By John Portch

Dr Áine MacNamara touches upon a perennial challenge in talent ID and development, a field in which her research is extensive.

“Early success does not always equal later success,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “but, in some ways, our pathways drive early success to get into the pathway, get funding and get competition opportunities.”

It presents a challenge to pathway coaches and environments, but MacNamara, an Associate Professor in Elite Performance and co-lead of the Coaching and Expertise Lab (Co|Ex Lab) in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University explains where the balance must be struck.

“There’s a bandwidth of performance early that drives both motivation, technical and tactical coaching opportunities,” she continues, “and all of those development factors will propel athletes towards success. That means that at the start of the pathway, coaches and systems need to look beyond just what makes someone good now towards consideration of those factors that support later development.”

These factors are influenced by an athlete’s proximity to performance (this is how urgently an individual athlete needs to deliver performance based on their stage in the pathway and current demands).

Then there is the question of temporality. Rather than simply the linear progression of time, temporality “is inherently fluid”, as MacNamara and her co-authors Ger Barry and Jamie Taylor wrote in their recent research paper.

“Temporality”, they wrote, “varies across individuals, shaped by unique personal experiences and subjective perspectives” and, rather than isolated moments, it is “a continuous flow where each experience is shaped by both past events and future expectations.” So one young athlete may be ready for senior competition at 17 years old; another may not.

In either case, “temporality can create a series of temporal reference points for coaches to help them coach for development and performance as required.”

MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute that the balance comes back to the coach’s intentions. “A coach must ask themselves what was I planning for that session, in this block, this season for the athlete or the team? How did I go about it? How did I review it? How does the athlete experience it?”

With all this in mind, we asked MacNamara to reflect on the characteristics of good pathway environments. We highlight ten that cover system prerequisites, environmental features, and day-to-day practice.

1. Multiple entry and exit points

Talent identification and development is not predictable. It is dynamic, non-linear and individual. “Because a 14-year-old swimmer isn’t just a 14-year-old swimmer,” says MacNamara. “They come with a range of individual factors and experiences.”

High quality pathways, she explains, are designed with multiple entry and exit routes that take into account that young athlete’s proximity to performance. “If I go and pick the best 14-year-olds for my pathway I’m probably going to include people who look good now but without the potential to be good later,” she continues, “and I’m at risk of excluding people who don’t look good now but have the potential to develop later.”

As for exit points, it may be that attrition rates are close to 99% but that is to be expected. “Conversion is a pretty poor metric to evaluate a talent development pathway,” she says of a topic that has long been at the heart of her research. “Even in the best environments there’s only finite space for athletes to develop into.”

Nevertheless, good pathway programmes equip young athletes with the “developmental constructs to be successful elsewhere”.

2. Firm understanding of an athlete’s ‘priors’

If coaches are to meet the demands of such a complex environment, they must develop both horizontal and vertical knowledge across their system’s curriculum.

“In a coaching context, horizontal curriculum knowledge informs what experiences might be desirable for athletes at specific stages of development, ensuring these experiences align with broader developmental goals,” write Barry, MacNamara and Taylor. “Vertical curriculum knowledge equips coaches to understand an athlete’s previous experience and anticipate the steps required to achieve desired future performance.”

Coaches generally possess strong horizontal knowledge but can lack that vertical understanding of an athlete’s “priors”, which is defined by Barry, MacNamara and Taylor as the experiences, beliefs, expectations and habits the athlete brings into the learning environment.

An athlete’s priors shape how they interpret coaching, respond to challenge and adapt over time and so, as MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “coaches with a broad understanding of everything that’s happening across the pathway and a high level understanding of what they’re delivering” are best-placed to meet the development and performance needs of their young athletes.

“The ultimate job of a talent pathway is to develop players for the future,” she adds. “That future isn’t yet defined, so we need to develop a breadth of skills – adaptability, robustness, resilience, as well as a range of technical and tactical skills – that will allow them to evolve towards that ultimate aim.”

3. Specialist coaches

Youth coaching requires specialists – it is not just a stepping stone to senior coaching. “Lots of systems now recognise the importance of that development coaching population being supported and developed themselves,” says MacNamara.

“The young athlete is a mixing bowl of inputs and outputs. They’re in school, they might be in an academy, they might be on a national pathway or at a club. So, in a way, coaching a developmental athlete is more complex than coaching an elite athlete; and the better a young athlete gets, the more people they accumulate.”

4. Equity not equality

An athlete’s priors, proximity to performance and temporality require adroit handling. “There’s almost like an orchestration from the coach’s perspective that’s recognising what the individual athlete needs at this moment in time and how to organise the environment to do that,” says MacNamara.

The coach needs to know how an athlete will respond to, say, entering a competition above their current capability, training with a new group, or being coached in a certain way. “There’s a triangulation of asking what is this athlete bringing into the environment? How do they cope with this? And, after reflection, what’s next? It’s almost like giving them the water wings to survive the turbulent thing that’s going to happen next.”

This, MacNamara suggests, is why the best environments offer equity rather than equality. “No one gets the same experience, but they get the type of experience that is required, that promotes their development at that time.”

5. Athlete agency is essential

Young athletes should be considered agents in their own development. “It’s pretty condescending to think on a pathway we’re just doing things to them,” says MacNamara.

She uses the example of an early maturer who suddenly finds themselves in a difficult academy environment. “Unless they understand why this feels uncomfortable and unless they’ve been given a toolbox of skills to be able to cope with that then retention on a pathway is going to be difficult because why would you stay if you didn’t know why what was happening was happening? High quality systems and environments integrate the athlete into their conversations and individual development plans.”

6. A shared mental model of development

The best way to ensure coaches, athletes and other staff are on the same page is alignment between three distinct curricula:

• The planned curriculum (the intentions, goals and structure of what coaches and the wider system intend to happen);
• The enacted curriculum (the behaviours, methods, activities and interactions that the coach delivers on the ground);
• The experienced curriculum (how the athlete perceives, interprets and responds to what is delivered).

“The alignment between the three is often broken because people don’t understand why what’s happening is happening,” says MacNamara.

“What we should be looking at is the experienced curriculum; what’s actually happening on the ground between different domains. So this idea of being interdisciplinary, not multidisciplinary. How do sports scientists, doctors, biomechanists, physiologists, coaches and other staff work together to ensure the experienced curriculum is what we intend it to be?”

