By John Portch

The Leaders Performance Institute’s forthcoming trends report reveals that nearly a quarter of the coaches and practitioners surveyed believe that psychology presents the biggest performance opportunity of the next five years – more than twice the figure that cited AI.

Yet 43 per cent also believe psychology to be the most under-served area of human performance.

There is a nagging sense in the sports performance community that while psychology has been in sport for decades, team have never fully integrated psychological services as part of their performance offering.

A desire for such integration lies at the heart FC Bayern Munich’s Department for Learning & Development, which was established for youth players at the FC Bayern Campus in July 2024.

The department’s first Head of Learning & Development, Christian Luthardt, is a psychologist by trade who now oversees areas including education, safeguarding and sports psychology at the 30-hectare site in north Munich.

His department is one of three (the other two are the Department of Football and the Department of Administration) that answer to Bayern’s Director of Youth Development, Jochen Sauer.

“Of course, we were all working together before July, there was a lot of mutual support, but hopefully are efforts are now integrated,” says Luthardt, who was the Campus’ only psychologist when he joined at its inception in 2017. Today he leads a team of two full-time and two part-time psychologists.

The work of the collective is informed by the club’s mission, which, as Luthardt explains, is “to create autonomous, resilient and ‘switched-on’ players who are open to new experiences, who are learners, intrinsically motivated, and who enjoy their journey.”

In delivering on their mission, Bayern have three areas of focus. The Department of Learning & Development will feed into each:

1. The player’s journey

Luthardt and his department are on hand from the moment a player is approached. “We try to psychologically inform the process of scouting,” says Luthardt. The club talks to players and parents, and when they are interested in recruiting the youngster, they will conduct a psychosocial interview. Campus staff members will travel to “see the family and get a feel for the player’s environment and the challenges that will accompany their transition if they move into our residence”. When players leave, they are not instantly discarded. “We have an off-boarding and aftercare process too,” says Luthardt. “It is about putting the human being first.”

2. The creation of a learning environment

“Learning environments need to be psychologically safe and healthy,” says Luthardt. Much of the work in this area is done by the team’s psychologists in conjunction with the coaches. “We are fortunate that we have a really good coaching group that want to support the players and reflect on the way they relate to the players and the kind of climate they create within their training environment.” As Luthardt explains, that might mean starting with feedback or it may mean giving the player a question on which to self-reflect. The aim is to “help players to feel that they are totally appreciated and accepted independently of their sporting performances, where they feel a sense of belonging.” Luthardt and his colleagues ultimately want the Campus to feel like a home from home. “It’s difficult, but we want to create a family atmosphere within the walls of our building.”

Such are the demands on the players’ time that Luthardt’s department has also created digital learning resources that enable players to learn on their own time in an autonomous fashion that complements their technical, tactical and physical development.

3. Life skills

From Under-11 to Under-15, Luthardt and his colleagues will deliver 30-minute workshops every two or three weeks rooted in “social projects”. He says: “Every team has a different kind of social project where they go and get some experience outside the football bubble.”

Schedules can be tight, but Bayern want players that are “not just not mentally ill, but actually flourishing and enjoying their journey”. The club wants to see “young people who, wherever they go, will be curious to learn and to also not see themselves just as football players.”

‘We now know our priorities’

One of Luthardt’s colleagues, a sports psychologist, joined the Campus from the world of aviation. “He came with some principles from aviation and one of which is ‘take off is optional but landing is mandatory’,” says Luthardt. “Previously, we had a lot of initiatives and projects and sometimes we wouldn’t land them properly because priorities changed.” Now, “there is a clear objective of what ‘done’ looks like at the end.”

Long gone are the days where three different practitioners would ask a coach to find time for a workshop in the same week because they hadn’t spoken to each other first. “We are now clear on what we are doing and with what age group, what are focus should be and where we will place our priorities.” At Under-12, for example, the focus may be on safeguarding topics or education around social media. It will be differ depending on the cohort and different people will take the lead.

“It will always be a question of ‘can we work together on this?’ Before July there were some processes where five people felt responsible and the project would not advance because no-one felt fully accountable for that process.”

Now, the Department of Learning & Development, as a multidisciplinary team, know who leads what. “We know where our priorities are, who needs to be consulted [in other departments], who needs to be informed, and who needs to be part of the project.

“Every person in our department knows, say, the five areas for which they have responsibility and this is what ‘done’ looks like.”

Catch Christian Luthardt speaking on 24 April at…

Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey

By John Portch with Luke Whitworth

What are the hallmarks of a good working dynamic between a practitioner and their head coach?

The question came up time and again during March across a range of Virtual Roundtables, whether the primary theme was organisational alignment, sports science, psychology or data usage.

This month we reflect on those roundtables and bring you four practices that have served Leaders Performance Institute members well when working with their head coaches.

1. Spend time with coaches and athletes

It sounds obvious, but coaches need to know how to apply the insights you deliver as a practitioner. “By always giving information that is contextually useful for that time of the year or by understanding the training cycle, you get more engagement,” said Kenneth Graham, a member of the Australian Institute of Sport’s Research Review Committee, who was speaking at an Exercise & Sports Science Australia roundtable. “You do need that time to build up the credibility and the acceptance of the coach to take on information from you; and over time that becomes a faster process. It can be done over a cup of coffee, you may not need a formal presentation, but being part of the process, seeing the development of the training programmes, being at the training sessions, being at the competitions, looking for the gaps where the information you’re giving is seen as valuable.”

