By John Portch

Phil Church is the Senior Professional Game Coach Development Lead at England Football Learning, which oversees the Football Association’s [FA] education pathways for youth and senior coach development and technical director development.

It was a role the Leaders Performance Institute asked him about in a recent edition of the Leaders Performance Podcast.

“Our mission statement is probably a good place to start,” said Church, “and it’s to increase the number of English-qualified leaders, which is managers, coaches and technical directors, working at the highest levels of the game.”

We spoke at length about the FA’s suite of programmes and courses as it works towards fulfilling England Football Learning’s mission statement.

Attention then turns to Church’s strengths as a leader.

“Have you read the book Range?” he asks. The Leaders Performance Institute responds in affirmation having read David Epstein’s book in preparation for his presentation at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Atlanta.

Epstein makes the case for an extensive sampling period for all youngsters who play sport. To make his case he cites 18-time tennis grand slam champion Roger Federer, who played a range of sports in his youth and brought those skillsets from other sports to his game as a tennis player when he settled on a career in tennis.

“I think I’m the expert generalist,” says Church, who goes on to explain himself in greater detail.

What do you regard as your greatest strength?

PC: I think my greatest strength comes in two parts. It’s my experience throughout the last 25 years because it’s varied, and lots of people have varied experiences, so I think I know a lot of things about a lot of things. I started working in community football and I loved it; I had to work with key stakeholders, the youth offending teams. I ran an inclusion, employment and training programme for West Ham United. And that exposed me to some fantastic people, some brilliant work, and it wasn’t about football, it was about trying to help some young people get through some stuff. There was some brilliant stuff around that. I was at the PFA [Professional Footballers’ Association] as a coach developer, working for the players’ union, I’ve worked in clubs as the head of coaching and had work around the youth team and the senior game areas and now I’m leading a team at the FA. So my experience is a part of it. And then I think I have a good level of communication, so I think I can impart information and reason. I suppose communication and influence would probably be the part I’d link into that, where I think I can add impact.

What strength do you admire most in others?

PC: Resilience, I think. I use a quote quite often and I said it to my daughter a few weeks ago: ‘You’re only limited by courage, tenacity and vision’. And I believe that. There’s some brilliant people doing some amazing things and life throws lots of challenges at you and sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s good; and that tenacity is linked to the pitfalls you have and successes you have too – sometimes they are hard to deal with – so I think the level of resilience; some of the things that people go through, some of the stories of people who were in the Commonwealth Games or the Women’s Euros. Some of the journeys they’ve had and the way they’ve moved through those is fantastic.

What is the key to strong teamwork?

PC: Trust is at the heart of it. And ‘trust’ is just one word. But underneath the trust comes a whole layer of time, relationship-building, competence. And you get trust in different ways. You get trust from being good at something, you get trust from being consistent, behaving in certain ways all the time, you get trust from modelling good behaviour, you get trust from doing what you say you’ll do, which isn’t always as common as you might hope it would be in the world. So underneath trust, there’s so many facets that if you’ve got it, it’s strong. It’s easy to lose, and you can lose it really quickly. It takes a long time to get but it’s easy to lose quickly. But if you’ve got trust you can achieve lots of things with lots of people.

How will you look to get stronger in your role?

PC: I’m always looking to learn from other people. I am very fortunate to be able to work with and alongside lots of fantastic people from diverse backgrounds, from different lenses, with different skillsets. Partly for me it’s intentional. So I’m driven by developing high performance, developing strong cultures, by helping to develop people, and within that space it allows me to get access to some unbelievable people who are doing some fantastic things. I’ve got that passion for developing and improving and I’ve got loads of people around me who I think are magnificent. Part of it is probably the self-reflection bit. So I’m around it a lot, I see it a lot, and I’m working out how I can apply part of that to myself is probably key.

Listen to the full interview with Phil Church below:

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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By John Portch

“I want to reiterate the point: no one can predict injury – it’s as simple as that.”

Ben Mackenzie, a Data Research Analyst at Zone7, an injury risk forecast and load management platform, is  talking at the organisation’s webinar titled ‘Blending Sports Science and Data Science’.

“Quite often, when people refer to injury prediction, I think the mind goes to ‘this injury, on this day, at this time, as a result of this action’ – and it really isn’t any of those.”

Instead, Zone7 can dip into its ‘data lake’ of over 200 million hours of performance metrics and over 10,000 injury instances to produce an injury forecast based on clean, consistent data.

Still, data science remains misunderstood across elite sport. “Sometimes data analysts and data scientists get blended together now that we have analytics departments,” said moderator Dr David T Martin, the Chief Scientist, Director of Performance at Performance Health Science. “Some people will say ‘I’m not a data scientist, I’m an analyst’.”

Mackenzie and Martin are joined in conversation by Gavin Benjafield, the Director of Performance at Los Angeles FC, who have worked with Zone7 for two years.

Mackenzie uses Benjafield and the club to further illustrate his point on injury forecasting. “We’re able to identify that ‘this’ player, if he continues on the path that he is, he might be outside a certain range, might be at risk or is a risk of an injury as a result of being outside of the norms for LAFC’s training data. Therein lies the risk forecasting. This player either needs to do more, we suggest that he does more, or we suggest that he does less to mitigate that risk of injury.”

Practitioners from across the globe logged on to listen to the trio discuss the distinction between sports science and data science, the misconceptions that abound, as well as the steps teams can take to better use the data they are collecting.

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute highlights the other key insights from the session.

