Scott Hann, the Head Coach of Olympic champion Max Whitlock explains his relationship with data and where it supports and challenges him as a coach.
“However, leading into Tokyo, I could have counted on one hand the amount of clean routines Max did. They were polar opposites.”
Hann is smiling as he tells this tale to the Leaders Performance Institute, because both Games proved to be a success for Whitlock.
In 2016, in Rio, he claimed gold in both the floor exercise and the pommel horse, while also earning a bronze in the men’s all-around event. Five years later, in Tokyo, Whitlock retained his gold on the pommel horse.
Those four medals go alongside the two bronzes Whitlock won in the team and pommel horse at the London 2012 Games.
Whitlock has been on the senior men’s scene for more than a decade and recently stated his desire to compete at the Paris 2024 Olympics – a decision Hann discussed during his recent appearance on the Leaders Performance Podcast – and that journey has seen him develop from a talented youth to a seasoned champion.
Whitlock’s body and mind have developed with each Olympic cycle.
“I have to do things completely different with Max,” says Hann, building on his earlier point. “And I have to accept that the small successes on the way are going to be different.”
The contrast between Whitlock’s preparations for the 2016 and the delayed 2020 Games were almost besides the point. Hann adds: “I had to have the confidence in that programme, even though there were struggles and adaptions, I had to have the confidence that what we were doing was right because that gave Max the confidence to trust the process.”
The Leaders Performance Institute has asked Hann about his relationship with data; how he uses it and any preferences he has as a head coach.
Says Hann: “There’s two sets of data that I think about: what repetitions need to be done to perform for a competition or to achieve a skill and, of course, the data that you gain from competitions in terms of scorings, deductions etc.
“Over the years, you do multiple preparations before a competition so you get a guide of what numbers you need to be doing; but you need to be able to adapt at every single different preparation because there might be a small injury, there might be different level gymnasts, you might have an older gymnast now.”
Video analysis is a regular feature of Hann and Whitlock’s training routine thanks to British Gymnastics’ relationship with the UK Sports Institute. “We’re doing that all the time, but you don’t realise you’re doing it because it’s usually on your mobile phones,” says Hann. “They’re so advanced these days. But we do have a great analyst at British Gymnastics so that when we can access her data it’s really useful and she’ll pull together all of the different scores and all the different starter scores so that we can take that and pitch where we want the routines to be at and it helps you develop and choose a team as well, if you’ve got all that data.”
Gymnastics is a discipline where Hann’s coaching intuition necessarily comes to the fore. “Once you’ve got your fundamentals in place, you adapt along the way using your coaching intuition and those small nuances of what you see because it’s not a timed sport. It’s not running, it’s not a strength sport, it is so intricate, with so many little details.
“If you think about it, on the men’s side of the programme, you’ve got six different apparatuses, six different events, and in an event, in a routine you do ten different skills, but to develop that, each skill you could have ten different techniques depending on ten different body shapes of athlete to learn that skill.
“Then you’ve got the strength & conditioning, the physical preparation, the mental preparation, the flexibility, all of those things that go into preparing all of those different skills, and then you’ve got to practise them individually, in combinations, and in routines to build that robustness and that physical preparedness to be able to do a full routine.
“Then, of course, you’ve got to do the numbers of a full routine to make sure that they’re prepared. There’s so many things that go into preparing an athlete that you can’t just have a bit of data that tells you how to do it. You should have a guideline of what works and then build on that.”
In Hann’s case, he uses all available sources of information to inform his judgments and overcome his inherent biases.
“In terms of the data from the competition, it’s important to look at where those deductions are because sometimes as a coach you do look at things through rose-tinted spectacles,” he says. “I’ve been guilty of that lots of times. ‘Where on earth did you get those deductions from?’.”
In the pommel horse, routines are scored by two judging panels. One begins with a score of zero and adds points for requirements, difficulty and connections. The second panel has a score starting at 10.0 and subsequently deducts points for errors. The difficulty and execution scores are then combined for a gymnast’s overall score.
“It’s important that you understand those deductions because you have to bring that into your training and make those small changes along the way. So the more data you get from that, the better.”
Injury prevention is another area of intense focus for Hann and British Gymnastics. “I haven’t had to do this with Max – touch wood – but identifying where common injuries occur and look at data to help avoid or mitigate those potential injuries. At British Gymnastics at the moment, they’re doing a lot of work on loading and trying to come with policies and guidelines to make sure that we’re avoiding or at least doing as much as we can to avoid any potential overload or over-use injuries. Acute injuries are going to happen, that’s the nature of the sport, but any over-use injuries so that we can get the athletes to have longevity in the sport, a healthy exit of the sport when they’re ready, so they’re not being held together at the end of it and, of course, a lot of that will link into their mental health. If their body feels good then they’re going to feel good.”
The Leaders Performance Institute asks how, for example, Hann will discuss data with a strength & conditioning coach. “Again, because gymnastics isn’t doing something specific like running where a strength & conditioning coach is almost part of the front, lead coaching team, it’s almost about building a robust muscle core to help protect the body as it goes through the specifics of gymnastics. So it’s helping the strength & conditioning coach understand what those specifics are so that they can design their programmes to make sure that the gymnast is robust and safe in their training.