2. Make accountability the norm

A department should articulate its goals within the team’s wider vision. “We all have a vision of what each department is working towards and who’s going to be responsible for those elements,” said one attendee during a roundtable discussing organisational alignment. A team can also ask, “‘this is what this department is working on – is that getting us to where we want to go?’”

Where your values are on the wall, they can serve as a useful conversation-starter. Another attendee, who works as a director of performance, spoke of approaching a staff member “standing in front of our strategy and saying, ‘where’s the work you’re doing? Where does it fit in our strategy? The acid test is they say, ‘oh, yeah, I work on this, and I know I contribute to that’. If they can’t do it then that’s on me, because we haven’t made it really clear where their work fits.”

Where there’s progress, you can celebrate the wins. “People get the chance to be appreciated. ‘OK, this is what you’re working on, this is how it’s going’” said a participant from a club in the NWSL, “and we can celebrate the victories where we’ve started to move the needle towards that ultimate goal.”

3. Timing is critical

“Timing is everything with coaches,” said one member during a roundtable that focused on the use of data. “The timing of when you plant the seed or present something new to a coach is really the start of the success or failure of what you’re trying to do.” Another attendee suggested that a practitioner must consider “what is it that you’re going to provide? And what is it you’re going to hold back?” A third offered an example of this in practice: “We’ve introduced not just new technology, like tools and hardware, but also a large number of new datasets and data metrics for the coaches to understand.” An astute practitioner will foster a curious mindset and understand “when it’s OK to give the coach a little bit more to stretch them and when we will hold something back.”

4. Find ways to track, test and refine your work 

Some people in sport openly lament the perceived lack of metrics in fields such as psychology. This notion frustrates Rich Hampson, the Head of Psychology on the men’s side at the Football Association, as he told a virtual roundtable on the topic of psychological services. He said: “I see psych fall down because it’s not defined well enough early enough.” However, if you are clear at the beginning, “90 per cent of it can be tracked. The broader you are, the less defined you are, it’s harder to ask: ‘is this actually having impact?’”

Benchmarking tends to be an area where sport excels, but not when it comes to psychological services. Hampson said: “I think sports should be more confident in going ‘if we’re clear on what we’re doing, more often than not, we’ll be able to give you an indicator here, whether that has done what we want it to do’; and then, like any science experiment, if your first intervention doesn’t lead to the outcome that you want, it gives you a real good platform to go ‘OK, why did that not work? And what do we need to adapt and change?’

“I think that’s really hard to do in a really objective way when you’re not setting that in the first place.”

And if you missed it…

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Performance Special Report – High Performance Unpacked

By Aaron Walsh

In this final article, I wanted to address the most common questions I get from coaches and organisations regarding mental performance and building a programme.

The first questions is often: how do we find the right person to lead that programme?

Before we proceed, I want to review the previous articles and examine why this question has proved challenging.

Finding the right person is difficult without the structure of a strategic program. The following quote is from a coach I interviewed while conducting my research. It perfectly captures the essence of the challenge:

“In other areas of performance, we give a clear mandate of what we want to happen in the programme, there are regular checkpoints to ensure we are on track, and we review the work after the season, with the mental stuff [skills] we tend to find a person and just let them loose, we don’t follow best practice.”

To prepare the provider for success, we need to view the work through the right lens. Rather than offering a reactive service, we aim to create a strategic program. We want to anchor the work in the foundations established throughout this series. Here are five crucial actions we can take:

1. Define the approach: Unless we define the scope of the work and set clear expectations regarding the time needed to achieve the desired outcomes, measuring the effectiveness of the work becomes impossible. For example, if we expect the team to have a fully integrated program while only employing someone for a few days each month, that goal is unachievable. Both the team and the provider will be left feeling disappointed by the gap between the intended impact and the actual results. Being realistic and resisting the urge to over-promise allows the program to be built at the right pace and in the right way.

Key questions:

• Before employing someone, are you and your team clear about your resources and time capabilities?
• Does this match your expectations of the provider?

2. Have a clear framework: With the range of subjects and focus areas in sports psychology, it can feel overwhelming for providers and teams to determine where to begin. However, a straightforward framework can offer a strategic approach that brings clarity and direction to their work. This helps prevent providers from jumping between various topics each week without achieving anything meaningful.

Key questions:

• What exposure has the team had to mental skills training?
• What foundations need to be built for the programme to be successful?
• Does the provider have the knowledge and experience to deliver these?

3. Have the right content: Mental skills are often presented in a generalised manner that overlooks the specific needs of athletes. My research found that “lack of relevance” was identified as one of the primary reasons teams struggled to see the impact of the work. If we can collaborate with the provider and clearly outline the challenges the athletes face, we can deliver a programme they can connect with.

Key questions:

• Do we know the mental demands of the sport?
• Is our content designed and presented to meet these needs?
• What are our athletes looking for in a programme?

4. Nail the delivery: For the programme’s success, it’s crucial to define how the work will be delivered. We need to align with the provider on the execution. The brief can incorporate a blend of group work, one-on-one sessions, and support for coaches. Additionally, we must discuss and agree on the provider’s presentation format and session duration.

Key questions:

• Which areas do you think will improve through mental skills training?
• Would you like the provider to collaborate with both athletes and coaches?
• What is the main method you envision for delivering this work?

