Alignment, the question of performance outcome vs performance growth, learning and adaptive leadership were all on the agenda of the Leaders Performance Institute in May.
Take the club’s 2-1 home defeat to Bournemouth in early April, which was widely perceived as one of the team’s worst performances of the campaign.
The team looked and felt exhausted, which was not necessarily helped by their Manager Mikel Arteta’s ferocious work ethic and increasing demands on the training pitch. It was a period when injuries mounted too.
But as reported in the Independent, Arsenal attacking midfielder Eberechi Eze, approached his boss and told him in so many words: ‘we can do this, but we need a bit of space’.
To his credit, Arteta listened and though they lost at rivals Manchester City the following weekend, there were shoots of promise in that performance. Arsenal would win their remaining five matches and clinch the title by seven points from City.
They then came within a penalty shootout of winning the Champions League in Budapest.
Arteta swore in the aftermath that Arsenal will be back; and one suspects he might listen to his players a little more readily in the future.
Which brings us on to happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute in May, where a consistent theme has been the prioritisation of athlete needs, hopes and expectations.
Let’s dig into it.
Quote of the month:
A lot of coaches are either overdoing the teaching so there’s not any learning taking place or there are too many missed opportunities for the teaching and learning. It’s also changing the perception of the teacher; I’m doing it to you versus facilitating learning.
So said the head of coaching at a British university. He then raised the question of timing. “Do you jump in straight away? Do you wait till the end of the session and reflect? Do you wait till the next day and do some teaching and learning?”
It was an important consideration for a Leaders Virtual Roundtable that focused on what it takes to create an impactful and effective learning environment.
Read the breakdown here.
Insight of the month:
We’ve actually had our coaches start to record 10 to 15 minute videos, send them to players beforehand, and then the actual talk becomes them being able to reflect and digest the information.
So said a player development manager from Major League Baseball at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable where members discussed working with younger people.
Younger generations of athletes (as well as coaches and other staff members) are digital natives and teams would do well to lean into this.
Another voice from MLB, a sports scientist, told the table:
I think there’s definitely a difference in terms of how I have had to learn to communicate with them and include them in various decisions and thoughts along the way — and I’ll be the first to say I fumbled royally multiple times at first.
Read the full session summary here.
Good to know I:
But not everything is collaborative. I think we oftentimes confuse it, but we don’t want collaboration all the time.
So says Teena Murray, the Senior Vice President of Integrated Performance Support at US Soccer. She made the point that when a team has a shared mental model, individuals understand their domain, they know where there’s overlap and where there’s room for collaboration.
She wants her staff to be able to ask themselves “when am I the leader? When am I working in collaboration with another area, whether it’s nutrition, mental performance or sports science with strength & conditioning?” The answers provide “a clear understanding of who owns what but ultimately knowing what it is that we’re trying to deliver upon and what are the target outcomes that we’re really trying to reverse-engineer with all of our processes.”
We caught up with Murray as US Soccer prepared to make its new National Training Center in Fayetteville, Atlanta operational.
She explained why US Soccer aims to be ‘radically aligned and seamlessly integrated‘.
Good to know II:
Jeff Pagliano of Management Futures hosted a virtual roundtable where he gave members some tools to help them become better adaptive leaders.
In part, it means recognising issues when they emerge and tackling them in a calm and methodical manner.
He shared with the table the two types of problem that tend to exist in high performance and what makes each distinct:
Pagliano then gave the table a series of hypothetical performance problems and asked them to decide if their nature was technical or adaptive. They were:
“These are the kinds of exercises I find to be really insightful because it helps me as a facilitator get a sense of where they’re coming from when they’re approaching leadership and change management,” said Pagliano.
Read more here.
Finally…
Paul Downes, the GM of Basketball New Zealand, described his approach to his first hundred says on the job. He argues that the idea that a new or transitioning leader can transform an organisation in the first 90 (or 100) days is unrealistic.
Read the first instalment of Downes’ miniseries here.
Image used courtesy of Basketball New Zealand.
Coming up for Leaders Performance Institute members:
The Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine explores how leaders should act when faced with incomplete information.
Adam Kucharski posed this question to bemused members at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
“Fortunately, we’ve got some data we can draw on here,” he added while presenting a graph illustrating the results of a study that showed a positive correlation between the amount Cambridge colleges spend on wine and their students’ exam results.
