Main Image: Basketball New Zealand

By Paul Downes PhD

In a recent Leaders Performance Institute article, Áine MacNamara outlined ten characteristics of effective performance pathways, emphasising environmental intent over time and the deliberate design required to support athletes through uncertainty (1).

What I took most from it was the challenge to move beyond static talent identification models and build environments that can respond to developmental reality as it unfolds. In my day-to-day work as a General Manager of High Performance (HP), that distinction matters as we cannot just select ‘talent’ and hope the system does the rest. We have to shape the conditions that help young athletes keep progressing.

In this article, I build on MacNamara’s recent discussion through the lens of the Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) 5×5 HP pathway. Drawing on my experience in the role, I describe how we currently operationalise talent identification and development decisions in a decentralised, resource‑constrained national system. I will discuss how those decisions collide with ethical responsibility, developmental uncertainty, and the lived reality of athletes and families in the Under 15–19 space.

To clarify, I am not presenting a model to be replicated. Instead, I want to be transparent about the trade‑offs, risks, and responsibilities that sit underneath age‑grade selection and programme design within BBNZ. My aim is to contribute honestly to the HP conversation about what great can look like when resources, time, and certainty are limited – and when decisions still need to stand up to scrutiny.

Framing the context: the BBNZ 5×5 age‑grade HP pathway

The BBNZ age‑grade HP pathway (Under 15–19) operates within a decentralised system that relies heavily on secondary schools and regional associations as the primary environments for daily training, competition, and athlete support. Unlike many international systems, New Zealand does not have a centralised academy structure or fully funded national talent development programme for basketball. Instead, development occurs across a distributed network of environments, each with varying levels of resourcing, expertise, and capacity.

A defining constraint within this system is that the BBNZ age‑grade HP pathway has historically been ‘user-pays’. Families of selected athletes contribute financially to participation in national camps and international FIBA tournaments. While basketball can be considered relatively accessible at an entry level, requiring little more than a ball and a hoop, progression into HP pathways requires regular access to facilities, specialist coaching, competition, and international travel. For many families, this represents a significant financial commitment.

Within a low‑resource, user‑pays environment, BBNZ’s ethical obligation is therefore not to over‑promise outcomes, but to ensure families clearly understand pathway intent, selection meaning, and developmental trade‑offs before engaging. In this way, transparency becomes a safeguard.

For New Zealand athletes, participation in FIBA Under 15–19 events serves a dual purpose. While these tournaments are legitimate international competitions, they also function as the primary global shop window through which US college programmes can assess New Zealand talent. They offer verified age‑grade competition, standardised rules, and direct comparison against major basketball nations which serve as reference points that NCAA recruiters rely on heavily given limited exposure to the New Zealand domestic school and association systems. This reality means that BBNZ age‑grade teams competing in FIBA tournaments are both development environments and exposure platforms that ultimately are significantly influencers regarding almost every strategic decision regarding the HP pathways.

Jackson Ball is a significant example of impact the 5×5 Men’s Pathway is having. Jackson’s pathway illustrates a progressive transition through BBNZ’s age‑grade system, representing New Zealand at U17 and U19 World Cups (2024 and 2025 respectively) before earning Tall Blacks selection as a 16-year-old and consolidating his development through ANBL competition in Australia.

Of his journey, Jackson says:

The NZ age-group pathway was huge for my development. It offered me elite coaching, international experience, the chance to compete against top players, and gave me the exposure required to earn college opportunities. Being part of the Hawks (Hawkes Bay) also showed me the level of physicality and toughness needed to compete at the professional level, and taught me how to balance basketball, school, and other commitments. Both opportunities sharpened my focus and showed me what it would take to continue on this path.

Developing self‑sufficient, coachable athletes

Across BBNZ HP pathway programmes, there is strong alignment with MacNamara’s emphasis on developing psycho‑behavioural skills that enable athletes to cope with the inevitable volatility of development (1). In the New Zealand context, this focus is not optional – it is essential.

In the absence of a fully professional domestic league and given the opportunities currently afforded by US collegiate scholarships, the vast majority of high‑performing youth athletes aspire to secure places in offshore environments. It is currently believed that success in these environments depends as much on self‑regulation and adaptability as on basketball ability.

To this end, BBNZ HP pathway programmes prioritise the development of self‑regulation, goal‑setting and reflective practice through progressive ownership of an Individual Performance Plan (IPP). These competencies are embedded through a combination of remotely, in assembled camps and during performance campaigns. Through conversations with NCAA, and professional coaches, there is a consistent emphasis that international athletes must manage training load, academics, recovery, and behaviour with minimal supervision if they are to thrive. Preparing athletes to meet these expectations is, therefore, a deliberate development outcome, not a by‑product.

Similarly, in preparing athletes to be coached across cultures, playing styles, and evolving on‑court roles, BBNZ places high value on coachability, responsiveness to feedback, and tactical learning capacity. Within both coach recruitment and athlete selection processes, values alignment is considered foundational. Learning behaviours such as; active listening, feedback integration, curiosity, and self‑direction are explicitly discussed, developed and ultimately rewarded.

This emphasis aligns with MacNamara’s advocacy for athlete agency (1) and is reinforced through multiple mechanisms for athlete voice. These mechanisms are not tokenistic; they actively inform IPPs, strengthen connections, and improve decision‑making quality across HP programmes.

Gender specific considerations

Male 5×5 programmes

A uniquely influential accelerator within the New Zealand male pathway is the Sal’s NZNBL and Rapid League. Running from February to August, these semi‑professional environments provide male youth athletes (sometimes as young as 15) with elevated learning opportunities. Examples include; daily exposure to senior level competition, experienced coaching, international imports regarding professional habits, and current Tall Blacks to share top down cultural learnings. Coupled with schools and associations, male athletes are being exposed to multiple coaching voices and styles.

Across these environments, a consistent observation that is emerging is that athletes who integrate performance and behavioural feedback openly, without defensiveness, tend to progress faster and attract greater interest. This is both domestically and offshore.

Female 5×5 programmes

In contrast to the men’s semi‑professional league, the equivalent for the women’s pathway in New Zealand is between October and December and falls after the FIBA tournament windows. An absence of genuine ‘best vs best’ training and competition year round is a constraint for female youth development. As a NSO, BBNZ must continually redesign development and identification processes for young women and cannot simply translate the male templates and processes. Regional ‘hotspots’ have emerged where the majority of selections currently come from however this dilutes the depth of possible talent that is FIBA capable and consequently reduces the number of female athletes capable of progressing through the pathway beyond school.

Some key strategic considerations moving forward include cross‑sport monitoring where BBNZ has the opportunity to engage female athletes currently participating in other sports. Typical sports include netball and volleyball domestically. A cross sport approach would include a perspective shift from output spotting to capacity sensing. Expanding on this there would be a requirement for coaches in the pathway to be able to identify and prioritise indicators of adaptability when looking for potential athletes. These may include; learning speed, response to adversity, competitive curiosity, and self‑regulation as well as direct screening days to observe and measure basketball potential in a variety of positions.

One athlete cited the transferable skills from netball to basketball:

Netball helped me develop decision‑making, competitiveness, and confidence in contact. I wasn’t a natural basketball athlete at first, but the coaches gave me confidence to try and helped me to quickly learned and adapt.

Present challenges

The decentralised model in New Zealand offers reach and diversity of experience but also presents enduring challenges. Some of the most prominent being: inequitable access driven by cost, variable regional quality and capacity, limited national contact time, and tension between long‑term development intent and short‑term performance expectations. Without a central academy, progress depends on alignment, trust, and shared standards across schools, associations, families, and national programmes which makes clarity, transparency, and consistency critical.

Designing selection criteria that withstand scrutiny

BBNZ age‑grade selection criteria for both male and female programmes are deliberately co‑designed across coaching staff spanning the full pathway (Under 15 through to the Tall Blacks and Tall Ferns). This breadth of input ensures decisions are not made in isolation from senior performance realities.

The criteria explicitly balance current performance contribution (“ability to impact a FIBA tournament now”) and projected long‑term potential (“future senior international capability”). This balance guards against over‑reliance on early output alone. BBNZ HP age grade selection decisions draw on multiple evidence streams, including: projected future roles, quality of daily training environment, positional needs and “international superpowers” and a clearly defined set of BBNZ HP character attributes (coachability, preparation, recovery behaviours, competitiveness, and clarity of purpose). The intention is to assess athletes holistically rather than through a single performance lens.

A part of the BBNZ system, transparency is critical. Criteria are communicated early to families, expectations are clearly articulated, and mechanisms exist to sense‑check or challenge alignment before processes are too far progressed. This is essential in a system where selection meaning can easily be misinterpreted as long‑term endorsement. BBNZ is acutely aware that age‑grade selections attract parental scrutiny, media interest, and retrospective evaluation. Robust criteria are therefore designed not to prove decisions “right”, but to ensure they are defensible, consistent, and ethically sound under uncertainty.