Once the foundations mentioned earlier are set and the key questions have been tackled, you’ll be in a good position to identify who would be the best fit for the team and the programme.

Here are some questions to consider with potential candidates to help you find the right fit. I’ll take a practical approach, as the qualifications and experience required will differ based on each team’s needs.

1. Can they connect with people from various backgrounds and build trust?
2. Do they have sufficient knowledge and resources to support the players and staff?
3. Are they effective communicators who can engage a room?
4. Do they align with the values and performance philosophy of the head coach?
5. Do they understand the mental challenges faced by the team? (Both cultural and performance-related.)
6. Do they understand group dynamics and their influence on the collective mindset?
7. Are they able to propel work across the entire system?
8. Do they recognise what success looks like and how to evaluate it?

The final aspect I want to explore is how we can integrate them after we’ve identified the person we think is suitable for the team.

1. Clearly mention when introducing them that their role is to enhance performance, rather than just to fix underperforming athletes.
2. Include them in the coaching team rather than in a medical role unless they hold a clinical position.
3. Make the mental aspect of performance a topic you review weekly, and have them lead that process.
4. Involve them in the team’s daily rhythm. They can assist with training, support the S&C team, and more. The more you normalise their presence, the more likely they are to be integrated.
5. Regularly seek their input on coaching, leadership, and the overall health of the environment.

As this series draws to a close, I believe that this important yet overlooked aspect of performance will become a key differentiator for teams that choose to engage. Considerable investment has gone into the physical and skills components of performance. While there are still gains to be made, these will be marginal. The mental performance of teams is a sleeping giant that has yet to be fully unleashed. Teams that dedicate time and resources will see the benefits.

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Duncan French, the Senior Vice President of the UFC Performance Institute, is describing the aftermath of a bout.

“If an athlete has gone through the fight pretty well and won, then it might be a very simple kind of cool down in one of the back rooms in the locker room and just do some light work to bring themselves back down again,” he says of the victor.

“If an athlete’s had a pretty significant amount of trouble, that’s a very different strategy.”

Mixed martial arts is, as he adds, “a sport of consequences”.

It’s all in a day’s work for French, who oversees the UFC’s Performance Institutes based in Las Vegas, Shanghai and, most recently, Mexico City.

There have been some teething troubles with the Mexican facility [4:40], but French took it all in his stride, as he tells us in the first of this three-part Keiser Series Podcast focused on some of the challenges faced and lessons learned by members of the Leaders Performance Institute during 2024.

French also discussed his evolving leadership style [6:20]; the personalisation of fight preparation plans [19:30]; and his use of data to inform those strategies [28:30].

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

By Aaron Walsh

While no-one doubts that mental skills are important, conversations with colleagues led me to believe that mental skills programs were rarely integrated successfully.

I wanted to understand the perceived gap between value and impact and embarked on a research project whereby I contacted 35 head coaches and performance directors and asked three questions.

The first two were ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions:

• Do you think mental skills play an important role in the overall performance of your team?
• Do you currently have a strategy to integrate this work into your team environment?

The third question was open-ended:

• What major obstacles prevent mental skills from being integrated into your team?

One of my significant findings was that the information delivered to the players, coaches, and staff wasn’t consistently effective. This is understandable; psychology is a vast subject, and translating the principles that underpin the work can be difficult. However, the last thing a provider wants to do is add a layer of complexity for athletes who already have the burden of processing a lot of information.

To address this, I will examine a couple of areas we can focus on to ensure the content we deliver is meaningful and impactful. We want it to enhance performance and provide the necessary information, tools, and support for our players and staff to perform at their best when pressure is present. The first area of focus is determining what content is needed for our teams.

To illustrate this, I will look at the different natures of the sports our athletes participate in and how that shapes what we engage them with.

Looking for the clues

When determining what content to deliver, our first reference point will be something other than a textbook or theory. We will use what we know about psychology extensively, but we need to ask a more critical question before we dive into it.

What are the mental demands of the sport? 

This seems a simple question, but it forces us to eliminate supercilious issues and allows us to identify where we can bring value to the athlete. To help us answer this question, I have divided sports into three categories. The reason for doing this is the nature of the sport will tell us what challenges the athlete is likely to face.

The categories below are not black and white in their definition; for example, in some sports, you have moments when you are required to initiate the movement (A lineout throw in Rugby, a free kick in football, a free throw in basketball). Still, most of the time, you are responding to movement. In other sports, you only initiate the movement (golf, archery, jumps in athletics).

Defining these challenges allows us to tailor our content to meet those needs. In other words, we become relevant.  For the sake of brevity, I will define the mental challenges of the sports involved and give three mental skills to enhance performance. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list but rather a snapshot identifying the demands and skills required to succeed.

1. Endurance sports

The name and nature of endurance sports give us immediate insight into their challenges. How do you mentally stay engaged in a mundane task that is causing significant pain?!! Endurance athletes are different beasts. To be successful, they must develop the ability to tolerate discomfort and resist the temptation to back off or quit. This becomes essential during long-duration efforts.

Key mental skills required

• Managing focus: The ability to maintain attention on the task so the athlete can push through fatigue and distractions during long events.
• Self-talk: Encouraging and affirming internal dialogue to counteract negative thoughts, especially in challenging moments.
• Adaptability: Being flexible and able to adjust plans or strategies in response to unexpected conditions (weather, terrain, etc.)