“That’s where that communication between everyone is key. Because they can also bring advice to you and if you’re open and able to take that advice onboard, you can reflect actually you can find new ways of doing things, but that’s the future, right?”
Listen below to the full conversation with Scott Hann:
Michelle de Highden and Bill Davoren from the Australian Institute of Sport discuss their organisation’s recent approach to coach development.
Recommended Reading:
Tips For Coaching Generation Z, From Eton College
Are Coaches Too Dogmatic About their Methods?
Coaching Mastery & Creating Environments for Talent to Flourish
Framing the topic:
Our first Member Case Study of the year provided an opportunity for Michelle De Highden and Bill Davoren from the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) to delve deeper into a case study of the coach development practices that are having the most impact across the Australian Institute system.
The session explored:
This was followed by:
Michelle and Bill began with a outline of the AIS’s key operating principles:
Next came an explanation of the AIS’s ‘how’:
They seek to enhance coach capability through the following approaches:
How the AIS shines a lens on experiential, social learning:
Four examples of coach development programmes implemented so far:
These were the two discussion points attendees were encouraged to answer in their breakout conversations:
The following emerged as learnings:
Questions and key takeaways from our members:
Head of Teaching & Learning Jonnie Noakes offers learning and development advice from the world-renowned boys boarding school.
Allow them to show their individuality and competitiveness
“They’re the first generation of digital natives,” said Jonnie Noakes when speaking of Gen Z, the group most often defined as having been born between 1997 and 2012. “They’re used to what is sometimes called ‘hyper-customisation’.” As such they value expressing their individuality. Noakes is the Director of Teaching & Learning at the world-renowned Eton College and, in 2020, he spoke at Virtual Leaders Meet: Coach Development about the traits of Generation Z as defined in a series of recent studies.
He ended his presentation with some steps coaches can take to effectively engage Gen Zs in learning and development. “This is a generation at ease with fluidity. That doesn’t just apply to their idea of their careers it actually applies in a way that is interesting and quite complex to their identity, their sexuality, to who they see themselves as being.”
Coaches should also allow them to be independent and competitive, which is one of the strengths of those who grew up post-9/11 and post-the 2008 financial crisis. “These are not dreamers, they know that life will not always be easy, they know they’re likely to experience significant failures before achieving success, but they’re willing to fail forward and try again. They’re very focused on skills and building their skills for future flourishing; and they are self-starters.”
Communicate with them face to face
The research recommends face to face communication. “They prefer this,” said Noakes. “They prefer to receive their feedback individually and in person.” Remember: “These are a group of people used to choosing exactly what they want, exactly how they want it, and this has a relevance too to the way we might reach them educationally.”
Show them how to collaborate
The research suggests that while Gen Z enjoy stories about their peers, they are less-collaborative than Millennials. “They have to be taught how to collaborate in a way that Millennials perhaps didn’t,” said Noakes. “They must also adjust to us just as every generation must adjust to others who don’t think in quite the same way as they do,” he added. “They’re not natural collaborators but we know the value of collaboration. Therefore, we can insist having shown them how to do it.”
On that note, Noakes referred to a study conducted at Eton around holistic education where the premise was that teaching students a traditional, narrow band of cognitive tasks was not equipping them for life. Growth mindset was a major consideration. “We were very interested in whether if we taught 17-year-olds growth mindset, that is an understanding that their abilities are not fixed, but that they improve with practice, and that crucially also applies to intelligence, which is not a fixed thing, would they become more pro-social?”
Experiential learning
“Generation Zs learn by doing – they like experiential learning,” says Noakes. “That’s not to say they’re not capable of learning by listening, of course they are; learning by reading, yes, that works too, but when you can give them an opportunity to learn by doing – give it to them.”
Gen Z are also responsive to “blended learning”. “That’s a combination of online and experiential learning, partially because it allows them to personalise the online element. Involve them in the planning and iteration stages of whatever you’re doing with them. They want to have a say in what’s happening to them. Don’t forget: they’re used to hyper-customisation.”
Focus on the future
“Gen Z like to know they’re going somewhere,” said Noakes. “Give them interaction with those in the years [cohorts] ahead, give them clear goals, help them to focus on their career development stages.” He also stresses that they’re pragmatic and tenacious. “They respond to the idea of ‘work hard and see the rewards’.”
Professor Carl Gombrich believes that interdisciplinarity leads to different perspectives on expertise and creativity.
It was with this idea in mind – plus what he perceives as the British school and university system’s inability to cater for more than narrow academic subjects – that he founded the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) alongside Chris Persson and Ed Fidoe in 2017.
Gombrich, who serves as the school’s Academic Lead and Head of Teaching and Learning, is a living embodiment of interdisciplinarity. He is a professor with degrees in mathematics, physics and philosophy. On top of that, he used to be a professional opera singer. Before co-founding the LIS, in 2010, he set up the UK’s first Bachelor of Arts and Science degree at University College London (UCL).
He broached the topic of interdisciplinary learning and knowledge at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London but, before taking to the stage, he sat down with the Leaders Performance Institute to give us a flavour of what to expect.