7. Successfully managed expectations

Athlete experience is also shaped by how success is framed and celebrated. MacNamara jokes that she has spent her career warning about the perils of early athlete success, but there’s no inherent harm in an athlete winning early in their development providing it is interpreted correctly and fully understood by the athlete and their coach.

“Being successful is both a motivational and strategically useful outcome at a younger age” says MacNamara. “Pathways need to manage those social expectations and how that success is experienced by the athlete and the people around them.”

8. Equip athletes with psycho-behavioural skills

Generally, it is not social rewards but challenges that inspire growth. “When we look at those athletes that successfully navigate the pathway, often they have relative disadvantages early on,” says MacNamara. However, by the time they become a senior athlete, having faced a wealth of challenging experiences, they have acquired a range of developmental skills and mechanisms that have allowed them to progress through each stage of the pathway. “Those psycho-behavioural skills are part of a toolbox that allows them to cope with the inevitable ups and downs of development.”

By contrast, the early physical developer who has had access to high quality coaching and environments may steal a march on their peers, but if they lack those psycho-behavioural tools then there’s a risk, as MacNamara explains, that their early lustre will be exposed as “fool’s gold”.

9. Coaches that balance fluency and learning

Coaches must know how to balance their levels of challenge and support. MacNamara says: “Being able to slide that dial for different people in a session is a real hallmark of quality coaching. We don’t coach to the mean – we recognise the range of experiences that athletes are having at that time and adjust towards that. With young athletes, there’s often a tendency for us to do a lot for them, provide them with positive experiences, because we want them to be good, we want them to enjoy it, we want them to get that feeling, but we also should want to create desirable difficulties.”

In training, that might mean balancing the provision of fluency sessions, which are often fun and easy on the eye, with error-strewn learning sessions. Yet too often, onlookers rush to judgement on a disjointed learning session.

“I can’t judge whether that’s a good session unless I know what you’re trying to achieve. What’s your intention?” says MacNamara. “If you want the kids to look good, feel great and boost their confidence, then your fluency session is a good idea. If you said we’re dialling up the challenge tonight because we’re working on certain technical aspects or for a motivational intention then a messier learning session is a better idea. And it’s not just the session. The intention and debrief at the end are critical too.”

10. A continuous cycle of reviewing, debriefing and reflection

That debrief needs to occur at both a micro and macro level. “The coach does not just make decisions on a daily basis, they will be within a session,” says MacNamara. “It’s the reaction to what is happening in those day-to-day, minute to minute interactions of a coaching session, and a recognition that the environment is everything that happens to the athlete, and how they’re reacting to things.”

This goes hand in hand with regular reviews of systems, processes and athlete individual development plans. “Ten years is definitely a long time for a 13-year-old at the first stages of a pathway,” says MacNamara of the latter. “So actually reviewing plans is critically important, and integrating people into that review is key as well.”

What to read next

How Do you Track Resilience in Academy Football Players?

By Jamie Taylor

Most people in sports coaching have little interest in research.

Additionally, one of the key challenges in coaching is that there is a world of evidence that can help practice, but most do not know about it.

At Dublin City University we are trying to subvert that attitude through our online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.

We have a community of around 100 coaches and practitioners who appreciate the capacity for research to enhance both theirs and their organisation’s practice in ways that have long been transformational in, say, S&C or medical.

In many respects, coaching is a discipline apart, yet sports performance has long-been reliant on other domains to pick up and apply research. More research can and should be done.

Below, I explore – drawing on insights from students across the doctorate and MSc programmes – the common barriers in coaching, before making the case for evidence-informed research that can meaningfully support practice. The programmes are delivered by a team of practitioner-researchers, including Áine MacNamara, Dean Clark, Robin Taylor, Rosie Collins, Stephen Behan and myself.

The common barriers

As a coach, you should be weaving research into your practice – it should not be additional.

“Last Friday, we protected two hours for some internal professional development with a group of practitioners,” says Ian Costello, the General Manager of Munster Rugby. “There’s 20 reasons not to do it, but if it’s important, it’s protecting the time in your diary, no matter how busy you are.”

Ian believes the programme has opened up new career options, potentially even beyond professional rugby union. He has now got into the habit of writing in his diary in three colours: black for operational matters; green for strategic issues; and blue for learning and personal development.

“Someone gave me one of those multicoloured pens – I hate them because of my bad handwriting and these don’t help – but it’s brilliant for my diary,” he continues. “Learning and personal development can be anything from podcasts to light reading or heavy reading. It can be writing too – that was a good life skill and practical skill that a mentor shared with me.”

Additionally, coaches have not often been shown how to critically organise their thinking, even when they thought they were doing so.

Ian has been coaching for more than two decades, but still wouldn’t describe himself as the finished article.

“The first year broke me down in terms of questioning everything I know around critical thinking and reflective practice,” he says. “What the doctorate does is give you more structure to that process. It provides you with a more robust and applicable skillset to be accurate in research terms and then to think critically about the information you’re absorbing. As time goes on, you’re able to transfer that to your practice more readily and with a lot more clarity.”

He is not the only one to find the first year challenging. “It was quite confronting and shocking,” says Jamilon Mülders, the Performance Manager at the Royal Dutch Hockey Association. “You try to present where you’re coming from, what you have achieved, what you have done and why you have done things, and the staff at DCU will pose little questions like ‘where’s the evidence?’”

Jamilon has won Olympic and world championship medals as a coach, and yet, as he says, “I have to acknowledge that nine out of ten things we did worked for whatever reason at that stage, but there was no underlying theory, no evidence. There was nothing you could fall back on where you can explain it or also just make sure that you detect possible mistakes, issues, challenges, hurdles which might have happened or occurred in other areas.”

He sensed that something was absent. “I felt that something was missing in my personal education and growth,” he continues, further reflecting on that induction period at DCU.

Some coaches may never have set foot in an academic setting but, whether it’s our doctorate or MSc programme, we don’t need to simplify course material for coaches. We just need to make sure we are providing the right provocation.

“When we’re asked better questions it causes us to say ‘actually, I took that situation for granted, but I need to peel that back a little bit more’,” says Rachael Mulligan, the Athlete Support Manager at the Federation of Irish Sport. “It forces you to go ‘what is the best question to ask in order to get to a better outcome?’”

The most recent cohort of students on DCU’s professional doctorate and MSc programmes lines up for a group shot at DCU in Dublin.

The case for evidence-informed – not evidence-based – research

I hear all the time that ‘we need to quantify this’. It leads us to measure things that don’t really matter simply because we can count them.