“Now, I suspect a lot of you are thinking ‘hang on, just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one thing is causing the other’; and you’d be quite right. But it doesn’t mean this data is useless, because if one can understand the consistent relationships between things, we can make predictions.” In this case, if they can spend more on wine they can also likely spend more supporting their students.
“If the college has a higher wine spend, it’s plausible that they will have higher exam results, not because one thing causes the other, but because you’ve understood that relationship to make a prediction.”
However, there are limits to just relying on prediction when making decisions. In sports science, for example, an injury risk model cannot tell a coach what to change in training. “‘You want to know ‘why is it happening?’ and ‘what can I do about it?’”
Adam Kucharski speaking at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.
Over the course of half an hour, Kucharski, a Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, explored the craft of decision-making as influenced by information availability and behaviour.
“How certain is enough?” he asked. “How do we weigh the different ways that we could be wrong or weigh up the potential to get more information? Then, crucially, how do we think about the communication of that? And in terms of the ambiguity around uncertainty, being able to evaluate our judgements and ultimately get those ideas and innovations into the hands of the people who can make best use of them.”
He encouraged people in sport to consider a range of factors.
Perfect clarity is rare
Hindsight is 20:20, which leads to what Kucharski calls the “fundamental problem of cause and effect”. He said: “You only get to see one version of reality. You take an action, you see the outcome, you don’t get to rewind reality, not take that action, and then see what happens next. You never get to observe the counterfactual.”
Injuries offer a good opportunity to understand cause and effect in sport. With this in mind, Kucharski cited a 2020 study by economist Ian Gregory-Smith on the connection between labour and productivity and how this relationship is impacted by the ‘exogenous shock’ of injuries [because they occur unpredictably and allow causal inference].
“Starting quarterbacks are paid ten times what the backup is,” Kucharski continued, “but if the star quarterback is injured and the backup is used, the team is not ten times less likely to win.” The actual figure is closer to 30% less likely, but that could still be the difference between a losing season and a lucrative playoff run.
NFL teams understand this. “What they found is it’s pretty well balanced in terms of the additional money they pay their star quarterbacks versus the financial loss they estimate if that quarterback isn’t playing. So it seems, at least in this analysis, a reasonably efficient market.”
Some risks are worth taking, some are not
The NFL study is instructive but, as Kucharski said, “we don’t always get the luxury of treating everything with that level of detail.” At some point someone must make a decision with incomplete information.
He told the story of William Sealy Gosset, an English statistician who was hired by Guinness in 1899 as the brewery sought to make their brewing more consistent. Gosset’s job was to help improve crop selection, yield consistency, quality control and the stability of fermentation processes through statistical analysis.
He developed methods that enabled brewers to draw reliable conclusions from small amounts of data. They needed a way to tell whether differences in quality, crop yield or fermentation were real or just random noise, even when they only had a handful of samples with which to work.
“Gosset was a pragmatist,” said Kucharski. “He didn’t like the idea that we needed to demand high certainty for everything.” Unlike some of his contemporary statisticians, Gosset believed that context was key.
Kucharski agreed. He said: “It depends on the situation that we’re dealing with, it depends on the impact of the decision. How much might we lose if we’re wrong? It also depends on how hard it is going to be to go out and collect new evidence. Some datasets are easier to get than others.”
It should not be a “one-size-fits-all” threshold. “You’ve got to be careful that you don’t just end up wanting more and more evidence that’s fairly inconsequential to decisions; there’s a risk you end up over-analysing.” On the other hand, “if there’s a large cost to being wrong and it’s easy to collect evidence, then you should demand that certainty.”
Leaders in sport, Kucharski explained, are likely to face high-impact decisions where it’s hard to gather additional evidence and build higher confidence. “In those situations, as well as making use of your judgement, the evidence you have available, you also need to be careful where you set the threshold for action.”
Inaction is also a decision
Set your bar for action high and you’ll avoid bad ideas, but you may also miss out on something groundbreaking.
“There’s a temptation amongst leaders to want more certainty,” said Kucharski, “but that in itself is making a decision. If you never make a decision unless you’re 100% confident, you won’t take risks or make progress; and that requires us to think more deeply about what we mean by being ‘wrong’. What are the different ways we could be wrong and how do we balance them?”
To illustrate his point, Kucharski referred to Albert Einstein’s irritation whenever his papers were peer-reviewed following his emigration to the United States. This was in stark contrast to his experience in his native Germany where, to cite one example, Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory who also served as Permanent Secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, promoted Einstein’s early research on relativity through the academy’s journals, always without recourse to peer review.
