By Rachel Woodland

The Women in High Performance Sport Community group aims to provide space to women in the sporting world to tell their stories and to shine a spotlight on some excellent people and their work.

In April, Vicki Wilson, Director at the Brisbane Broncos, joined our group call. Women coaches and practitioners from across the globe gathered to listen to Wilson tell the story of her journey from athlete, to coach, to high performance manager, and now a member of the board of directors at the Broncos. Hers is a story we wanted to share more of and to learn from.

What has propelled Wilson’s career?

From Wilson’s perspective, she believes she has an eye for detail and an ability to plan, whilst wanting the best for athletes. She enjoys imparting knowledge, as well as gathering knowledge to extend her perspectives. She has also always been determined to be better. Having been an international athlete herself, Wilson can also lean on those experiences to guide her work. She’s also adaptable and, since her days playing netball, has always asked questions and seeks to understand ‘why’.

A key lesson was when she was dropped at an early stage in her playing career. It came just as she thought she would be made captain. The lesson she took was to never take anything for granted. This has resonated with Wilson every time she has applied for a role since. It also means she will quickly move on to the next challenge.

What drives success?

To help people succeed Wilson shared some tips:

1. Your high performance manager and administration team will make you or break you. So pick wisely – always look at who is running the show.
2. Surround yourself with support – informal mentors, peers etc. and treat them well.
3. Always have people smarter than you on your team – then let them use their expertise, whilst asking them ‘why?’ too.
4. Don’t over-commit. Give yourself time to switch off.
5. Ask questions of people around you e.g. what would they do? How would they find that?
6. Add perspectives to the pool that you draw on. Change your own if needed.
7. Share your own learnings with others.
8. Recognise good work. Celebrate success.

Support your high performance managers

Contrary to instinct, Wilson believes sitting with high performance managers and helping them with their planning is critical. Many will have come from a coaching background and might not know the role fully. It shouldn’t be assumed that they know what’s expected and what needs to be done. Expectations need to be shared clearly before a season starts. It’s about shaping this support around learning, and being their ally and not wanting them to fail, rather than trying to catch them out and needing them to show they know everything already. It really is about eliminating all assumptions.

Wilson’s inspiration

Wilson wanted to mention the women head coaches who were part of the original Australian Institute of Sport. There weren’t many, and they experienced difficult moments. However, they paved the way for others by challenging and contributing when in shared spaces between sports. They were avid readers and learners, many working in academia. They also showed that women coaches can be as successful as men. Wilson has been inspired in particular by Wilma Shakespeare, who was an international athlete, captain, coach, administrator, Queensland Academy of Sport CEO, and eventually travelled to the UK to be the founder and first National Director of the English Institute of Sport [now UK Sports Institute] in 2002. It is Shakespeare that inspired Wilson to explore administrative roles.

Thinking of joining a board of directors?

Wilson spoke about her advice for those who are interested in joining a board. She recommends sitting with someone who has done the role. This will help you fully understand what’s expected, and what’s your purpose in that role. From her experience, it’s about challenging management; making sure they’re doing what they said they would and asking them if it could be done better. It’s also about managing staff and athletes, and getting to know everyone in an organisation at a personal level.

Wilson fielded questions from the group too. They asked about:

Her challenges along the way

Wilson was open enough to share where some of the biggest challenges have laid – fortunately our previous community call attests to changes in ways of working. It has happened that athletes who are closing in on retirement have wanted the decision to be made for them. As you can imagine, that hasn’t made it easier for them to accept said decision. Wilson has also learnt the importance of an administrative team who are supportive and aligned to your values, having lost a role, alongside others, when strong decisions were needed. She is also grateful for the work done by many to have changed the way athlete pregnancy is treated.

Planning for the logistical realities

It’s not always spoke about, but coaches and other staff will make decisions, and have decisions made for them that can leave them unsure of their future and exposed financially. Wilson shared that she has found that when it mattered, things gained positive momentum quickly for her. Small contracts came in, moves to different countries weren’t as terrible as feared. She learnt to be open and once she’d accepted something be all in. Wilson has learnt to not panic, and importantly, to back her own skillset. It helps that she has a positive mindset, and that she’s always been a naturally good connector.