There are different ways of seeing this and my view is that evidence should inform coaching, working alongside professional experience, theory, and context, rather than being treated as something on which coaching can be straightforwardly evidence-based.

“For anybody to be genuinely comfortable about their view of the world or their view on practice, it should be research-informed,” says Scott McNeill, the Head of Coach Development at the Premier League. “The risk and challenge of research is that sometimes things can go out of date very quickly. A body of research can be nearly out of date the day that it’s printed. So to keep that as a consistent and live way of engaging in practice would make sense to me, that suggestion that knowledge isn’t fixed, that these things keep evolving.”

“The first thing I said was my issue with research is I sometimes think researchers are almost in an ivory tower and very much removed from what goes on in the day-to-day field of performance sport,” says Rachael of the topic.

“That perception was completely quashed after a couple of weeks in the programme because there’s so much emphasis in terms of, yes, this is fantastic in the academia space, but how do we move this into real-life practice?”

“I used to always say I was evidence-based and a lot of coaches will pride themselves on that,” says Christoph Wyss, the Lead Physical Performance Coach at Red Bull. “But I think evidence-informed makes more sense because if a research paper comes out, being evidence-informed is taking that research, reading it, critiquing it, seeing what’s good and what’s not, and then applying that to your setting, because every setting is different.”

As he says, “with evidence-based you’re just transplanting it, doing exactly what they did, but then evidence-informed is more translating it.”

“There’s not necessarily one solution,” says Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.” The key for Eilish in her work is to ensure she and her colleagues are “making as informed decisions as possible when we’re designing learning activities” because “not everything from research may be transferable into a practical environment and, equally, every practical environment is going to be hugely different.”

“Being evidence-informed is probably more aligned with what we do on a day-to-day basis,” says Niall O’Regan, the Head of Education & Development at the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). “It is something that has helped me to understand how to be authentic, how to be creative in adapting what the research is saying is to suit the needs and the context and the environment that you’re in.”

Plus, as Scott says, “people sniff you out pretty quickly whenever there’s a gap between what you’re saying and what might feel real to them. Our job as people that work in this space is to either translate the messaging in a more accessible way or to admit that there probably still is a gap.”

And therein lies the opportunity to ask better questions.

Research should never be far from practice

While the programmes can be intimidating for coaches, we’re here to help in any way we can because it is important that research is not too far from practice. When they are close, the research finds practical application.

“This was a part I enjoyed from day one because you could immediately see the practical implications and make an impact,” says Jamilon of his coaching in field hockey. “So if I were talking with S&Cs about load management around our training, my new way of approaching them and asking questions really helped me to have a clearer view on the team and the environment.”

In some cases, research can help to highlight the current inadequacies in a high performance programme.

Niall, for one, thinks differently these days about coach development structures at the FAI; and it feeds into his practice.

“There are some experienced coaches that have so much knowledge and so much expertise in their fields that they may not need to go systematically through a certain set of steps,” he says. “They may have the ability to effectively communicate, empower others or share knowledge in a way which doesn’t require them to go through a checklist. They can get to the end with the exact same learning and sometimes even more learning.”

Such an approach doesn’t necessarily sit right with the coach and it wouldn’t necessarily sit right with the coach developer. “There’s a grappling effect where those people probably feel like, ‘well, I’m being rigidly pushed into a checklist of things and being asked to do things that I naturally wouldn’t do myself’.”

It comes back to being research-informed. “The person in front of you is the actual start point, and then it’s up to us as the educators and developers to be able to link it into research. The practice comes first and then it’s a matter of layering in what research is out there that can inform the decisions that that person is making.”

If you would like to know more about the professional doctorate and MSc programmes at DCU please email Jamie Taylor at:

[email protected]

By John Portch

On behalf of the Leaders Performance Institute I would like to wish you all a very happy New Year.

Here at Leaders Towers we were delighted to enter 2026 with Lando Norris newly installed as the Formula 1 world champion.

Several of us hope it will be the first of several world titles for the Brit, but my colleagues and I were also struck by the manner in which his McLaren Team Principal, Andrea Stella, spoke of Norris’ holistic development since finishing a distant second in 2024.

“He definitely learned a lot from last year’s mission, even though it didn’t go all the way to the last race,” said Stella in the aftermath. “There were some learning moments, like in Austria. That was tough.”

Stella referred to the moment when Norris collided with Max Verstappen as they vied for the lead at the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix. Norris would not finish the race; Verstappen claimed fifth position and a further ten points as he motored towards his fourth world championship. But Stella believed that something changed for Norris that day.

“I think Lando raised his self-image, along the lines of, ‘I can compete with Max’,” Stella added, warming to the topic.

“In my view, there was another important turning point this season: the way Lando responded to the difficulties at the start of the season. That was the beginning of a structured, holistic process that encompassed personal development, professional driving and racing craftsmanship. And I’m particularly pleased that Lando was able to capitalise on that because I haven’t seen anything like it in terms of the amount of work, the people involved and the speed of development.”

These utterances came just days after a Leaders Performance Institute Virtual Roundtable where members discussed holistic athlete development and alighted on some of the themes raised by Stella including athlete co-ownership, the convergence of performance disciplines, and the increasing emphasis placed on mental performance.

Members can read more here.

There was plenty more besides to engage our members’ during a busy December at the LPI.

Insight of the month:

“One of the things I see, certainly in the corporate world, is that people mistake ‘good’ for high performing. In my experience, genuine high-performing teamwork is much rarer than people would admit.

“We know what it feels like when a team is dysfunctional and something’s not working, but when a team is harmonious and there are fairly good relationships, people mistake that for being a high-performing team.”

The wise words of John Bull, the Head of High Performance at our friends Management Futures. Bull led a session looking at the elements that go into making a high performance team, from the building blocks needed to the human factors that can inhibit your progress.

Best advice:

“Listen to the system and the system will tell you what it needs. I think a large part of where culture can get derailed is where people don’t feel heard and valued.”

So said a performance support specialist from the Australian Olympic and Paralympic system at a virtual roundtable where members discussed how their team cultures are evolving.

They specifically referred to the potential resistance a leader may encounter from long-tenured staff or when dealing with rapid turnover. In any case, your people must feel you are listening to them.

Performer(s) of the month:

We’re within our rights to say Norris here, but December’s accolades go to Bluey Heeler and her friend Rusty.

The second half of that sentence may make little sense if you’re not familiar with the Australian children’s animated series Bluey, but one women’s international cricket team has inaugurated its ‘Rusty Award’ for the best teammate, a gong that is handed to a player at the end of every training camp or block.