“Planck’s philosophy was it’s better to set the bar low and get ideas at the price of making some mistakes than set it too high and miss out on both,” added Kucharski.
A leader must assess the trade-offs and decide which metrics define success.
‘Weasel words’ help no-one
Sherman Kent co-founded the CIA’s Office of National Estimates (ONE) in 1950. A year later, as Kucharski told the audience, the office published a report entitled ‘Probability of an Invasion of Yugoslavia in 1951’. It concluded that there was a “serious possibility” of a Soviet invasion that year.
Kent later asked the different analysts involved what numerical probability they had in mind when they agreed to that phrasing. Their answers ranged from 1:4 to 4:1.
“He got quite frustrated with this,” said Kucharski, “he said ‘in intelligence, like in a lot of crisis and decision-making environments, you don’t get certainty and clear facts; you often have to use judgement’. He noted that people hate being pinned down to judgements; and they use ‘weasel words’.” These are intentionally ambiguous or misleading turns of phrase.
Kucharski admitted he had been guilty of using weasel words himself in the past. “The value in pinning people down to a judgement is it allows you to evaluate their judgement, particularly under uncertainty.”
Your network is critical when selling decisions
Kucharski argued that it is critical for leaders to balance the interaction between evidence, people and methods of communication.
“It’s not just about models,” he said. “It’s about how they interact with people; those end users.”
Leaders should look to create a “network effect”. “If you get the flu, you probably got it from one specific person; but ideas and the adoption of innovations don’t work like that. There’s a lot more need for social reinforcement.”
It helps to build credibility (“if you hear about something independently from lots of people, it gives you increased confidence about it”) and social legitimacy (“you might believe something is true, but if other people aren’t acting like it’s true, you might be less likely to act”).
What to read next
Emily Scarratt and John Mitchell knew their England team could be world champions, they just needed the right environment to be able to prove it.
The centre had just competed in her fifth tournament (a joint record in the women’s game), claimed her second winner’s medal, and helped to complete an 11-year quest to bring the World Cup trophy back to England. It was almost the perfect way to bow out after 17 years as an international, 115 caps and a world record 754 points.
Yet she had only played 19 minutes of England’s campaign – all as a second half substitute in the Red Roses’ opening pool match; a 69-7 defeat of the United States in Sunderland.
“I’ve definitely been part of environments before where that kind of non-playing player can become quite negative and toxic,” she told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
“For a large part of my career, I was starting and therefore it’s very easy to say the right things and present in that way when you’re not under the stress of not being selected or not playing as much as you would like.”
Scarratt was joined onstage by England Head Coach John Mitchell, who in early February extended his contract until the 2029 World Cup and added Scarratt to his coaching staff.
The session moderator, Rachel Vickery, asked him what it meant to see Scarratt and her other non-playing teammates (known within the Red Roses setup as “pillar” players) celebrating with such vigour.
“I reflected that we actually hit the sweet spot with the culture,” said Mitchell. “Sometimes you don’t get that sweet spot and we might not get it again.”
Rachel Vickery (left) talks to John Mitchell (middle) and Emily Scarratt (right) onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.
Here we reflect on what Mitchell and the Red Roses got right for 2025.
He spoke up when something wasn’t quite right
When Mitchell signed up to become England Head Coach in 2023, his remit was to win the World Cup. He was a coach with a proven track record in the men’s game who had now been handed the resources and the players to deliver the Women’s World Cup on home soil.
But in 2018 and 2022 England had lost World Cup finals they could, or perhaps should, have won.
“The leading question was how do we get done what we haven’t through the years?” said Mitchell.
It involved integrating young talent (eight players made their World Cup debuts against the US) and tactical tweaks (they had been too reliant on their maul). Both required an environment that enabled the best team on paper to prove they were the best team on grass.
To deliver on that front, Mitchell and the team’s leaders landed on three guiding values: ‘courage’, ‘take the handbrake off’ and ‘be all in’.
These values inspired England’s veterans and new internationals alike. “If the top person genuinely believes that culture is important it makes a difference,” said Scarratt. “Potentially in previous campaigns that hasn’t been the case and culture could get a little bit sidetracked or lost along the way.”
Mitchell even spoke up when he spied a shortcoming in the players’ well-meaning desire to ‘do it for the girls’.