The group reflected on…

1. What their organisations are doing to support them. Answers included:

• Encouraging them to attend conferences
• Connecting across sports and organisations
• Finding the right level challenge – frame it as a positive, even when difficult
• AIS Women in Leadership Programme Talent Programme (for women executives)
• WhatsApp groups that support programmes like the one above well beyond their official run dates

2. What they would like to see in a dream world:

• The head coach, high performance manager, and CEO are connected and aligned to others, and know the value of each other’s skillsets (as well as those of the other staff members)
• Time protected for CPD
• Specific roles in projects, to support specific development goals
• Space to get things wrong and test learnings – for failure to be okay
• More space given to knowing yourself, as early as possible in your career

3. How they’re supporting others:

• Through mentoring
• Supporting and connecting with staff, athletes, and administrators
• Encouraging people to understand themselves, to know how to work with others
• Giving people the same time that was given to them, to support them in their careers
• Celebrating the successes

4. Resources recommended for learning outside of sport:

• Acting courses
• Spotlight – profiling from Mindflick
• Skill development delivered through a different lens:
  • Negotiation skills – from a lawyer
  • Difficult conversations – from the emergency services
  • Leadership skills – from a generic or business perspective

What to read next

The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport

By John Portch

Champion teams often cite their pre-season work as a determining factor in their success, but Helene Wilson’s Northern Mystics adopted a novel approach.

“We were bottom of the table and we made it to the top by literally changing the way we practised and our environment,” Wilson told an audience at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance.

Wilson, who currently serves as Manager of High Performance Sport New Zealand’s [HPSNZ] Women in High Performance Sport programme, was primarily at the Etihad to discuss her five years as Head Coach of the Northern Mystics, a netball team in New Zealand’s ANZ Premiership.

The Mystics won the first national championship in their franchise’s 24-year history on Wilson’s watch in 2021. They went close again in 2022, her final year, and won a second Grand Final in 2023.

Yet in 2019, as Wilson explained, they finished bottom of the ANZ Premiership. At the time, the Mystics were infamous for their disunity and underachievement.

The talent and potential was there, but Wilson knew it could not be unlocked without an environmental overhaul. She started with one simple question: “how do we create an environment where high performance comes from out-learning your opposition and people are on a journey together to get there?”

Find a suitable framework for addressing performance questions

Central to their transformation was the Mystics’ belief in the Māori concept of ‘Wānanga’. “It’s a word that means coming together and meeting to discuss, collaborate and consider,” Wilson told the Etihad audience. “It could look similar to a team meeting but it can take many forms and Wānanga happens in many ways.”

A fuller account is provided here but, in summary, a Wānanga provides a space for collective, inclusive, reflective practice (‘Rongo’ in Māori) that enables people to reengage with problems in the world beyond (‘Tū’) having formed a consensus on the best solutions.

“There is an energy about it,” said Wilson. “The process and energy is like a coming together and moving apart in a state of clarity, which is collectively built together. The process of ‘Karakia’ – transitioning from one realm to another – takes us from the worlds of Tū and Rongo.”

These Māori concepts and traditions resonated with her staff and playing group, but Wilson emphasised the relevance of the framework rather than its local aspects. Coaches, she argued, should use cultural artefacts germane to their context. “There’s stuff around us everywhere that you can apply in different ways and it’s the framework that is key.”

The players and staff bought into the idea and it meant the team could get to work on what was needed to take them from last to first place in the space of two years.

Improve the quality of your interactions

Ahead of that triumphant 2021 season, Wilson and her coaches convened to establish what it would take for the Mystics to win that season’s Grand Final. They also invited the playing group to do the same.

“We tried to define the standards that we needed to shift to win the Premiership,” she said. “I remember specifically at this time we would Wānanga in the gym and we were talking about the standard of performance that we needed to put down on the court in pre-season to ensure that we could win the Premiership.”

The players and coaches often had contrasting views. “We had all the data and the information and knew what we needed to do, but we had to hold that back and let the players lead it,” she added.