Sports science vs data science

There is a perception in the sports science world that data science is just another element of the job. Benjafield shares the story of a job opening at LAFC. The position was for a data scientist and the job description made that clear, yet just 25% of the 200-plus applicants worked with data. “Sports science: your understanding of physiology, psychology, biomechanics, all those components are nothing to do with data science,” said Mackenzie. Whereas the data scientist’s ability includes “[collecting] data, clean data, and understand multiple programming languages as well as the ability to clearly express what your findings are – they are completely different disciplines.”

Should you outsource your data science?

To illustrate a point around using consultants, Benjafield spoke of his ability as a handyman around the house. He is adept at certain task but draws the line at electrics. At LAFC, Zone7’s forecasting services and AI fulfil the role of the electrician. “If you’re just going to absolutely outsource everything then you’re just going to be an organisation with a ton of consultants running around you. You’re actually not going to have any identity,” said  Benjafield. “We’re not going to become a consultant circus, we’re going to strategically pick those that we believe are the electricians that we feel comfortable doing that by ourselves, but we still want to take ownership and do a lot of the things ourselves otherwise we become spectators in our own department and I don’t think anyone wants that.”

As Mackenzie said: “A sentence that is thrown around at Zone7 quite a lot: we are a weapon the practitioner’s armoury. You have the tool box, we are just the hammer. There are many other tools that can get jobs done or can be used for other jobs. It is up to the practitioner to use their skill, their interpersonal skill and their skills in other sports science disciplines, combining all those elements and information provided by Zone7 for them to come to an informed opinion and not data-led.”

Creating actionable steps

Actionable steps are essential when using data, as 100 metrics cannot be manipulated by someone in Benjafield’s shoes across 25 athletes. Minor adjustments and corrections are a good start. LAFC worked with Zone7, who retrospectively analysed a season of data, to hone in on five GPS-related metrics. “Three of those we were already monitoring closely, two of them were not, so I think that just helped us to get actionable items,” said Benjafield, who is mindful of the challenge of pleasing coaches who want as many players as possible available.

The future

Mackenzie and Benjafield wrapped things up by pondering where the future relationship between data science and sports science. “People are fearful of losing jobs or being overtaking by data or AI,” said Mackenzie of the sports world. “I think it requires a change of mindset, a change in appreciation of different skillsets, and an understanding that a different skillset offers different things. That’s where it needs to start. Mindset, openness and willingness.”

Relationships are important for Benjafield too. He said: “I’d like to still be in an industry where we are wearing fewer external devices but we are collecting more data and richer data; and that is translated. I don’t want to lose the relationship with the athlete.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Tom Friend

NFL implemented a gradual ‘ramp up’ practice regimen during this year’s training camps, based on recent wearable data that showed an incremental increase in practice length can help curtail soft-tissue injuries.

According to the NFLPA’s General Counsel and Head of Medical Innovation Sean Sansiveri, all 32 NFL teams—besides being required for the first time to place GPS trackers on every player—had to adhere to the new health and safety protocol at training camp.

“We’ve now mandated a gradual ramp for the first time this season,” said Sansiveri, referring to the revision that was approved at this spring’s annual league meeting. “We had an acclimatization and contact integration period the last two years because of Covid, but this will be a whole different approach to that, and we anticipate seeing a reduction in the lower extremity injuries because of it.”

Sansiveri said that by monitoring players the last two “Covid” seasons through wearables designed primarily by Zebra and Catapult, the league determined that a spike in soft-tissue injuries came from “overbearing load” during early-season workouts.

“One of the things, very interestingly, that we learned from the GPS trackers was the teams that had a gradual duration ramp up,” Sansiveri told SportTechie. “Meaning start one practice at 90 minutes, the next one at an hour and five minutes, then an hour and 20 minutes—the teams that didn’t do that had almost a 25 percent higher risk of lower extremity injuries.

“But we wouldn’t be here if not for the use of the X,Y data and being able to monitor load [with wearables]. The information has turned out to be tremendously valuable for injury mitigation. And [this season] we want to look at intensity, we want to look at conditioning tests, we want to look at the number of padded practices. The CBA limits it to 16 during the training camp period, but not all clubs use all 16. And so looking at from the pure injury side, plus the load and the movement standpoint, we’re able to piece together with the help of our engineers a pretty clear picture of what’s contributing to the injuries.”

The NFLPA has to sign off on any wearables deployed by the NFL on its players and has formed a “joint sensor committee” with the league to ensure that the devices are “validated for its intended use and what the potential arms or downsides are.” Sansiveri, for instance, says some devices (such as sweat patches) are “bleeding over into bio-specimen” collection, and those need to be consented to by the NFLPA, as well.

Last season, Sansiveri said approximately 25 teams used various GPS devices during practice—either from Zebra, Catapult, STATSports or Kinexon. But by having all 32 teams gradually ramp up practice length during this year’s training camps, the data should be more definitive going forward. Last season’s Super Bowl Champion Los Angeles Rams were particularly lauded for their load management tracking during every preseason and regular season practice, which led to a reduction in injuries while winning nine of their final ten games.

“You can definitely bucket the teams in terms of the ones who are more effective than others,” Sansiveri said. “Depends on how you look at it. Whether you look at total number of injuries, which may not necessarily be indicative. Because you can have more contact injuries, for instance, versus non-contact and load-based. So if you break it down in terms of the duration ramp-up thing that I mentioned, there is a clear difference in the number of lower extremity injuries based on that. And that’s one of the reason we’re pursuing this the way we are.”

“As I said, the duration ramp-up question was primarily based on the two Covid seasons worth of data. But you can bolster that by looking at the piecemeal data sets on this issue we had previously. So I would say the study really solidified two years ago, and it’s sort of been in the works much longer than that.”

Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, used the Rams’ game-wrecker Aaron Donald as a prime load management example in a conversation last February with SportTechie.