Navigating FIBA cycles, maturation, and performance horizons

A unique complexity within youth basketball is the three‑year FIBA competition cycle. Year one requires a top‑two Oceania finish to qualify for the Asia Cup in year two (which requires a top‑four finish to qualify) and in the final third year is the possibility of a World Cup.

When analysed through evidence‑informed What It Takes To Win frameworks, the performance requirements of year‑one competitions are significantly lower than those of Asia Cup and World Cup phases. Without multi‑horizon awareness, the BBNZ HP system would risk rewarding early maturation, or tolerating sub‑optimal psycho‑behavioural behaviours in athletes who initially dominate early levels of training and competition. Current research supports such caution. Mikołajec et al. (2) demonstrates that performance differences among U15–U16 national‑level basketball athletes are heavily influenced by biological maturation, underscoring the need for flexible selection horizons and avoidance of fixed judgements. Similarly, a recent systematic review of youth development manuals from leading FIBA nations (USA, Spain, Australia, Canada, Argentina) found consistent emphasis on long‑term development, technical‑tactical foundations, and diverse experiences over early specialisation (3).

BBNZ HP therefore frames its selection decisions around clarity of pathway position at a point in time, rather than prediction of ultimate success. Athletes and families are supported to understand where an athlete is now and what it will take next. This approach helps manage expectations and protects against the conflation of age‑grade selection with permanent endorsement.

Ethical responsibility in a user‑pays system

Ethics in talent pathways are rarely about perfect solutions. They are about honest framing.

In a user‑pays, low‑resource environment, ethical failure most often occurs when systems promise certainty they cannot deliver. BBNZ’s responsibility is therefore to ensure clarity of intent, informed consent, and realistic understanding of probabilities and trade‑offs.

One family of a former pathway athlete was able to reinforce this perspective, stating:

What we appreciated most was the honesty. No one promised that this pathway guaranteed selection or a future contract, but they were clear about what our child would learn, what the experience would involve, and the probabilities involved. That clarity helped us make a decision we were comfortable with—even knowing there were no certainties.

Another added:

Looking back, the value wasn’t whether our child was selected. It was the development they received while they were in the system. If that quality hadn’t been there, selection alone would have meant very little.

These lived experiences reinforce a central principle that selection without development quality is a false positive.

What are BBNZ HP selecting into?

The previously discussed points raise a critical question for any national system: are we selecting athletes into teams, or into development environments?

If selection confers visibility and pressure but not improved coaching quality, learning support, and behavioural expectations, its value diminishes. Effective pathways must ensure that selection meaningfully enhances development and not merely exposure. Equally important is retrospective evaluation. It is important that HP systems are committed to rigorously examine their processes and at a youth level considerations include; who was missed, who exited and why and who re‑entered later and succeeded. The sentiment of creating continuous learning systems resonates with MacNamara’s (1) recent identification that continuous cycles of reviewing, debriefing and reflection being a characteristic of good pathway environments.

Performance shifts

Over the past two years, the BBNZ HP 5×5 pathways have seen a clear step-change in performance and pathway outcomes across the system. At the performance end, U17 Men delivered back‑to‑back 4th‑place finishes at the 2024 and 2025 FIBA U17 and U19 World Cups, underlining New Zealand’s improved ability to consistently compete with the world’s best in the most demanding age‑group environments. That momentum was reinforced in 2025 with the U17 Men winning New Zealand’s first ever FIBA Oceania Cup gold medal, a significant milestone for the programme.

In parallel, the U17 Women qualified for consecutive FIBA U17 Women’s World Cups (2024 and 2026), reflecting growing depth, continuity, and competitiveness in the female pathway. Equally important, these results are being underpinned by strong off‑court outcomes. The 2025–26 season saw a record number of New Zealand male and female athletes competing in NCAA Division I, demonstrating that the pathway is not only producing teams that compete globally, but individuals trusted to perform and develop in elite daily environments. Taken together, these outcomes point to a system that is converting alignment, selection, development and competition into sustained performance, not one‑off results, and building a broader base of high‑quality athletes capable of succeeding on the world stage.

Concluding reflections

Strong HP pathway systems are not defined by how often they predict perfectly, but by how transparently they operate under uncertainty. Early selection can be complex and require evidence to make the most complete decisions possible. Decisions that influenced by maturation, opportunity, and environment rather than guaranteed trajectory. High‑quality HP systems therefore should prioritise adaptability, multiple pathways, and ethical clarity over certainty.

Consistent with FIBA’s youth strategy, age‑grade international tournaments are best understood as development accelerators, not performance forecasts. In resource‑constrained environments like New Zealand, the real work lies in designing systems that respect developmental variability while maximising opportunity.

That, ultimately, is what it really takes.

References

1. 10 Ways in Which the Best Environments Support their Pathway Athletes – Performance Institute
2. Mikołajec, K., Arede, J. & Gryko, K. Examining physical and technical performance among youth basketball national team development program players: a multidimensional approach. Sci Rep15, 3722 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-87583-7
3. Santos, Jhonatan & Sato dos Santos, Yura & Goi, Cauê & Junior, Eduardo & Godoy, Sergio & Galatti, Larissa. (2024). Training young people in basketball (under-15 to under-19): what are the tactical-technical contents described in the manuals of leading countries in the FIBA ​​ranking? Rectos. 61. 1474-1483. 10.47197/retos.v61.108287.

What to read next

You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

By John Portch

As Tom Kelley once asked, if you blew up all the systems at your organisation, what would you keep and what would you change?

Kelley, a partner at global design firm IDEO, was an inspiration for Lachlan Penfold when he was appointed Head of Performance at the Melbourne Storm in 2017. The team were reigning NRL premiers and keen to build on that success.

“That was a challenge that I put forward to all of our football staff, coaches, performance staff, football ops,” Penfold told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2024. “If we blew this up, what would we keep and what would we change?”

It was a necessary question because, as he explained, “sometimes when you have a lot of success, you don’t want to change things because you think that there’s only one way to do it.” Instead, he is a firm believer that there is “more than one way to skin a cat”, which is central to Kelley’s argument. “That was a really refreshing approach of how to go about it.”

Penfold’s approach both encouraged collaboration across the Storm’s performance team and harnessed the expertise in the room as the group sought to provide the best possible performance support to their players.

Below, we return to a selection of our most insightful conversations with performance directors to discuss their approach to balancing the need for integration with excellence and pose the reader five questions.

1. Are your team’s efforts coordinated or are you just busy?

Daily meetings are a must, even for those who admit they’re “not a big meetings guy” such as Michael Italiano, the Head of Athletic Performance at the Rajasthan Royals.

For all that, he finds the expanse of a cricket field to be ideal for both formal and informal check-ins, as he told the Leaders Performance Institute last year.

“The walk around the ground is just pure gold,” he says of the deep conversations a lap of the ground can inspire. “When you’re at training there’s something about walking and looking out over the ground that brings a sense of openness rather than being across the table from someone, which at times can feel, maybe subconsciously, quite confronting.”

At daily 9:30am meetings, Italiano attempts to read the room. “I’m almost like ‘OK, who do I need to check-in with? Who do I need to bring more energy to? Who do I need to be more curious with? Maybe there was a player who has been off in training the last two days and I need to be more curious with them, their data and wellness scores.” That curiosity is a must because he cannot see everything.

From the IPL to the NBA, where Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, uses structured check-ins to establish communication loops on athlete priorities.

“We want to try and distil it from one to three points in each of those areas. We then meet as a larger group, all of health and performance, so we can go through each player,” he told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2025. “What the other clinicians are doing is really important in my view. Whatever issues I’ve seen here it is very rare, almost never, that things get missed.”

2. How do you preserve expertise in an interdisciplinary system?

Shared goals do not mean a dilution of the expertise within a performance team, they merely indicate that specialists are contributors to the holistic performance picture.

As Rice said of the Sixers, “we can have the best strength coaches, the best nutritionist – and that’s really important – we have excellent clinicians, but the context is really what underpins it. It doesn’t really matter how good that rehabilitation plan is if we don’t understand the context”. Once that context is understood, “that allows us to put the pieces around them to support the athlete.”

“I need to think like a football coach,” said Penfold of his work at the Storm. “In my role as a head of performance, often there’s a physical element to what we do but I also need to think like a football coach; how is this going to make them a better football player versus just a fitter, faster, stronger football player?”

It is a shared performance team goal. “Are they prepared to put developing a better football player first and having a growth mindset around that versus just staying in their little bubble and just working on their area?” Penfold continued. “So there’s a lot of parts that that go into making up a successful team or a great team outside of just the wins and losses.”

3. How do you approach trade-offs?

The pursuit of trade-offs is all about balancing competing tensions in performance.

Jack Nayler, for one, is convinced that control has its limits. ‘The more we try to control the system, the more we leave ourselves open to system errors adversely affecting our progress in the long-term,’ the Head of Sport Science at Everton wrote in an article for the Leaders Performance Institute. He added: ‘we cannot with complete accuracy predict what will happen in the future; all decisions are essentially gambles.’

Penfold is of a similar mindset. “If you’ve got 35 players, they’re 35 different players with different responses,” he said. “There’s always a lot of different decisions you’ve got to make and hopefully you get more right than wrong.”

You certainly don’t want to duplicate the work. “If we have three people doing five lots, all of a sudden we’ve got 15 sets instead of five,” said Rice, before outlining his true concern. “It’s very rarely missing things – it’s everyone trying to do the right thing.”

4. Do you and your team have a shared mental model of performance?

Simplification is key to Rice’s approach at the Sixers; and he admitted that the team’s small roster size (15 players) helps.

“It allows us to distil the focus areas which become the priorities in each area for each player; and then we have that in a spreadsheet,” he said. “The flow on from there is reasonably straightforward to see what programmes need to be implemented for this player and who’s going to drive them.”

This is easier with a shared mental model, which is also something Nayler explored. ‘The first thing to know is that in a complex environment, performance emerges from between the components an in inter-dependent manner, and not from the summation of the performance of each component in isolation,’ he wrote.

5. Does your culture enable or inhibit collaboration?

Collaborative structures are critical, but “have you created an environment that encourages people to want to get better, that allows them to thrive?”

The question was posed by Penfold, who described how his department adapted its approach ahead of the 2024 NRL season. “One of the things I believe we did well this year, was to create an environment of joy in which people want to immerse themselves in getting better.”

When there is that level of commitment in a psychologically safe environment, “it becomes the ‘mastery’ environment” that all performance directors crave.

What to read next

You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

By John Portch

Spotting the need for change is one thing, articulating it, whether as a coach, performance director or as a head of department, is quite another.

“The challenge is how to get buy-in from management and decision-makers,” Jeff Pagliano, who works with leadership consultants Management Futures, tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “How do you make the case, then build-in time to innovate so that you can adapt?”

That ability to spot the need for change and then respond effectively formed the basis for Pagliano’s presentation at a recent Leaders virtual roundtable during which he shared Management Futures’ model of adaptive leadership.

We caught up with him post-session to hear it for ourselves.

Pagliano begins by outlining the four skills of Management Futures’ model of adaptive leadership and their corresponding traps:

Pagliano acknowledges that these can be difficult to discuss in the abstract and invited participants to undertake a seemingly straightforward task to help illustrate both the skills required and the traps to avoid.

First, he asked them to draw two five-point stars on a piece of paper. The stars had to look like this:

Then Pagliano challenged each member of the group to draw a line in the narrow space between both stars while only using a reflection (provided by the screen of their mobile device) to guide them. It is, as anyone who has tried this exercise can tell you, difficult to do.

He says: “At this point I’ll ask, ‘okay, so talk me through what that process looks like’ and usually folks will say ‘I had to stop and think about how my pencil was moving in relation to where I was seeing it on the reflection of the phone’. And I say, ‘well, great. That’s actually what we’re going to focus on because that’s a key skill for adaptive leadership. We take what we call a ‘STOP moment’.”

A STOP moment is a deliberate pause that allows a leader to step back, assess the situation from a higher perspective, explore available options, and return with a more effective response:

There is also the question of what you’re actually seeing when you step back. Pagliano outlined two types of problem for the table:

He then gave the table a series of hypothetical performance problems and asked them to decide if their nature was technical or adaptive. They were:

• Performance is consistently dropping off in the last quarter due to competitors fatiguing less
• Despite having the same athletes and same coaches, attack strategies are no longer working as well
• Increase in pre-season training is leading to more injuries
• You have a new gameplan which the team buys into, but they are struggling to execute consistently

“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,” says Pagliano.

For the final part of his presentation, Pagliano outlined three approaches to spotting the need for change:

1. Look for persistent performance gaps, despite sustained effort, that signal an ineffective strategy

Sometimes a once successful strategy becomes less effective; sometimes we need to acknowledge our approach has never worked. When trying hard, our scan becomes tunnel visioned – beware of this common trap.

Questions to ask yourselves:

• Where are you seeing a persistent or growing gap between aspiration and reality?
• What strategies of yours seem less effective than they once were?

2. Environment scanning

Look for shifts which could have a significant impact on performance, both threats and opportunities.

Questions to ask yourselves:

• What is different, new, becoming more important in our environment?
• What are our competitors paying more attention to? Do we have new competitors?
• Pattern spotting – what trends are we noticing an increase in?

When something unexpected happens, consider if it’s an example of an emerging pattern.

3. Stress-testing our strategy

Challenge your strategy in a hypothetical setting (free of the consequences of ‘real’ failure).

Questions to ask yourselves:

• Surface and challenge assumptions: What assumptions does our strategy depend on? Which of these are vulnerable?
• Pre-mortem: If we are going to underperform this season, what are most likely to be the causes?
• Scenario planning: What could seriously disrupt our performance?
• Red teaming: How would you beat us if you were our competitors?
• A fresh pair of eyes: Who do we have in our network who could provide useful feedback?

“I think sport, like any other industry, has to be adaptable and flexible, says Pagliano as we wrap things up, “but it’s difficult for any organisation to adapt when there is a legacy way of doing business and achieving success. I don’t think sport is immune from that.”

What to read next

How the British Red Cross Continuously Adapts While Staying True to its Values

By John Portch

When it comes to performance planning and reviewing in sport, Teena Murray sees plenty of room for industry growth.

“We have grown immensely in high performance sport, especially in the team behind the team,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “but we haven’t really evolved in terms of how we think about the structure and how we organise these teams.”

Murray is ten months into her tenure as the Senior Vice President of Integrated Performance Support at US Soccer, where she oversees the delivery of high-performance services to the 27 national teams that compete under the federation’s banner.

She recently hosted a virtual roundtable where members of the Leaders Performance Institute shared their challenges in this space.

“The common denominator remains the challenges we face around interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary connection,” says Murray, who feels that sport’s organisational designs and structures have “lagged” behind other high-performance domains. “We also talked about how we lead up and get some of the senior stakeholders in the organisation more engaged around advancing the models that we’re working within.”

As long as such disconnects exist, “we can’t build something significant and we can’t have the sustained success until we really take a critical look at how we’re organising these teams.”

She cites other contributory factors, such as ever shorter coaching tenures and even the limitations of a team’s physical space. “There’s environmental challenges in the way some of our buildings are designed, where we might have medical over here and performance over there. And I think we all know that structure drives function.”

To that end, US Soccer has opened its new National Training Center in Fayetteville, Atlanta [the ribbon was cut last week]. “It has been an incredible ride getting this place up and running and getting all of the equipment installed and getting organised for the first camps that will also begin in this building next Monday [18 May],” says Murray. The timing could not be better with the Fifa World Cup on the horizon and the US serving as co-hosts of the tournament.

“It’s been fast and furious at times, but it’s also incredibly rewarding; and just to see the pride. This is the first time US Soccer’s ever had a home, and it’s been a pipe dream for a long time. So to see it truly becoming a reality for so many folks who’ve been part of the federation for a long time is very rewarding and really exciting.”

Murray is the first to admit that US Soccer still has plenty of work to do when it comes to planning, reviewing and delivering sustained improvement, but she was still happy to speak to us about some of the elements she hopes to see come together in the near future.

Alignment: a shared understanding

“The complexity is very real,” says Murray when reflecting on her work. She and her leadership team are “trying to solve for complexity by creating a philosophical foundation and trying to really align mental models around who we are, what we’re here to do, and how we’re going to work together.”

It is often easier said than done and, as she explains, “you can only move at the speed of trust”. “At times, it feels like I’m moving very slowly. At other times, I realise even though it feels slow, it’s still too fast. It’s really toggling between the fast and the slow.”

They ask themselves: “When is there an opportunity to move fairly quickly and get something accomplished and try to get a few wins on the board? And when do we need to slow back down and just stand and have a coffee and continue to get to know folks?”

It points to the search for alignment. “I use the term ‘radically aligned and seamlessly integrated’,” she says. “So everyone involved needs to feel like we’re truly radically aligned, philosophically and operationally, and that the delivery, the execution is meeting the standard.”

Sustained improvement: ‘learning at speed’

Radical alignment and seamless integration are about enabling US Soccer to “learn as fast as we can”, as Murray puts it.

