“That balance needs to be carefully managed otherwise the person can go down a whole spiral of interventions that might not always be appropriate,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.
Brickley is speaking just moments after appearing onstage at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Twickenham Stadium.
He acknowledges that athletes often have traits that set them apart. “Athletes work differently,” says Brickley, who is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton and an exercise physiologist. “They might not be well in a general sense but perform absolutely brilliantly. Then you may have a situation where you reduce their training and focus on their wellbeing. You can’t do one without the other.
“It’s a tough area and I don’t know if we’ve got the people trained up to the level needed at the moment.”
How does he see the scene developing in five years’ time? “To be honest, I think we’ll still be way off,” he says with a smile. “We’ve gotten better with things such as nutrition and we’ve moved away from those old-style bullying coaches that put athletes under pressure and we’ve weeded out a lot of the rough things that affect athletes, but there will still be challenges.”
The Leaders Performance Institute sat down with Brickley to briefly run through his reflections on the run-up to Tokyo, where Storey won three Paralympic gold medals, and his thoughts on coaching in general terms.
Gary, how do you seek to combine your coaching and academic knowledge within the performance environment?
GB: It works both ways, as what I learn from the athletes I can pass back to the students. I’m interested in nutrition, environmental physiology and training theory and there’s a lot that I’ve been able to pass on to my athletes. Say, for example, Sarah Storey is getting ready for the Tokyo Games and she wants to do some heat and altitude work. I’ll work out what’s the best procedure, we’ll try it out, I’ll get her feedback, and then take it forward to the next stage and see if we get some performance improvements.
What has been your biggest performance challenge of the last 12 months?
GB: Not going to events has been hard. I couldn’t go to Tokyo, I’d been to all the Games since 2000, it’s been remote coaching from home, which has been a challenge. There was no contact with families and that was pretty tough for athletes. You couldn’t win a gold medal and go and celebrate with your family. There were also athletes who contracted long Covid and did not make it to the Games. Tokyo, success-wise, was great for us but we never knew if it was going to happen until the last minute. Then you need to prepare for things to go wrong. For example, Tokyo was about preparing for the heat and then it poured down with torrential rain during one of the road races.
How important is the feeling of control for a coach?
GB: I give control to the athlete until I feel that something might be going wrong or not in the right direction. Then I would intervene. That could be an injury or it could be a piece of equipment that requires the right innovation team. I have coached in water polo, swimming, triathlon and elite cycling and there’s a process of continual learning and educating yourself, lifting different ideas from different sports. In the past, I’ve had some pretty dodgy coaches and you learn from their errors too.
In what ways do you check the learning and understanding of your athletes?
GB: Onstage, I mentioned being a decent filter as a coach and getting rid of the rubbish, whether that’s rubbish people that are trying to intervene with the athlete or rubbish ideas about the theory of a sport or how you recover. As a coach, I find myself filtering that out so that the athlete hasn’t got to deal with issues like that. They can focus on their race, on their recovery, and have a good, settled situation at home or on the track.
How do you ensure that everyone inside the building feels empowered to speak up and explore performance questions?
GB: I think we talk a lot about collaboration and multidisciplinary work. The coach needs to pull on a lot of different people at different times. Some people you may not talk to for two years, other people you might be talking to them on a daily basis. If you find that people are backing off a little bit you have to ask why they’re not contributing to the team. That could be the nutritionist who hasn’t felt that they’re needed because the person’s nutrition is fine. We’d ask them ‘can you find out a little bit more for us in this area?’ There are always performance questions and ways you can encourage people to feel a greater sense of ownership in their work.
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The Leaders Performance Institute explores what Jones thinks it takes to get a team ‘humming’ and presents five points for consideration.
“You start at midnight, then you’ve got 12 hours to get to midday,” he told an audience at August’s Leaders Meet: High Performance Environments. “By that time your team has to have evolved into a winning team.” Jones, like numerous head coaches in team sports, can feel the clock ticking.
“In Premier League football, you’ve probably got eight games to get to the high performance, in international rugby you’ve probably got two years. Generally, I think it takes a team three years to be really humming when you’ve got all the bits and pieces in place.”
Here, the Leaders Performance Institute explores what Jones thinks it takes to get a team ‘humming’ and presents five points for consideration.
1. The coach as a chemist
For Jones it starts with the leader’s vision for the team. A high performance environment must support that vision and the leader must be ready to tweak things when necessary. “You’ve got to work backwards,” he says. “Get the structure to support the vision, then you’ve got to get the right people and the right behaviours. You’re like a chemist, you’re pouring little bits and things in there, taking away, and every day you’ve got to check the temperature because every day you get closer to where you are at your best and you’re also a day closer to where you’re not at your best. The cycle of life is more exacerbated in the cycle of sport.”
2. Sports science as a key accelerator
Sports science practitioners, led by the vision, must work to ensure the most efficient application. “I think when sports science came in, they wanted to be Godzilla and beat their chests and show everyone how clever they were; and now they’ve worked out that they’re just part of the package,” says Jones with a smile. “They’ve got that understanding, they’re part of the package, they’re a key accelerator of sport but not a driver; their role has become clearer.” He retells the story of an episode ahead of England’s 2019 Rugby World Cup campaign. “The first four weeks we didn’t let the players wear GPS and the coaches were sweating,” he continues. “The coaches didn’t like it, the players didn’t like it. I just said ‘work out what a good session is’. So we did that and it took away that fixation with GPS.” Keen observers will have noted that GPS technology remained a vital tool in for England throughout the tournament and beyond. Jones simply wanted underline his point. “You’ve got to make sure you manage all of that and make sure it’s in the right direction for the team.”
3. Sports psychology is the future
Jones’ tone is bellicose but he readily admits to his reliance on the high performance team, including those working in performance psychology. He says: “I think the sports psychology area is the biggest growth area of the game of any sport at the moment. If you look at any team now, do they go into the game with the right attitude and how do you get them to be at the right attitude more often than not? If you can get your team with the necessary talent and the right attitude at the start of the game, then you can beat the average, you’re winning in your competition.
“How do you get that? I think the one block that’s got the most area to investigate is performance psychology. When I say that, I mean it’s everything: that’s the relationship when you’re sitting at the table with your staff, the relationship you have between the staff and the players, the players with each other.”
Relationships are crucial given the growth of multidisciplinary teams in high performance. “If you go back 20 years ago in rugby, a player would have to have in a team environment maybe four key relationships: the head coach, maybe the strength & conditioning coach, maybe the manager – maybe three – and now they’re expected to have maybe 15 key relationships. The ability to develop that area and make that really hum and be at the level you want it to be is the key thing.”
4. The forensic psychologist as a cultural architect
Jones continues with a joke: “I reckon now you almost need three psychologists on your team, if you’re a big team I reckon you need one for the players, who are working on their individual mindset, their own individual skills. You need one for the staff – then you probably need one for the sports psychologist!”
On a more serious note, he makes the case for teams hiring a forensic psychologist to help deliver an understanding of what makes people tick. “We’ve been working with this woman who’s a forensic psychologist. I’ve been lucky enough to coach for 30 years and, in the last three weeks, I’ve learnt more about how to be more engaged, more intentional in the way I speak to people.”
5. Guardiola and Klopp as model leaders
Jones has often stated his admiration for Manchester City Manager Coach Pep Guardiola and his Liverpool counterpart Jürgen Klopp, both of whom he thinks understand how to cajole players without letting standards slip and decline. He says: “They’re tough on standards, aren’t they? You see them during the game they’re yelling and screaming but when they come off the field they’re an engaged and loving father that’s embraced the players. Our ability to engage the players is one of the hard things.”
It stems from the high performance environment and the team’s original vision. “The ability to make people work hard and do the really difficult things is getting harder and you’ve got to explore every avenue of how you do that and that’s got to be through having the best psychology and having the best performance staff.”
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