“Aaron Donald,” says Vincent, pronouncing the name with emphasis. “Nobody gets more double and triple-teamed in the National Football League over the last 7, 8 years than this man. In the trenches. That’s monitoring, that’s [load] managing. They have a lot of players in that situation where they don’t miss a lot of game time. But that is being properly managed through the head coach [Sean McVay] and the head trainer, Reggie [Scott]. So that’s everyone being on the same page. You can’t do it and be effective if it’s not a team. You can’t have one side of the house saying, ‘Data is it,’ and the other side of the house saying, ‘Nope, it doesn’t work.’ You can’t have sports science over here and someone says, ‘I don’t believe in sports science.’”

“[The Rams are] so cutting edge. When you look at their injury prevention, their injury reduction platform, it’s data science. They are no question light years ahead.”

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

By John Portch

There is a common perception in football that if you finish lower in the table than you did the previous season then you have failed.

The truth is not always so simple. Women’s Super League [WSL] side Brighton & Hove Albion finished sixth in 2020-21 and followed that with a seventh-place finish in 2021-22. Last season was their fourth as a WSL team, having received a top-tier licence in 2017, and the first where they were unable to match or better their previous position.

It is a source of frustration for Manager Hope Powell, who shares the view that outcomes are not everything. She says: “We were really disappointed because we should have finished sixth, but it was still a really successful season because of some of the performances we had. The way the team performed, the way the staff performed – we put things in place and we delivered in lots of areas. It’s been a successful season for us and, for me, success is defined in so many different ways on and off the pitch.”

Powell, who also admits that she “cannot ignore the league table”, describes the challenge of taking on the WSL’s wealthier clubs as Brighton’s “greatest opportunity”. “From a football perspective, challenging those bigger, more established clubs that have been in the high end of the game for so many more years than we have is a daily challenge for Brighton, in a good way,” she continues.

The Seagulls are looking to meet that challenge both on and off the field, with Powell discussing player development in the second part of her interview with the Leaders Performance Institute. In the third and final instalment, she reflects on the culture at Brighton and the steps she and her team are taking to develop a high performance environment conducive to challenging for the top four in the WSL. “That’s where we want to be and we have to strive to be better than they are [the clubs who make up the current top four], to shift our club from where we are now to where we want to be.”

A nimble approach

Powell explains that at the end of the WSL season, the team generally holds a review, which is a process led by her psychologist [Beth Yeoman was appointed as Senior Psychologist for Women and Girls in May 2022]. “It’s standard stuff,” says Powell. “What went well, what we want to keep doing, what we want to let go and what new things we want to introduce.”

The most important thing, she continues, is the weekly conversations between Powell and her staff about the environment and the culture. “Is it working? What do we need to do now? What’s important? What isn’t important? I find that to be a weekly conversation so that we don’t just say ‘all the way through the season we’re going to do this’ and then at the end of the season decide if it’s been good or bad. I think it’s just about conversations and setting the tone of where you’d like the environment of the people you’re working with to be. I don’t think it’s too onerous.”

The Leaders Performance Institute suggests to Powell that it sounds like cultural mapping. “You can call it that,” she replies, “I think it’s just about having open and honest conversations. Certainly for me and my team. How does the environment feel? How are the players? What do we need to change? How do we need to engage them more? What about their voices? Is it too much? Too little? If that’s called ‘cultural mapping’ I don’t know, but that’s what we do on a regular basis.”

Powell has learned, during the course of her coaching career, to trust her gut. It served her well in the 15 years she spent as Manager of the England women’s senior team between 1998 and 2013 and so far during her five years at Brighton.

“I really believe that coaches have a gut feeling,” she says. “‘How does this feel today?’ Or during the week I’ll ask myself ‘how is training?’ Maybe it didn’t feel or look right. ‘What’s going on?’ Or, ‘this feels good – what happened? The players seem happy’. It’s those conversations and I get those feelings and so I like to challenge those feelings. ‘Am I missing something? It doesn’t feel right’. Generally my gut tells me ‘stick to it, Hope’ and every time I don’t, it doesn’t quite work out.”

Adding value

Powell speaks fondly of her coaching staff. “I believe I have the right people,” she says. “The most important thing is providing the opportunity for the team to say ‘this is what I think we should do next’. I am not precious about what we do as long as it adds value. If we think that it will work and we try it, that’s where the constant conversation is important. ‘It doesn’t [work]? Well we’ve tried it. I want the staff and, more importantly, the players to own it, be engaged, to have some pride in what they do and add value.

“It’s a chance for the multidisciplinary team to go, ‘this was really good, I didn’t think this worked, I think we need to change it, I don’t think it’s right, Hope.’ ‘What do you think then?’ I’m very much ‘what do you think?’ because even though I’m the leader, I’m not – we’re all leading it, they’re all experts. I manage it and I make the overall decision because if it doesn’t work, I lose my job. I get the input of everybody. My favourite words are ‘what do you think? What are your thoughts?’ That’s how I work. If you can’t trust your team or the people you’re working with then they’re not the right people.”

There is occasional turnover of staff and Powell will pay more attention to the work of new staff. “And then those conversations become less and less,” she says. “‘Just tell me what you are doing so I know’. ‘Is this OK?’ ‘ Yeah, go for it. Let me know when it’s done.’

She also senses when new staff members are keen to make a good impression. “They come in, and try to make an impression, as people do, and I have to say to them ‘don’t just say something because you feel that you have to. You’re not going to be judged because you don’t say something – say something only when you can add value. If there’s nothing to say then you don’t need to say anything’, but people want to make an impression. You make impressions in other ways, don’t you, it’s not all about having the last word. It’s not always copying in everyone in an email, which absolutely drives me crazy. Why do people do that? Because they’re trying to look good. That’s really sad, actually. That’s the world in which we live. I’m just not like that.”