She echoes former New Zealand All Blacks’ GM Darren Shand, who recently cited American systems scientist, Peter Senge, when describing learning as “the only sustainable competitive advantage”.

Murray explains that her team employs a “closed loop process” of “plan, do, review, learn.”  She speaks of their daily debriefs (morning and evening) and more formal gatherings held after national team camps.

As a result of these touchpoints, they can tweak their strategies in the pursuit of sustained improvement. It’s a real team effort. “Everybody needs to contribute to that process and align on what we feel are the key learnings and then how we are going to iterate or improve our process together.”

There is also a balance to be struck between consistency and innovation. “We need to find that sweet spot between continuing to do the key things really well and then also starting to elevate or advance and start to integrate maybe some of the new pieces that are now possible for us here at US Soccer.”

She wants her team to “think outside the box” and embrace the opportunities provided by a new facility, but she also knows they “have to be smart about how much new are we going to try to incorporate or how much new are we going to try to adopt.”

Review: multi-level and psychologically safe

“A lot of honesty and a lot of feedback – fast feedback – is critically important if we’re going to learn and adapt quickly,” says Murray. “It’s also about making sure that we have the psychological safety in the room and also the ability to be truly honest with each other when things are not going the way they need to go in figuring out how we’re going to course correct.”

The aforementioned daily huddles are new for a lot of members of staff. “We have people who aren’t used to being at the table with some of the other groups,” she continues. “It’s great to get people in the room, but we’re almost trying to learn together how we want these meetings to go and how we want the debrief to go and how we want to feed some of the learnings back in. So it’s been fun. We’re learning a lot and evolving very quickly in real time.”

The US Soccer Integrated Performance Support team’s goal is clear. “If we have the right processes in place, we’re automating the right things and we’re using dashboards effectively and the tools and technologies that we’re using to gather data, the ability to be effective and successful on the day should be pretty straightforward.” Then, when things inevitably go awry, “we know exactly how we’re going to manage it and bring it back online.”

‘But not everything is collaborative’

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. “But not everything is collaborative,” says Murray. “I think we oftentimes confuse it, but we don’t want collaboration all the time.”

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.”

What to read next

How the British Red Cross Continuously Adapts While Staying True to its Values

By John Portch

‘Peace-time plans are of no particular value but peace-time planning is indispensable.’

Former US President Dwight D Eisenhower wrote that line in a letter to a US diplomat in 1950 and repeated the sentiment throughout his eight years in the White House.

The line was quoted by Patrick Mannix, the Sports Science Senior Manager at US Soccer, at a presentation to Leaders Performance Institute members in 2025.

“The idea behind this quote is that high-performance teams don’t necessarily have a static plan,” said Mannix.

“The plan is constantly evolving as new information comes to light, whether that’s in relation to the tournament that we’re playing in, the players that we’re working with, and a variety of other contexts that are relevant to the world of international soccer.”

With a considered plan, a leader can align their people and allocate their resources effectively. With a structured review process, improvements can be sustained.

That is the message at the heart of a forthcoming case study virtual roundtable hosted by Mannix’s US Soccer colleague, Teena Murray, who will speak in her capacity as the organisation’s Director of Performance and from her experience of leading performance programmes at the NBA and NHL.

Here, we foreground Murray’s presentation with a selection of five best practice insights in the realms of planning and reviewing delivered by members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

1. The VMOST framework

‘The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less,’ wrote James Thomas. ‘They are those that build solid foundations, plan with intent, adapt with discipline and continue to stay rooted to the agreed values and behaviours when circumstances change.’

Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club, wrote these words in February.

He argued that while planning is often perceived as control, he believes it to be the opposite:

When the direction is clear, planning is decentralised. Coaches, athletes and staff can act with confidence because they understand the broader context. When strategy is absent, everything escalates upwards. Decisions slow, responsibility blurs and energy is wasted re-litigating the same conversations week after week.

Thomas then introduced business strategist Rakesh Sondhi’s VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics) framework, which ‘provides a disciplined way of connecting the big picture of the future to the daily actions, tasks and deliverables required to get there’: 

‘The power of VMOST lies in its simplicity,’ Thomas continued. ‘In high-performance environments, complexity is already high. Strategy models must reduce cognitive load, not add to it. VMOST creates line of sight. Individuals can see how their daily work connects all the way through to the long-term vision of the team and/or organisation.’

Finally, ‘when applied well, this kind of structure does not constrain creativity. It enables it. People can feel empowered to adapt, innovate and solve problems within a clear strategic frame’.

2. Find the right time for athlete education

Paul Ford, the outgoing Head of Performance at the British Olympic Association, explained in a recent article that an Olympic Games environment ‘is the worst possible place for trying to get people to peak and perform to the best of their capabilities’. He wrote:

Athletes are compacted into a brand-new village of more than 16,000 people who are all subject to a constrained competition schedule in what amounts to 52 world championships in 17 days, all in the same city.

It’s almost like they are being set up to fail when they’re expected to deliver the best performance of their lives.

The key, he argued, is tapping into the bits of the Olympic experience that build you up and not the elements that can detract from your performance. Athlete education is a critical element of the BOA’s fixed Games plan and comes in the form of discussions. ‘When to land these discussions is the next question,’ wrote Ford, before adding:

[Ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics] some sports, such as sailing and canoeing, will know their Olympians as early as September 2027; others, such as track and field, won’t select until May 2028. So the education journey we go on with the sailors and canoeists is long; we can plan out and get that right and drip feed it at the right times. Whereas the track and field athletes don’t want to hear anything about the Games because they’re not necessarily going. We must be smart in making the education bespoke and fit for purpose for each sport. Equally, some will want us to sit down and talk it through while others just want those short videos and podcasts. It’s finding out how the different cohort of athletes’ best digest information.

3. It is critical to learn from failure

In October, Everton’s Head of Sport Science, Jack Nayler, penned his thoughts on what it takes to look at a failure and ensure lessons are learned (primarily in the context of complexity in sports high-performance systems).

He shared his reflections on the late Richard Cook of the University of Chicago, specifically his treatise entitled How Complex Systems Fail.

Nayler wrote:

Around this time, I was challenged by a friend in the industry to put together my thoughts on building a performance department for a sports team. I found it challenging just to make an org chart and list positions without giving the background and rationale for why and how the department existed in that structure as well as its philosophical construct. This exercise of transferring ideas from my head on to paper forced me to critically confront my assumptions and crystallised my thoughts on how I believe we need to operate in the complex environment of elite professional team sports (specifically football as this has been my professional experience).

4. Embed review mechanisms

Mannix and his colleagues at US Soccer continually face the club vs country balance. In his aforementioned presentation, he spoke of the process that takes place when American players report for international duty.

“Building rapport and trust with those clubs is massively important because that helps us drive a lot of the exchange of information,” he said. “We need to know when our equipment and staff are arriving and where our players are coming from.”

Some may be in better shape than others, which underlines the need to review ahead of a session. Mannix said:

When a coach is trying to build out the session plan, the right hand is a good sports scientist or a performance coach, and the left hand is the first assistant, and those three individuals are working very closely to ensure that there’s a good plan in place for every training session. There’s good understanding as to what the availability of the players is going to be, particularly in the first two days of training, because what we’ve found through communication with clubs is we sometimes have to be flexible when players are coming into our environment simply because although Europe observes FIFA windows, we have to work with our partners in MLS on when players are released to come and join our environment.

Mannix and his colleagues understand the range of fixed and dynamic constraints they face. They use that understanding to find ‘optimization indicators’:

5. Pursue collaborative planning where possible

Where can you pool your resources with others for the collective good?

In 2024, the UK Sports Institute, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Australian Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand formed the Global Alliance, which enables them to share sports science research and best practice when it comes to their female athletes.

The Global Alliance is a case study in what can be achieved in time and resource-limited environments when organisations collaborate in areas with little impact on competition itself (they still want to beat each other).

The Alliance’s main objectives, as explained on a Leaders Community Call in November 2024, include…

• Sharing best practices and resources: By pooling their collective knowledge, Alliance members can develop and implement the most effective health initiatives and signpost others towards the best practice or research already implemented by their colleagues in different regions.
• Benchmarking and baselining efforts: The goal, as Helen Fulcher, the Athlete Performance Support Lead at HPSNZ explained, is to “create a baseline that is higher”. Members of the Alliance will regularly assess and combine their efforts to ensure continuous improvement which, in theory, should result in healthier female athletes and higher levels of competition.
• Addressing misinformation: The group are passionate about making sure that the information available would be representative of the global athlete population, and therefore diverse, whilst being evidence-based. You want to be able to say “‘as of now, this is the best way to treat X’,” said Amber Donaldson, the VP of Sports Medicine at the USPOC. Athletes from different nations will also help spread accurate information about health topics, such as menstrual cycles and nutrition, through their platforms.
• Speeding up progress: As a collective the alliance can move practices along more quickly, be that through raising baseline levels faster, or by being able to increase sample sizes.
• Conducting collaborative research: Richard Burden,  who leads the Female Athlete Performance Programme at the UKSI, said: “If you can combine multicentre research, with those multicentre being in different countries around the globe, then you are naturally going to get a more diverse, rich database and, therefore, the insights that we’re going to be able to get from that are going to be just way more valuable for everybody”.