In one particular pre-season Wānanga, Wilson addressed the Mystics’ reputation for throwing away possession cheaply. The players sought a measurement for tracking their improvement but one wasn’t forthcoming. “How do we measure it? How do we know we’re doing well? We couldn’t agree, we couldn’t align, so we had to go out and learn.”

That Wānanga preceded a public pre-season game and Wilson used the opportunity to pose further questions: if you make mistakes on the court what does that look like? How many mistakes is OK? What’s your key role in your position? For example, if you’re a goal attack and your main role is to get the ball to the goal shooter as accurately as possible and you want to throw it from the first phase in the centre, how am I to determine that you will get that ball there? Tell me what you need to do. And they will tell me how they believe they will take this skill and execute it to the level we’d accept, as well as how many mistakes we were allowed. They defined what they were going to put on court and what they were going to get right.”

Each member of the team would set personal limits. “It looks like ‘I won’t make the same mistake twice in a row’. OK then, if you do, then you’re off. You’ll work with the S&C on the side line in front of the public, practising that mistake for two minutes, then you’ll go back on court and we’ll see how you go.”

The continuous Mystics substitutions made the game a strange spectacle. “You can imagine the first half the first time we tried this,” said Wilson. “It was like a yoyo. My opposition coach said to me ‘what the eff are you doing?’”

“There was a lot to unpack in our changing room after that and our psychologist was a great help.” The subsequent Wānanga went on for an hour and a half. One of the key questions was the matter of each individual’s role in the team. “Even if I’m only on the bench how do I still contribute? It was the benchies’ job to pull their teammates up when they weren’t executing the skillset they said they would more than two times in a row. That then formed a drive for individual performance.”

As Wilson said, the Mystics changed the way they practised. “It wasn’t just making an effort to say it – it wasn’t as simple as that – it was the quality of the interaction that happened.”

Increased energy and confidence

At the Etihad, Wilson shared an image of her team lining up backstage ahead of the 2021 Grand Final and noted the sense of “energy and confidence; that they each had each other’s back as they go out and do it.”

She said: “Then we joked we were doing this hard work as people so I could get to drink a piña colada on the bench while I was coaching; knowing I had done my job. I wish I had one, because they were driving the performance on that day.” The Mystics quickly established a two-goal lead over their opponents, the Mainland Tactix, that they never relinquished in a 61-59 victory.

“We made seven errors in the entire game,” Wilson continued. “And when we had that Wānanga at the start of the season, the players said they should be able to make 64 errors in a game. We [the coaches] knew they needed to make under 15 [to win the Premiership] and they made seven. It shows how they drove their own performance.”

To further underline how the Mystics transformed their environment, Wilson referred to Grace Nweke, a 21-year-old New Zealand international and one of the rising stars of the sport. She joined the Mystics in 2019 while still at school but, thanks to Wilson encouraging her players to have a voice, Nweke immediately had the platform to speak up when she felt things weren’t working for her.

“She was 16 years old and didn’t quite think her S&C programme was quite right for her and she asked how we could discuss how it might be changed – that’s powerful for an athlete to have that support [especially] when the S&C said ‘well, I’ve been doing this for 20 or 30 years’ – but then it’s also powerful for the S&C to say ‘how are we going to work together to make this better?’”

In the first part, we delved deeper into Helene Wilson’s role in creating a culture that enabled the Northern Mystics to ‘out-learn’ their opponents.

By John Portch

Helene Wilson came to high performance coaching from a background in education, so it is no surprise that she places a premium on learning.

“Working in netball, in a woman’s environment, and coming from a background of being a teacher, I think that learning is incredibly important,” she told the audience at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium.

“And how do we create an environment where high performance comes from out-learning your opposition and people are on a journey together to get there?”

Wilson, who currently serves as Manager of High Performance Sport New Zealand’s [HPSNZ] Women in High Performance Sport programme, was primarily at the Etihad to discuss her five years as Head Coach of the Northern Mystics, a netball team in New Zealand’s ANZ Premiership.