2. Sports where you respond to movement

Most sports require the athlete to respond to movement to be successful. This includes both a moving ball and opposition. The nature of the games, from basketball to football to rugby, is fast-paced, and participants must make numerous decisions under fatigue and pressure. This is often accompanied by strategic demands, with various game plans that must be executed for the team to perform well. As the introduction mentions, these sports are intertwined with moments where the athlete must initiate the movement.

Key mental skills required

• Clarity: Being clear on the athlete’s role in the team, understanding the key areas to focus on, and being aware of crucial game plan responsibilities.
• Decision-making: Ability to make the right decision at the right time. The clarity above needs to be married to in-game calmness. It will be necessary to trust their instincts and preparation for this to occur.
• Moving on quickly: Mistakes will occur in a fast-paced game where multiple decisions are made. Athletes must be able to reset mentally, let go of the past, and refocus on the next task they need to excel in.

3. Sports where you initiate movement

These tend to be the sports where perceived mental failure occurs. How many of us have watched an athlete with a putt to win or a kick to seal victory, and those athletes succumb to pressure? What makes these sports so demanding is that you have time to think when you initiate the movement. Unlike responsive sports, where you are primarily instinctive and reactive, these sports ask the athlete to prepare for a difficult task, fully aware of what is at stake.

Key mental skills required

• Pre-performance routine: Most of the tasks in these sports are repetitive. Even if the environment in which they function has variables, they would typically be described as closed skills. A consistent routine underpinning the task allows the athlete to build a process for dealing with pressure.
• Task focus: having time before the movement is initiated gives space for the athlete’s thoughts to wander. They can drift to the outcome and the potential consequences of failure. The routine explained above gives a place for the thoughts to land; by focusing on the task and the associated requirement, they can mitigate against the temptation of outcome distraction.
• Staying present: When you are required to repeat an action numerous times, it’s difficult not to be impacted by the past. If an athlete remembers a poor shot, throw, or kick, it can significantly affect the next one. Therefore, the athlete must be able to reset and stay engaged with the present demands.

One further layer of having demand-based content is making it positionally specific. In a team sport, what will be required will be different. A goalkeeper will be different from a forward, and a front rower in Rugby will be different from a fly-half. A quarterback will be different from a lineman. The more we can dig into these demands, the more relevant our content will be.

Three principles to guide our content

The second aspect of enhancing engagement is related to how we present to the athletes. Once we identify what needs to be delivered, how do we maximise our time with the athletes so the work is meaningful to them?

Below are three principles I have leaned on to make this happen:

1. Simple — Psychology is a complex subject; however, there is no need to make the content inaccessible by using language and terms you don’t need to. You don’t need to impress them by demonstrating your knowledge of the subject matter.Additionally, I have made the mistake of presenting too much information. The more information you have, the greater the chances of being confused. If you keep the language simple and try to cover only a little, you enhance the audience’s ability to grasp the key messages.
2. Relevance — Any content we deliver must apply to the athlete’s needs. The athlete cannot integrate irrelevant mental skills into their performance. Not everything you know will be relevant to what they need. One good question for us to ponder is, “What do they need to know that is relevant to the challenges they will face?”
3. Applicable — The content needs to be translated into practical solutions. No one wants to be told they are “doing it all wrong” and then not have a roadmap for growth to occur. They should be able to walk out of a session with some tools they can apply to their performance that meet the demands they will face.

Reflection questions

• What are the mental demands of the sports you are engaged with?
• What mental skills will be critical to meet those demands?
• How do we ensure the information is simple, relevant and applicable?

Further reading

Your Team’s Mental Performance Program Will Only Be Effective with a Clear Strategy. Here’s What you Should Do

By Aaron Walsh

In recent years, there has been a focus on the mind’s crucial role in achieving peak performance.

It is almost impossible to listen to an interview with or watch a documentary about successful individuals and teams and not hear them refer to the role of mental skills and their significant impact on performance.

As this awareness has grown, we have seen roles created and resources dedicated to help drive and support this vital work.

But is this upswell in demand being translated into effective work? I was curious and began to ask other mental performance coaches I knew and enjoyed some valuable interactions.

From these conversations, something quite clear and surprising emerged: though the work had been normalised, it needed to be integrated better, and as a result, the impact that both these coaches and the teams they were engaged with was not occurring to the level they hoped.

This graphic from the 2016 Rio Olympics captures this perfectly:

Image: Aaron Walsh

I wanted to understand the perceived gap between value and impact and embarked on a research project, which I’ll discuss throughout this series.

Each article will build upon the next. Here, I will define my approach to mental skills; the second will examine the need to have a framework in place for delivery; the third will capture the content that needs to be in place; the fourth will address the actual delivery of the work; and the final instalment will help you to find the right person for your team.

The mental side of performance is not 90 per cent, but it’s not insignificant either

Where does the mental side sit within a team’s overall performance?

Many coaches and athletes say it is 90 per cent but I think the real figure is much lower and, in my view, we need to correct this discrepancy because it significantly shapes the work at hand.

To compete at the highest level, your athletes must be physically capable, possess the necessary skill level, and have an effective game plan. We can measure this for most teams and benchmark ourselves against the best we play against. Sports science as well as game film and analysis give us tremendous insight into this; and we can track the growth of our teams. You can’t outthink a lousy body, lack of skill and poor strategy.