Additional reporting by Sarah Evans, Rachel Woodland and Lottie Wright.

By John Portch

Ayao Komatsu is a recurring presence on the popular Netflix series Drive to Survive.

Not that he watches it, as he told the audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

“When I’m doing my job, if I even for a moment think about what I say or how I behave or how I’m perceived by a TV audience, then I can’t do that job,” said the Team Principal of the Haas Formula One team.

Those inhibitions, he explained, “could be the difference between me making the right decision or not” during a race.

Not that Komatsu is unaware of the influence he has as a leader. Google his name and the images that spring up tend to depict him holding a microphone at a press conference or media engagement. In that sense, Komatsu’s onstage appearance in London – just days after November’s Brazilian Grand Prix and a 12-hour flight – is no different.

“When you’re doing a media session that is an opportunity for us to tell our story, who we are,” he added.

Who they are is Formula One’s smallest team, both in terms of staff size, budget and infrastructure, but with a hard-earned reputation for punching above their weight under Komatsu’s stewardship.

In the year prior to his elevation, Haas finished tenth out of ten, which was in keeping with their size but below the expectations of team owner Gene Haas.

Komatsu, who previously served as Haas’ Chief Race Engineer, took the reins from Gunther Steiner ahead of the 2024 World Championship and led the team to seventh in the Constructors’ Standings; in 2025, they finished eighth.

He puts it down to an organisational structure that “promotes and forces communication and helps people to get to know each other”. “If we cannot work together, we’re not supporting each other, if we’re not aligned, we’ve got zero chance against organisations that are a minimum three times, sometimes four times larger”.

Ayao Komatsu onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval in London.

Over the course of 35 minutes, Komatsu set out what it takes to manage the pressure and expectations of building on Haas’ successes while keeping in touch with Formula One’s leading lights.

Komatsu understands that you can’t chase results under pressure

Chronic pressure eventually leads to diminished performance. Komatsu found this out to his cost at the 2025 British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

“My mindset approaching the race was completely wrong,” he said. “I was really trying to force the result because I knew we should be scoring lots of points.”

Haas had spent considerable time and resource developing their car prior to Silverstone and knew that their drivers, Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon, could claim high finishes. Instead, the duo collided on the 43^rd lap and finished pointless.

“What happened was really instead of letting the race come to you, doing your best, focusing on yourself, you are just focused on the result.”

It was a rare misstep for a leader who tries to give his staff “breathing space” and “a chance to think more about what they do rather than chasing it, because that’s not sustainable”.

Nevertheless, he pushes people out of their comfort zone each day

Komatsu said: “Our people are not afraid of failure. If you’re afraid of failure, nobody’s going to move.”

The right balance of challenge and support can enhance both focus and motivation.

“You’ve got to give people a clear message that, ‘come on, you’ve got to take yourself out of your comfort zone every day’,” he added. This is Komatsu’s non-negotiable. “If you haven’t taken yourself out of your comfort zone once a day, actually, I don’t think you’ve done your job.”

Komatsu encourages calculated risks that build confidence

Whenever crisis strikes, Komatsu has a well-planned contingency to relieve collective stress.

One such occasion was at the first race of the 2025 season, in Melbourne, where the Haas cars just “did not function”. Ocon qualified in last position, while Bearman could not even set a qualifying time and was required to start the race from the pit lane.

“That was a really testing time,” said Komatsu. But the team had discussed this very possibility for the past four months. They knew the car would either fly, flop or achieve something in between. In the event, the car flopped.

Their response to that race weekend was governed by the new car regulations coming in for the 2026 season. Most teams began to focus on their 2026 cars not long after Melbourne. Haas, with their comparatively modest resources, had no choice but to develop their 2025 car further because, as Komatsu said, “one place in the Constructors’ Championship is worth millions”. “So to make next year’s budget work, with brand new regulations, you’ve got to keep spending money to develop the car.”

He is proud of what happened next. “We just got on with it,” he continued. “I gave the team a clear objective; what is not acceptable, what we need to achieve. I didn’t tell them how. I listened to them and they came up with the solution and took the risk.”

While the true outcome “will only be known in January or February”, the 2025 car did improve and so did the team’s standing.

“For me, more than that sporting result, more than the lap time we gained, the important thing is the confidence this gives the people of the organisation; it’s priceless.”

Ayao Komatsu and Esteban Ocon talk on the grid prior to the F1 Grand Prix of Abu Dhabi at Yas Marina Circuit in December 2025.

He has also cultivated a ‘no blame’ culture

In removing the fear, providing breathing space, and giving people latitude to solve their own problems, Komatsu has cultivated a ‘no blame’ culture.

He took public responsibility for the collision at Silverstone but later spoke to Bearman and Econ about what went wrong. He let them air their grievances and decide the future rules of engagement when their cars are in close proximity mid-race.

“I said, ‘look, until the next race, we’ve got two weeks. Take your time, you put everything on the table and, by next week, can you come to an agreement? If you don’t come to an agreement, I’ll tell you what we need to do’,” said Komatsu while fully aware that neither driver wants to be told what to do by anyone else.

“The important thing here is that full transparency,” he added. “I don’t have any other agenda than wanting both of you to perform; the team to perform. I’m not biased towards one driver or the other, but then again, sometimes I have to make a decision that will disadvantage one of the drivers, but as long as this guy knows that I was making that decision purely based on the interest of the team, as long as you’ve got that respect and transparency, it’s fine.”

When Ocon signed with Haas ahead of the 2025 season, some external observers harboured reservations due to his supposedly difficult character. Komatsu, having worked with Ocon for more than a year, is having none of that.

“I knew that it’s got a lot to do with the respect between the team and the driver, transparency, and then providing that safe space. I was very confident that we could provide that environment.”

What to read next

Even the Best Tennis Players in the World Are Worse When the Stakes Rise – and it’s Not Just Down to Random Variance or Bad Luck

By Sarah Evans, Rachel Woodland & Lottie Wright

You might have thought that the UK Sports Institute, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Australian Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand were the fiercest of rivals and would be unlikely allies in sharing high performance practice and intelligence.

However, the quartet have formed an unlikely partnership for the good of female athletes across the globe and with the aim of pushing forwards advancements in female health research and practice.

The result is the Global Alliance and, on our most recent Women’s High Performance Sport Community call, we were joined by Dr Helen Fulcher from HPSNZ, Dr Amber Donaldson from USOPC, Dr Rachel Harris from the AIS, and Dr Richard Burden from UKSI, to discuss how it works.

All four institutes have made their own way in providing additional focus and resource for female athlete health, starting at different points in time across the last ten years.

All four have focused on education. The AIS, UKSI and USOPC have had further branches into research; HPSNZ have looked at processes and systems linked to technology; and the USOPC have had to consider partnerships that help navigate a geographically large country and complex health system.

However, all four acknowledge that despite their positions of privilege there are limits to time and resource in this area, and all four are aware of what improving health for females, who typically suffer more injuries and illnesses than males, could do for raising levels of competition. The opportunity the group of four are close to bringing to reality is for an alliance to support globally with raising minimum levels of understanding when it come to female athlete health.

The formation of the Global Alliance

The world of elite sport is quite small, so when travelling to conferences and talks on these spaces, the group realised that they are all doing the same things, with limited resources and time. So the premise of the Alliance is to combine resources and save time across the group. After all, as Burden asked, “what’s the point in spending lots of money people don’t have on education resources when it already exists publicly?” Whilst bumping into one another, the group organically had conversations on how they can work together to increase efficiencies without crossing boundaries of competition. “We are all under-resourced, we’re overstretched in terms of the time that we’re wanting to spend in this space,” said Harris. “We really wanted to try and allow the people that are working in our sporting organisations to be more proactive.”

Traditionally seen as rivals, these organisations are now collaborating for the benefit of female athletes across the globe. The primary goal is to collaborate on female health initiatives, leveraging each organisation’s expertise and resources. This collaboration aims to enhance the health and performance of female athletes by sharing knowledge and best practices across regions.