“Interdisciplinary learning is learning in which you combine the skills, knowledge and methods from more than one discipline,” he says. He then cites the hypothetical example of a coder with an intimate understanding of graphics and art being good at data visualisation. “Those two things don’t generally go together but you can combine them comfortably these days and be a very go-to person. There are so many combinations. I had one student on a programme I set up studying genetics and law because she’s very interested in going into the legal aspect of genetic engineering.”
Essentially, interdisciplinarity combines knowledge in new and useful ways, which is a handy skill to have in sport, as Gombrich would point out onstage. Sport, he accepted, is highly specialised, but environments do change and people must draw on new knowledge to be able to adapt and grow. An interdisciplinary approach also leads to an increased menu of options and, therefore, more creative approaches to problem-solving.
However, while there are tangible benefits to interdisciplinary learning and knowledge, Gombrich feels that systemic problems in the British education system, to name but one example, present an obstacle to realising society’s collective potential. “Our school system and university system are not set up for this at all,” he continues. He believes they are beset by what he calls “legacy thinking”. “So my life for the last 12 years is opening the door for students who want interdisciplinary learning and knowledge; and the great joy has been seeing how successful they’ve been as a result.”
Addressing real world problems
Is interdisciplinarity as simple as trying to analyse and understand gaps in skillsets and complementing those with expertise from elsewhere or is it something more holistic?
“I think it’s been a spectrum. It’s not black and white. But what I’ve been amazed about in my career in the last ten years is how students find the gaps,” says Gombrich.
This is where he believes legacy thinking presents an obstacle. “There are so many new areas which are more complex and require more combinations than old academic subjects will really allow for,” he adds.
“I think the reason the thing I did at UCL was a success is because I had a boss and a boss’ boss who allowed me the space, within an established institution, to do that. [For] most institutions – not just universities, anywhere – you’ve got to look at the incentives of people. What are people incentivised to do? Academics in their academic subjects are incentivised to be brilliant at that one very narrow academic subject. Because of the way the degrees are structured, they’re incentivised to get students who are only really very good or interested in that subject.”
Schools, he argues, are no different given the distinctions they emphasise between science and humanities. “You need a sympathetic manager who’s honestly going to knock a few heads together sometimes and say, ‘we totally respect what you do in your area, but there’s more to life than just your area and can we help students learn enough of your area to do well, but also combine it with other things?’.”
He returns to the story of the law student who studied genetics. “The pushback might be straightaway from the lawyers like, ‘Oh, well that person’s only half a lawyer’ or ‘that person’s only half a genetics engineer’, but you say they’re more than double – the unique lawyer who knows about genetics.
“Actually a student of mine has a great way of saying this. He’s working in AI and law, another fantastic combination where there’s such a need for people that can speak to both audiences, and he says it’s pretty hard to be the top 1% of anything – it’s really, really hard. But it’s not that difficult to be the top 10% of two or three things, and if you see that as a multiplier you become the top .1%, or 1 in 1000, in that new unique area.
“There are these areas open to you if you just keep your eyes and ears open.”
Strikingly, the LIS teaches no subjects. This is because the school does not believe in traditional categories of education that it feels no longer reflect the world today. “We just teach through real world problems, so students will study something like sustainability in equality and we’ll teach them methods – so basically research methods. It could be quantitative methods around statistics, it could be graphical methods, it could be social science methods. How to design a survey, how to conduct an interview. And we don’t say, ‘oh this is economics’ or ‘this is sociology’ or ‘this is physics’ – we just teach them tools to go out and to tackle that problem. So this is the big step that we’ve made – it’s very radical. I think it’s very hard for people to shift their mindset.”
It sounds like they are teaching students an entirely new way to learn. “Absolutely, 100%, that a big meta of all this. One of the quotes I say from a student of mine is about how being on our programme she was almost forced, as she puts it in a beautiful way, to: ‘foster a burning curiosity about things’. And that’s kind of a teacher’s holy grail, because if you can take someone from thinking that learning is just kind of receiving knowledge passively, perhaps regurgitating it through an exam, and then have them thinking, ‘I’m just curious, I want to know, I want to learn!’ then they’re kind of made for life, really. They can, in this modern world retool, retrain, have three or four careers and that’s really nice to hear.”
How does the LIS track progress without exams? “One of the defining features of interdisciplinarity is trying to reflect the real world more. In the real world there are no exams. There’s things you do, there’s feedback and, if you’re a good learner and you’re lucky to get feedback, you should learn from that experience. That’s what learning is: trial, error and feedback, and iteration and improvement.”
The LIS prefers real life projects. “For example, in the first year, our students worked with 13 separate individual external organisations on a sustainability consultancy report. These were only first years and it was quite scary for them coming from school and all the traditions of school, but the [clients] were genuine external clients, people interested in doing a startup around waste management or in education, looking at schools, school architecture, all sorts of different things. And our students were asked to use the knowledge they got from our programme to write this report for them. So there is a real emphasis to try and make the assessments as real as possible.