CPD and mentorship

Powell is a big believer in keeping herself fresh and current through presentations, seminars, podcasts and conversations with other coaches. “When you have been on a journey as I have been, everyone thinks that you stop learning,” says Powell, who also serves as a coaching mentor with Fifa, Uefa, the Premier League and the Football Association. “The younger coaches come through and they want to absorb all of the information and quite often forget that you are still on a journey and you are still learning yourself. I think it’s really important as older coaches that we have that capacity and we have the will to do that.”

Of her own mentors, Powell recalls a former coach who, in his day job, was a senior manager at BT. “A lot of people reported into him and that really helped me when I went into management,” she continues. “It wasn’t about football, it was about managing groups of people, having a strategy, having a plan, how you communicate to groups of people, how you share your vision with your team and all of those sorts of things. I think if you can get a mentor outside of your sport, that is really powerful.” What about mentors within football? “I also value the people I talk to and the mentors I had in the sport because they understand it from the sporting context. If you can get a balance of both it’s really helpful.”

Brighton will provide and finance regular CPD opportunities both internally and externally for staff members. “The staff, or ‘coaches’ as we call everybody, have a responsibility to deliver CPD so that it enhances their knowledge, their learning and their development. I think it’s really important,” says Powell. “So all my staff have to deliver whether they’re a junior therapist or a senior practitioner. It’s very important that everyone gets the opportunity to deliver and to lead. It’s not just about the most experienced person in the room giving all the information.”

Diversity as a competitive edge

Powell is a pioneer in English football. She was the youngest-ever Manager of England when she was appointed, aged 31, in 1998. She was also the first woman and first black person to take the position.

Her role at Brighton affords her the opportunity to directly impact the diversity of her staff. “I guess I’m in a good position as I have the responsibility of recruiting and hiring staff,” she says. “You try to get the best players and the best staff possible. I quite like an equal split of male and female.” She points to the fact that she has a female assistant manager [Amy Merricks] and a male goalkeeping coach [Alex Penny].

“I think it’s important to have a diverse group. We have people who are from abroad as well, not just English. We’re down by the south coast and the demographic is very white and middle-class. I’m very happy to recruit from closer to London – I live in London – and I’m quite aware and mindful of that, to make sure the group is diverse, because then you get diverse thought. Otherwise you get everything that’s exactly the same and that just doesn’t work.”

Powell actively tries to provide employment opportunities for women because they are all too often lacking in English football. “I want the best person but I’m also mindful of the diversity in the group and, if I’m honest, I’m a bit biased because of opportunities for women in the game. If there’s a good female, I look at the female first if I think they’re good enough. They’re more likely to get the job simply because the opportunities for women aren’t afforded as much as they are for men, especially in football.”

She prides herself in her honesty but also in her support for her staff. “I think if you were to ask any member of staff if they feel supported they’d all say ‘yes’,” she says, reflecting on  Brighton’s progress on her watch. “Everyone believes in what you’re trying to achieve and everyone is prepared to work together.”

By John Portch

• Combine physical, mental and tactical aims

• What can you ask athletes to do in the ‘other 22 hours’?

• Load manipulation is the last resort

Representative training design

The international footballing environment, as Bryce Cavanagh explained, inevitably limits the amount of time coaches and staff can spend with athletes. With this in mind, Cavanagh, who serves as the Head of Performance at the Football Association, told an audience at 2020’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Total High Performance that efficiency can be found in representative training design. “Firstly, we look at areas that stretch us on the field,” said Cavanagh, who works primarily with the England men’s senior team. “We tend to look at those denser periods, those peak periods, and we feel they tend to be represented by three things commonly. One is the intensity; generally the intensity goes up during those periods, so you’ve got a physical construct or a physical risk around fatigue; or an opportunity. Clarity, so players needing better decision making, performing under pressure and whatnot. And the other one is execution; execution of skills. That’s where they either break down or you execute them correctly. So there’s a physical, psychological and a tactical, technical construct there.”

Psychological stress under fatigue

Cavanagh recommends recreating the stressful conditions of match play to the greatest possible extent in training drills at both youth and senior levels. “We’re really careful to look at those peak periods and look at those three constructs [intensity, clarity and execution] and try to create opportunities in training where we’re hitting two or three of those in what we call ‘mutualism’ or mutual benefit between them,” he said. “An example might be something that’s got a technical or tactical outcome but we’re doing it under physical stress that you would find in those peak periods in the game. We can obviously feed back live and feed back GPS metrics around what some of those look like from the rolling average research that many practitioners do these days.”

In some ways, such sessions can serve as talent ID opportunities. “All the way down the pathway it’s important for us because we get such limited time with players; and coaches get limited time to assess the players,” Cavanagh continued. “Having more and more representative training is almost like having a talent ID tour in a way because you’re seeing how the players stand up in a game-like situation. If you haven’t seen a lot of a guy who’s come into an England camp, you can get a better indication of how he’s going to perform when he gets to the business end.”

The ‘other 22 hours’

Players arrive at international camps in different physical states. This necessitates an assessment that eschews traditional methods of gap analysis – “we have not got the luxury of 52 weeks of unlimited datasets”. There is, however, good communication with the English Premier League clubs that supply the bulk of England players, which enables the sharing of some metrics, such as GPS data. There is also a lot of relationship-building with the players that come into the squads.