“My thinking was that emphasis might be slightly calibrated towards ‘me’ – not intentionally – but how do I get the girls to calibrate towards ‘we’?” he said. “Because if I inspire you and I’m inspired by you, isn’t that more important, more inspiring to the person next to you? We get the job done and then our voice around our individual ‘why’ will be far greater.”
The cultural tweaking never stopped
“It’s very easy to just pick values, put them somewhere and hope that people live by them,” said Scarratt. “Our values were genuinely threaded through a lot of what we did, whether it was medical presenting or S&C presenting” and, when you witness that, “it’s very easy to buy-in”.
Mitchell held difficult conversations when necessary, but all players and staff, Scarratt said, were expected to speak up when necessary “to nip things in the bud before they became potentially bigger.”
At the suggestion of leadership consultant Patrick Marr, Mitchell would ask his player leadership group and support staff on the eve of each international camp to tell him “who’s going to pull the cart forward? Who’s going to sit on the cart? Who’s going to hold up the cart?”
After an hour he would “come back and I’d see two or three players, plus a couple of staff, where our priority needs to go,” he said, adding “we would then decide on who I would speak to and who they would speak to.” For every player or member of staff, there would be someone who could bridge that gap and “communicate around standards of behaviour”.
Mitchell even danced on TikTok when duty called
If you’re an England supporter, you may have seen the TikTok video of Mitchell dancing with his players.
“I needed to show vulnerability,” he said of such moments, which was not something he considered as a younger coach. “I had to do things that I probably don’t normally do and join in with the girls on certain things.”
Psychological safety may start with players or their head coach dancing in the dressing room, but it ultimately manifests on the pitch during tricky spells or in performance meetings when a staff member has the courage to raise a performance issue.
Mitchell knew he had to lead from the front. “Sometimes you’ve got to be the leader of those actions before somebody else does them.”
That said, his belief in the power of the head coach has been softened (and his self-awareness amplified) by three decades in the sport. “You learn through emotional intelligence that you don’t have to be absolute or right when making decisions. Just use your people. Listen to your people.”
John Mitchell and Emily Scarratt shake hands as their session draws to a close at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
The team talked about the pressure they felt
For the first time, England openly spoke about winning the World Cup. It served as a pressure valve and, again, gave voice to their values.
“It might sound a bit silly but we hadn’t done that before,” said Scarratt, implicitly acknowledging how awkward the group felt at first about such an “un-English” sentiment.
As the English media and public latched onto the team ahead of the US match, the pressure grew. The players trained poorly on one occasion but, instead of dismissing it, they discussed it openly.
“I think we did a really good job of dampening it down by not not speaking about it,” Scarratt added. “By actually putting it out there and allowing people to know that other people felt like that.”
And Mitchell’s words after England eased through the gears on the opening night set the tone. He said: “There’s bigger games coming where teams will put even more pressure on us, so let’s take confidence from what we’re building and stacking as we’re going along. Our game doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be effective, and that will win us the tournament.”
He was right and, looking to 2029, their goal is to win back-to-back World Cups, establish a legacy as one of women’s sports greatest teams, and to further grow the women’s game.
These lofty goals provoke three questions that Mitchell and England must answer: “What will earn the right? What will we keep and take forward with us? And then, thirdly, is what we what will we need to start again?”
What to read next
Meaning Does Not Guarantee Medals, But it Strengthens the Behaviours that Make Medals Possible
In the first month of 2026 Leaders Performance Institute members discussed at length strategies for effective learning, the value in evidence-informed practice, and why your values should be the carrot, not the stick.
It was a lesson to all sleeping giants. Here was a team with the most losses in the sport’s history and, over the course of their 16-0 season, had compiled more wins than between 2020 and 2023 in total.
Indiana Head Coach Curt Cignetti spoke of a “paradigm shift” in the aftermath of the Hoosiers’ 27-21 defeat of Miami.
“People can cling to an old way of thinking, categorising teams as this or that or conferences as this or that or they can adjust to the new world, the shift in the power dynamic in college football today,” he said.
Cignetti was brought in ahead of the 2024 season and transformed the mindset of a team that had been treading water for decades.
“There’s got to be a lot of like-minded individuals who come together for a common purpose, and sometimes that belief has to be a little bit irrational,” said Indiana centre Pat Coogan.