“The other answer to that is a bit more theoretical, but I think it’s worth trying to answer it – how do you assess interdisciplinarity? How can you say you’ve done a good job combining genetics and law? That is much harder to do because you’re coming from a space where we know what law looks like, we know what genetics looks like [but] we don’t really know what someone who’s really good at that combination looks like. But that’s the sort of challenge we should like as educationalists and we are working on that. We’ve got various ways of looking at how students have synthesised knowledge together, how they’ve integrated it. We’ve looked at quite a few meta things like how they’ve framed the problem, how they’ve been critical of the various different perspectives. We talk a lot about taking perspectives on a problem, having evidence that you’ve taken more than one perspective. So there are quite a lot of these meta tools, but it’s interesting actually, in setting up a new uni, a lot of the kind of standard regulatory phraseology just doesn’t work because it says, ‘demonstrate that you’re better at this discipline in this way’, but we don’t want one discipline, we want them to take different perspectives and synthesise them in new ways.”
The balance between ‘synthesis’ and ‘analysis’ lies at the heart of the discussion between traditional methods of education and interdisciplinary learning. “In education, we’re very good at analysis because we know what it looks like to break something down into bitesize pieces and then be critical about it. Or if you get something right and we can give that a mark, we’ve got a checklist about that.
“We don’t really know what good synthesis looks like, because almost by definition synthesis gives you novelty, it gives you newness – someone’s done something cool and combined these two things that you’ve never seen before. How are you supposed to go to your mark sheet, to the regulator, or even to the student sometimes, and say ‘this is really good’?
“I said to my students at UCL that I’m going to reserve the top marks for those of you who surprise me in a good way. And what’s the students’ first question? ‘How can I surprise you, Carl?’ And it’s like ‘just stop and think about it for a moment.’ And that’s the twist you need. Of course certainly some students are scared of it, some even resent it because they think, ‘no, if I do everything correctly I should be able to get the top grade.’ And you want to say ‘no, you do everything correctly – that’s cool, you’re a B.’
“You’re never going to be outstanding, you’re never going to change people’s minds really, or create something, unless there’s a whole bit above doing everything correctly which we reserve for that synthesis, that novelty and that productive, creative approach”.
Specialist-generalists
How interdisciplinary learning and knowledge may best apply to sports is in the continuing debate around specialists and generalists in high performance.
Gombrich is a believer in the theory of interactional expertise, which was devised by a professor of social sciences called Harry Collins, who defined the concept as: ‘the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practise it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners.’ The opposite is contributory expertise, which is possessed, quite simply, by experts in their field.
“There’s an entire huge class of people in the knowledge who use their linguistic interactional expertise in really valuable ways,” says Gombrich. “Now the challenge for this is people think this means that if you can bullshit your way you’re good, you’re doing a good job. And Collins said this isn’t about bullshit, it’s about leadership – can you understand someone’s point of view and their objectives without being them? Without being a marketeer or being an accountant, can you really understand what makes them tick, what they care about, what their main concepts are in their discipline? Can you advocate for something without being an expert in that area?”
Interactional experts, as he would tell the audience, have the ability to ask penetrating questions, play devil’s advocate, translate accurately from one expert to another and negotiate in unfamiliar circumstances. This means they are good at taking perspective, translating between sectors and brokering, showing empathy, being creative and demonstrating leadership.
But how should a team be constituted? “There are quite a lot of these meta questions,” says Gombrich. “Can you find the right narrow experts that are willing to open up and listen to other perspectives? Or, and there’s a risk here, do you say you’re not going to have experts like that because they just can’t integrate? So you’re going to have a whole bunch of people who are open-minded, but is there a kind of groupthink in open-mindedness? So there’s a kind of asymmetry with this, you see. The open-minded person has to, in a sense, include the close-minded person in their discussions; and interdisciplinarians are always trying to do that, kind of widening the ambit of inclusivity. A close-minded person just says, ‘oh, I just don’t consider you, you’re out of my spectrum’. But that, in a way, makes their life a bit easier. There’s just one track. But I think in an interdisciplinary team you can’t afford to do that. So you need to include difficult people who might challenge you, and some of the very, very difficult people might not even be willing to be in the conversation with you.
“We have two very high level guiding principles at LIS for our students and I guess they apply everywhere because we’re about tackling complex problems. One is that you need to pursue multiple perspectives and the other is you need to think in terms of networks and relationships. Now how this works for teams in sport I’m not quite sure, there must be a way, but often when solving a problem these days it’s best if you’re humble enough to know that you don’t know the answer but someone in your network does. And if you can pick up the phone to them and get 20 minutes with them they might give you that nugget which you didn’t get before.”
Gombrich concludes with a quote from former US President Harry Truman. “He said: ‘it is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit’.
“Humility is a theme across all this. Humility of knowledge, humility of learning, humility of reaching out to people and admitting you don’t know.”
Fresh insights from Leaders Performance Institute members delivered at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable on 18 January.
Recommended Reading:
Talent Pathways – Some Essential Considerations
Are your Talent Pathways Considerate of Non-Linear Progression?
Framing the topic
This topic-led virtual roundtable delved deeper into the topic of player evaluation. It has been a topic which often comes up within the membership, and we looked specifically at how our members balance evaluating their players based on their potential versus their current abilities.
We picked out four key points from our discussions:
Understanding what the key characteristics are within your sport that are more likely to lead to success. These can be physical, technical/tactical attributes, but most importantly in many cases, the psychological or behavioural traits which are harder to quantify. Gather as much data on the athletes in relation to these as possible and track these over a long period of time.