Cavanagh and his colleagues also understand that every activity in training or during a match comes at a cost and, if the gap is too large, it may see a player miss training or even a match, the first thought goes to what can be achieved away from training. “We try to look at other areas to offset that set of scales,” he added, referring to the “other 22 hours”. “So if the cost is X, what can we do to offset that cost? Chronically, you increase the capability of the player and more capable players recover better, handle the cost better, but the more acute stuff we’ve gone after really hard. We’ve got a camp, we’ve got a captive audience, we’ve got them 24-7, so we’ve gone after the sleep, nutrition and recovery stuff.

“What can we do there to offset that cost acutely before the last resort being the load manipulation or training manipulation?”

By John Portch

Hope Powell describes a situation that sounds common enough across the football world.

“This is no disrespect to players, but they want to get there yesterday,” says the Manager of Women’s Super League [WSL] side Brighton & Hove Albion.

“I am always telling them it’s a long process, a marathon not a sprint, and you’re not going to go from one to ten in five minutes. They’re so used to getting everything now.”

She readily admits that after 15 years as Manager of the England women’s senior team, it has been a challenge for her at Brighton, where she was appointed in 2017. There is also considerable player turnover in the women’s game each off-season, which necessitates the development of in-house talent for all WSL sides.

“You have to move with the times, you have to stay current and fresh, you have to understand Generation Z,” Powell continues. “Club football is new to me. I know after five years in a club environment it seems long but it’s very new.” In her previous post, she would see players during national camps and international competitions. As a club manager, she sees them almost every day of the season. “That has been an eye-opener in the last five years and it’s made me look at myself as a manager and how I perform on a daily basis.”

That said, Powell admits her remit as Manager with England was not too dissimilar. “I’m responsible for the pathway of women’s football at Brighton and I did exactly the same with the FA [Football Association] and I really enjoy working with young players on the development side; working with different coaches and different teams.”

Powell, who previously spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute of her strengths as a coach and the leadership traits she most admires, here reflects on Brighton’s role in developing talent and ensuring players are prepared for the transitions they face.

Adapting to the players’ needs

Powell sees part of her role as a guide. She says: “Young players want it ‘now’ and obviously I don’t have all the answers – my job is to guide them to problem-solve.” Inevitably, her squad is made up of youthful talents seeking to make their mark in the sport and seasoned campaigners some of whom, in their early to mid-30s, are coming to the end of their playing careers.

“I have to adapt to their needs, their expectations, based on where they are in their career,” she continues, adding that players of all ages and experiences will ask why they may not be playing but that she will typically have more of those conversations with younger players. “The young players will say ‘I want to play’ and I’ll say ‘you’re not ready’.”

She describes an exercise in managing expectations. “Every young player thinks that they are good enough to play. They are good enough to play in terms of their talent, but I wonder if they don’t appreciate the demands at the highest level. Playing 90 minutes week-in and week-out is a challenge for any player. The on-pitch, the football bit, they just want to play, which is great. It’s more about the off-pitch considerations. The mental and physical demands of the game.”

Powell is aided in her efforts to support these transitions by her multidisciplinary team. “Their role is really important,” she says, “working with individuals and having conversations. We do a lot of one-to-ones with players, they will talk to our psychologist. We do a lot of analysis and we ask players to self-analyse and discuss their games. What they think they’re doing well, what they don’t think they are doing well, and just try to pull it all together.”

Often she will illustrate her points in a literal sense. “I’m very much drawing diagrams. ‘You’re here at the moment, now you’re in the middle bit of this development, you’re still developing, and we know at some point you will get to the point where you can excel and execute a task on a football pitch.’ I’m forever drawing pictures so that they can visualise what it is I’m trying to say; and I find myself having to do that, in a nice way, with some of the younger players because they’re good enough but not ready. That’s when the multidisciplinary team come into it as well.”

Formulations

Powell explains that her multidisciplinary team is led by her psychologist and clinical team. “We have – and this word is new to me – ‘formulations’,” she says, explaining that it is the multidisciplinary team that leads what is a player-focused process.

“We discuss the player from an on-pitch point of view. How they’re doing technically, tactically; are they playing well, are they in the team, are they not in the team – and the issues start coming when they’re not in the team or they’re young players.

“Psychologically, what’s the impact of that on the young player and how can we support them? Physically, where are they? They probably wouldn’t be able to last the 90 minutes; how can we support them physically to become better? It might be additional programmes for that player; it might be that they go and have one-to-one sessions with the psychologist and it might be that we sit down and do individual clips with that player.

“It’s very much engaging the multidisciplinary team from the outset, go through every player, have those formulations. They will meet every player, the player will meet every member of the multidisciplinary team, and then we just have conversations around the players all the time.”

‘You are not just a footballer’

Powell places considerable emphasis on her duty of care towards players. “I think that’s really important as their career can be over in a flash,” she says.

The club will provide player care from its academy through to the first-team and help players to find education and development opportunities. “We work to identify what their interests are, where we can help them, and sometimes we are able to help fund those opportunities.”

It is often a different conversation depending on the player and the stage of their career. Powell continues: “Most older players have got their path but it’s the younger players coming through who see the world of women’s football as it is now. They think: ‘wow, I can earn a good living here and I just want to be a footballer’. The older players have always done something else. The transition for the older players is probably OK but we still support them where we can. If they want to do education courses, like some of our players are doing a Masters, a degree, I’ll give them the time off to study if they need it, or to go to the university, whatever it is they need we will support them through that.

“The younger players coming through, I don’t let them get away with ‘just’ being a footballer – you  can’t have it. You have to do something else and then we try to find out what they like, how we can support them and get them on courses, even if they’re short courses, because your career could be over in a day. You get a bad injury and then that’s it, your career is over. But young players don’t think about that at all.”