“We used an episode to bring to life our ‘embrace change’ value,” said the team’s performance lead at the very same virtual roundtable.

Good to know:

Did you know there are four types of innovation?

That is according to renowned change management specialist Greg Satell and his model of innovation, which Professor Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, shared during the second instalment of his three-part roundtable exploration of tech-supported innovation in sport:

Serpiello then shared his thoughts on each quadrant:

Basic research – a low understanding of both domain and problem: “We don’t really know what the problem is and we don’t really know in which field or area it happens.”

Disruptive innovation – a well-understood domain but poorly understood problem: “In this area you may need something like innovation labs or launch pads.”

Breakthrough innovation – a poorly understood domain but well-defined problem: “This is the reverse of disruptive innovation… the classic example of open innovation.”

Sustaining innovation – a well-understood domain and problem: “The most common form in sport [and often the subject of] continuous research, design thinking or road mapping.”

Members can read more here.

Startling fact of the month:

Serpiello was back at it in the third and final session of his series with further reflections on our 2025 Trend Report.

The report posed the question: do you have a process in place to make sure that the tech you implement is the right one?

Fewer than half of respondents said ‘yes’, with more than a third saying ‘no’. Curiously, nearly 20 percent said ‘I don’t know’.

“That’s a good chunk,” said Serpiello. “It is probably more interesting than the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ given that most of the people that responded are at the ‘head of’, ‘director of’ or ‘vice president of’ level.”

What followed was an exploration of what a thorough and considered process of procurement should include.

One you might have missed:

Jamie Taylor, an Assistant Professor in Elite Performance at Dublin City University [DCU], used a virtual roundtable to explain to members that coach development too often veers towards less direct practices.

“Similar to what we see in coaching, there has been a view that it’s inappropriate to offer more direct pedagogical approaches,” said Taylor. He believes this is a consequence of sport being influenced by executive coaching practices and adult learning theory. Yet coaching is not C-suite work.

Supported reflection and communities of practice can be useful, but there are limitations. “If the coach hasn’t got the knowledge to reflect, or the coach developer doesn’t have a strong pedagogical capacity, then it can end up being just a nice coffee and a nice chat.”

Read more about the challenge of raising coaches from merely ‘competent’ to genuinely ‘expert’ here.

Finally…

A photo record of the best bits of 2025 at the Leaders Performance Institute.

What’s coming up in January for members:

Check out your 2026 virtual learning calendar at:

Virtual Learning

By John Portch

The problem with coach development practice is that the coach developers and their organisations do not always fully understand what they’re trying to achieve.

That is according to Jamie Taylor, who described the state of play.

He said: “It’s unclear how we help coaches to get better and it’s even less clear what methods of coach development are appropriate.”

Then, he added, “it’s very difficult to be able to evaluate and review coach learning.”

Taylor, an Assistant Professor in Elite Performance at Dublin City University [DCU], had set the stage for his virtual roundtable presentation, which explored all facets of the coach development challenge that faces organisations across the world of sport.

Competent or expert?

Taylor, using the graphic below, outlined the tasks (on the left-hand side) that a coach developer needs to be able to fulfil in their role and the questions that each task provokes (on the right): 

Too often, organisations do not adequately answer these questions.

The Premier League, for one, were struggling when they turned to Taylor and DCU three years ago.

“At the time, the Premier League thought they had a competent academy coaching workforce, but they weren’t happy with just ‘good enough’,” he said.

Together, they worked to identify the qualities of coaches deemed ‘expert’ as part of their Coaching Expertise Project. They co-developed a coach profiling tool to help academy coaches on that pathway from competence to expertise.

“The tool itself is around a half a day’s worth of different simulations that the coach can go through. It presents them with various difficult scenarios,” Taylor continued. “At the end, it generates a profile that says, ‘here’s where a coach might be strong, here’s where a coach might be weaker’.”

The project has yielded demonstrable outcomes. “Coach developers are reporting that it’s much easier to understand what a coach needs and be able to direct them and say, ‘here’s the time we’ve got and this is how we might use this time to influence and enhance your practice’.”

There are, however, still unknowns. “When evaluating and reviewing coach learning and development, we are still unsure what ‘better’ is.”

The project continues and coaches are tracked in their progress.

The ‘messy’ middle

Good coach development work combines both more direct and less direct approaches.

Taylor believes a thorough approach would look something like this:

In reality, however, coach development too often veers towards less direct approaches.

“Similar to what we see in coaching, there has been a view that it’s inappropriate to offer more direct pedagogical approaches,” Taylor continued. He believes this is a consequence of sport being influenced by executive coaching practices and adult learning theory. Yet coaching is not C-suite work.

Supported reflection and communities of practice can be useful, but there are limitations. “If the coach hasn’t got the knowledge to reflect, or the coach developer doesn’t have a strong pedagogical capacity, then it can end up being just a nice coffee and a nice chat.”

Between the more direct and less direct approaches illustrated above is what Taylor calls “the messy middle”.

“We haven’t often seen approaches like cognitive apprenticeship, where somebody’s needs are identified, understood, and they’re given tasks that are just beyond their current ability. We haven’t got into directed reading and listening, mostly because lots of the available resources aren’t necessarily coaching-focused. Nor have we paid lots of attention to the ability to generate feedback rather than offer more supported reflection.”

‘The things we might do to generate competence don’t always promote expertise’

As the Premier League and DCU observed, the things that coach developers can do to generate competence do not always lead to expertise.

The notion of ‘best practice’ is a prime example.

“When we say ‘best practice’, I think we’re essentially saying ‘if we do it like this most of the time, it will be better rather than worse’,” said Taylor. “This tends to be more observable. I can see somebody doing ‘this’ and what I’m going to do is encourage somebody to repeat this ‘best practice’. This can be done through auditing processes; it can be done through more directive approaches; and it is significantly easier to leverage and promote than expertise.

“Now, expertise could be associated with good practice, but ultimately that means understanding intentions and context, and it requires us to probe and promote adaptability for coaches; for them to be able to respond to changing contexts. And I see these two things in tension with each other. Lots of the things that we might do to generate competence often don’t promote expertise.”

Taylor then illustrated this point of difference:

The middle domain – skill acquisition – came to the fore in Taylor’s work last year when the Dublin Gaelic Athletic Association enlisted his support in a coach development capacity.