However, when everything is equal, a mysterious performance aspect relates to your ability to deliver your best when it matters the most. It’s hard to measure and quantify at times, but we all know it makes a difference.

In the insanely competitive world of high performance, the mental aspect is a competitive advantage, and if you are not investing in it, you are leaving performance on the table.

My research

I contacted 35 head coaches and performance directors and asked three questions.

The first two were yes/no questions:

Do you think mental skills play an important role in the overall performance of your team?

Do you currently have a strategy to integrate this work into your team environment?

As you can imagine, 100 per cent answered ‘yes’ to the first question, but only four (11 per cent) answered ‘yes’ to the second question.

The responses I received showed that mental skills were acknowledged as necessary, yet integrating this work effectively remains challenging for many teams.

The last question was open-ended, and I wanted to know what prevented these teams from integrating this crucial work:

What major obstacles prevent mental skills from being integrated into your team?

From this question, four major themes emerged:

1. Lack of support from key stakeholders.
2. The work often became siloed.
3. The provider did not understand the demands of the environment.
4. The information presented was often too complex and not relevant to the needs of the athletes.

The research also revealed two critical realities:

1. Most teams don’t know where to begin

Most organisations and teams, though genuine in their desire to equip their teams with mental support, did not know where to begin.

When a team did engage with a potential provider, the nature of that work was often unclear. The work could become random, misaligned, and therefore ineffective.  As a result, the provider frequently felt siloed and isolated and usually lacked alignment with the core messages of others in the environment.

Alongside this, the lack of understanding, support and buy-in from key stakeholders (coaches, players, and support staff) created confusion about what the provider was there to do; in some cases, their role was reduced to fixing underperforming athletes, far from an ideal model and approach.

2. A lack of clear application

Secondly, a provider who engaged with a team without integration felt a lack of connection to the needs within the environment. This meant the information they presented to the team was only sometimes relevant. The theories were acceptable, but the ability to translate them into simple information for the athletes to apply was lacking. The failure to integrate meant providers, at times, were throwing darts at a board and hoping they’d hit the bullseye.

The research raised an important question: how can we integrate this work more effectively? After all, teams value the work but are unsure how it fits within their setting.

To better understand the challenges facing most teams, it is worth exploring the five broad approaches to mental skills services:

1. No program

Recognition of the need is almost universal, but knowing how to address it is challenging. Some teams struggled to find the right person, to have a model that fits their needs or to have a budget to invest in mental skills. They would often conclude that no program is better than one without clarity, intent, and appropriate resources. They are right.

2. The Minimalist approach

Someone engages with the environment intermittently. They may do a few workshops. The workshops may be helpful, but they must be more strategic and embedded into the environment with follow-up for impact to occur.

The danger with this approach is that it stirs up the possibility of growing in the mental side of performance but does not effectively answer the need.

What this looks like: someone in the environment 3-4 times a year for 1-2 days

3. The Deficit approach

This is the most common approach for teams who have begun some work. Mental skills are presented as something that is reserved for players/ teams that are struggling. This approach further drives the negative stigma associated with the mental side.

With this model, mental space can quickly become a performance scapegoat. If the team does not perform, it’s a mental issue, but the ability to address it and grow can’t occur with a deficit approach.

What this looks like: someone in the environment a few hours a week or when needs arise

4. The Skill approach

A skill-based approach is when a team sees mental skills as something everyone needs to work on. The scope of the work consists of the team’s general mindset, providing tools to help people grow, and doing a lot of one-on-one work.

The result, however, can still be siloed from the rest of the coaching team; it is still person-dependent rather than program-dependent. Rather than having a strategy and model that shapes the provider’s work, the work relies on a person to come into a context and decide what needs to occur.

What this looks like: someone in the environment 2-3 days a week or on important tours/ fixtures etc.

5. The Integrated approach

This is the optimal scenario and most immersed model. There is a clear strategy that everyone agrees on, buys into, and drives. Mental skills are a critical pillar of performance, and financial resources and time reflect this. They work across the whole team. The focus areas would be coaching performance, coaching the other coaches, coaching the way culture is developed and lived, and coaching the leaders in the environment.

What this looks like: they are fully integrated into the team and viewed as critical to success as a skilled coach. They are part of the environment regularly, have genuine input, and are seen as a valuable resource.

Questions to ask yourselves:

• Does your team currently have a mental performance strategy?
• What approach best suits your team and meets the mental demands it faces?
• Are you setting up your providers to be successful and have an impact?

Aaron Walsh is performance coach and consultant. He is currently the Mental Skills Coach for Chiefs Rugby in New Zealand and Scotland Rugby. If you would like to speak to him, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By John Portch

When Australia retained the Women’s Ashes in the English summer of 2023, there were mixed feelings for future captain Alyssa Healy.

“It feels a bit dirty in a way, but we got the result we were after,” said Healy in the aftermath. “I think the gap’s not necessarily been there as much as everyone has spoke about.”

There was a sense amongst Australia’s players that their success owed to a quirk in the format. Yes, they had won the series’ only Test match, but they had lost both limited-overs series 2-1 to England. Nevertheless, the scoring system was weighted in favour of the Test and, at the series’ conclusion, the teams were tied on eight points each, which meant Australia retained the Ashes as holders.

It was not the type of emphatic victory to which Australia and their Head Coach Shelley Nitschke had become accustomed. After years of blazing a trail and lifting trophies galore, Australia’s rivals were beginning to bridge the gap.