Powell’s concern for her players is obvious and she is bemused about her reputation as “a little scary”, as she puts it. “I have quite a nice relationship with the players, but they don’t want to be seen as ‘teacher’s pet’ sometimes. It makes me laugh,” she says. “They can be quite emotional in our one-to-ones, and I care about the person. Before the football, it’s the person for me – football is absolutely second.”

By Sarah Evans

• Building an effective team takes time

• Adaptability is a key trait in new recruits

• Staff development is an evolutionary process

Evaluate where you are and what you need to implement

“Building a successful team takes time,” David Tenney, High Performance Director at Austin FC, told the Leaders Performance Institute while still serving in the same role at the Orlando Magic. He spoke about how he sees his role as a leader is in developing his team over time to problem-solve better, to become more resilient, and to grow. Tenney then explained how, ultimately, he wants to facilitate a process by which his people, as staff members, are able to say, “we are getting better, making good decisions and continue to grow as people and practitioners.” He also went on to highlight that “there will be a certain point when they can grow and move on and you start the process all over again.” Then, he made clear that it is of critical importance to take time to evaluate where you are and what needs to be implemented or changed. He said: “When new hires come in, everyone doesn’t know each other’s strengths and it takes time to build those relationships. The first three or four months will be messy, but that’s OK.”

Don’t just hire the best people

Tenney spoke about some of they key characteristics he looks for in the practitioners he brings onto his staff, and explained how adaptability was one of the most crucial attributes. He highlighted that he often looks to hire people from outside of the sport as they can bring in fresh new perspectives. “Putting departments together is really hard, as it is a dynamic structure,” he said. One hire can impact on who the other hires might be, therefore, “it’s not always about hiring the best person for each role – it’s really trying to figure out how they’re going to fit together”. Elite sport is exceptionally chaotic, and Tenney highlighted the need to be able to evaluate whether someone coming into the team has the emotional resilience to deal with the pressures of elite sport. He said that many of the practitioners are the first people the athlete will see in the morning, and so they “can set the emotional tone for the building the moment the athletes walk in. So if you’re tired and frustrated, and the athlete walks in and we’ve just lost five games in a row, you’re sending that message to the athletes. Not everyone can do that – it’s a key trait.”

Making staff feel invested is key to their development

Tenney stated that “staff development is an incredibly evolutionary process.” As staff teams get bigger and practitioners that used to be part-time consultants are now becoming full-time hires, there are more interactions. With this in mind, Tenney shared with the Leaders Performance Institute that “the hardest part of my role is to bring people together, make sure information isn’t lost, and make people feel invested.” Often the practitioners are so focused on connecting with the athletes, that they actually miss connecting with the other staff members. Thus, Tenney said: “it is really important to set an environment where we’re collectively acknowledging each other’s individual strengths over a period of time, and I think that makes people feel more invested and committed.”

“Our mission statement is probably a good place to start,” says Phil Church, “and it’s to increase the number of English-qualified leaders, which is managers, coaches and technical directors, working at the highest levels of the game.”

Church is the Senior Professional Game Coach Development Lead at England Football Learning, which oversees the Football Association’s [FA] education pathways for youth and senior coach development and technical director development.

He joined the Leaders Performance Podcast to discuss the FA’s suite of programmes and courses as it works towards fulfilling England Football Learning’s mission statement.

Within that discussion we also touch upon:

• The selection process for the courses [8:00];
• Talent mapping with a view to adding support and value for learners [12:00];
• Programmes for graduates to continue their CPD and to meet the needs of the game [17:40];
• Why diversity and inclusion still needs attention at the FA [28:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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By John Portch

Hope Powell, the First-Team Manager at Women’s Super League [WSL] side Brighton & Hove Albion, has been coaching for almost 25 years.

What makes her a better coach now than she was when she was first appointed England Women’s Head Coach in 1998 – the first full-time appointment to the position – or, say, when she led England to the final of the 2009 European Championships?

“I don’t know that I’m better,” is her candid response. “I’m not saying I’m any better. I think I’m different, I don’t always get it right.” There are times when she admits that she can be intolerant in her interactions with players. “I’m having to adapt myself,” she continues. “I am still learning the art of management and I think it’s important that you keep learning because the game evolves, people evolve, their experiences are different.”

When Powell took the England reins, women’s football in the country was still largely amateur. The players she led to consecutive World Cup quarter-finals in 2007 and 2011 all held other jobs. Now, thanks in no small part to the work Powell did during her 15 years at the Football Association [FA], she is in charge of a fully professional Brighton. She joined the club in 2017.

Here, Powell, who also serves as mentor working with the FA, Premier League, Uefa, and Fifa, reflects on her qualities as a leader and discusses the leadership traits she admires most.

Hope, what do you regard as your biggest strength as a manager?

I think being honest and supportive with staff. I’m sure if you were to ask any member of my staff if they feel supported I think they’d say ‘yes’. I’m fair, honest and supportive. I see being honest as a strength; ‘this is what I think, and I’m saying it how it is’.

What strength do you admire most in others?

Honesty. Being authentic.

What do you mean by ‘authentic’?

I know it has nothing to do with the delivery, but my experience has been interesting. A lot of coaches are copy-cat coaches. They’ll watch you deliver a session and write everything you do down and then just go out and copy what you’ve done without perhaps understanding, without putting some context to it. I’ll ask them ‘if it doesn’t work how are you going to change it? How are you going to be creative?’ I’ve had a lot of that in my career. ‘Hope, have you got any sessions that you can give me?’ No, I can’t give you anything. That’s not coaching. Put yourself out there, design your sessions, have a go, if it doesn’t work, tweak it and do something else. I think authenticity is a big one for me. The coaches of the future, in any sport, will need to be creative, authentic, and be students of their sport; understanding the nuances of their game.