At the start of his secondment he leant towards expertise, but when three coaches announced their intention to move on at the end of the season he pivoted towards supporting them in skill acquisition for athletes, specifically the planning of sessions and whether performance metrics were being met.

All three elements are key to coach development work, both “systemically and individually”.

Taylor’s hope is that “over the long term, we’re going to start progressing towards a broader and wider reach for coach development practice.”

What to read next

How Do you Develop the Most Expert Coaching Workforce in World Football?

Main Image: Phil Greig, courtesy of the Premier League

By Dr Jamie Taylor

There is an enduring assumption in football that the manager of the first team is the best coach at the club.

Yes, a head coach could be an expert, but that team might also be blessed with a highly expert foundation phase coach or an expert professional development phase coach. Each faces different demands and their work as coaches is inevitably different, but each can be expert.

My colleagues and I have been influenced by the adaptive skill model of Paul Ward and his colleagues. We see coaching expertise as the ability for someone to form intentions in their coaching practice and then flexibly and adaptively work towards those intentions – or change those intentions based on the changing context.

This idea is at the heart of the Coaching Expertise Project, which is an ongoing collaboration between the Premier League and Dublin City University and Insight Foundation Ireland. The project was launched in 2023 as part of the Premier League’s efforts to cement its reputation as world-leading in coach development practice.

Most of our data was collected by Mike Ashford, a postdoctoral researcher at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, while at the Premier League, Scott McNeill, the Head of Coach Development, and Danny Newcombe, the Senior Coach Development Manager, have driven the work from their side.

Scott and Danny’s roles have been to ensure the Coaching Expertise Project is anchored in the real demands of coaching practice and closely aligned to both academy and first team environments. They have worked with clubs to identify expert coaches across phases and to shape the project so that it reflects the realities of their day-to-day work. This is important for them because their ambition is to impact the full coaching pathway, supporting ongoing development not only in academies but also in first team settings. More broadly, their main intention is to contribute to the wider football system by enhancing the skill and expertise of both coaches and coach developers. The Premier League sees this as part of a bigger picture as they work alongside their professional game partners.

Photo: Phil Greig, courtesy of the Premier League

At the outset, we identified six coaches per phase across the Premier League, each working at a different development phase in their club’s academy. These coaches were selected from amongst their peers – the only effective means by which we can say one coach is better than another – and invited to undertake an extensive research journey.

Through this process we seek to better identify and understand the coaching demands at different levels. If we can understand those demands then we can be better at identifying expert coaches and helping coaches to reach an expert level.

The coaches involved in the project love it too. They’re constantly trying to find opportunities to learn and develop and it has supported their efforts to step into deep, reflective practice.

And so in shifting that focus from mere competence to true expertise, the Coaching Expertise Project has challenged long-held assumptions and is establishing new industry standards.

The issue with traditional coach development plans

Too often in coach development practice there has been a tendency to focus on coaching behaviour. That’s antithetical to what expertise is because, by definition, expertise is about flexibility, decision-making, and changes to practice that are, frankly, not very observable.

The risk in focusing on behaviour and attempting to change coach behaviour is that we end up reproducing what’s already there.

If there is too much focus on behaviours there is also too much focus on the coach and not their environment. This creates coach development plans divorced from demands. It is important to ask: is a coach development plan based on the demands of practice or on a series of generic capacities that cannot be tracked?

Our project is focused on the interaction between the coach and their context because we cannot identify expertise unless we understand the interaction between a coach and the demands of their role. We’ve identified a series of coaching demands – six or seven per phase – then mapped out the cues and strategies that expert coaches use to navigate those demands. It’s not a list of qualities that says ‘every good coach does this’. The demands are consistent but the coaches are different, and they navigate those demands in reasonably unique ways.

Photo: Phil Greig, courtesy of the Premier League

What ‘expert’ looks like

The Coaching Expertise Project has used this fresh understanding of the demands and coaching context to build a profiling tool that we want to embed in coach development at the Premier League.

It will inform a needs analysis for each coach because we can better understand good practice and the development status of the coach in question.

Capacities are still important. Entry level coaches will still need to show that they’re good enough to enter a role, but the Premier League’s ambitions extend beyond that starting point.

We’re going to be able to provide recommendations for coaches on the different demands of their roles and how they might work to develop themselves against these demands. Ultimately, we hope it’s going to become embedded into coach development practices across Premier League academies and in the daily life of an academy coach.

People have also asked me if we’ve simplified anything for coaches. The answer is no. You’d never say ‘how do you simplify this for a sports scientist or psychologist?’ because we have higher expectations of those professions. Coaches are some of the most expert practitioners in any field so it’s less important that it’s simplified and more that it’s valid and useful for coaches, that it can be integrated into their workflows.

Photo: Phil Greig, courtesy of the Premier League

Evolution not revolution

This remains a fruitful area for research. There are fewer than ten studies that have used expertise as a lens to understand coaching practice – and two of those studies have been mine.

The Premier League remains committed to the ongoing development of coaches across both academy and first team settings. The central intention of the project is to contribute to the wider football system by enhancing the skill and expertise of coaches and coach developers alike. By doing so, we aim to strengthen the overall quality of coaching and create development environments where the very best practitioners can continue to grow and positively impact the game.

We hope that this will eventually have an impact in the wider sporting world, but we are promoting an evolution rather than revolution, and if we can recognise the very best coaches and we’re better able to develop coaches towards expertise, it’ll see those coaches rewarded for good practice and then ultimately every player, when they walk into a club, is on the receiving end of high quality coaching practice.

Dr Jamie Taylor

Jamie is an Assistant Professor in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University, with a focus on coaching, coach development and coaching research. As a researcher, he supports practitioners on DCU’s MSc and professional doctorate programmes and collaborates with high-performance sports organisations including the Premier League, GAA, IRFU, and Premiership Rugby. As a coach developer, he has worked across a range of high-performance environments. Alongside his academic and development work, Jamie coaches rugby union at Leicester Tigers.

If you would like to speak to Jamie Taylor, Scott McNeill or Danny Newcombe about their work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By Luke Whitworth

Stephen Torpey, the Academy Director at Premier League Brentford, was damning in his verdict on the English football academy system’s ability to give young players a happy, fulfilling experience.

“There are 18,400 players on average in the system,” said Torpey, when speaking at Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey in April. “To say that every single one of them is ready, can handle this environment, and is going to have a great time whilst in it, I would question that.”

