only just about high performance sport but actually more about the sport and what it takes to support these amazing athletes. We’ve got brilliant athletes who despite the system have really achieved some amazing things. So how do we really help to facilitate them to continue to do that and provide some added value to their own environments? And part of that is making sure that as well as the experiences, actually the medical support around them and making sure that they stay fit and healthy as the volume and pressure increases. The pressure can have that negative effect of making them more susceptible to injury and illness. So how do we stay on top of that?”

Beyond performance itself, Jatin Patel, the Head of Diversity & Inclusion at the Rugby Football Union, is optimistic that his work can continue to have an impact on the sport of rugby union.

“I’m really looking forward to having more conversations around and spreading the importance of inclusion from grassroots all the way up to professional,” he said.

“Guiding and advising people how we can do it better, learning more myself, being new to rugby, and ultimately the longer-term aim of bettering the game and future-proofing it and ultimately reaching our objective and wanting to be a sport that’s more reflective of society.”

These sentiments are shared by Patel’s session moderator, Shona Crooks, the Head of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion at Management Futures.

She said: “I’m excited to learn more in this space. I think because I work in DE&I everyone expects you to have all the answers and it’s nice as I evolve, as organisations evolve, as society evolves, and so coming up with new ways to do things, new options, new training, new skills; how I can help to upskill people, how I can bring and move the conversation on. Because, ultimately, the end goal is that I do myself out of a job, that, actually, we’re so inclusive and everyone feels that sense of belonging, that DE&I just doesn’t exist anymore. How do I help each year to chip away at that?”

We then wrap up this two-part series with a reminder that in times of uncertainty, whether that be through growth or a more general sense of volatility, your fundamental principles will be invaluable.

“There’s always the unknown of what’s coming,” said Craig McRae, the Senior Coach of Collingwood FC, who are developing as a team under his tutelage. “That’s an attraction and an excitement in itself. For us, it’s about repeating behaviours. Putting ourselves into a position that we were last year and in our game like any game, you don’t start at the top, you’ve got to work your way up the ladder. I think that’s part of the excitement of our journey.”

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

High performers in both sport and business tend to overcomplicate things, on the other hand, they cannot just assume they can go it alone.

Dan Lawrence, the Head of Performance at Matchroom Boxing, watched his former boxer, the now-retired George Groves, learn this in real time.

“Yes, he had a team. He had myself, a conditioning coach, we had his head coach at the time,” Lawrence tells the Leaders Performance Podcast. “He was steering the ship at that time, whereas I don’t think that was the right way to go.”

In fact, “you have to have a cohesive team working with one sole goal”.

Here, Lawrence discusses his work in combat sports while also touching upon:

• The reasons why people over-complicate human performance [6:00];
• The differences in working with boxers and footballers [10:00];
• Working smarter, not harder [13:00];
• How the role of the S&C is evolving [23:00].

Dan Lawrence Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

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

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?

A podcast brought to you by our Partners Elite Performance Partners

“The most important thing when stepping up from being an individual contributor to being responsible in a management position is that it’s not about you any more,” Max Lankheit, the San Jose Earthquakes’ Director of High Performance, tells EPP’s Founding Partner Dave Slemen.

The duo are discussing the traits needed when stepping into a leadership position for the first time.

“The important thing that people need to understand, in my opinion, is that you can only hunt one rabbit at a time,” adds Lankheit.

“So either you can work on your skills or help others work on their skills.”

Max, a former youth athlete and acting student, talks to Dave at EPP about his non-linear journey to the top of elite sport amongst other topics.

EPP are a performance consultancy and search firm highly regarded across sport and, for this episode, Dave poses the questions that cover:

• The non-sporting elements of Max’s background [2:30];
• Why the stigma around ‘manipulation’ is undeserved [10:00];
• The importance of the environment in helping people to thrive and reach their potential [25:00];
• The difference between purpose and values, vision and objectives [35:20].

Dave Slemen Twitter | LinkedIn

Max Lankheit Twitter | LinkedIn