Performance. Physicality. Personality. One organisation explained how they grouped their key traits into these three headings, and they are then mapped out as current vs potential. Some elements of these continuously develop and some cap out. Therefore it is important to figure out where they are in that stage; knowing how much opportunity there is left for growth or development allows you to make a more informed decision on the player.
Elite performance qualities. This is a tool one of our members use to rate the players and evaluate their performance. The players are asked to rate themselves based on some key characteristics such as teamwork, competitiveness and adaptability. The coaches or leadership group then also rate the player, and the most important part is then the discussion between coaches and players about the ratings. The power is in the conversation and understanding the players better.
Have IDPs as player-led exercises, rather than coach-led. Have the athletes become an integral part of this process, where ideally the player is bought in and contributing or co-creating the plan.
Understanding the athlete’s capacity to learn is critical in understanding their potential. In their IDP, instead of having ten areas of focus, have one or two goals at a time, so you can assess how quickly they progress and learn. Also assigning a practitioner as a mentor to help them with that main goal will enable them to be more effective.
Scouting and coach reports can be one of the most effective tools in player evaluation. Having multiple eyes, multiple times, on players avoids bias and increases effectiveness.
However, how do you ensure longevity of the scouting process? How are you evaluating the evaluators and ensuring you have quality and consistency in this process over a long period of time?
It was stressed that data is only ever a discussion point. It is always the experts whose opinion has the most weighting.
Player. Person. Performer. Measuring the non-tangibles is so hard, therefore understanding an athlete’s inherent motivation and drive becomes crucial. Looking at their performance habits, what they are doing day in day out, is an indicator that they will have the internal motivation and drive. Often it is doing the basics and having the love for the game which become the fundamentals for success.
For those working within academies or with younger children, making sure you speak with the people that spend the most time with them is critical. This is often the pastoral members and those who spend time with them in their dorms. Understanding them as a whole, what their habits are, will provide you with the most insights. The interconnectivity between these departments then becomes critical and, again, stresses the importance of open communication.
18 Jan 2023
ArticlesThe Leaders Performance Institute highlights six areas in the EPPP’s ten-year review.
The EPPP was launched in 2012 to overhaul the English boys academy system and ensure the development of a higher quantity – and better quality – of ‘home grown’ players at a time when English talent pathways were widely considered to be lagging behind their counterparts in nations such as France, Germany and Spain. The EPPP was adopted across the academies of the English men’s football pyramid from the Premier League to League 2.
Today, the top line numbers released by the Premier League, FA and EFL indicate that the EPPP has had a positive impact. For example, there are 762 more academy graduates with professional contracts in the English leagues than there were during the 2012-13 season. There has also been progress at international level, where the England youth and senior men’s teams have enjoyed considerable success in recent years. The EPPP faces the constant challenge of trying to satisfy all its stakeholders, but English football is better at transitioning home-grown talent than it was in 2012.
The plan is overseen by the Premier League’s Director of Football Neil Saunders, who spoke about the progress made in the last decade at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium.
Saunders’ appearance came shortly after the publication of the EPPP’s first 10-year review and, here, the Leaders Performance Institute highlights six ways in which the initiative seeks to address some of our members’ most pressing concerns around talent pathways and player evaluation.
What are the best predictors of success in youth and academy football? No club or organisation claims to have all the answers, but the EPPP has been designed to maximise the opportunity for those who enter talent pathways from under-nine and upwards. The approach is based on the Four Corner Model for long-term player development. The ‘four corners’ – technical, psychological, physical and social – were applied to the FA’s Future Game Plan in 2010, which according to the EPPP review, ‘has been adapted and tailored by each club according to their own playing and coaching philosophy.’ All clubs have developed an Academy Performance Plan in line with its vision, philosophy and strategy. These Academy Performance Plans also integrate ‘core programmes of the EPPP, such as: education, games programme, coaching, and performance support.’
In the discourse around talent pathways, some have bemoaned the fact that coaches have not always been credited for their inherent expertise, that they are too readily dismissed for not being objective. The EPPP works at a systemic level to underline the value placed in coaches and, since its inception, there has been an increase of approximately 50% in the number of coaching hours available to young players at English clubs. ‘Changes to the coaching offer since the EPPP have been led by three key factors,’ says the review. The first is ‘quality’. The EPPP set standards that focused on elements such as ‘different aspects of the game as a player progresses, including age-specific coaching and coaches.’ Then there is ‘access’, which is where the EPPP tried to bring coaching hours ‘in line with leading practices across multiple sports and disciplines’. Finally, the question of ‘development’, which is the effort to offer coaches ‘new individualised programmes and qualification requirements, tailored to each phase and Academy category.’
Through the aforementioned Academy Performance Plans, the EPPP enables multidisciplinary player profiling. ‘Performance support staff work closely with other key Academy staff groups to aid and inform player identification, development, and transition along the pathway,’ the review says. ‘Academies have increasingly taken an integrated and holistic approach to delivering individual programmes, tailored for age and stage of a player’s development’. ‘Generally, [the EPPP] has led to more informed discussions and a genuine appreciation of the capacity an individual player can express given the physical and mental limitations imposed by their stage of development,’ wrote Edd Vahid, the Head of Academy Operations at the Premier League – and Leaders Performance Advisor – in 2021 while still working at Southampton’s academy.