She took the Mystics’ reins in 2017 and would eventually lead the Auckland-based franchise to success in the 2021 Premiership Grand Final, ending their 24-year wait for a national championship. But not before the team bottomed out in 2019. “We were the wooden spooners,” she said.

The team had performed promisingly in the preceding seasons but, in 2018, the unforeseen departure of goal shooter Maria Folau due to personal reasons left the Mystics underpowered. It showed on the court and Wilson admitted that she was perhaps fortunate to retain her job at one stage given the turmoil behind the scenes, “but the players wanted to come back and play for the team because they believed in what we were trying to do.” Two years later they were champions.

Beyond reaching and winning a Grand Final, Wilson and the Mystics wanted to rewrite the history of netball underachievement in New Zealand’s Northern Zone, where Wilson coached the sport for three decades.

“The Northern Zone has the biggest number of participants in netball – a third of our netball-playing population is there. There is also a population of ethnic diversity, age diversity, socio-economic diversity,” she continued. “We had 17 netball centres across that area and I inherited a narrative over that time that we’re talented – more than anyone else – but it’s actually a curse in high performance because that doesn’t matter.”

There had, according to Wilson, been a history of disharmony in the Mystics ranks. “The landscape of where we come from, and thinking about the land, it was actually quite disjointed. Auckland, our biggest city in New Zealand, is groups of little villages that are quite insular and quite different to each other. And we were also sitting on volcanoes and literally it was pretty explosive the way we used to behave.”

By the time they won the championship in 2021 and went close again the following year, this was a team transformed. “We won the Premiership after 24 years of trying, but really the learnings, what happened between 2017 and 2019 and up to 2021 was massive and it’s not just about me and what I did – it was about what we did together.”

Finding energy and bringing clarity to the changing room

The “catalyst for change”, as Wilson describes it, was her involvement in HPSNZ’s Te Hāpaitanga: Women in High Performance Sport Coaching Initiative. Its pilot programme ran in 2019 with Wilson serving as a mentor to women applying to be high performance coaches.

The cohort visited a ‘marae’, a Māori meeting ground, of which the focal point is the ‘wharenui’, the communal house where people meet. A wharenui, with its ornate wooden carvings and elaborate design, is steeped in Māori metaphor. It provides a space for collective, inclusive, reflective practice (‘Rongo’ in Māori) that enables people to reengage with problems in the world beyond (‘Tū’) having formed a consensus on the best solutions.

“There is an energy about it,” she said. “The process and energy is like a coming together and moving apart in a state of clarity, which is collectively built together. The process of ‘Karakia’ – transitioning from one realm to another – takes us from the worlds of Tū and Rongo.”

It was a cultural element that resonated first with Wilson then with her playing group. “You don’t need to know it’s Māori,” she said. “If I stood at the front and tried to be Māori I think people would think I’m a fraud and I’ve got to be respectful, not being Māori, but having a deep understanding because I do come from New Zealand.” Wilson encourages coaches working in other regions or nations to find the cultural artefacts that are authentic their groups. “There’s stuff around us everywhere that you can apply in different ways and it’s the framework that is key.”

Coming away from the pilot programme, Wilson drew on the work of corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson who wrote a book in 2014 entitled Above the Line. According to Henderson, people will come to a team with their own beliefs, which play out as behaviours. People’s values are born of their beliefs and behaviours and, in a team setting, these all help to construct the group’s collective behaviours. These eventually become the team’s culture.

At the Mystics, group behaviours tended to be a product of the disharmony that denoted the team’s decades of under-achievement. The group would seemingly generate a lot of heat but not necessarily much light.

It ultimately comes down to the leader. “The mistake we often make is starting at values rather than giving space for beliefs to be heard,” said Wilson. The trick was to create a space where everyone felt empowered to share their beliefs. “We came together as a group and said ‘everyone’s a leader. The standard we walk past is the standard we are prepared to accept’ and it’s super important not to walk past unacceptable standards. So we redefined our environment so that everyone on our team was a leader and ‘leadership’ was simply our actions and our behaviours. It wasn’t the role or the position we were given.