What is the key to strong teamwork?

Strong teamwork is all believing in the vision. All on the same page. I think if everyone buys into that and the team buys into that, it brings that togetherness and that togetherness means that you want to work for your team, your teammates. It’s having that. ‘This is where we want to be, do we all believe in it? Yes we do. Let’s all work in one direction and if we all believe in it collectively then we’re more likely to support each other and work harder for each other and do anything for each other.’ That for me is what teamwork is. Everyone believes in what you’re trying to achieve and everyone wants it because everyone is prepared to work together.

You’re Brighton’s First-Team Manager but you’re not the keeper of the club’s vision.

No, the owner [Tony Bloom] sets the vision for both teams: the men top ten, the women top four; and our job is to try and deliver that with the resources he puts at our disposal. It’s a collective. He set the vision but we’ve all gone ‘great, let’s go for it. Why not?’ And I go: ‘top four? Why not top one?’ That’s good because it gives you some direction. Is it just about staying in the league? The first year I was there, of course it was, because we were new to the WSL. The owner is a fan of the club and as soon as he decided he wanted to make progress in the women’s game he said ‘this is where I want this club to go’ and we said ‘great’ and, for me, it was telling him ‘this is what I think it will take’. We have ownership of that and he’s been very supportive.

Do you enjoy regular conversations with the Brighton board?

We have a men’s board and a women’s board, which is great. I have to present to the board annually. We have a Technical Director [David Weir] who has that direct link with the board. It’s kind of a one-club concept, one-club vision for the men and the women, so you feel heavily involved. And my job as the First-Team Manager is to ensure the team delivers that on and off the pitch, which is a great responsibility and a huge one. It’s what I’m used to. It’s what I like doing.

How will you look to get stronger in your role?

It’s a challenge to bring in the right players and the right staff at a club like ours; and there is always some turnover at the end of the season. But the right players and the right staff make your job so much easier. We’re in a recruitment phase at the moment and we just want to get better and perform better. That’s the idea.

In partnership with

By Sarah Evans

The focus of our third Leaders Meet of 2022 was around the dynamics of performance pathways and how to effectively manage the transitions of the athletes throughout. We also highlight the need to ensure psychological safety, particularly the notion of learner safety within your teams and staff throughout the pathway.

Session 1: Performance Pathways Part 1: Creating Effective Transitions

Speakers:

John Alder, Head of Player Development, Welsh Rugby Union

Helen Reesby, Head of National Performance Pathway, Lawn Tennis Association

Transition experiences:

• When have you managed transitions well? When the transition is anticipated, you can prepare and make plans. When you can engage in mentoring, learn from others, and have great support. You have time to understand what you need based on your values, and understand what is right for you.
• When have you not managed a transition well? Dealing with something with that it out of your control, such as a career-ending injury.
• Biggest lesson learnt was the importance of speaking about it. We need to be able to sit, and address the issue. This might not be what you want to do, but it is essential. From an external point of view it might seem as though you have transitioned well, due to looking to what’s next and making plans. However, it is essential to not presume anything. It’s very easy to assume someone is OK based on their exterior, but you won’t truly know until you ask.
• Importance to reflect on both positive and negative and not to stray away from either, as we can take huge value out of both.
• Recognise the ending of one chapter and embracing the start of something new. And the importance of understanding our identity and how that impacts our transitions.
• The role of your support system in helping you cope with transitions. Very important to have key people to support you in processing the emotions around the transitions in order to help manage the phase effectively.

Effective transitions:

• What is a transition? Moving from junior to senior, injuries, changing position, location change, essentially an experience which stretches and requires change. The process of exiting something and entering something new or different and making this, hopefully, as seamless as possible.
• Who is going through the transition, what resources do they have, how does it fit into their learning and where are they heading? What skills are required going into it?
• Having the readiness and ability to meet the demands of the next stage.
• Two elements to a transition: performance-ready. What are the demands of that next stage, do you have the tools to be able to step up? Person-ready: have you got the personal skills, are you ready for the lifestyle change? Are you personally ready? You often see one or the other.
• We prepare them well for the anticipated change especially making them performance-ready. But often what we don’t spend enough time on is preparing them for the unanticipated transitions which inevitably will happen, and these are often the person-ready skills.
• ‘Prepare the child for the path and not the path for the child’.
• Have the athletes got the resources to deal with the new challenges or changing environment?
• Smooth transitions or not? Recognising which transitions might be used as good bumps in the road to aid in their development.
• Team sports: experience transitions together but it might feel different for each person. The importance of understanding how things impact individuals differently and the challenge of the coach to recognise what is best for each player and how they are experiencing that change (identity, curriculum, direction of travel).
• In individual sport, how do you scale? Helen believes in a person-first approach with tennis being a highly individualised sport. There is a scale of transitions – they range from large transitions to small fry. The individualised approach is so important in terms of presuming and assuming.
• Gender-specific in tennis – understanding differences in genders. Still person-first as you can’t just group the genders but what are the general differences to be aware of?
• Parent involvement – in tennis they have to be heavily involved (time and resource). It’s easy to get frustrated by this, but they have a major influence on the transition and the support of the athletes, if you can engage with them and take them on the journey with you, they can be incredibly valuable.
• Social cultural context and how that mediates transitions – what are the dynamics at play in the environment that can impact a transition? In many squad-based teams and sports, you can have 50 people including staff and athletes.
• The importance of role clarity on the field and off the field.