The fear of biases undermining decision-making in talent development and evaluation is universal. For its part, the EPPP has taken steps to abate the effects of relative age effect. ‘As a global phenomenon,’ says the review, ‘a higher proportion of boys in the Academy system are born in the first quarter of the academic year’. The system has organised festivals for children born towards the end of the academic year, but ‘analysis has shown that this bias does not necessarily translate to the likelihood to succeed in the professional game’. Indeed, the provisions of the EPPP understand that the transition to senior football is not one-size-fits-all, that player journeys are unique.
There are, however, three broad player ‘archetypes’ found across English football, according to the review. First is the ‘fast-tracked’ player, such as Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold, who broke into the senior team as a 19-year-old; second is the ‘focused development’ player, such as Harvey Barnes of Leicester City, who took targeted loans (temporary transferral of his registration from his parent club to a loan club) before making his Premier League debut; third is the ‘tiered progression’ player, such as Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins, who had extensive lower league experience (including some targeted loans) before making his Premier League debut at 25.
There is also the question of underrepresentation of players with Asian backgrounds in the academies of English football. During the 2021-22 season, and within the auspices of the EPPP, the South Asian Action Plan was launched in partnership with the anti-racism football charity Kick It Out. Says the review: ‘It aims to ensure that every player has the opportunity to achieve their potential in football through the delivery of research, staff training and Emerging Talent Festivals focused on equal access and improving pathways through the Academy system.’ It states that 648 players attended an Emerging Talent Festival during the 2021-22 season and there has been a more than 60% increase in academy scholars from black, Asian, mixed and other backgrounds in the last ten seasons. There is, however, much work still to be done on that front.
The EPPP provides a uniform structure to academies, who then issue players with bespoke individual development plans (IDPs). IDPs are useful for assessing how a player is developing against the principles set out on an academy’s talent pathway. The resulting contrasts can often validate the methods being used, one of which is self-reflection. IDPs provide the space for players to self-reflect with increasing emphasis as they progress along the pathway. The review says IDPs aim ‘to be aspirational and provide the right level of challenge to encourage the individual to maximise their potential as a player and as a person’.
Teams also place an emphasis on player and team analysis. ‘Academy players fully understand the demands of the game, with a deliberate focus on performance analysis education to equip them with the skillset to drive their own development, underpinned with a unique club philosophy and data-driven approach.’
The EPPP also supports a player’s academic progression and seeks to provide both life skills and what the review terms ‘life-enriching experiences’. According to the review, more than 20,000 players have attended the academy life skills and personal development programme since its introduction.
As for coaches on the EPPP, they are invited to join a ‘community of learning’ as part of English football’s Integrated Coaching Strategy, which is ‘a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver and sustain world-leading coach and manager education, development and career pathways across English Men’s and Women’s professional football.’
During its ten-year existence, the EPPP has never stood still. Tweaks have been made across the board, whether it’s the academy games programme, which was redesigned and enhanced during the 2013-14 season or the creation of the Professional Game Academy Audit Company, between 2018-19 and 2020-21, which provides ‘an independent and comprehensive audit of rules and standards to clubs.’ Competition rules will continually be updated, new processes introduced, and priority areas identified.
Ty Sevin of Keiser says that coaches often overcomplicate performance.
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Ty Sevin, the President of Keiser Corporation, was speaking at a lunchtime masterclass at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium.
The session, which was titled ‘Engineering Human Performance: utilising the principles of elite sport and bringing them to the boardroom’, placed Sevin onstage with Matchroom Boxing’s Head of Performance Dan Lawrence as they discussed their favoured high performance pillars, bridging performance gaps, and taking the standards of elite sports training into everyday life.
“[Performance Coach and Professor] Andy Galpin said ‘methods are many and concepts are few’,” Sevin continued, “and I feel like there’s a fundamental lack in the understanding of concept – basic fundamental principles that guide us in human performance – and more performance coaches [are becoming] dogmatic about their methods.”
Sevin, a former athlete and coach with three decades of experience at Olympic and collegiate level, was addressing the question of why coaches often overcomplicate performance. “The method is the means to the end but they don’t focus on being dogmatic about the concepts, they focus on the methods. So you have to understand what kind of engine you’re building and that totally depends on what the requirement of the sport is. And once you can simplify that, evaluate the athlete, evaluate what they have to perform on the field, it doesn’t matter what they do in the weight room if it doesn’t transfer on the field of play it’s a total waste of time.”
Physical-tactical-technical-mental
What sets apart podium-potential athletes from the rest? “There was not a physical gap between the people who won and who didn’t: it was the extreme ownership and it was the passion that they had – the soft skills,” said Sevin, perhaps reflecting on his time as the Director of the Track and Field Residency Program at the United States Olympic Committee’s Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. “It’s the relentless pursuit in many cases of going where no one had gone before.”
He highlighted specific traits: belief, consistency, compliance, hard work and dedication. In underlining his point he referenced the reflections of British Olympian Dina Asher-Smith, who spoke onstage earlier that day. “You have to have a team built around you,” he added, suggesting that community may be the most important factor behind those traits.