The Alliance’s main objectives include…

• Sharing best practices and resources: “You can’t do everything on your own,” said Burden, “or your organisation can’t be everything to everybody.” By pooling their collective knowledge, Alliance members can develop and implement the most effective health initiatives and signpost others towards the best practice or research already implemented by their colleagues in different regions. The dream is to be able to give people one place to come to, and then to be directed to other places. Ultimately, no individual person can be an expert in everything, and we should always remain open to the idea that someone might know more than we do.
• Benchmarking and baselining efforts: The goal, as Fulcher explained, is to “create a baseline that is higher”. Members of the Alliance will regularly assess and combine their efforts to ensure continuous improvement which, in theory, should result in healthier female athletes and higher levels of competition.
• Addressing misinformation: Simultaneously, the Alliance would ensure that accurate and reliable information about female health has the potential to reach all athletes, especially those in regions with limited access to such information. The group are passionate on making sure that the information available would be representative of the global athlete population, and therefore diverse, whilst being evidence-based. You want to be able to say “‘as of now, this is the best way to treat X’,” said Donaldson. Athletes from different nations will also help spread accurate information about health topics, such as menstrual cycles and nutrition, through their platforms. The Alliance recognises the influence of social media and aims to create content that can be shared widely to reach a broader audience.
• Speeding up progress: As a collective the alliance can move practices along more quickly, be that through raising baseline levels faster, or by being able to increase sample sizes.  The group have an inherent belief that the collective is greater than the individual. They also want to make sure that as relatively well-resourced nations with greater access, they welcome in their colleagues in countries where access and resources may be more limited.
• Conducting collaborative research: One approach to speeding up progress would be to continue the research work that is currently happening in silos. There is potential in multicenter research projects, as Burden explained. He said: “If you can combine multicenter research, with those multicenters being in different countries around the globe, then you are naturally going to get a more diverse, rich database and, therefore, the insights that we’re going to be able to get from that are going to be just way more valuable for everybody”. It’s still a competitive environment. “We still absolutely want to beat all of the other people in the Alliance that we’re forming here on the medal table,” said Harris, “but we certainly see that the things that we’re doing in this space are not about state secrets.”
• Providing a blueprint: The aim is to develop a central repository of trustworthy information to which athletes, stakeholders, and organisations can refer. It’s not often that cross-country collaboration happens but, by bringing this Alliance together, a blueprint for collaboration, and how to ‘do’ it, can be created; from ideation to doing; sharing learnings as they emerge, especially when they are collaborating on an important topic area. They want to show how a collaboration can start and, ultimately, how to ensure longevity beyond the four current members.

The Alliance faces several challenges, including:

• Getting things through layers of bureaucracy. The solution is commitment to sticking with it, but then being inventive with methods of information dissemination.
• Ensuring that the resources and information generated are visible and accessible to athletes and other stakeholders globally. This involves understanding and appealing to the way in which athletes take on and digest information. It will also require strategic communication and collaboration with local leaders and organisations.
• The need to combat misinformation. The alliance will provide rigorous, trustworthy information that cuts through the noise of inaccurate or misleading content. It will be able to share aligned messaging globally.
• Resources are not limitless. Hence the need to come together to collaborate and combine resources for a scale of economies effect.

• Time is precious. In addition, the numbers of athletes going through some of the specific female health experiences can be quite small, so to learn and provide advancements could take much more time if each institute tried to do so on their own. The multicenter research projects should counter this.

• To be truly representative globally, the Alliance will have to grow to be culturally diverse and account for different languages and time zones. The group recognise that this will be a challenge and it might take grit and determination to make it happen.

The alliance is committed to overcoming all of these challenges by building robust, reliable resources and ensuring they are effectively communicated and accessible to all athletes.

A proactive and inclusive strategy

The Global Alliance is a comprehensive approach to enhancing female athlete health that prioritises:

• Collaboration: The Alliance is built on shared values, humility, and a commitment to improving female athlete health through collective effort. “We’re all in exactly the same position and we’re all really wanting to do the same thing,” said Harris.
• Education and resources: A key focus is on creating and sharing educational materials that are accessible and evidence-based. As Harris said: “We felt that by ensuring we could create some of these resources, they could put more of that time into looking after their athletes.”
• Future vision: The Alliance is aiming for a sustainable, impactful approach that can adapt and grow to meet the needs of female athletes globally and improve female health for athletes. It wants to raise the standards of competition along the way and, through its multicenter research, increase the number and diversity of research participants and insights. The Alliance may not be everyone’s answer, but could be a connector, with a central platform for sharing information gathered across the board.

Top tips

Just start! If you’re working in a small organisation where you can’t produce education modules or you can’t fund research, there’s no harm in just starting a conversation. Build your own networks, forge connections, and don’t be isolated.

Find people with the same values and intent. “And that’s not to say that there is no kind of diverse thinking within our group,” said Burden. “But the underpinning values within the Global Alliance and the work that we’re trying to do are all shared.”

It’s not about ‘us’ but a bigger purpose. Fulcher spoke of building communities within your area of expertise or within your own nation, but then taking that further. “That’s within your specialty, within your area or your nation,” she said. “I think it’s a natural step to build an international community; and we do have them, but they’ve been a bit ad hoc.” The Global Alliance is, as she added, an opportunity to raise standards across female sport. “The focus is not just on individuals having great connections but what can we collectively do better for this group of athletes that we all care about.”

Stay curious and be friendly. “One of the biggest things is to be humble,” said Donaldson. “Really coming to this platform being  humble and wanting to learn, wanting to contribute is key.”

Find out what works for you. You can learn from others but try to ascertain what works for you in your context too. Donaldson said: “I can tell you exactly what we do, but you’re not going to be able to replicate it like for like.”

Those in-person moments can be critical. “Those in-person conversations can help build relationships,” said Donaldson, who explained that the Alliance meets periodically. “You can also get more done when you have those conversations.”

Involve coaches in the education piece. Fulcher said: “Make sure coaches feel comfortable enough so that if a certain issue is brought up, they know where to direct traffic and tell people where to go for help.”

By Aaron Walsh

What do we believe to be the most effective way to develop our people?

Do we focus on increasing capability or reducing interference as a primary strategy?

In theory, most would agree with increasing capability but, in practice, our coaching models are often dominated by reducing interference.

There’s a time and a place for work-ons but, from a mental perspective, when we overfocus on weaknesses, players can become oversensitive to threats that could impact performance. Their thoughts drift towards what could go wrong and how those weaknesses could be exposed.

When we focus on their strengths, they are more likely to look for opportunities to express those positive points of difference. Rather than being anxious about performing, they are excited.

Your mental performance work should align with your overall performance philosophy and beliefs about how we get the most out of the people we leads, but once a team has decided on an approach to increasing its mental performance, there needs to be some strategy around the work. To do this, there are three questions to guide us:

1. What is the vision for the work?
2. What philosophy will drive the work?
3. What framework will we build the work upon?

Creating a vision for the work

Let’s start with the end in mind. What would success look like if we nail this work?

This question lets us capture something tangible and provides strategic direction with clear outcomes. It anchors us in reality while buffering us from the temptation to be reactive when various challenges arise.

Here is an example of a vision statement we can use:

‘We want to produce self-sufficient athletes who can embrace the demands of being a professional athlete while delivering their best when it matters the most.’

Success is clear. There is no ambiguity, and everyone involved in the program can align around this vision.

Capturing your philosophy

Secondly, having a philosophy about how we will achieve the vision is vital. This is more about ‘how’ we will approach the work and what will guide the delivery of the program. This should capture and reflect our broader high-performance beliefs around growth and development.

There is an equation we can use to help us define this.

High Performance = Capability – Interference

This definition poses a critical question for everyone in the performance space.

As asked above, when finding the most effective way to develop our people, do we focus on increasing capability or reducing interference as a primary strategy?

We can all think of coaches who start a review with clips about poor aspects of the team’s performance and it is normal for players to have those aforementioned work-ons at the beginning of each week.

This is not to say that there is no place for this, but we select players because of what they can do. It’s their strengths and their ability to impact the game that make them valuable members of a team. Furthermore, if all we give them are areas of their game to work on and if they change week by week depending on their game, then we endanger development through inconsistency.

Whatever your agreed approach to mental performance, it should align with our overall performance philosophy and beliefs about how to get the most out of the people we lead.

The right framework

With the vast nature of subjects and focus areas within sports psychology, it is often daunting for providers and teams to know where to start. However, a simple framework can create a strategic approach that brings clarity and direction to the work. This prevents the provider from bouncing around different subjects weekly and not building anything of substance.

The framework above is anchored in the philosophy introduced previously, which states mental skills exist to help people grow and maximise their capability. It intentionally starts with foundational subjects that build upon each other. The reason for this is linked to the growing prominence of the mental side of performance. With more discussions occurring, more articles being written, and the emergence of social media, there is a danger of replacing foundations with tools.