“Especially in a place that hasn’t had success like Indiana. I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen the way this place has been characterised, and when Coach Cig got here, he believed, and he got people to believe. Sometimes people laughed at him and thought he was crazy, but that’s irrational belief. You’ve got to get people to buy-in and believe in the mission.”
With a host of senior players set to graduate, success may not be replicable in the short term, but Cignetti is ready for whatever comes next.
“Perfection is impossible to attain on a consistent basis,” he said. “But we’ll continue to take it one day at a time, one meeting at a time, one practice at a time, and just keep improving and committing to the process and showing up prepared, trying to put it on the field, and see where it takes us.”
It was a powerful message to kick off the year in sports performance and one that underlined the importance of the fundamentals while refusing to stand still.
Which brings us nicely to the happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute these past four weeks.
Insight of the month
‘What underpins successful teams across formats is not uniformity, but clarity of individual responsibility within a collective framework. Team performance does not replace individual accountability; it depends on it.’
In a guest column, James Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire CCC, spoke about facilities being a secondary concern until the leaders had created the right environment to enable athletes, whether they’re the Olympic champions with whom he has worked or Premier League and Champions League-winning footballers, being paramount.
Read more about why high performance is not something leaders should demand. It is something they should enable.
Britain’s Anthony Joshua on his way to winning gold at the 2012 London Olympics. (Scott Heavey/Getty Images)
Surprising insight of the month
Did you know that Team GB built its own hub within the London Olympic Village in 2012. This was very much a “host nation benefit” as Paul Ford MBE called it in another popular guest column last month.
The Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association wrote:
When we finished in London we looked and thought: ‘it’s not home advantage necessarily, we just need to be more creative’.
It provoked a question: how do we create an optimal physical way of uniting the team within the Games environment? Part of it was using our Olympic Village residential space smarter. But you can’t expect this of the local organising committee to do on our behalf, since their brief is so vast. Instead, we decided to take it out of their hands. And for each of the subsequent Summer Olympics we have found an out-of-village space exclusively for our use.
Read more about their approach here.
Team GB flag bearers Helen Glover and Tom Daley pose for a selfie outside the residence of the British Ambassador to France ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Best advice
Leaders Performance Institute members across the globe strive to encourage learning throughout their teams and while it will always be an important feature of any successful team, you should not waste your time on the wrong people.
As performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler explained at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable:
“There’s definitely some people who, you can try as hard as you like to get them to learn and I think we have to be cognisant of our own energy as someone who’s seeking to help. It’s a bit like athletes, isn’t it? If you’re up for it, I’ll give you 150% of my energy. If you’re not, after a period of time, I’ll just go, ‘look, you crack on’. So I think we have to be accepting of that.”
Over the course of an hour, Brunnschweiler and a band of LPI members noted ten strategies for more effective learning.
One you might have missed
Jamie Taylor of Dublin City University and the CoEx|Lab made the case for evidence-informed as opposed to evidence-based practice.
He enlisted the help of students from DCU’s online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.
One such student is Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association.
As she told Taylor, you can’t simply drop research on top of a sports programme. It must be used critically, in conjunction with a coach’s own research, and applied in an informed manner.
“There’s not necessarily one solution,” she said. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.”
The key for Ward 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.”
Read more about DCU’s programmes here.
Quote of the month
“We have to become diplomats, high‑level development people who can manage such diverse groups. Somewhere along the line, we need to start creating those development opportunities for everybody who’s on this call.”
These are the attention-grabbing words of a performance director working in India who spelled out the challenges in talent identification and development.
He and a host of LPI members listed five of the most common trends (and five opportunities) in that space.
Good to know
Organisational values should be your carrot, not your stick.
That’s according to Emma Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain, is the Commandant of the Tedder Academy of Leadership at the RAF. In 2015 she became the first woman to run RAF Officer Training.
In her appearance at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, she spoke about how the RAF’s values, all contained within the prosaically titled Air Publication One document, had been used to browbeat good people.
“Actually 99% of my organisation are amazing, they really are, and I wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe in, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of. And we know from all the different behavioural models of change that it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”
Again, the focus was learning strategies in an inspiring presentation.
The RAF’s Emma Keith onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. (Leaders)
What’s coming up for members
As Jamie Taylor of Dublin City University and the CoEx|Lab explains, the university’s master’s and doctorate programmes are designed to help coaches and other high-performance practitioners embed research into their daily practice – a habit that is sometimes overlooked in sport.
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:
