By John Portch

In January, Indiana became college football’s first first-time national champion in 29 years.

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

Virtual Learning

By John Portch

“In this era where there’s so much data, there’s so many insights, there’s a risk we forget that human learning is a major part of how we progress.”

With those words host Iain Brunnschweiler, who runs the Focus Performance Consultancy, set the scene for a virtual roundtable discussion during which Leaders Performance Institute members shared the strategies that have facilitated better individual and organisational learning within their teams.

“There’s definitely something about learning being contagious,” he added in expectation. “If credible, valuable members of staff are going after things deliberately like you are, I’d hope that there’s some sort of contagion within your organisation.”

To start proceedings, Brunnschweiler outlined a four-part model of organisational learning. “This is an unpublished model,” he said of it. “This is the world according to me.”

Effective priming

“How can we deliberately set people up for learning? That’s something that I’ve increasingly considered,” said Brunnschweiler, who highlighted one-to-one conversations with staff members as a way to identify their aspirations and their motivations.

Appropriate stimulus

“How do we provide a stimulus to create thought in aspirational people?” In a previous role, Brunnschweiler implemented weekly 30-minute meetings with staff members. He also enlisted external speakers and asked individuals to present on a teaching project.

Sense-making (culture)

“If within your organisational culture there are people and spaces that allow you to have conversations, check and challenge your thinking, that is a really good way of helping the learning to land,” said Brunnschweiler, while emphasising the cultural dynamic.

Committing to action

“Often,” Brunnschweiler said, “the greatest risk here is that we have a brilliant conversation, and then we do nothing about it’. How do we commit to something that’s going to make some sort of change, whether it’s small or large?”

The group then shared ten strategies to encourage more effective individual and organisational learning:

1. Give staff members the freedom to explore learning

“If we want to happy or we want to have happy staff, we need to give them some freedom,” said a sports scientist working in the major US leagues. “And if we want them to be free, then we have to encourage them to be courageous and pursue what they want to have and what they want to do.”

Brunnschweiler said:

“A learning culture starts with recruitment… can we keep shifting that culture by recruiting naturally curious and hungry people and maintain momentum.”

 2. Hunger for learning must be role-modelled from the top

Often, staff members are eager to learn, as a psychologist working in the US college system observed, “but having leadership model this is so key”. Only then will staff members carve out the time, as he said:

“If your staff members don’t feel like they have the grace and space to allocate time in the day they’re going to say, ‘I have to do this,’ or ‘I have a meeting’ instead.”

3. Understand people’s motivations

If you can understand someone’s motivations or aspirations then you have an anchor for a conversation about their development. Brunnschweiler explained that it is important to focus on those who want to learn, not those who don’t. He said:

“Some people have little appetite for self-development. And I think we have to be cognisant of our own energy… and accepting of that fact.”

4. Create individual development plans for staff members

The aforementioned psychologist made a convincing case for staff IDPs. He said:

“We talk so much about player development plans, but do we truly have staff development plans, like, ‘here’s where you are, here’s where you can go, here are the gaps to be filled’?”

5. Place staff on secondments when possible

“We don’t put barriers in the way of our people going out on secondment,” said a director of cricket in the English game, where the season is not a 12-month schedule. This is, as Brunnschweiler observed, a cost-effective way of bringing IP back into the building. He said:

“How can we be resourceful? Can we create opportunities for people to visit places and return with knowledge without spending money?”

6. Find your critical friends

Sense-making can be difficult, but sometimes it just takes opening your phonebook. A call with a critical friend is what Brunnschweiler calls a “micro sense-making space”. He said:

“I’ve accrued a small network of people who, for example, when I’m driving, I just phone them up and I know they’ll challenge my thinking and that I’ll learn from that conversation.”

7. Learn from failures

“I’m far more interested in the failures,” said a physiotherapist at a globally renowned organisation. “When my team see me talk about failures, when things have gone wrong, that makes people listen a bit more; and I often think we should prep to fail. Are we ready to fail, so that if we fail, we can look back and say, ‘okay, we did everything we wanted to do?’” Brunnschweiler agreed, adding:

“It’s a good sign if you’ve lost and a staff team are reviewing and reflecting on it and they’re genuinely unpicking and they’re able to call each other out or go, ‘do you know what, I messed up today’. That is a real signature of a place that wants to get better.”

8. Importance of managerial vulnerability

Leaders can role-model learning, but they can also demonstrate vulnerability.

“If you can put your hands up and say, ‘I made a mistake’, that sets the culture, it sets the environment,” said a physiotherapist working in Australian sport. In building on that point, the physiotherapist from No 7 said:

“If we can guarantee that removal of blame, it will encourage us to talk about what we can learn.”

9. Job security

It sounds obvious, but managerial vulnerability goes hand in hand with job security.

“In a fast‑paced environment there is more chance of people getting sacked. I think this could be almost correlated to your hunger for learning,” said the physiotherapist based in Australia. “You might just sit there, be quiet, go insular, and just tick our day‑to‑day off – you don’t want to put your neck out there.” He has witnessed the impact of leaders reiterating that people’s jobs are safe.

“When you are told people aren’t just going to get sacked, it creates the environment for learning.”

10. Appoint a dedicated staff member for learning

“I’ve never worked somewhere that’s had a dedicated head of learning,” said an analyst working in Middle Eastern football. “It always falls on line managers and it’s hit and miss.” Brunnschweiler agreed and added:

“How does any organisation ensure that a PDR process is not just some tick-box exercise, but there’s genuine validity in what you’re going after, what you’re going to commit to, and then it’s followed up on?”

What to read next

Five Effective Learning Strategies at the Royal Air Force

By John Portch

“Some of you will laugh out loud when I ask this,” says Rick Cost, the Director of Performance at Olympique Lyonnais, “but how do we deal with what Mother Nature gives us?”

Cost was speaking at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London where he was invited to share his views on injury prevention and rehab.

He explained that while planning is important for a director of performance, the human element ensures there will always need to be a degree of flexibility when providing sports science services to athletes.

As he said, there is no “magic sauce” when it comes to reconciling coaching intent, the training required, the athlete’s experience of that training, and making tweaks as required.

Nevertheless, Cost and his peers have to be cognisant of the trends currently shaping athlete development, which we have divided into five themes.

1. The athlete as a member of your interdisciplinary team

Athlete-centric development is long been in vogue but athlete-involved approaches are starting to gain traction.

“Our goal is to put the athlete in the centre and then we fit the jigsaw pieces around them,” said Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, in our Teamworks Special Report.

Those jigsaw pieces – the technical, tactical, physical and cognitive – will depend on the individual, which has inspired a trend towards athlete-involved development, as Jack Nayler explained in the context of his work at Premier League Everton.

“I believe that a player-involved as opposed to player-centred approach is vital in developing this knowledge,” wrote Nayler, the club’s Head of Sports Science. “Although the difference is subtle, it is an important distinction to make. In a player-centred model, the team of practitioners, ologists and experts discuss the player and develop a plan, drawing on all their expertise. A player-involved model brings the player into that process, involving them in the decision making and design of their training.”

For Nayler, the benefit is clear. “The player needs respecting as a key member of the interdisciplinary team. Not only will this help to develop the player’s understanding of their body and the training process, but also their investment and trust in the programme. This is key in a sport such as football where the link between doing physical work and performance isn’t always immediately obvious and the talent pool is global.”

2. The continued rise of external clinicians and coaches

As high profile athletes continue to work with their own personal trainers, the sports scientists of the major leagues are doing everything to bring them into the fold.

“It’s about role clarity,” Rice told the Leaders Performance Institute. “If a player has an external strength coach or external physical therapist, you try to sit down with them and work out what the player’s programme is going to look like. So what access do they have? Are they going to be working out in our facility? Are they going to do it separately?”

It is increasingly common for group chats including the athlete, their personal coach, and the key members of a team’s high performance staff. “We want all the information in one place so at least we know what everyone else is doing, and then it allows me in my role to make sure we’re not doubling up on things,” added Rice. “Can we agree on what the goals are for this player, understanding that we may be trying to get there in different ways with different philosophies, but what are the key points that we can agree on and can we get the data in one place so we can all access it and share it? We’re trying to work together, not fight against what the other people are doing.”

3. Better defined performance and clinical psychology

The highest-performing teams will understand psychology’s role in preparing their athletes.

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

Walsh argues that is important to define the scope of the work, establish a clear framework, and provide the right content so that the delivery lands.

Whether it’s performance psychology, mental skills or a clinical issue, all staff members are called upon to play their part, as Dr Lyndell Bruce of Deakin University told a Leaders Virtual Roundtable.

“It’s not a once-off conversation because they flagged on the wellbeing this week and then two weeks later they’re back in their normal range – we continue that conversation and check-in,” she said of her work at Deakin.

“Where pathways are regularly communicated, [it’s about] checking for understanding of do you know when to use it, how to use it, what the process is, destigmatising it through education, through raising awareness so it becomes a normal part of life,” said Emily Downes, the General Manager of Leadership & Wellbeing at High Performance Sport New Zealand. “It’s not something that you go and necessarily do when you’re at your worst. So how can you use all of these services proactively to keep you actually performing?”

4. AI as a useful ‘sparring partner’

However AI is used in athlete development, there are some fundamentals that are likely to hold true, as Maximilian Lankheit explained to the Leaders Performance Institute.

“If you don’t know the question, if you don’t know what you’re asking for, you’ll never get a good answer,” said the Senior Medical and Performance Manager at European Football Clubs, which is the representative body for Europe’s football clubs.

“People don’t know what they’re actually looking for. They’re trying to find something in the data that either validates their bias or whatever, but you need to know what you’re looking for.”

With that first question answered, Lankheit believes AI could be “a useful sparring partner that can make you more efficient” when it comes to areas such as devising periodisation protocols.

However, he preaches caution. “When it comes down to everybody’s individual work, I think it will make us much better, but the human sense-making is important.” He cited Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak, who said: “I have AI myself: actual intelligence”.

“Without actual intelligence,” Lankheit added, “artificial intelligence doesn’t matter because we as the human users need to add the right context.”

By John Portch

Three come-from-behind wins in a row propelled the Brisbane Broncos to the NRL premiership following a 26-22 Grand Final defeat of the Melbourne Storm in early October.

Michael Maguire’s team were behind at half-time in every game of the finals series but came back to beat the Canberra Raiders (the minor premiers) in the qualifying and elimination finals; they over-turned another half-time deficit to beat the Penrith Panthers in the preliminary finals; and lightning struck thrice in the Grand Final when they faced a 22-12 deficit at the interval.

“I didn’t have to say too much at half-time. I just said to them ‘your best half is about to come’, because we have come from behind over the last month. I said if you go and do that, we win the game,” said Maguire – a former speaker at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit – after the Grand Final.

This was a team whose belief in their ability was forged in adversity. Maguire stuck by his players at tricky moments during the season. At times, following a run of poor results, it seemed unlikely that the club would challenge for its first NRL premiership since 2006.

“I remember Madge’s passion and him sticking up for us midway through the year when we were getting rinsed through the media about the way we go about things, but the care he has for us, no one knows outside the club,” said fullback Reece Walsh.

“The way he looks after us as people, the way he looks after our partners, there is nothing more we could ask for. He demands a lot, as he should demand a lot – we have just won a comp.”

Both Maguire and Walsh hint at the ingredients for high performance – empathetic leadership, high standards and mutual trust – that underpinned the agenda at the Leaders Performance Institute in recent weeks.

Below, we give a flavour of the conversations that commanded attention during that time.

‘The standard you walk past is the standard you accept’

Maguire was in attendance at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in November where the Broncos appeared onstage courtesy of General Manager Troy Thomson.

We also heard from rugby’s other code, rugby union, as England’s former fullback Emily Scarratt and Red Roses Head Coach John Mitchell explained how the Women’s Rugby World Cup was won; before that, Johann van Graan delved into the transformation he led at English Premiership champions Bath Rugby.

Nestled in between was an inspired presentation by Emma Keith,  a group captain, who is the first female to run Royal Air Force officer training.

Hers, much like Maguire’s, was a message of empowerment rooted in accountability and care. She said:

“The standard you walk past is the standard that you accept. That can be poor infrastructure that you don’t report; it could be poor behaviour. If you walk past it, you’re saying it’s okay. And that’s a slow rot from within.”

Group Captain Emma Keith talks to UK Sport’s Alex Stacey following her presentation on officer training in the Royal Air Force.

Read more from the summit here.

The price you pay for poorly delivering feedback

“In terms of feedback, we’re quite basic creatures,” said Simon Eastwood. “We will react and respond instinctively to what we perceive as threat or reward.”

As Eastwood, the Head of Leadership Skills at Management Futures, explained, the wrong word, tone, timing or even body language from a coach can trigger a negative reaction when giving an athlete feedback.

Eastwood hosted a virtual roundtable aimed at helping coaches and practitioners to improve how they deliver feedback.

He shared a number of tools on the day, including the SCARF model.

This framework, devised by neuroscientist David Rock, explains five domains that influence human social behaviour and motivation. SCARF stands for:

1. Status – our relative importance compared to others.
2. Certainty – our ability to predict the future.
3. Autonomy – our sense of control over events.
4. Relatedness – our sense of safety and connection with others.
5. Fairness – our perception that exchanges are fair and equitable.

“It’s a great tool for stepping back and assessing your team and thinking about what really makes them tick,” said Eastwood. “Crucially, it’s not about avoiding that feedback.”

He suggested that leaders should reward these needs through feedback, so people feel valued and motivated rather than threatened and, to illustrate his point, presented a table that set out what ‘threat’ and ‘reward’ may look like in each domain:

Eastwood then posed a question: “When giving positive feedback, which elements do you find most need to be reinforced?”

Leaders Performance Institute members can read more here.

The evolving work of the psychologist

Elsewhere, Dr David Fletcher, a Professor of Human Performance and Health at Loughborough University, and Dr Danielle Adams Norenberg, the Head of Psychology at the UK Sports Institute co-hosted a roundtable on the evolving role of the psychologist.

They outlined two ways in which a psychologist may be a useful asset for the head coach:

1. The development of the coach’s leadership skillset

A psychologist, Fletcher explained, can help a coach to develop their “time management skills, body language, and communication skills” in the pursuit of better performance.

By the same token, psychologists have been instrumental in facilitating a shift from deficit-based to strengths-based coaching. Adams Norenberg said: “Even if planted within a very generic training session, athletes have the self-awareness, knowledge and autonomy to make the most out of their training session by focusing on developing their strengths.”

2. The development of their psychology skills

Psychology is another string in a coach’s bow. If they understand the types of pressures that athletes experience they can “choose a particular training session to not necessarily develop technique or tactical skills, but psychology skills.” Adams Norenberg cited the example of the VR headsets used in training by Team Europe ahead of the 2025 Ryder Cup. Some players simulated the spectator abuse they would endure at Bethpage Black; others used it not for pressure training but relaxation, such as the Norwegian Viktor Hovland, who recreated the fjords of his homeland.

Leaders Performance Institute members can read more here.

True innovation must have an impact… but what is innovation?

Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, posed this very question at a recent virtual roundtable.

He argues that teams should alight on a shared definition; one that does not conflate the concept with ‘creativity’. (Creativity, as Serpiello explained, is the outcome of an ideation phase, while innovation covers the execution and eventual impact of an idea.)

Then, he made the case that when teams have an agreed definition of what ‘innovation’ means to them then it offers a “clear way to approach and analyse whether the innovation processes in your organisations work or not.”

Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation

Innovation, Serpiello argues, also comes in several shapes and forms depending on the nature of the problem. To make his point, he introduced renowned change management specialist Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation, which provides a practical framework for introducing innovative practices, encourages strategic thinking about problems and helps to facilitate better collaboration.

He presented a diagram of Satell’s model to the table:

Serpiello then shared his thoughts on each quadrant:

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

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

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

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

Leaders Performance Institute members can read more here.

By John Portch

On Sunday the Northern Superchargers Women lifted their first Hundred title following a match-winning performance from a player who had been in England for just two weeks.

All-rounder Nicola Carey hit an unbeaten 35 runs at Lord’s to help the Superchargers chase down the Southern Brave’s first innings total of 115 for six.

“The whole group is amazing, so it was so easy to come in the middle of the tournament,” said Carey on the field at Lord’s in the aftermath.

“A couple of weeks ago I was back home in Tasmania, doing a cold pre-season,” she added, “so to get the call-up first of all was pretty surprising and to finish the couple of weeks with a win, it couldn’t have gone better.”

Head Coach Lisa Keightley and captain Kate Cross have pulled out all the stops to foster an inclusive environment, to which Carey’s compatriot, Phoebe Litchfield, alluded.

“The Northern Superchargers are my favourite team to play for,” she said, “and it’s just been a blast.”

Their human touch was in further evidence as the team carried a life size cardboard cutout of their injured and absent teammate, Georgia Wareham, onto the podium, then going as far as to place a medal around the cardboard Wareham’s neck.

Add this all up and the Superchargers’ approach appears to be simple: put your people first and they will deliver upon their talent.

This was a recurring theme across the Leaders Performance Institute in August.

Here is a snapshot of what was said.

Psychological safety… or psychological confidence?

This question was raised in a recent  Leaders Virtual Roundtable that explored the balance between challenge and support for athletes.

Psychological safety has long been a performance buzz term, but a team in motorsport is taking it upon itself to reframe its terminology. Their wellbeing lead told the table: “We’re playing around with the idea of creating psychologically confident people. In meetings, we make sure that we give everybody a chance to speak up… there’s also got to be challenge, to get [people] to that psychologically confident point.”

Words clearly matter, as a performance support coach in British varsity sport pointed out. “The language we use when we’re talking to the athletes, it’s not a ‘challenge’, it’s not an ‘adversity’, it’s ‘exploration’, ‘playing’, ‘responsibility’.”

Try to cut through the noise around the athlete

Athletes increasingly ask for support beyond their sport and performance, which means everyone must be on the same page.

“Do you think the modern athlete has changed or has it always been like this, but as performance staff, have we failed to notice it?” asked Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers at our Sport Performance Summit in Philadelphia.

“We think it is 50:50 as there is no denying that they are more informed because of more information being available,” he adds, “but this does create noise.”

The remedy requires trust as players in the modern era tend to ask for an explanation more often. The Sixers talk to their players and they talk to them early as they seek to understand what’s important to them. “Do not shut things down right away, work with them to find solutions.”

There is, however, a limit. “It is important to have your non-negotiables so they know where the line is too.”

Team planning, individual focus

Patrick Mannix, the Sports Science Senior Manager at US Soccer, set the scene for a roundtable presentation that centred on performance planning in the international game, specifically the development of camp training plans for players who join up from their respective clubs in the US and beyond.

The players as individuals are at the heart of their planning, with sessions devised two weeks out once player arrival times are confirmed.

“We will design things from a team level, but then we also have to look at matters very closely at an individual level when we’re trying to safely integrate players into our national team environments,” said Mannix.

“Most of the time, we are dealing with tapering strategies and figuring out how can we optimize players’ readiness going into competition,” he continued. “So it’s often an exercise in fatigue management when they’re coming into our environment and not necessarily trying to drive fitness adaptations, but, on the flip side, we’re also there to potentially facilitate a lot of those long-term physiological adaptations that are occurring.

Alignment and the ‘multiplier effect’

True alignment delivers a multiplier effect, as John Bull told a roundtable of Leaders Performance Institute members last month.

In an ideal world, each stakeholder’s efforts would multiply the others. “One person’s talent is building on and adding,” says the Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures. “The multiplication becomes exponential.”

If teams are to achieve the multiplier effect, Bull highlighted five critical considerations:

1. Who?

Who are you trying to align and what different talents can you bring to bear on a problem? Be sure to involve all relevant parties, including those who may be excluded for fear that they will be distracted.

2. What are you trying to achieve and by when?

Misalignment often arises not from disagreement on the goal itself, but on the timeline and resources needed to achieve it.

3. Alignment on strategy i.e. the ‘how’

The distinction between strategy (high-level direction) and tactics (specific applications) is not always understood.

4. Ways of working

Alignment is an outcome of agreed processes of communication, collaboration and decision-making.

5. Vertical and horizontal dimensions

While vertical alignment (e.g. between board and coach) attracts a lot of focus,  horizontal alignment between departments or teams underpins a truly joined-up approach.

What to read next

Transparency, Empathy and Empowerment: Five Ways Teams Are Serving their People in 2025

By John Portch

More than half of coaches and practitioners feel they could be better at balancing challenge and support for their athletes and other personnel.

That is according to a straw poll of Leaders Performance Institute members conducted at the outset of a virtual roundtable we hosted in late-August.

Some members – 42 per cent – rate themselves at four out of five, but everyone in attendance felt there was room for improvement.

With the scene set, members went on to highlight four factors that underpin a good balance of challenge and support, with reflections on how these look in practice in their environments.

1. Psychological safety… or psychological confidence?

The idea of psychological safety was raised several times. Psychological services are a key offering in the provision of safe spaces. A member who works in a senior health and wellness role in a major US league, spoke of their organisation’s success in providing confidential counselling services that support individuals in their pursuit of performance goals.

Psychological safety has long been a performance buzz term, but a team in motorsport is taking it upon itself to reframe its terminology. Their wellbeing lead told the table: “We’re playing around with the idea of creating psychologically confident people. In meetings, we make sure that we give everybody a chance to speak up… there’s also got to be challenge, to get [people] to that psychologically confident point.”

Words clearly matter, as a performance support coach in British varsity sport pointed out. “The language we use when we’re talking to the athletes, it’s not a ‘challenge’, it’s not an ‘adversity’, it’s ‘exploration’, ‘playing’, ‘responsibility’.”

Another idea proffered is to take steps to reduce the fear of (inevitable) failure by creating a low-support, high-challenge environment. “We’re trying to make our training environments more intimidating and challenging than the game would be, so that’s not only going to make those game environments easier and normalise failure, but it also allows them to fail in front of their peers and get more comfortable in that space,” said a coach from American baseball. “Then what the support side looks like to that is not just coach to player but player-to-player; figuring out those challenging environments and finding different solutions with each other.”

2. Set standards and expectations first

This provides clarity and should remove doubts. “The places that do this really well, without exception, spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a training block or at the beginning of a year discussing what the priorities for that thing are and what the standard is,” said a performance science advisor from the Canadian Olympic system.

With those standards in place you have a framework on which to build trust. “When you get to work with a player that you might not know as well, that’s just going to help you get to the trust piece faster and be able to challenge each other in that way,” the baseball coach added.

“One of the things that I see,” said a performance science advisor based in Canada, “is when it’s not just the coach that’s holding athletes accountable, it’s the athletes holding each other accountable as well. That’s much easier when there’s been some time spent talking about what the expectations for the standard are.”

The idea, as a wellbeing lead in motorsport said, is to create “better challenging conversations because it really is a massive coaching benefit. Just creating that space for challenging conversations, practising it, scripting it, and it becoming a natural part of our every day”.

3. Customised support

An attendee with experience of coaching in English football argued that challenge and support is more about the individual than the environment. They said: “Individuals need different things at different times, so if we understand an individual’s needs, then we, as a group, are best placed to cater to individual needs based on where somebody is.”

This is reflected in the psychological services provided by teams. “We are mainly here to navigate and help them navigate their career progression on an individual level,” said the aforementioned health and wellness lead. These services are increasingly integrated and perceived as a part of a holistic offering. “The fact that we have this space in and of itself is really hitting the nail on the head in terms of how much just caring on an individual level really does impact performance.”

It is also incumbent on coaches and staff to know their athletes. “I was reflecting on an athlete who’s getting three buses in order to just get to training, and is just struggling to feed himself,” said the coach in English football. “Lots of that wouldn’t be known unless we were properly getting to know somebody.”

“It literally is just needs analysis,” a member added. “I think just really understanding the individual, because there’s just so much variety and meeting them where they are in the correct language.”

4. Foster autonomy

This is critical in an era where, as one attendee put it, “we’re observing that student-athletes are almost afraid to try new things.”

“Getting athletes to engage in ‘what does this need to look like in order for us to have success?’ really helps foster autonomy,” said another member whose work brings them into regular contact with younger athletes. “They’re an active part of the process of deciding what’s going to happen next, what went wrong, how do we fix it.”

“Getting them to buy into their own responsibility is critical,” added a race engineer when reflecting on drivers in their motorsport. “They have to be ready to leave here with the ability to be responsible for their own actions.”

Another participant spoke of an idea they had while working in English football: “We put constraints in place that meant that the athlete couldn’t revert to his normal type. He had to go and find a new way to execute the same outcome.”

What to read next

Transparency, Empathy and Empowerment: Five Ways Teams Are Serving their People in 2025

By the Leaders Performance Institute team

Inevitably AI was top of the agenda at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Philadelphia last month.

Michael Jabbour, the AI Innovation Officer at Microsoft Education, was on hand to explain that while our futures will look different, there will be simple steps we can all take within our daily practices to integrate AI in useful and supportive ways.

“Quality use of AI comes from communication,” Jabbour tells the audience at the Wells Fargo Center, while running through some of the different types of AI, from simple to advanced and from retrieval to autonomous.

Fundamentally, he speaks to the human side of AI usage. Jabbour is a firm believer that with the right prompts AI is a superb teaching tool. “You’re going to have to fight for friction in order to grow,” he continues. Content generation, summary, code generation and advanced search are all areas where the right prompt can reap dividends.

Whatever the AI’s form, however you use it, “great communicators are excellent in what they get out of AI.”

The same can be said for coaching and high-performance work in general, with speakers from teams including the Philadelphia 76ers, Flyers, Gotham FC, USA Gymnastics and US Soccer joining the University of Pennsylvania and the American School of Ballet to discuss how we can better support the people we serve.

Here, we pick out five things to think about in promoting better alignment, more people-focused approaches to performance, and more thoughtful use of data.

1. Be transparent in your decision making

It is perhaps only in retirement from competition – and in going on to assume admin positions in sport – that Yael Averbuch West and Li Li Leung fully understood the value in organisational transparency.

West has been the General Manager and Head of Soccer Operations at Gotham since 2021, while Leung has served as President and CEO of USA Gymnastics since 2019 (before that she was a Vice President at the NBA).

Both have enjoyed success and endured tough times during their tenures and both explain that without transparency, there can be no alignment. And without alignment, you’ll never be able to establish your priorities, set a course and make big decisions.

There is opportunity in moments of hardship, as Leung explains. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” she says, repeating the words of American political theorist Saul Alinsky. There are obvious moments when it’s right to make a change and align people behind a strategy but, Leung adds, “it’s tougher when you’re deciding whether you need to push through and commit to a process or change.”

“The decisions I’m most proud of are the ones that were the most difficult to make – and often they’re the ones with the clearest answer…”

Yael Averbuch West

“… and you’ll still get crucified for it.”

Li Li Leung

“It can be difficult to commit to a process and find a way, rather than start again, but it’s often the right thing to do.”

Li Li Leung

2. Cut through the noise around the athlete

Alignment is key because the simple fact is that athletes increasingly ask for support beyond their sport and performance. Everyone must be on the same page.

“Do you think the modern athlete has changed or has it always been like this, but as performance staff, have we failed to notice it?” asks Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers.

“We think it is 50:50 as there is no denying that they are more informed because of more information being available,” he adds, “but this does create noise.”

The remedy requires trust as players in the modern era tend to ask for an explanation more often. The Sixers talk to their players and they talk to them early as they seek to understand what’s important to them. “Do not shut things down right away, work with them to find solutions.”

There is, however, a limit. “It is important to have your non-negotiables so they know where the line is too.”

“The guiding light is that everything that we do needs to help players thrive at NHL level,” says Ian McKeown, the Vice President of Athletic Performance & Wellness at the Philadelphia Flyers, who sat next to Rice. “We are being very intentional in using [the concept of] ‘thriving’ in our language.”

It is important to meet athletes where they’re at, understand their wants and needs, and to involve them in the decision-making process.

And lean into change. See it as comforting – it doesn’t automatically mean that what you did before didn’t work.

“As the person overseeing the performance programme, it is important to listen well and be curious about what is going on across different departments and relationships in that environment. I sought to explore the physical barriers and other impacts of what was going on and I intentionally adapted the flow of the environment to change this.”

Ian McKeown

3. Better leader = better human

“Social and cultural connection is the secret to our success as a species.”

So says Dr Michael Platt, the Director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you want to be a better leader, be a better human.”

He speaks to the importance of the social brain network, which is a set of interconnected brain regions involved in understanding, interpreting and responding to social information. This could be recognising emotions, understanding others’ intentions or navigating social interactions.

To that end, he encourages leaders to employ perspective thinking. This can be as simple as writing down five things that illustrate your point of view before then attempting to think about them from another person’s perspective.

Platt also encourages eye contact and deep, rich conversations as starting points on the path to greater connection. Neuroscience explains that good relationships emerge when our brains are synchronised and there is a pattern of activity aligned to the other person.

“Your social brain network is like a muscle: the more you use it, the bigger it gets, so it’s critical to exercise it.”

Michael Platt

4. A programme should protect and empower

Ian McKeown at the Flyers made the point about helping players to thrive. Similarly, the notion of holistic support underpins the work of the American School of Ballet with its students.

“We want students to develop so that they are thriving and not just training,” says Katy Vedder, the school’s Director of Student Life, when speaking of their Whole Dancer Approach.

“We acknowledge their adolescent brain and try to create a sense of belonging as they discover who they are and what they value. We want to support their humanistic needs too and their competencies beyond performance, including self-awareness, peer connections and a healthy comparison framework.”

Wellness isn’t supplementary – it’s central to performance, identity and longevity.

Integral to this reframing has been a realignment of performance priorities, with re-education around cross training and strength & conditioning helping to reduce injury rates while better considering wellness and recovery.

“We can’t work in silos,” says Aesha Ash, the school’s Head of Artistic Health & Wellness. There were several nodding heads in agreement around the room. “The dancers have to be at the artistic centre and we have to work to collaborate in support of them.”

“Our students are not just artists or athletes, they intersect both and need a support system that honours their full, true identity.”

Katy Vedder

“We have to challenge the definition of success at a systemic level. We celebrate those not pursuing becoming a professional dancer, widening the parameters of success.”

Aesha Ash

5. Use data, but don’t discount the person

We close the circle by returning to the question of technology, specifically data.

Both Sam Gregory, the Director of Data & Analytics at US Soccer and John Boyles, the Director of Research & Development at the Sixers, make the point that data isn’t here to take from a coach’s systems or expertise, but to elevate it.

“We want to help you do what you’re best at and take away the parts humans aren’t as good at,” says Gregory. “We’re not trying to replace the system and the expertise.”

That means presenting data in robust but useful formats that never lose track of the human subjects at the centre. With this in mind, it is a good practice to exhibit caution in overcommunicating the data and what the numbers are saying.

Analysts should focus on connection, communication and clarity, especially with those departments and individuals who perceive data as a challenge to their daily workflows.

Finally, infrastructure readiness is critical. There is a lot of noise in the ether when it comes to data and technology, with numerous vendors trying to pitch the exclusivity of their datasets. To abate the noise it is important to build robust strategies and infrastructure to ensure that the noise doesn’t find its way into programmes.

“The aim is to get to the point where data is available to support every decision made, even if it’s not used for every decision.”

Sam Gregory

“We need to think about the importance of what’s visible when discussions are happening. The insight displayed can have an effect on the conversation.”

John Boyles

What to read next

‘We’ve Lost Athletes Because of this’: When Support Descends into Surveillance

By John Portch

Why is alignment seemingly on everyone’s lips across the world of sport?

“When you get everyone in a system pushing in the same direction, it can have a multiplier effect. The momentum of each person’s efforts building on each other,” said John Bull, the Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures.

“It is,” as he adds, “a key area of performance at which we can all get better.”

In his online presentation for members of the Leaders Performance Institute, Bull outlined the common obstacles as well as steps all teams can take to get better at coordinating their efforts.

How alignment affects performance

Alignment – the coordinated efforts of a team – takes several forms. Each has different implications for performance outcomes.

Bull illustrated some of those differences using mathematical symbols (and idea lifted directly from Ineos’s Sir Dave Brailsford).

In an ideal world, each stakeholder’s efforts would multiply the others in this fashion:

“One person’s talent is building on and adding,” says Bull. “The multiplication becomes exponential.”

He used the analogy of a group of people pushing a car up a hill. “It’s also about timing. Are we pushing at exactly the right time, which is really what the multiplication symbol is because you get this amplifier effect.”

Additions are more commonly found, but it’s not true alignment:

“What I would mean by a plus is that two parts of the organisation are still moving in the same direction, still aiming at the same goal, but it’s not joined up. It’s independent activity,” said Bull. “They’re still adding their talent, so it’s still a positive contribution, but you’re not getting that momentum multiplier effect. And we all know what that feels like.”

The risk is that subtractions or divisions rear their ugly head:

“If you’ve got two parts of the organisation with very different interpretations of the strategy, you have it taking away from each other,” said Bull of the subtraction.

As for the division symbol, “that would be where, politically, you’re starting to get factions, briefing to the media, or people actively recruiting allies against another part of the organisation. Or sometimes where you have a board or owner deliberately undermining the coach.”

If teams are to achieve the multiplier effect, Bull highlighted five critical considerations:

1. Who?

Who are you trying to align and what different talents can you bring to bear on a problem? Be sure to involve all relevant parties, including those who may be excluded for fear that they will be distracted.

2. What are you trying to achieve and by when?

Misalignment often arises not from disagreement on the goal itself, but on the timeline and resources needed to achieve it.

3. Alignment on strategy i.e. the ‘how’

The distinction between strategy (high-level direction) and tactics (specific applications) is not always understood.

4. Ways of working

Alignment is an outcome of agreed processes of communication, collaboration and decision-making.

5. Vertical and horizontal dimensions

While vertical alignment (e.g. between board and coach) attracts a lot of focus,  horizontal alignment between departments or teams underpins a truly joined-up approach.

Bull then highlighted some common tensions:

He said: “The reason I want to share these is to highlight where you might go for opportunities for improvement. Where do you see the opportunities for improvement in your environment and what’s your role in that? Where can you make a difference?”

The same goes for tests of alignment:

Each type of test presents opportunities to strengthen systems through reflection, planning and proactive leadership if you’re minded to look.

What actually works?

Bull suggested several methods for Leaders Performance Institute members to mull over:

What to read next

Do you Feel your Team Has Plenty of Clarity But Still Suffers from Misalignment?

By John Portch

“The one thing I believe about high performance is that it’s pretty simple but it’s also really hard to do consistently over time.”

The Leaders Performance Institute has just asked Greg Shaw, the High Performance Director at Swimming Australia, for his thoughts on the growing complexity of performance environments.

This complexity is both reflected in and a reaction to what Shaw calls the “growing sophistication” of performance roles. In many respects, as he noted in our Teamworks Special Report earlier this year, Shaw perceives himself as a “project manager”.

Which is not in itself a bad thing. Fields such as sports science have blossomed in elite sport, but consistency of application and outcome, whether locally or at scale, has often proved elusive.

“We all make bad decisions,” adds Shaw, “and a lot of smart people make dumb decisions.”

Here, we highlight four areas where Shaw and Swimming Australia, are trying to give their athletes, coaches and staff every chance to make better choices.

1. Identify the barriers to better decision making

“We heavily invested and remain interested in behavioural science and how we can help our athletes and coaches make smart decisions and follow hard behaviours,” says Shaw. Swimming Australia’s aim is to “help make those decisions easier and those hard performance behaviours more frequent.” They enlisted the help of behavioural design experts to help identify and understand the existing barriers.

Shaw himself has a background in sports nutrition and illustrates his point through the lens of dietetics. “It’s the behavioural component of nutrition,” he continues. “It doesn’t matter what you know in terms of, say, biology, it’s if you can make the right choices and how social and cultural drivers impact those choices.”

2. Manipulate the environment to remove those barriers

The ideal, as Shaw says, is for the athletes to “turn up, do what they need to do, and live a high performance lifestyle”. This, he admits, is easier said than done. Even a disciplined athlete can inadvertently harm their health and performance. “It often leads to concerns around wellbeing, being overloaded, overworked and over-stressed.”

The key is to “manipulate the environment and the process to help the athlete make it simpler and easier.” Shaw continues: “I think the future of high performance is designing things purposefully, not just the training we do but everything that fits outside of that; the life, the social environment, the club culture, the programme culture, the experts around you so you know to make the right choices and adaptations.”

He is clear that it is “more about environment and behaviour than it is about science and the expertise of performance.”

This is in keeping with Swimming Australia’s ‘people-first’ approach. “It’s understanding what’s a good stress and what’s a bad stress,” says Shaw, who explains that there is an increasing empathy for what athletes go through to sustain high performance over extended periods of time.

“An athlete may enter our ecosystem at 15 or 16 and leave our ecosystem at 35, so if we don’t have that ability to understand how we must adapt in how we interact with and support our athletes, then they’ll leave.”

3. Let people refine their processes before looking for scalability

Shaw admits that Swimming Australia, when it comes to system-wide initiatives, has traditionally been an organisation that “scales first and tries to find efficiencies later”. However, the organisation has typically excelled when it comes to individual and group piloting. Shaw has noted the distinction and continues to learn as he goes. “Over the last 18 months I’ve realised it’s not about adding more, it’s subtracting and refining ideas to their simplest and easiest, then letting people add their flavour to it,” he says, warming to the theme.

“Oftentimes, we try to scale and have things fit within boxes, but scalability comes from understanding the fundamentals of an idea or process, making sure that happens, and then giving enough space for others to iterate and develop their own process.”

4. Use AI as a co-pilot

Shaw sees the potential in automation, with caveats. “As we automate, we free up time to interrogate the data more and more, but that puts people behind the screens and offices we’re trying to free them from in the first place,” he says, adding, “automation should free coaches to spend more time on the pool deck and in performance environments”. Doing this will enable coaches to “be compassionate with the athlete, to better understand what they’re going through, or to understand if a piece of information is going to be necessary for them at this point in time.”

As for AI, he sees the benefit as being rooted in “augmented decision-making”. “We want to use AI to help people make good decisions, to help strip away the noise, to make the signal a bit clearer,” he continues.

Such clarity helps to reduce “data hallucinations and noise, which you may not realise for a couple of months”. By that point, “you’ve wasted your time.”

That does not mean outsourcing data interpretation entirely to AI. “We believe in the co-pilot model of AI rather than having the artificial intelligence doing it for people.”

What to read next

Coach and Staff Wellbeing: Five Approaches to Five Common Challenges

By John Portch

England’s Lionesses retained their European title in dramatic fashion last month.

Nestled in between the myriad elements that contributed to their success was the team’s sense of being “proper English”.

The trope was first aired in February following England’s 1-0 defeat of Spain (who were also their opponents in the Euro 2025 final), with defenders Millie Bright and captain Leah Williamson hailing a “properly English” performance.

Winger Chloe Kelly repeated it during the Euros, and several players were asked to define what it meant as the tournament went on. No-one gave exactly the same answer.

“It’s that we give everything, we run ourselves into the ground,” said midfielder Keira Walsh. For forward Alessia Russo it means “we’ll stick together”. For defender Lucy Bronze it means “if push comes to shove, we can win in any means possible”.

For England’s Dutch Head Coach, Sarina Wiegman, it means “passing with purpose”.

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter one way or another. Much like words on the wall of your changing room, it is more about the feelings they generate than the actual words used.

That is certainly the opinion of Dan Jackson, the General Manager of Player Development and Leadership at the AFL’s Adelaide Crows. He has spent his post-playing career working with teams on their culture. The words on the wall are often a focus.

“I probably spend the least amount of time worrying about whatever words they’ve got,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in an article that appeared last month.

“Often, I don’t even bother changing them because if you want ‘connection’ or ‘unity’ or ‘team first’ or ‘family’, it doesn’t really matter. What I want to know is the behaviours you’re going to commit to, your system of accountability, and how you drive those behaviours.”

It was one of several nuggets of insight on offer, member to member, across the Leaders Performance Institute in July.

Are you a soldier or a scout?

“Some of the skills of adaptive leadership are more obvious, but that doesn’t make them easier to learn,” said John Bull.

The Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures hosted the third and final session of our Virtual Roundtable series entitled ‘Leading in Complexity’.

Bull wanted to encourage Leaders Performance Institute members to reflect on their own role as an adaptive leader and pinpoint some areas for self-development.

He introduced the table to the work of philosopher Julia Galef, who has outlined what she calls ‘scout’ and ‘soldier’ mindsets:

A scout mindset, such as when a scout might draw a map, is essential when learning and adapting. “It’s about acknowledging we might know some elements of the map, but large parts of the map are still undrawn,” added Bull. “It’s not ignoring that we have expertise, but it’s looking for what’s missing.”

On the other hand, a soldier mindset is counterproductive because, as Bull said, “most of our energy is going to influencing other people to see things our way as opposed to learning from what we’re missing.” It can also help, as Shona Crooks, a colleague of Bull’s from Management Futures says, to ‘put your brain in neutral’.

What kind of listener are you?

It was a question posed by Management Futures’ Jeff Pagliano during July’s Leadership Skills Series session.

There are at least four different types of listener, as Pagliano pointed out, but anyone can become better at listening at depth.

He illustrated his rationale with this graphic:

“Usually when we’re trying to persuade someone, it’s all about sharing our perspective. We call that ‘advocacy’,” said Pagliano. Your advocacy will be made up of the facts known to you, things you see as important, and any assumptions you make about the other person.

That person will have facts, thoughts and assumptions of their own, which is why we must add ‘inquiry’ to help bring those to the fore. “And when you bring those two things together that’s where you get that shared pool of insight.”

Listening at depth has other benefits too:

• Knowledge and information that may not have been obvious is allowed to surface.

• It creates a connection and builds trust. It goes way beyond just listening and sharing information.

• If you can cast aside your scepticism and assumptions, you will be able to “listen generously and share tentatively” – an idea posited by business professor Erin Meyer in her 2014 book The Culture Map and shared here by Pagliano.

Do you care enough about your coach and staff wellbeing?

“We’ve had athlete wellbeing and engagement in place for more than ten years. We still don’t have coach wellbeing and engagement in place at all.”

This observation, offered at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable on the topic, is by no means unique.

Members of the Leaders Performance Institute have seen the following approaches help:

1. Find space for coach and staff wellbeing in their strategies
2. Encourage coaches and staff to develop work friendships
3. Depicting presenteeism as irresponsible
4. An individualised approach to wellbeing
5. The idea that wellbeing and performance are indivisible

Read a full account here.

The postpartum return of British athletes

This was a theme of last month’s Women’s High Performance Sport community call, which featured Esme Matthew, the Head of Physiology at the UKSI, and Dr Kate Hutchings, who works with the UKSI’s leading clinical services for all world-class-funded Olympic and Paralympic athletes.

They discussed six key areas:

1. Preparation and planning

Early and open communication helps athletes and their teams set expectations and create tailored return-to-performance plans, with support from performance lifestyle advisors.

2. Multidisciplinary support teams

These help to place the athlete at the centre of their own decision-making.

3. Pelvic health as a game changer

Pelvic floor education and support are essential for postpartum recovery.

4. Individualised return plans

Each athlete’s requires unique and flexible plans informed by health monitoring and any necessary practical adjustments. It is key to enable them to stay connected to their sport.

5. Mental health and identity

Mental health support is vital as athletes adjust to motherhood.

6. Peer support and mentorship

Informal peer networks, such as WhatsApp groups, offer valuable emotional and practical support, helping athletes share experiences and reduce isolation during pregnancy and postpartum.

Click here for a fuller insight.