Effective pathway transitions were a major theme of the day’s discussions and leant themselves neatly to a virtual roundtable the following week when practitioners from across the globe were invited to share insights into the development experiences they believe have proven most effective in helping young athletes to make the transition from the junior ranks into senior competition.

The conversation alighted upon six important elements.

1. Relevant competition exposure

The fact that competition exposure was up first reinforced how crucial experience is for young athletes, particularly the act of exposing them to different types of adversity and building their mental resilience through that process.

Competition experience represents an obvious focus, with one environment in the world of swimming identifying a small gap in their programme for 19-23-year-olds – those that fell between the top end of the pathway and the senior team. They plug this gap by taking this cohort overseas to compete in competition-style scenarios. They also simulated experiences they might encounter during senior competitions, from the use of coaching language and setting out behavioural expectations to the potentially unusual timing of meetings during competitions. The impact has been positive.

2. Exposure to senior environments

This is closely linked to competition exposure and includes both the opportunity to experience senior environments and train with more mature athletes and senior, high-performing coaches. A number of participants mentioned ‘taster sessions’ as a simple but effective way to improve the transition experience by offering a sample of life within the inner sanctum. Moreover, it is helpful for senior coaches to be able to benchmark future talent in a way that informs selection.

These practices hint at the importance of connection between senior and development environments and better integration of the people operating in these environments. If true alignment is to be achieved in this area, senior coaches must buy into the idea that providing exposure and opportunities is a critical element of talent development.

3. ‘Buddy’ systems

In building upon the idea of increased exposure to senior environments, the table talked about being creative and resourceful in using more experienced athletes to aid transitions. One participant revealed that rehabbing senior athletes are encouraged to mentor their team’s academy players, which facilitates consistent messaging across the board while also equipping those senior players with new skills. It called to mind proximal role modelling, which has long been discussed within the walls of the Leaders Performance Institute.

Whatever your approach to pairing senior and underage players, the table agreed that it must be consistent and cannot be just a reactive exercise.

4. Individual development plans

These are for athletes and coaches alike, as one participant said of their environment. A good IDP caters to individual needs and creates reflection moments that aid transition experiences.

One attendee from an Olympic sport spoke of their team’s sessions promoting athlete identity and a better understanding and awareness of the support systems available to them. It causes athletes to ask themselves: who are the people who can support me in this phase of my transition?

Psychological profiling is a natural corollary. A participant from a club in English football is endeavouring to better understand the psychological makeup of young talent. They want to know how they learn and what environments would encourage better growth. They also alighted upon the idea of building stronger inner resilience, which is too often overlooked in the face of tactical and technical development. To aid them in this mission, the club seeks to help its support staff develop greater emotional intelligence as their young players manage the highs and lows of their development.

5. Upskilling your coaches

The table underlined the importance of investing in coach development as a key influence on transition experiences for athletes. One element of this is ensuring coaches are equipped to recognise and understand different transitions as they occur in different contexts and, therefore, deal with them more effectively.

One environment within the Olympic system explained how their decentralised programme has witnessed new performance records at junior level due in part to their consistent approach to coach development. Their heightened emphasis on coach support and development extends not only to their current athletes but those next on the pathway.

Also, coach-to-coach exchanges enable individuals to discuss both common transitions and those lesser-considered transitions that are nevertheless challenging, such as injuries.

6. Dedicated resource

It is essential to have dedicated resource to managing athlete transitions, whether an athlete is progressing to a senior squad or leaving the sport entirely. One attendee described their specific remit for pathway transitions, which enables them to identify gaps and then create the strategies or skillsets to plug those gaps. It is important that athletes are supported emotionally, technically and tactically.

This goes for the learning and development of coaches too, with the consensus being that they can take advantage of the expertise in their high performance ranks whether that’s sports science, nutrition, skill acquisition or biomechanics. Their learning and development excels when they cede some control to their support staff.

One attendee told the tale of an experienced Olympic coach who worked with a skill acquisition specialist to ask if there was a better way to help athletes transition from reaching finals to topping the podium. In other words, how can elite training design benefit from scientific enquiry?

Final considerations

Better onboarding

Too often, the induction process for young athletes is reduced to a tick-box exercise. Mindful of this, one environment talked about adapting their induction language and approach. Beyond induction, they are providing youngsters with a longer period of onboarding, which could be months, to help create the time and space for them to ask more questions and get to know the environment better. It prompted another at the table to ponder how we might check the success of our onboarding strategies. For example, one can test for understanding when it comes to education processes.

Continuous refinement

The continuous interrogation of what went well and what didn’t will help to refine processes of transition. One attendee stated that it’s important to critically reflect and then adapt how we support young athletes through the transition phase from underage to senior level.

What to read next

The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Rob Schaefer

Weeks after closing a $1.8M seed funding round, computer vision-powered coaching and analysis platform SportAI has secured its first major commercial contract, inking a deal with racquet sports booking platform MATCHi.

Through the agreement, SportAI’s offerings will be available on the MATCHi TV streaming service, which is underpinned by cameras installed at 2,000 of MATCHi’s tennis and padel courts. The integration lets players access highlights and technical analyses of match footage on their phones. In all, MATCHi has a network of more than 1M users across 2,600 venues and 14,000 courts in 30 countries.

Financial and duration terms were not disclosed.

Oslo-based SportAI was co-founded by Lauren Pedersen, a New Zealand native who is combining passions for sport and technology to democratize access to swing technique analysis – first in racquet sports but with the aim to eventually expand into the likes of cricket, baseball and beyond.

Image: SportAI

“Technique coaching, specifically, is still very subjective and expensive and unscalable,” Pedersen told SBJ in a recent interview at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, where she spent time during the U.S. Open pitching prospective clients. “If you have a tennis lesson pretty much anywhere, it’s easily going to cost $100 – and you might have a good coach, but if you had three or four good coaches looking at your technique, they would all say something different, and there would be no data to back up what they’re saying.”

SportAI’s system is hardware agnostic; its algorithms can be applied to phone or camera footage and generate overlays that chart swing curves (and compare those curves to professionals), ball strike timing and other statistics like hip or shoulder rotation and swing velocity. The system also provides textual feedback, which as of now is pulled from a matrix of preset options but could in the future tap into a large language model, Pedersen said.

Here, Pedersen demonstrates the technology analyzing her one-handed backhand.

“To get to technique analysis, the computer vision, the platform itself, has to identify the boundaries of the court, identify different players on the court, be able to pick up all the biometric movement,” Pedersen said. “Before we even get to the technique analysis, we’ve got a lot of the technical data, which provides heat maps and statistics as well. We can deliver all that, and then technique analysis or coaching on top of it.”

Pedersen is charting a B2B model for the company, wherein SportAI licenses access to its software to three key segments: racquet sports clubs and coaches, broadcasters, and equipment manufacturers. She did not disclose pricing but noted it is variable based on which analysis modules businesses subscribe to.

As a coaching tool, Pedersen asserts that SportAI can reinforce instruction with empirical data, expand coaches’ influence outside of traditional lesson hours by making swing analyses accessible remotely, and unlock incremental revenue by creating a premium digital offering coaches or clubs can charge members to use.

For broadcast, Pedersen envisions the potential to improve the less objective niches of common tennis analysis and introduce technique comparisons between players or digital twin visualizations.

Integrating with equipment manufacturers, Pedersen added, would bring the opportunity for increased personalization in matching players with the appropriate racquet for their skill level and play style.

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

An article brought to you in collaboration with

By Luke Whitworth

Half of the practitioners at elite sports organisations believe there is limited integration between their data analysis and coaching teams.

That is according to a straw poll of attendees at a recent Virtual Roundtable hosted by the British Association of Sport & Exercise Sciences [BASES] and the Leaders Performance Institute.

The perception is worse when it comes to analysis and recruitment, with over 60 per cent of attendees suggesting that their analytics and recruitment teams do not work closely at all.

Yet 63 per cent also believe that improved data and computer literacy across their staffs would directly impact performance.

The sense that there is room for improvement gave the session its title: ‘Mobilising Performance Analysis in Practice’. It was the second in our three-part collaboration with BASES called Advances in Performance Analysis and centred around two case studies.

The first was delivered by Julia Wells, the Head of Performance Analysis at the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], and the second by Mat Pearson, the Head of Performance Insights & Data Strategy at English Premier League side Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Five areas where data literacy can improve performance

Before Wells and Pearson delivered their insights, attendees were set a further task: ‘as a consequence of improving data or computer literacy, describe what you would see as being the most significant impact on performance’.

The responses were varied but five stood out:

1. Improved efficiency: save time and, with that time-saving ability, you have more space to explore and analyse the insights to then act upon them. Similarly, greater efficiency means less education on metrics and processes for those who don’t have expertise in the area. Finally, there will be fewer mistakes.
2. Better accuracy: this leads to better decisions, thus allowing one to be more evidence-based in wider decision-making.
3. Observing trends over time: if done well, this leads to more engagement from coaches and athletes in the process and allows for data trends to be seen over a longer period of time.
4. More evidence-based decisions: an ability to create general reports at user level with an ability to drill down and ask more specific and sophisticated questions of data.
5. Easier benchmarking: there is room for more programme guidance and testing if things are working. It leads to more objective-based player assessments rather than just the subjective.

How the UKSI are mobilising performance analysis work-ons in meeting common challenges in data analysis

The first session highlighted the four biggest challenges facing people who use data analysis in sport. To kick off her presentation in the second, Wells explained how the UKSI is trying to tackle those four challenges (plus another).

Challenge 1: integration

Go back to basics. That’s the approach of the UKSI, who have placed an emphasis skill development, support structures and a clear data strategy.

It goes like this: the relevant staff members are upskilled in areas such as collecting the right data, using the correct formats in the right places before the interrogation and analysis even begins. This is then supported by a clear data strategy geared towards performance planning. For example, roles such as the data & insight lead and the performance data lead are embedded within the organisation to better help those leading programmes with the direction and the integration of their data. Thus, the strategy can come to the fore and everyone can better understand what needs collating and why within the team.

Challenge 2: data collation

Wells described how easy it can be to stay on the “hamster wheel” of collecting data without taking the time to critically reflect and pause. Can you, for example, call upon efficient processes for collecting data and wade through the myriad datasets potentially available? She recommended asking “quality questions”: why are we creating the data, what is its purpose, what decisions is it informing, particularly in the coaching process? Teams should do this periodically and continue to plan, do and review. Wells also encouraged engaging in conversations with key leaders in the environment to discuss what to start, continue and stop. It’s important to intentionally carve out those opportunities as part of your performance planning.

Challenge 3: communicating data insights

Wells stressed the critical nature of human engagement in the process and regards communication is a highly technical skill, despite the views of those who might see it as a ‘soft’ skill.

She shared that the different performance departments within the UKSI work closely with the psychology team to help elevate understanding of self and others. Wells said, if we can better understand the people we work with, it will support how people can get the best out of each other.  As part of this process, they’ve tapped into better understanding one another’s preferences in order to be more impactful in how they support each other.

Challenge 4: buy-in

It is not uncommon for senior stakeholders to not perceive the value of the work being done. This makes it incumbent on analysts to critically assess their impact and share the meaningfulness of their work. “It’s our job, and it’s our role to be critically analysing why and presenting that back,” as Wells said.

On that note, alignment to the sport’s strategy helps to provide a clearer connection. If this alignment and connection isn’t there, you’ll naturally get disconnection so it will be more challenging to get the buy-in.

In addition, relationships are just as critical when generating buy-in. Wells advocated inviting leaders and key stakeholders into your world and shadowing them. When they immerse themselves in better understanding the process you’ll find that it can quickly lead to them becoming a voice for you in wider conversations.

Challenge 5: data illiteracy

Too often, practitioners can suffer in silence when looking for solutions. In the latest Olympic and Paralympic cycles, Wells and her colleagues are seeking to increase data literacy across the board. They have introduced an internal online data community that provides access to resources, promotes connection, and leads to the sharing of good practice.

Wells’ team also put together a ‘Data Leadership Programme’ which is focused on pulling together the data leaders in the various sports with whom the UKSI work to look at opportunities, challenges and future direction. Courses, with titles including ‘Data Camp’, ‘Project Automate’ and ‘Code School’, were created to improve skills and processes for coaches and practitioners to help them be more efficient. In her mind, this has been crucial to enable people to be upskilled; and all support staff should be able to ask a good question and have the data skills to answer them.

How data analysis is supporting coaching and recruitment at Wolves

Pearson explained that he and his colleagues at Wolves are trying to align the club to ensure there is consistent evidence available and better identification of the trends impacting decision making from a data point of view.

He focused on two key areas: coaching and recruitment.

1. The integration of data analysis with the coaching process

In the environment, the analysts are part of the multidisciplinary team. They are very much now voices in the room and, with it being a specialised discipline, all analysts must have an impact on decision making.