They all provide the foundations for Sevin’s winning “triad” of an athlete’s physical capability, tactical and technical ability and mental competency. The coach’s role is essential at that intersection. “You’re trying to address each one of those things individually and then going back to your basic concepts of ‘what does this athlete need? What are their strengths?’ Doing a simple SWAT analysis on an athlete, which is something that came from the business world that I incorporated at a very young age. You’ve got to know the strength of an athlete and what their weaknesses are; and within those three pillars you can address almost anything that happens as long as the principles are being met on top of it.”
Better coaches are better guessers
Sevin was immersed in the traditional coaching ethos of being athlete-centred, coach-driven and science-based. However, he prefers to switch ‘science’ for ‘results’.
“Science seeks answers and training seeks results,” he said. “If you look to science, you have to have pragmatic experience. The reason that coaches I think do well over time is not that the coach is so much better than the coaches they’re competing against, it’s because they have the opportunity to work with athletes over a long duration of time where they learn knowledge and they see all these different holes that athletes can have. So if you’re a young coach and you’ve got no mentor or progress and you see a hole or a deficiency in an athlete, you’re practically guessing; and as you become more experienced as a coach you become a better guesser.
“Someone asks: ‘how do you get to that level?’ It wasn’t because I was a better coach, I got involved with really good coaches at a really young age and you learn from the athletes. There’s nothing you can learn in a university setting that will help you on the field; and that’s the art of coaching.”
Sevin, who also worked as a stockbroker upon leaving college, feels that the lessons he learned in that world were readily applicable to his future coaching. “I had that foundation of understanding of how to do strategic operations planning and I applied it to an athlete,” he said. “And when you identify every criterion that’s necessary for whatever they’re competing in and you have a pretty good idea of that athlete. [You have to] test, evaluate, prescribe.
“So I test. I’m matching that test up against what the demands are of that position, that body type, that skillset, that metabolic need; what are the limb speed requirements? What are the power output requirements? What do they have to do to become resilient? That all falls in that onion of the human capabilities. You test, you evaluate, and then based on your education, based on your pragmatic experience, you implement.”
Sevin explained that he sees himself more as an educator than a coach, that he focuses heavily on the ‘why’ with an athlete. “I like it because a lot of coaches don’t know the ‘why’. They really don’t know the why, they just do it because that’s the way they were trained or that’s how their mentor did it and that’s where the dogmatic approach comes from.”
Education and communication are the coach’s trump cards. “It’s an evolution of understanding the athlete, how is your relationship with them, how do you communicate with them, but if you can identify the problem, tell them why this is hurting their performance, and have a game plan, and be honest about it and say ‘this could work or it may not work’, with the honesty and the communication you fill the gaps in over time.”
2 Nov 2022
ArticlesHow Tennis Australia works with coaches in the provision of life skills, regulation and self-awareness tools for its young players.
“We’re Tennis Australia employees but some of these kids will return to a private coach. So there’s a lot of communication between our coaches and their private coaches.”
Robertson has joined his colleague Nicole Kriz, the National Lead of Tours, Camps, College and Wellbeing at Tennis Australia, to discuss the Wellbeing and Life Skills Programs that the organisation provides for its young players. They speak to the Leaders Performance Institute from a hotel in France where they are on tour with a group of 13 and 14-year-old players from Australia.
The duo spoke at great length about the benefits for its young players, who are provided with life skills and regulation and self-awareness tools that will serve them well in their lives beyond the tennis court.
But what about the coaches? Kriz says: “The question for us is: how do we assist the coaches to deliver the content as best and as broadly as we can?”
Educating the coaches
The coach buy-in has been essential for Tennis Australia, where coaches serve as another medium between the players, the parents and their private coaches at home. “We’re developing the whole person by giving them this range of activities but we need to be able to map that back and formalise it,” says Robertson. “Culturally, good coaches have always got this, we’re just trying to formalise the program in some respects.”
There are challenges, however. “If the kids are with you, and we say: ‘this is part of your role. You need to find time each day to have those ad hoc conversations that happen, but then you need to do some formal things and you need to put the assessment in’ – that’s a challenge. Not to upskill the staff but giving them a process that they have to follow through. I think that’s in all sports. Like in other sports, if I’m a backs coach I can say ‘I’m only responsible for the backs and Nic’s responsible for the forwards and you’re responsible for the mids’. But it’s not like that. Sport’s changed now. It’s all based on relationships and there’s more to coaching than going out and hitting a tennis ball.”
“I think it’s the understanding that coaching has moved from the on-court to off-court and then how do we create a program so that the quality of delivery is consistent,” adds Kriz.
“The quality of how you coach or Nic coaches is going to be completely different,” says Robertson. “That’s why we’ve written the program because you need to have some foundation elements that you need to tick off. You might have a good relationship with some of the kids and they’re onboard straight away because they love what you do, they love the relationships. Whereas if I come in and I haven’t got a great relationship they’ll ask ‘why are we doing this?’ The quality of the delivery is going to vary. We’re aware of that. It’s like school teaching. It’s going to vary from class to class. The actual foundation of what we need to get done and what we need to put in, that’s the program. And how it’s delivered is going to be different for every person.”