“We needed to have a better understanding of what being valued and contributing to value looked like and how that would affect performance. So there was intense learning at this time because the players wanted to be a leader but there needs to be clear evidence of what that means for performance – and intense learning is how do we care, listen and bring those diverse opinions to the table, as well as skillsets the people bring. I think we learned that together as staff, performance experts and players.”

Learning from the ‘moment of truth’

In his 2021 book Belonging, Owen Eastwood cited Harvard professors (the late) Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman, specifically their renowned 2008 publication on corporate leadership teams entitled Senior Leadership Teams: What it Takes to Make them Great. ‘Of all the factors we assessed in our research,’ they wrote, ‘the one that makes the biggest difference in how well a senior leadership team performs is the clarity of the behavioural norms that guide members’ interactions’.

It was on Wilson and Sulu Fitzpatrick, who was appointed as the Mystics captain in 2021, to create the right environment. “We were trying to learn what stuff we will deploy in that circumstance to ensure that the collective performance outcomes we needed were going to happen. In the Māori world we call this ‘Kotahitanga’. ‘Ko’ meaning a central point’; ‘Tahi’ meaning one; ‘Kotahitanga’ meaning collective unit.”

For the Mystics, Kotahitanga meant reaching a consensus through ‘Wānanga’. “It’s a word that means coming together and meeting to discuss, collaborate and consider,” Wilson told the Etihad audience. “It could look similar to a team meeting but it can take many forms and Wānanga happens in many ways. Conceptually, it happens in the world of Rongo; you’ve got to go deep. At a Wānanga, I put a concept on the table, a picture of performance that I may see as a head coach, or someone else may put it there depending on who’s taking a lead that day, and the Wānanga takes the form of questions, from multiple perspectives, and we keep going until we get some sense of alignment. It doesn’t come with any level of expertise or experience, it comes with everybody’s level and everybody contributes.”

The Mystics would typically hold a team-wide Wānanga once a week and any time the group deemed one necessary. Wilson’s role was to ensure: “enough creative tension in the room to drive performance and shift performance but also making sure that people were able to learn the art of listening, hearing, weaving different perspectives and energy that people brought to the Wānanga.

“Wānanga can get heated, it can be soft and gentle, it can be all of those things, but Wānanga is about is that you sit there in the world of Rongo until you get it done. Sometimes we had training or practice [in the world of Tū] straight after and we were running late because the Wānanga is more important than the physical practice – practice had to happen whenever it needed to happen based on the Wānanga.”

Wilson explained that there were three broad categories of people, characterised through their ‘energy’, who would join a Wānanga: people who connected to others from the heart, those who had insight from their intellect, and people with the drive and willpower to perform. “My shift as head coach was to connect to those three levels of care of where I was with an individual.”

It was not easy. At first, there was a lack of intent, decisiveness and the results did not necessarily translate into performance. “I think setting this up was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done and one of the spaces where I learnt so much as a coach.”

Crucially, the group bought-in, even after the underwhelming 2019 season and the disruption of the pandemic. In time, the group developed its own lexicon, which included the term ‘moment of truth’, meaning a reference to the key moments in a match as defined by players and coaches individually, who would then weave their ‘moments of truth’ together in a Wānanga. “We would stay there until we were ready to define the moment of truth that was going to give us the greatest learning going forward.”

As she said, it was not always Wilson who led the Wānanga. She recognised the need for others to take the lead in order to feel that they belonged and that their input was valued. ‘We look for proof of our values from our leaders,’ wrote Owen Eastwood in Belonging. ‘We do not want our leaders’ personal beliefs forced upon us – we want our tribe’s authentic values articulated.’

That is where Wilson felt the key knowledge sat in any case. “My learning was to sit at the back and know that my knowledge was not sufficient; that the knowledge was in the room and I was there to sense the problem and the Wānanga would sort out what the problem was. I needed to be the last one talking in the room.”