Session 2: Performance Pathways Part 2: The Different Stages of Psychological Safety

Speaker:

Tim Cox, Managing Director, Management Futures

Psychological safety:

• “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes” – Dr Amy C. Edmondson.

Why it matters:

• You want people to be able to think clearly, to make connections, share insights, bring ideas and learn.
• As a leader you want to simultaneously increase intellectual friction and decrease social friction.
• Google Project Aristotle: the number one determinant of team success was psychological safety.
• Wellbeing.

Social pain & the brain:

• Whilst social pain and physical pain can have similar characteristics, they are not the same experience.
• They share some of the same underlying neural substrates.
• The common experiential element is the affective component of pain – the distressing experience associated with these threats motivates individuals to terminate, or escape the negative stimulus.

Four stages of psychological safety:

• Inclusion safety: I feel valued and a sense of belonging. Safe to be myself. This is a pre-condition for the other three.
• Learner safety: I feel safe to ask questions, seek guidance ask for help, admit mistakes, and be vulnerable.
• Contributor safety: I feel safe to share my ideas, and trusted to act on my initiative.
• Challenger safety: I feel safe to challenge the status quo.

Inclusion safety – key concepts:

• What it should take to be included – two things:
• Be Human
• Be Harmless
• And yet…
• Sometimes we extend partial or conditional inclusion safety. Sometimes we revoke or withhold it.
• ‘We like to tell ourselves soothing stories to justify our sense of superiority’.

Learner safety – key concepts:

• The moral imperative to grant learner safety is to act first by encouraging and inviting the learner to learn.
• Failure isn’t the exception, it’s the expectation and the way forward.
• The most important signal in granting or withholding learner safety is the leader’s emotional response to dissent and bad news. How are your reacting, because the learner is watching us?
• The prejudiced mind is wilfully blind. Do you genuinely believe they can?
• When the environment punishes rather than teaches, whether through neglect, manipulation of coercion people become defensive, less able to self-diagnose, self-coach and self-correct. That opens people up to the risk of real failure – the failure to keep trying.

Contributor safety – key concepts:

• A toxic environment shuts down performance because people worry about psychological safety before performance.
• Speaking first when you hold positional power softly censors your team.
• Inviting people to think beyond one’s role expresses greater respect and grants greater permission to contribute.
• It’s the leader’s role to recognise the difference between dissenting and derailing behaviour and manage the boundary between the two.

Challenger safety – key concepts:

• Challenger safety democratises innovation.
• The more unknowns the leader eliminates through transparency the fewer the sources of stress for the individual.
• Nothing shuts curiosity and exploration down faster than a small dose of ridicule administered at just the right time.
• Deprive your team of challenger safety and you dedicate the team to the status quo.
• Assigning permission for dissent from the outset takes away the natural fear associated with challenging status quo.

Six ways we can increase psychological safety:

• Build trust and belonging.
• Put it on the table – discuss it.
• Model openness and honesty.
• Make it easy to speak up.
• Praise it.
• Constructively challenge fixed positions.

Model openness & honesty

• We forget how scary we are. Our power silences people.
• We don’t question our list of whose opinion counts.
• We send ‘shut up’ versus ‘speak up’ signals.
• Watch your language.

Make it easy to speak up

• Ask open questions to seek input, but make them specific e.g. What do people think we should be paying more attention to?
• Red teaming / Brains trust meetings.
• Use small groups or 1:1 conversations.

Session 3: Performance Pathways Part 3: An Insight into the FA’s Approach

Speaker:

Phil Church, Senior Coach Development Lead, The Football Association

• Individualisation: we’ve certainly moved into a landscape where individualisation is key in relation to developing coaches and players. We have what we call a talent map, where we can look at who might have potential. We have boots on the ground, they’re ‘in the trenches’, provide unconditional support and they are not just there when they’re winning. This provides a good idea of the landscape and therefore how we can influence it.
• Create a personalised and connected experience: we know the power to individualised approaches, but to elevate this to the next level, how are you connecting this to the experience players or coaches face? Individual relationships are a key component of this (who, self, how, what).
• The FA’s approach to development: the general rule of thumb for the organisation’s development approach is 70:20:10. As people involved in developing talented coaches or players, you’d expect to see our work somewhere in and around the 20 or 10 section. This is why context and experiences outside of this around important to consider.
• If we are only with them for 10-20% of their time, how can you influence and add value for them in that short space of time? You get trust in consistency and competence. How are you adding value to a player or a coach? ‘Bring a gift’ to add value to them.
• Environmental context: spend time getting a better understanding of the context of the team around the individual. An individualised approach is powerful for development, but the external environment for the individual has potential for large influence.

Attendee takeaways:

• Inclusion requires understanding of team values – learning, challenging, contributing.
• Best practice for psychological safety – new people coming in to be clear of expectations and culture, and to talk about intent around psychological safety within the induction.
• The need to formalise your transition process.
• Think about the best way to train or support psychological safety.
• The need to share the four stages of psychological safety and the six descriptions with the team.
• To have the agreed ways of working threaded through a club or organisation strategy.
• Have best practice embedded into everyday work and life.
• Reflecting on effective transitions.
• It is important to understand where failure fits into psychological safety – should we support failure at the top end of elite level performance?
• As a coach or leader, understand your own transition journey to empathise and support the athletes.
• Identifying your team’s roles and responsibilities to help build the six ways to increase psychological safety – use your super strengths well.
• Psychological safety to give awareness to development pathways.
• A way of changing best practice – at national senior team selection meetings, instead of the chair / senior selector listing their team selection and then asking the room to share theirs and justify the differences, build psychological safety in the room by ‘putting it on the table – discuss it’. All of the selection committee put their teams up simultaneously and then open the discussion.