To that end, Pearson’s team have moved away from leaving the coaches to find the solutions themselves. Instead, analysts are encouraged to go and find solutions, present them to the coach, and then have good conversations to better find the optimal outcome.

Part of the challenge we can face, said Pearson, in particular with performance analysis at first-team level in professional football, is that many environments can be quite coach-led, which is in keeping with the nature of short tenures. The coaches will lean into their viewpoint as a way to exert their control. Therefore, education is important and, in particular, how you communicate with them to ensure the message lands. That said, Pearson observed that coaches in modern day football are more attuned to data and performance analysis and are much more data literate and comfortable with technology.

A key learning when integrating performance analysis and data work with coaching is to make insights as contextual as possible. If you provide insights to a coach that are out of context, you’ll lose them straight away.

2. How data can support the game model, recruitment and selection

Pearson told attendees that some of the biggest strides in performance analysis and the wider data team have been in the field of game modelling, recruitment and selection decisions, with the obvious caveat that subjective input is still valued immensely.

The team have worked to create objective measures against the game model. In better understanding this, it has provided an additional layer of information related to individual player requirements for the game model. These insights are helping to inform both selection for matchday but also the recruitment of new talent. When thinking about the recruitment process in particular, Pearson said this process has helped to educate scouts and other recruitment personnel in the attributes for which they should be looking.

Visuals have played a key role in this process too, particularly in being able to show what it looks like to play in this particular style that the coach or manager wants. They’ve worked to make the playing style more objective.

By John Portch with additional reporting from Joe Lemire

David Dunne believes the nature of the multidisciplinary team in sport is rapidly evolving.

“We expect a nutritionist, coaches, S&C, psych and physio – that’s what we consider a multidisciplinary team,” he told the People Behind the Tech Podcast in April.

“However, now [a multidisciplinary team includes] behavioural psychology, UX [user experience design], UI [user interface design], data science, software engineering, performance science. It’s a whole other world that has opened up new possibilities that we didn’t know were there as a practitioner.”

Dunne, who is the CEO and Co-Founder of Hexis, an AI-powered predictive nutrition service for elite athletes, has made an almost full transition from high performance sport. He previously served as Head of Nutrition at English Premiership rugby club Harlequins and still works in a similar capacity with Ryder Cup Team Europe.

While his assessment of tech’s role in high performance is unsurprising, his views on those “possibilities” now open to practitioners provide some food for thought – and not only for nutritionists or dietitians.

“What we’re going to see is the evolution of the hybrid practitioner,” he continued.

What are the implications for you and your team? Below, we set out a HYBRID framework to illustrate the concept.

H – Haste – “[Going] back to Quins, you spend a lot of time behind the laptop,” said Dunne. “You got bogged down in a spreadsheet. It’s tedious.” However, a hybrid practitioner will “use tech for tasks that can be algorithmically delivered at scale.”

Y – Yield – this can mean being receptive to others; and a hybrid practitioner “uses technology for what it’s good at” while people can focus on what they’re best at, which is “being human”. As Dunne explained: “Humans are good at building relationships, learning how to have conversations, and listening to people and actually helping them change their behaviours and change their beliefs about certain consequences or their own abilities over time.”

B – Balance – Dunne’s Co-Founder at Hexis is Sam Impey. “A brilliant scientist,” as Dunne said. “A far greater academic than I’ll ever be.” Nevertheless, Dunne is aware of his own assets. “My personal strengths have always been on the coaching side – put me in any locker room, put me in any team setting, I love to have conversations, I love to listen.” In truth, a successful practitioner needs both sets of traits. As Dunne put it, “let’s call it practitioner tacit knowledge and actually the application on the frontline.” The best example of this in Hexis’ work is how their app has been influenced by the COM-B model, which is a framework for understanding and changing behaviour – both key factors in performance nutrition. For a behaviour to occur, a person must have the capability, opportunity and motivation to perform it. Practitioners aiming to change behaviour should therefore target one or more of these components.

R – Roadmap – practitioners are too often constrained by tech being restricted to trackers. “It’s retrospective”, said Dunne, specifically of nutrition trackers. But with predictive AI entering the market, the role of the practitioner is likely to be more forward-facing. “We always need to know [and] we always want to help them know what to do next,” he added. This is particularly important in light of Hexis-sponsored research suggesting that most athletes are ‘confirmation seekers’, meaning they want to lead on “making the decision but then they want something to help verify that they’re going in the right direction.” A hybrid practitioner can cater to this need.

I – IT / MI – “I think what we’re going to see more of is a more highly-skilled human practitioner with a lot more software skills and [skills such as] motivational interviewing [MI] on the frontline, and then technology systems that ensure a standard of care across the whole organisation, 24/7, 365 days a year,” said Dunne. Key to that is reducing the “noise” around the athlete. With the right plans and structures, the hybrid practitioner can “deliver impactful value to the athlete.”

D – Data – with apps such as Hexis allowing for data integration – their collaboration with training app TrainingPeaks is a prime example – there is the opportunity for practitioners to make better use of existing data rather than merely seeking the next thing. With the right blend of skills, the hybrid practitioner is well-placed to ask: what can we do with the information we already have?

Listen to the full interview with David Dunne below:

A Data & Innovation podcast brought to you in collaboration with

David Dunne describes a perennial problem for practitioners in elite sports.

“There’s a fundamental mismatch between what practitioners can deliver and what athletes actually want and desire,” he told Joe Lemire and John Portch on the People Behind the Tech podcast.

“So we pivoted towards the COM-B model.”

During this episode we spoke at length about Hexis’ continued growth following a successful seed round, technology’s ability to influence the evolution of the practitioner, and the fundamental union of academic rigour and those so-called softer skills.

COM-B was a major part of that conversation. It has been integral to Hexis’ growth. The company used it in tandem with elements of design thinking which, as Dunne explains, stems from his time working for teams including Harlequins and Ryder Cup Team Europe.

The model is a framework for understanding and changing behaviour. It was developed by Susan Michie, Maartje van Stralen and Robert West in 2011. The model posits that behaviour (B) is a result of an interaction between three components:

Capability (C): this refers to an individual’s psychological and physical capacity to engage in the activity. It includes having the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities.

Opportunity (O): this encompasses all the factors outside the individual that make the behaviour possible, including social and physical environmental factors.

Motivation (M): this includes the brain processes that direct behaviour, such as habits, emotional responses, decision-making and analytical thinking.

Listen to the full conversation:

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