Here’s what I mean: subjects like mindfulness, breathing, and visualisation are helpful and, in some cases, necessary. However, they are just tools that can help under pressure. Dealing with pressure will be much more effective if these tools are married to other critical mental skills. This framework aims to introduce these skills systematically and purposely so the athlete is well equipped for the various challenges they will face. From experience, athletes who know how to grow themselves and their mindset find pressure, something they can face and overcome. Giving a few tools won’t accomplish that.

Grow yourself

The first aspect of the framework lays the foundation for mental performance. When discussing this with an athlete, we can introduce and define it by asking five questions.

1. Why do you play the sport? (Purpose)
2. What are you trying to accomplish? (Goals and aspirations)
3. How will you get there? (Creating a performance plan)
4. When will you do the work? (Self-management and Ownership)
5. Who is in your circle? (Support)

Purpose: We want athletes connected to a purpose that fuels their performance. Every athlete will face challenging periods throughout their career, whether it’s injury, non-selection, or a loss of form; there are moments where doubt emerges that can potentially derail their journey. Being connected to why they play the sport and accessing that passion provides perseverance and focus during these difficult times.

Goals: Knowing what you are trying to accomplish is vital for any athlete. To understand this, here is a simple analogy. When we want to get somewhere in our vehicles, we set the destination in our GPS. We do this so we don’t get lost and waste time getting to where we want to. This is the same for an athlete; without clear goals, they can spend much time going in different directions and not get closer to their desired destination.

Planning: Once we know where we are going, we must understand how we will get there. This is where a good plan is invaluable. To continue the analogy above, a GPS provides clear steps so we arrive at the right place at the right time. Many athletes set goals and fail to determine what they must do to get there. A performance roadmap creates a focus on the right areas of development that will be critical to achieving what the athlete has set out to do

Ownership: I was recently asked what characteristics are shared among the best athletes I have worked with. Though there are many that they share, one sticks out. They take ownership of their careers. They drive the different aspects of performance and see those around them as key supporters. They don’t make excuses or play “victim” if things don’t go their way. One key aspect of this is how they use their time; they have a weekly schedule that is linked to the goals they have and the plans they have in place. They are purposeful and hold themselves accountable.

Support: The final aspect of growing yourself is about support. Throughout their career, athletes will have numerous and different perspectives offered by coaches, support staff, and agents. They need to be clear about what voices are essential. Having a clear support circle is critical so they stay on track and have the encouragement to get where they want to be.

Grow your mindset

The second aspect of the framework is grow your mindset. American psychologist Michael Gervais defines mindset as “how we see ourselves and the world we live in.” This is critical for athletes. Here are a few examples of the power of the mindset

Constant Improvement: Are athletes focused on getting better every day? Do they have a process in place to achieve this? Can they be consistent regardless of what happened the day or week before? Can they manoeuvre through the highs and lows of the game and remain anchored to their pursuit of being their best? They can reduce all the noise of competing by returning to a simple question: “How do I get better today?”

Opportunity-focused: Do they view themselves as competent, and is it an opportunity to express themselves? Or do they see themselves as imposters, and is the game a place where they get exposed? One mindset produces trust and excitement, while the other produces doubt and anxiety, both significantly impacting performance.

Antifragile: Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines antifragility ‘as something beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.’ This is particularly relevant for athletes, as adversity, disappointment, and failure are common obstacles they will face. Do they see this as something that destroys them or something they can learn from and be better than ever? Their mindset towards challenges is a significant indicator of future decline or growth.

Growing under pressure

The final aspect of the framework is how we deal with pressure. Most people see pressure as something to be avoided at all costs. Certain situations cause deeply uncomfortable feelings. Without the right strategy, pressure can feel unmanageable and, at times, paralysing. For athletes, there is no option to avoid pressure if they want to be successful. Therefore, they must have the tools to approach it confidently and believe it is a place where they can succeed.

As mentioned above, there are many practices and tools related to pressure. Once we have the foundations in place, they are valuable. For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into all the tools, but there is a clear outcome no matter what we use.

We want to be able to deliver our best when it matters the most.

Below are three things we can focus on to help our athletes be at their best in the big moments

1. Get calm: Under pressure, the nervous system can cause chaos. Our minds begin to race, and our bodies react. Our first port of call is getting calm so we can deal with the moment in front of us.

2. Get clear: Once we are calm, we need to manage our focus. Often, under pressure, there is a temptation to go to the outcome of a game or the consequence of getting things wrong. We want to eliminate that distraction and focus on the task at hand.

3. Let go: The final reality that can help us when pressure is present is letting go. This requires us to trust what we have at that moment and surrender. The more we try to control, the less instinctive we will become. Athletes are at their best when they are free, trust their skillset, and play what’s in front of them.

In conclusion, a mental performance program will only be effective if there is a clear strategy behind it. Here are a few questions to help stimulate this:

1. Do you have a clear vision for the program?
2. What philosophies will undergird and guide the work?
3. What framework is best for your team?

Further reading from Aaron Walsh:

Why the Upswell in Demand for Mental Skills Is Not Being Translated into Effective Work

By Rachel Woodland, Lottie Wright & Sarah Evans

The research gap – or gender gap in research – is one of the most enduring challenges in women’s sport.

Not only is there less research on female athletes, often that which does exist is of poor quality and is limited in its application to athletes.

To compound matters, much of the tech available does not have female athletes in mind, which calls for greater levels of safeguarding for those athletes.

The Centre of Excellence for Women in Sport is a space in which to address all of those challenges. It addresses the unique needs of female athletes, focusing on health and performance support for Olympic and Paralympic sports, as well as professional sport. The Centre also aims to bridge the gap between academic research and practical application in elite sports, ensuring that female athletes receive tailored support based on rigorous scientific research.

Opened in March 2024, the Centre is a collaboration between the UK Sports Institute [UKSI] and Manchester Metropolitan University.

In several key ways it is an ideal marriage. On one hand, the UKSI brings its sports knowledge and knowhow, and understanding of the complex environment of elite athletes and sports. On the other, Manchester Met brings their research expertise and both quality assurance and scientific rigour.

Leading the project are Dr Richard Burden, the UKSI’s Female Health & Performance Lead, and Kirsty Elliott-Sale, Professor of Endocrinology & Exercise Physiology at the Institute of Sport at Manchester Met.

Their hope is to generate richer information that is more valuable and applicable to the athlete, coach and the sport – all of which should lead to greater engagement from everyone.

Both joined the Women in High Performance Sport community call that took place in early October. It was the first of two in partnership between the UKSI and the Leaders Performance Institute. Joining the duo was rower Heidi Long, who won bronze in the women’s eights at the Paris Olympics this summer.

The Centre of Excellence for Women in Sport has three key purposes:

1. Thought leadership and collaboration

The Centre aims to be a hub for thought leadership in women’s sport, setting the agenda for elite female athletes in the UK. Experts from various fields are involved, ensuring that research is co-designed with athletes and coaches. It is then the duty of the Centre to ensure that its findings are relevant and applicable.

Part of this is building a network within elite sport so that the data can be picked up and used again. Then planning the research so that there can be intentional overlaps between sports and a pipeline of future users.

2. Standards and quality assurance

High-quality research is a must. The Centre is committed to producing credible and impactful data that can be translated into practical applications. This involves rigorous methodological standards and continuous feedback loops with athletes and coaches.

Knowing the sport specifics to focus on that help uncover necessary insights, but with the right overlaps to other projects so that the science and sample sizes increase to build the science.

3. Adapting research at the pace of high performance

With research traditionally taking time, the Centre is a live example of research adapting to the needs and wants and context of the sport without losing the scientific robustness that we so need and that’s constantly evolving. For example, exploring less invasive ways of measuring ovarian hormone profiles using saliva and urine based methods.. Whilst taking any measurements can feel time consuming for the athletes, it’s a balancing act of beneficial learning versus over imposing on the athletes..

Realtime feedback has been a key advancement of engaging the sports with the research, and to be able to make changes based on findings before the full project is completed in the run up to an Olympic or Paralympic Games.

All of which raises standards as the data collected is credible, with the potential to be translatable, which in turn increases its utility and potential impact.

Project Minerva is a prime example of this process in practice.

Introducing Project Minerva

Project Minerva – named after the Roman goddess of wisdom, justice and strategic war – is an ongoing research project started by the GB Rowing team in collaboration with the UKSI, Manchester Met and several external stakeholders.

It has set out to investigate the relationship between the women’s squad training programme characteristics (e.g. training volume, intensity distribution and frequency), internal training load (heart rate, RPE, and blood lactate monitoring) and hormone function, on the menstrual cycle and overall health.