“There were just a few signs along the way that the game was changing and other teams were getting close to us,” Nitschke told an audience at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse.

She also spoke of her team’s resilient but laboured performances in their 2022 Commonwealth Games semi-final and final. Those matches against South Africa and India, respectively, could have gone the other way were it not for decisive moments of inspiration from Australia’s serial winners.

“We were finding ourselves in those positions more often than I would have liked,” Nitschke continued.

She had led Australia into the Commonwealths as Interim Head Coach and was appointed on a permanent basis after the competition. For all the planning that went into retaining the Ashes, the drawn series rang alarm bells in Nitschke’s mind, and the post-tour debrief was not going to her liking.

“We were happy to bring the Ashes home, but we knew there was work to do heading into the T20 World Cup [taking place in the UAE in October] and the discussions just weren’t moving the dials as much as I was hoping.”

Nitschke responded by pushing for change and her efforts have so far been vindicated by Australia’s subsequent results. The holders enter the World T20 as the favourites to defend their title.

Here, we explore the four steps Nitschke has taken to keep Australia ahead of the chasing pack.

1. She found the reason for change

Nitschke had noted Australia’s opponents’ increased aggression and strategic use of powerplays [ten-over spells in an innings where the fielding team is restricted in the number of players they can place outside of a 30-yard circle around the batting team’s wicket]. Without adaptation, Australia’s approach would not cut it at the highest level for much longer. “I went to the analysts and started to crunch the numbers and have a look at what other teams were doing and where we fared in regards to the rest of the world,” said Nitschke. “We like to think that we would have been ahead of the game, particularly around powerplays, but there were certain parts of the game where we just weren’t.” It led to a fresh set of winning measurements and KPIs; and Nitschke had her vision for change.

2. Then she found the right words

It would not be what Nitschke said but how she said it. As she prepared her pitch for change she first presented to her Team Psychologist Peter Clarke, a popular figure within the playing group. Nitschke said: “He was really useful in recommending the language to use; saying ‘don’t dumb it down and ‘don’t say it’s not a huge challenge’ or ‘just a few tweaks’.” Clarke guided Nitschke in her use of words and reassured her that in several key elements, such as assessment, stakeholder analysis and change strategy, she and Australia had already made a start. Armed with the right delivery, Nitschke could begin to instil the team’s revamped style and strategy.

3. She asked for input

After the initial pitch, Nitschke would deliver a data-informed dossier to every player during Australia’s October 2023 series with the West Indies. The coaches had already decided it was not the moment to implement wholesale change. “We contacted them and just let it stick with them for a while – it probably would have hit a few between the eyes.” It was a frank admission and not without risks. The trick was to ask each player for their opinion. “It led to some really good suggestions,” said Nitschke, who also consulted her staff, several of whom chipped in with ideas from beyond cricket.

4. She identified her change agent

When leading a transition, you need influential people to have your back when enduring setbacks. “We’ve lost a few games we ordinarily may have won,” said Nitschke, who was keen to take advantage of the relatively low stakes series following the Ashes. She would lean heavily on Alyssa Healy, who was appointed Australia captain in December 2023. “Alyssa was involved from the start in driving [the change] through the playing group.” Nitschke would need to call upon every bond of trust developed between the duo in their six years working together. She continued: “There were some senior players that were probably challenged a little bit through being asked to play a little differently than what they had been for the last few years, even though they’d been successful. It could have gone in a completely different direction because if we didn’t have buy-in from the captain then we probably weren’t going to get buy-in from the rest of the team.”

By Rachel Woodland, Lottie Wright & Sarah Evans

There needs to be more support for practitioners, coaches and others working in sport when it comes to better understanding women’s health.

That is the consensus across our Women’s High Performance Sport Community, from ongoing conversations to a recent mini survey conducted during our latest Community call, where the focus turned to education for staff.

We were joined by Dr Natalie Brown who is a Research Fellow working as part of a collaboration between Sport Wales and Swansea University with the Welsh Institute of Performance Science [WIPS].

Brown leads the Sport Wales Female Health & Performance Team, which has grown to seven members and is responsible for supporting all staff at Sport Wales in their journeys towards better understanding women’s health.

Brown’s own reasons for her specialism in women’s health stem from her time as a performance scientist with Welsh and British Swimming. She wanted to know more about what she didn’t know and to support the female athletes as best as possible to optimise their performance. It was an early nod to the relevance and interconnectedness of women’s health for practitioners.

Support for female athlete health at Sport Wales

In Brown’s time, Sport Wales’ approach to female athlete support has progressed from being wrapped around individuals to three areas of focus:

1. System level support
2. Individual athlete support (and support for practitioners too)
3. Sport-specific support

There are also three key themes that span everything Sport Wales do: athlete development, health & wellbeing, and athlete environment. Where once Brown worked alone, she now oversees a multidisciplinary team of seven, with specialisms in physiotherapy, physiology, medical, nutrition, strength & conditioning. The work has gone from focusing on the menstrual cycle to include puberty, relative energy deficiency and more to fully encompass female health support.

It is critical for those practitioners to be a good fit and Brown’s team was put together by grouping those who had an interest and the drive and motivation to work in this area of sport. Across the Welsh system, it enabled a network of voices to be created, rather than a single voice; making it more embedded and more natural.

The team work both in overseeing projects and research into specific areas of women’s health and in supporting the athletes, practitioners, coaches, and sports in applying knowledge to their performances. As Brown said, “we’ve got a knowledge development, but we’ve also got application and those two things run in parallel.”

Their efforts to speak to athletes help them to better understand areas where there was suitable support and where there was not. It enabled the sports science and medicine teams to adapt their athlete support. Concurrently, Brown and her colleagues captured all this information to help inform their progress.

Surveys to better understand ways of working

Seven years ago, Brown’s team circulated a survey for all of Sports Wales’s sports science practitioners. It asked:

1. Did practitioners have conversations about the menstrual cycle in their sports, with their athletes, with the coaches?
2. How confident are they talking about the topic?
3. What is their knowledge level?

The survey was circulated at a time before women’s health proliferated as a topic of interest. It identified gaps, highlighted the steps needed to effect change, and what practitioners were requesting. And so the team came together that now works within Sport Wales.

Having a dedicated Female Health & Performance Team allows planning around how to move forward in support of both female athletes and performance practitioners; and as staff members have changed, so Sport Wales has continued to survey its people. They continually assess people’s comfort levels discussing multiple topics within female health and the factors that influence that comfort.

Brown was also particularly interested in whether or not practitioners know where to go to seek further support. The figures are startling. “20 percent still say no, which is too big,” said Brown. That 20 percent is therefore part of her team’s plan. All practitioners need to know that the Female Health & Performance Team is there to support them, and also direct them to other resources and, just as importantly, emphasise that the whole of a team behind a sport need to have this information shared with them.

A more recent survey enabled Sport Wales to better understand how it can support its system’s network of coaches and practitioners. Indeed, there is a growing cohort that see the relevance of a female health lens in addressing issues such as injury risk and performance improvements. This information has helped Brown’s team ask for additional resources and support. It also helps build the full story and picture.

The emergence of a common practice

Sport Wales conducted the survey, put together a team, worked across its sports, and what has emerged are common practices that help to embed female health as a topic within the Welsh sport system.

For example, as Brown said, “across the three themes [see above] there are always at least two people from the team asking how does that apply from a female perspective? Have we considered XYZ from a female-specific angle?”

The current approach is praised for creating an open culture. The Female Health & Performance Team have worked with the sports to normalise conversations around women’s health and how it relates to performance.

Potentially the most interesting piece to emerge from their most recent survey was around knowledge improvement and how the team want to receive information. The two highest reported options were athlete stories & experiences and resources to read. This has led to a shift in how Brown and the team are supporting practitioners and prevented them from heading down the wrong route. It also means that Sport Wales can also think about how to use the stories and experiences to support wider practitioner development. For example, what would it look like for a new starter?

It’s standard practice for all Sport Wales projects to be evaluated as they happen, which means that check-ins keep the team challenged and relevant, as well as aligned to organisation’s wider aims. Their purpose and rationale remains clear.

Another positive consequence is that Welsh sports proactively approach Brown and her team to request help and support. There’s also now an induction for any athlete joining Great Britain’s World Class Programme. It looks across all areas of female health and includes screening from an MDT approach, which then means specific areas can be addressed for the individual, as well as from the perspective of their sport. The overall goal is to ensure that female health considerations aren’t an extra thing or a tick-box exercise that’s added on but are standard, truly embedded and normal practice for providing individual holistic support.

Compared with how things were done previously, one of the biggest changes for Brown has been planning ahead and thinking about how you upskill practitioners and how to engage with sports, as well as identifying which elements are sport-specific and require different support or consideration; and how to provide those resources for athletes, coaches, and practitioners. This is all with the key moment in mind: ‘the doing of it’.

In monthly meetings Brown’s team create scenarios and engage the practitioners in conversations around topics such as energy deficiency or puberty. It provides the space to address meaningful questions as part of the conversation, such as ‘how does that apply in practice?’ or ‘what does that mean?’ This space has potentially been the most impactful development, according to Brown.

Beyond the work that she and her team are completing, they’re linking in with the other parts of the Welsh network across other universities supporting WIPS and Sport Wales, as well as the other Home Nations of the UK. “So in terms of staying ahead of the curve, it’s always a challenge, especially with the pace at which female sport is currently moving.”

How to make female health a performance priority at your team:

• Invite people external from your female health and the performance team to come in and join the conversations, raising different questions.
• Balance individual needs versus sport specific challenges with whole system support.
• Specialist areas need to consider the female specifics as normal, for example nutrition is thought about with that lens too.
• If you’re working as a lone ranger in this space, consider how things are being embedded, knowledge is being passed on, and progress to creating a team is happening.
• Language is a really important area too. Don’t exclude anyone, but also correct. Underpinning language with evidence has been effective. Language can also be the key to confidence to talk about the topics and roll it out with athletes.
• Consider behaviour changes and the role of psychology in female health.
• Always provide the evidence of why behind knowledge, advice, support. Especially considering the volume of information, including misinformation, being shared around these topics at the moment.

By Rachel Woodland

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What goes into the development of a performance strategy for female athletes?

Judging by the responses during the October group calls of our Women’s High Performance Sport Community Group, the answers are manifold.

Nevertheless, the experiences of the female coaches and practitioners on the calls can be clustered into three main themes: structures and teams, data, and education.

Here, we delve into each in turn as discussed by the female coaches and practitioners from leagues, teams and organisations across the world who joined the October calls.

Structures and teams

We are at a point in time where not only are new roles are being created, but new teams and departments are being introduced too.

We’ve learnt that asking someone to add ‘the women’s side’ to their role isn’t fruitful. We also know that women’s sport demands its own coordination of research and management of research questions. This means that consideration is needed in planning out the departments, positions, and staff needed. In turn, further thoughts go towards SWOTs, goals and objectives, what type of people are needed, which processes are needed. We want to help these teams set up to operate for success.

Teams typically haven’t had many staff in place, especially not full-time staff, but now we’re able to add more people, we need to make sure people fit within our processes and visions. It should be a given that those being hired for women’s sports are receptive to wanting to understand and adapt their work to best suit women.

For Dr Sue Robson, the Healthy Women in High Performance Sport Programme Lead at High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ), it’s been important that her new role fits around what exists already, and that when putting a programme together,  we know the context and culture first. It takes time but find out why, and how, what exists already does, and its current value to the group. Understand your situation before making changes.

Those on the calls also heard about different bedrocks to strategies and what’s needed to make a programme work. For Robson, it’s Environment, which impacts Knowledge, which impacts Evaluation. The process can’t just be a tick-box exercise. It needs to understand reality and equip people for useful conversations. In evaluating, it is important to establish baselines and track progress so that efforts are in the right places.

For Angel City FC of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), it’s been understanding the head coach’s playing style and training philosophy, alongside the GM’s vision for the club. This includes deciding how performance is to be measured, and what’s needed as a foundation to this.

Additionally, we haven’t been able to escape the need for education as a part of strategies. More on that below. 

It’s a widely shared view that there is a lot of tasks anyone could be doing at any one time. Thus prioritisation and structuring a strategy requires an outlook across multiple timelines. HPSNZ are looking to three time lines. The immediate, and minimal viable product: how can they take what they’re doing now and make it better quickly? The short to mid-term, six to 12 months: which big topics would make a significant shift if changes are made? Long-term, 12 months and more: if we know more about this topic we could make a confident change. HPSNZ are exploring how to measure coach knowledge on female health as well as how to better understand tracking menstrual cycles so that they can build a self-learning environment for athletes.

The group also discussed how leagues, federations, governing bodies, institutes of sport, and clubs can collaborate better, with education, knowledge sharing, or support on adding value for athletes in differing environments at different stages of performance cycles. This is even more critical when new clubs and franchises are being created, and when resources are being increased for new roles, departments and teams. Particular examples shared and encountered recently are, the NWSL’s Medical Manual and UK Sport’s Pregnancy Guide, there was agreement that more could be done.

Data

Which information is collected when, and how often, are important questions that shape data collection procedures within a strategy.

In some environments, some current practices mean that athletes could go as long as two to four years before having an opportunity to flag a concern. The onboarding period is an important time, it will shape expectations and is a good chance to show care and precedence, as player profiles and individualised plans are built out. It’s also a time where you can signal that there are topics of importance beyond the menstrual cycle.

There’s also consideration to be given to how to time testing and research to fit with the competitive schedule, and to ensure compliance from the athletes, so that there is buy in from the majority, which will assist with the data making an impact. The basics need to be right if what we do know is to have a positive effect on the future.

Positioning data as a support for players, rather than a stick is important. Moreover, those in non-medical and science roles can be key to shaping a culture of compliance. Deciding as a collective which questions are important for impacting performance over time is also critical.

One extra hurdle for performance teams is around the application of research in elite environments. Current research isn’t always aimed at an elite or professional level; there then becomes a need to test in these environments before confirming an approach. This leaves a desire for applied and academic worlds to meet and collaborate further.

When it comes to informing strategies, a varied way of collecting data through conversations as well as surveys to let people share their lived experiences more naturally has proven successful. In general practice, conversations and trusting relationships help athletes bring up what’s important to them beyond the obvious topics for women. For example, urinary incontinence is the type of medical issue that can go under-reported.

Education

Education has emerged in conversations as another universal must-have for any strategy. It will shape the culture, and equip athletes to give better information, and enable athletes and staff to have better conversations. Nothing important is easy, as they say. There are questions around how best to deliver education and on what cadence so that it is effective and engaged with; enabling people to ask further questions and instigate continual education.

There is acknowledgement that education at a younger age will support athletes when they enter elite and professional environments, and that using parents can be an effective tactic. There’s also awareness that elite and professional organisations can support community education, perhaps in a way that traditional educational settings haven’t been able to. And ultimately, how do we measure education?

If you’re working with athletes who share spaces across genders, it’s important to give additional thought to the physical environment. Images should reflect the athletes, and not just be of men – representation matters. These little details can let girls and women know they’re front of mind too.

Who is your strategy for? Beyond education will it support staff as well as athletes? Ultimately, no one should suffer in silence. We want environments where athletes and staff feel equipped and safe to have useful conversations around their health, so that concerns can be raised and then acted upon.

Whilst there’s lots to be worked through, the overall sense we got from the conversations was excitement for the number of resources and the money being invested in high performance departments to support players, that will help the teams be more sustainable, and prevent turnover of staff. In turn, this will support people to build a culture and vision, and have people join departments knowing what to expect and how they can add value. There is a belief that people will be able to complete research over longer periods of time. There will be people in place to get clean data, decide on interventions, and to ultimately be able to be strategic with their high performance departments.

Finally, there will be a growing belief that this will be possible for an increasingly wide number of women’s teams and sports, following in the footsteps of some of the more mature sports and organisations.