In Part II, we explore how the coaching staff helped the Mystics players to transfer their personal and collective development to the court.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

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

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

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

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

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

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

What they said

Danny Kerry on managing team vs individual dynamics:

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

Emma Trott on listening to athletes:

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

Next steps

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

2. Is everyone on your team speaking up?

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

What she said

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

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

Next steps

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

3. Removing the physiological barriers to participation

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

What they said

Nikki Brown on breast health:

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

Amal Hassan on the impact of the menstrual cycle:

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

Emma Brockwell on issues related to female pelvic floor dysfunction:

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

Next steps

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

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

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

What he said

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

Next steps

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

“There’s a tension there that exists between knowing what you’re going to cover and responding to the humans that are in front of you,” said Iain Brunnschweiler, the Head of Technical Development at English Premier League club Southampton FC.

“We’ve tried to evolve a curriculum, a player development framework, that manages that tension. We want to cover specific topics and we also want to coach the player that’s in front of us.”

Brunnschweiler was speaking onstage at Leaders Meet: Coach & Player Development on the 24 March at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, where he was joined by England Netball Head Coach Jess Thirlby to discuss the progress being made in coach and player development.

During the session, which was moderated by Dan Clements, the Performance Coach Manager at Wales Rugby Union, the duo discussed:

• Why curriculums need to be carefully implemented [3:00];
• The value in playbooks and the implications for creativity [12:00];
• The most meaningful learning experiences they provide [16:00];
• Finding work-life balance [24:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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On International Women’s Day, we reflect on the pivotal roles played by women across high performance sport.

By John Portch

From the front offices to the locker rooms via the psychologist’s couch, we bring you ten performance lessons from the Leaders Performance Institute vaults that continue to resonate today.

1. Athletes need to feel a sense of belonging

The WNBA is renowned for its advocacy of social justice issues and one of the its leading lights, the Seattle Storm, have been at the vanguard under CEO and President Alisha Valavanis. Backed by one of sports few all-female leadership groups in Force 10 Hoops LLC, the Storm has won three championships and made every effort to ensure the players find an inclusive, cohesive locker room where everyone is committed to representing the Storm’s vest.

“It starts with establishing personal relationships and building relationships on trust and connection so that players can share with us what their hopes are off the court,” said Valavanis, speaking to the Leaders Performance Institute in 2020. “There’s a real intentional effort to learn all about all of the individuals in our organisation and we certainly have conversations with players on how we can support them and make sure that everyone is clear what it means to be part of this organisation.”

2. Engage your athletes in their development

When athletes feel secure then you can empower them in both their personal development and the collective. “I’m a big believer in getting players to collaborate, present back, research, share with the group, present to the coaching group and vice versa,” said Jess Thirlby, the Head Coach of the England netball team on the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2020. “It’s a good way for me to check understanding from the group and it helps inform how to set direction and invest my energy when I hear the playing group back and they’ve demonstrated really sound understanding of themselves and the opposition and, not only that, but coming up with ways in which we’re going to pit strengths against their weaknesses.”

3. Make space in your schedule for independent development

Thirlby’s emphasis on empowerment is matched by Lucy Skilbeck, the Director of Actor Training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [RADA]. “One of the things we’re looking at is how we can develop a more facilitative relationship with the student and how we make more space within the timetable for the student’s independent development,” she told a Leaders Performance Institute Webinar in 2021. “We’re also looking at how can we foster in them a greater sense of independence and understanding of themselves as artists and actors; as people who can make and create work as well as deliver other people’s work. Pedagogically, how do we work with them to facilitate the growth of their individuality rather than a monocultural process?”

4. Take a step back

Paula Dunn is the Head Coach of the Paralympic Programme at British Athletics. Ahead of the delayed Tokyo Games, where her team claimed 24 medals, she spoke of the perils of micromanaging. “I thought I had to be in charge, I had to be tough, I had to work the longest hours, I had to have all the answers,” she said. “It’s never good to have a decision made by one person, so I’ve tried to work with my team, understanding what their motivations are, and just being honest when I just don’t know something or if I’ve had issues.”