For GB Rowing, project  Minerva has been an iterative process, and ,  working with the UKSI Female Athlete Programme, Man Met, and in collaboration with the athletes, has increased the research capability and scientific rigour, so it now provides a valuable resource within the UK sports system, as Dr Burden and Prof. Elliott-Sale explained alongside Long, who shared her experience of Minerva as an athlete during the Paris Olympic cycle.

Project Minerva has led to…

… increased athlete and coach engagement through education and a focus on purpose / the why. The more performance-based something is, the more likely an athlete will be to engage. Heidi Long and her teammates were keen to know what they could glean from the research.

… better communication and understanding between athletes and coaches. This allows for more personalised training and performance strategies (that can be tweaked due to embedded real-time research and data). They could see the results of applied research – and the data that was personalised for each athlete – which was further motivation for a cohort of goal and results-driven athletes.

… the debunking of common myths, particularly those around the menstrual cycle. There is no supporting evidence to suggest that an athlete’s phases impact her ability to train. Minerva – in an unplanned moment of feedback – demonstrated to athletes they could perform – and win – in different phases of their cycle.

… increased use of useful tech. Minerva can call upon technology developed by the UKSI and its partners, such as Intel. Data collection is less arduous and much more accessible as a consequence.

Three questions to ask yourselves when embarking on such projects:

1. Your female-specific research: is it being conducted from a health perspective, a performance perspective, or both?
2. Do your performance team have the bandwidth, the funding, the right people with the knowledge and experience, and capacity develop and deliver to make changes based on the results?
3. Is it useful or merely interesting? Understand the question you want to ask; where it’s come from and why it needs answering.

The Centre of Excellence for Women in Sport’s ultimate vision is to pioneer innovative and impactful research that accelerates the development of women’s sport. This includes:

• Ensuring that research findings are directly applicable to athletes’ training and competition.
• Leaving a lasting legacy through credible data sets, resources, and educational initiatives that benefit future generations of female athletes.
• To allow every female athlete to train and compete to her potential.
• By generating and showing cases resources that can be used, raising awareness that starts now and continues through all future generations.
• Providing trustworthy, reliable, rigorous education tools. Filling the void around female athlete health that is too often filled with nonsense.
• Continue to be a place for athletes, coaches, and all staff to have deeper conversations, as understanding is deepened and academic application expanded.
• Be a hub for colleagues and allies across the world, not just a UK-based centre, but something that becomes truly global. There’s a lot to be learned from one another.

Final question: is any research better than no research?

Not all research is good research. Research can bring beneficial interest in an area, but poor-quality research can lead to misinformation (particularly on social media) as well as misdirected efforts and resources, which is a significant concern in the context of limited budgets and time.

Research has to meet standards in terms of methods, equipment and protocols (all of which can be expensive or time-consuming). Moderate research may have its uses but it’s nuances must be clearly signposted.

Prof. Elliott-Sale explained that research can never be one-size-fits-all. It is important to work with individual athletes, establish their response (if there is one) to stimulus and whether or not theirs is a consistent response. Either way, you can leverage a positive response and mitigate an adverse response.

By John Portch

When Great Britain’s wheelchair rugby team came off the court in Paris, their disappointment was mixed with immense pride.

The team narrowly lost their bronze medal match at the Paris Paralympics 50-48 against Australia, but captain Gavin Walker was positive.

“If you’d have asked me two years ago, I’d have probably snatched your hand off for the experience of playing for a bronze medal,” he said, mindful of the transition the team has been in since winning gold in Tokyo.

“We go into another rebuilding process, another four years ahead of us and looking towards LA now,” he continued. “[We will be] growing the sport, putting time into grassroots and developing the team going forward.”

Not that any stone was left unturned in the build-up. “Our performance in Paris highlighted the progress we are making and confirmed that we remain at the forefront of wheelchair rugby,” says Lee Stutely, Great Britain’s Team Manager.

She is speaking to the Leaders Performance Institute about Great Britain’s two team camps that took place at St George’s Park in Staffordshire before the Games. The first, a seven-day visit in January, focused on their continuing preparations; the second, a four-day camp in August, represented the final taper towards Paris.

Both were a result of smart planning, with Stutely taking a lead on the logistics of the camps. “We came and rec’ed, just me and our Head of Performance Support & Science Barry Mason,” adds Stutely. “Then the coaches came with some athletes to check the playing surfaces.” From there, the coaches and performance team came together with Walker and vice-captain Stu Robinson to map out the sessions and structure.

All reflect with satisfaction on the work that was done in the last cycle. “The team’s trajectory is clearly on the right path toward further medal success,” says Stutely, “and we are driven by our commitment to high standards and continuous improvement.”

The team will conduct a post-Paris debrief to identify its strengths and weaknesses. “We will be hoping to learn if the systems and processes in place were effective,” adds Stutely, who emphasises how important it is to retain and refine successful strategies. “We will also examine what can be improved and what we should stop doing. As Paris showed, there is little between the top teams. We need to identify where can we get our marginal gains and what can increase our competitive edge in the next cycle.”

Chris Bond of team Australia is on the ground after a clash with Aaron Phipps of Team Great Britain during the Wheelchair Rugby Group B game Australia vs Great Britain. (Photo: Marco Mantovani/Getty Images)

The home of England

Great Britain qualified for Paris by finishing runners-up at the 2023 European Championships.

With their passage secured, the team could step up their preparations. While happy with their usual training facility at the Lilleshall National Sports Centre in Shropshire, Stutely and her colleagues felt that a change of scenery could reset minds and take players out of their comfort zones.

The 330-acre facility at SGP fitted the bill. Stutely says: “It made them more aware that they were moving onto a competition and preparing for something special rather than just being their home from home training environment.”

SGP is also the home of 24 England football teams. “We have quite a few football fans within our team so they were excited,” adds Stutely. “It’s historic and other senior teams have trained here, such as the England women’s rugby team. The venue is awesome for us because it’s accessible; and everything – training facilities and accommodation – is in one location.”

In addition to an onsite Hilton Hotel, the complex boasts 14 state-of-the-art football pitches, which can be configured for a variety of sports, as well as a range of indoor facilities including a full 3G pitch, a multifunctional sports hall, gym, hydrotherapy pools and a cryotherapy chamber.

The SGP team were on hand to allay any concerns. “Kevin Sanders was very good to us,” says Stutely of SGP’s Elite Sport & Partnerships Manager. The team could count on court time, gym time, meeting rooms and private dining rooms. “The Hilton were also very good at making sure we had as many accessible rooms as possible and that everything was suitable for our athletes’ needs.”

SGP is the home of England’s Para football teams and has long been committed to ensuring that the nation’s disability and impaired teams have equal access to the complex’s high performance facilities. It’s a point of pride for SGP, even if this process remains a work in progress, as Becky Bullock, the SGP Customer Account Lead at the Football Association, tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“We acknowledge there is always more we can do,” she says. “We are continually learning, listening and striving to improve, and we remain dedicated to incorporating best practice into the future design and development of our facilities to be accessible for all.”

Aaron Phipps of Team Great Britain competes during Bronze medal match between Australia and Great Britain. (Photo: Aitor Alcade/Getty Images for IPC)

The future

The Great Britain team is aware of its legacy beyond the court, with Walker taking the opportunity after the bronze medal match to address the audience watching at home in the UK.

“For fans out there and people who are watching this, we’re all playing this sport after starting life with a disability or going through some sort of traumatic injury,” he said. “The fact that any athlete in the Paralympics is competing shows they’ve overcome adversity and everyone should be proud of any performance. I guess that’s the main message for anyone out there that is struggling – this is something that can get you out of those dark times.”

Wheelchair rugby, as Walker alluded to, is an egalitarian sport. It is built on ensuring that players with different care needs can compete together. Players are assigned a points-based value based on their functional ability ranging from 0.5 (those with the highest support needs) to 3.5 points (those with the fewest). The total point value of a four-player team cannot exceed 8.0 points unless it includes a female player, which affords a team an extra 0.5 points, taking the maximum total to 8.5 points.

“Some team bonding happens because of accessibility issues, the whole ‘no-one is left behind’ thing,” says Stutely. “They always look after each other.”

The British Paralympic Association works with Games authorities to ensure that athlete accommodation at all Paralympics is suitable for their teams’ needs. Stutely, who took part in her fifth Games in Paris, believes that environments have generally improved since the London 2012 Games raised the bar.

“As staff and athletes, we spend a lot of time being adaptable to the environment we enter,” she says. “Overcoming any challenges and learning how to control people’s mindsets when things are not going the right way is so important.”

Looking further ahead, Stutely is excited for Great Britain’s prospects. “We also have a promising depth of young and talented athletes. This blend of experience and emerging talent positions us well to continue competing at the highest level and achieve even greater accomplishments on the world stage.”

Further reading:

Pre-Season Preparations: Why a Home from Home Can Make All the Difference