As with players and parents, there is also a need for staff to understand that a development tour for players of 13 or 14 years of age is exactly that. Kriz says: “It’s an education piece for the coaches too because we’ve got 12 coaches on this trip and we’re trying to educate them and say ‘this is not about performance, guys. You’re not judged as coaches depending on if the kids are winning or losing’. It is needed because a lot of coaches, when they get to this level, they think that they need to get a result and the reality is that it’s not always going to happen on this tour. You’re actually developing these kids for the next tour – this tour is for the results on the next tour. Otherwise the coaches are building up that anxiety within them and they’re putting that pressure inadvertently on the kids, not meaning to, but then it starts to get a little more demanding on the kids. If you throw your kid into the tournament at the start of the week without any tools to manage their new situation and just go ‘work it out, sink or swim’ you’re not going to have a good result.”
Both Kriz and Robertson speak about the challenges of adherence. “We’ve had athletes and coaches starting at seven o’clock in the morning and the last matches have been finishing at 10 o’clock at night and for a young kid that’s pretty rough,” says Kriz. “By the time it’s 10:30, they need to be in bed but they’ve been at the court all day. Yesterday was their first afternoon off and they’re like ‘can we do the spreadsheets tomorrow because we’re tired?’ So it’s that adherence in terms of what’s your priority here, what do you need to get done irrespective of your ‘I want or I feel or I do or not like it’? So it’s trying to educate them in that regard. Where is the best time? Where is the best place? And how do you prioritise that along with your on-court and off-court component?
“Tennis is one of the only sports where your match can finish past midnight. On his way to winning the US Open in September, Carlos Alcaraz finished his quarter-final match at 3am, with his fourth round match extending past 2am. While this is a long way down the track for our younger athletes, we must proactively teach them the skills to be able to cope with the inherent demands of professional tennis.”
There will also be times when coaches need a break. Robertson says: “My role is that I’ll go from tour to tour and the first thing I’ll do is see how the staff are and go, ‘right, have a night off, I’ll take the kids out for dinner because it’s good for me to connect with them anyway and see what they’re like’ and it gives the staff the night off just to check in with family properly, not just the five-minute phone call between getting on the bus and being at the court, having some rest, watching Netflix, whatever it might be that they need. There’s the formal program for the kids, but there’s also an acute awareness for the staff to help each other.”
The Leaders Performance Institute explores three practices that will help with your coach education and development initiatives.
A recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable on ‘coaching the coaches’ brought together coaches, coach developers and other discipline leads who were keen to learn more about current focuses associated with coach developments. Together we sought to explore best practices and practical ideas around how to support coaches and, here, the Leaders Performance Institute identifies three practices to consider with your teams.
1. Learning networks
Coaching at the elite level in particular can be a lonely existence. To provide coaches with more support, organisations are beginning to ask coaches, as part of their development journeys, to review and design specific learning networks. This creates an awareness of who they speak to the most and who and where do they go to for new knowledge around a particular section of performance.
Coach developers are seeking to map what these networks look like and subsequently align them to personal development plans. As a coach developer, ask yourself: are there any gaps and how do we plug them? A nice term highlighted on the call was that we want to encourage a ‘seascape of learning’. As a coach you navigate your own journey, as opposed to just being told what you need to do. People are there to support you navigate the journey but not there to be directive. The role of the coach developer is to raise awareness of different things they want to look at themselves, or potential blind spots.
2. Creating transparency around development focuses
We often talk about the importance of multidisciplinary teams having clarity and understanding of the individual development plans of athletes – what about extending this further to creating transparency around the development plans or coaches and other high performance staff? For coaches in particular, it’s important to show vulnerability and invite feedback from athletes.
A couple of examples were shared on the call where coaches have put their individual development plans up on the wall next to the athletes, allowing for the athletes to also input on what the focuses of the coaches are. If we want to create a culture of genuine feedback on coaching create space for the athletes to understand what the focuses are, make it a two-way process so that the development plans aren’t sitting separately.
3. Coaching cells
The notion of coaching cells is not a new phenomenon for a number of organisations, but they can be an impactful and productive way of creating opportunities and space for coaches to converge in both a formal and informal way. Coaching cells are small groups of coaches who get together and take it in turns within the group to present either a coaching challenge, a topic of interest or opportunity they see.
The purpose of the cell is to create a cross-pollination of ideas and space to share ideas and solutions. Aside from the opportunity to have impactful and important discussions around coaching practice, coaching cells are a powerful intervention in developing relationships between coaches.
There are some organisations across high performance sport who have taken the notion of coaching cells a step further, placing more emphasis on the concept of interdisciplinarity in sharing best practice and insight across disciplines. Cells have been designed to include a coach, nutritionist, sports scientist, athletic performance specialist and psychologist – this intervention aids the knowledge development and appreciation of how different disciplines influence and can support one another.
The summary notes from a Leaders Virtual Roundtable of Leaders Performance Institute members on ‘coaching the coaches’, which took place on 18 August.
Recommended reading
Coach Development: Special Report
10 Considerations For Your Coach Development Pathways
Framing the topic
The field of coach development continues to grow at a fast pace. We are in a space where the value of coach support is becoming more apparent and important across high performance environments. In this roundtable, we looked to explore and hear about the focuses of others around how they are focusing on developing their coaches.
Discussion points