5. Is the athlete’s real competition the challenge of fulfilling their potential?

Anne Keothavong, the Captain of the Great Britain Fed Cup tennis team, is engaged in the development of the nation’s players and knows that no corners can be cut. As she told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2018, the challenges can differ from player to player. She said: “Every player represents a different case, depending on where they’re ranked and how old they are, how long they’ve been playing professionally, and what targets they need to hit. I’m not involved on a day to day basis but when I see them in a training or competition environment I’m looking out for whether they’re improving, consistently working on those goals, and the other things they want to focus on to help make them a better tennis player.”

6. Track athletic development through relevant tests

The best data can be linked to specific tests and Kate Weiss, the Director of Sports Science at the Seattle Mariners, walked viewers through a hypothetical process with a pitcher at our February Webinar. “When they come in, we’re going to test range of motion, we’re going to test movement capacity; how are they going to move in a general sense and a baseball-specific sense,” she says. “We’re going to look at the different components of strength, speed, power, we’re going to look at body composition. All these different things that we know contribute to and help support what they do on the field. Then what we’re going to do is look at the on-field data and link that back and go ‘OK, maybe there’s issues with their shoulder separation on the mound.’ We’re going to look through everything and go ‘OK, is it coming from a range of motion issue? Is it coming from just a movement capacity issue?’ Or if it’s not those things maybe it’s just a coaching issue that we have to work on and come up with specific drills.”

7. Data: spend less time capturing data and more time analysing and feeding back

“For data capture and analysis, we have a mantra at the EIS: ‘we should spend less time capturing data and more time analysing and feeding back’,” said Julia Wells, the Head of Performance Analysis at the English Institute of Sport. “That’s something that’s been rooted in us since the inception of our Performance Analysis team.” She and her team supported Great Britain’s athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Games and, as she told the Leaders Performance Institute in the aftermath, they prioritise harnessing the latest tech and relationships with the end users. “The software available now is immense,” she added. “There’s so much to choose from, which can be a challenge but we honed in on data visualisation and our ability to translate data into usable insights.”

8. Do not attempt to separate emotion from performance

Sports Psychologist Mia Stellberg feels attempting to shut down emotions is counterproductive for athletes. “The more they can understand emotions, they can explain and understand what they are feeling or how that feeling came to occur is the first step,” she told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2021. “We can never control anything that we are not aware of. So you need to be aware of your emotions, sometimes this is the most tricky part of my work, to talk about emotions to young guys at age 20 who just want to rule the world, play and win the title! Then the second step is understanding how that feeling occurs or what needs to happen before it pops up, so if we want to prevent negative feelings we have to understand what happens before it comes so that we can learn how to control, how to prevent.”

9. Embrace risk, expand comfort zones

Mental performance coach Véronique Richard, who has worked with Cirque du Soleil as well as a variety of sports organisations, attempts to cultivate ‘risk-friendly’ environments. “Risk needs to be part of your environment,” she told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2018. Richard strives to foster the conditions for enhanced skill development in the athletes and performance artists with whom she works. In short, she introduces an element of chaos. “By working through that mess, people actually increase their repertoires of thoughts and actions, which contributes to creativity,” she said. “First, I ask the athlete: ‘what are you avoiding not because you’re not skilled enough but because it makes you uncomfortable?’ There’s all sorts of things we don’t do because of discomfort; it can be technical, tactical psychological, emotional, personal, ego and then, as a leader, your role is to find the right stimuli to bring the person to explore discomfort and bring people to work in this zone of discomfort; and if you manage that successfully you actually expand their zone of comfort.”

10. Do your athletes know where to turn for help?

In 2019, the Australian Institute of Sport established its Career & Education Practitioner referral network, as Matti Clements, the acting CEO, explained in her former role as Deputy Director of Athlete Wellbeing and Engagement. “That is practitioners who can provide high level expertise on vocational pathways. It’s referral-in and we’ll cover the costs of all podium-plus-level athletes and coaches,” she told an audience at Leaders Meet: Wellbeing. The AIS also provides help for the athlete wellbeing & engagement managers with the provision of a personal development programme. “This is so that we can ensure a level of risk management and skillset across those people. What we’ve done is invite the whole system, including professional sports, into that education and we’re creating community practice hubs so that they can actually have some peer support; it’s led by us, but there’s peer support there.”