By Aaron Walsh

What mental performance work needs to be delivered, and how do we go about that?

To successfully integrate the work, teams need to understand what a mental performance coach can do to elevate performance and how to deliver that work most effectively. Traditionally, the delivery model has involved one person attempting to meet the needs of everyone in the environment. This often leads to frustration for both the team and the provider. The team feels like the demands are only sometimes met, while the provider feels more time is needed.

A more effective model is viewing the provider as a facilitator, where they engage the key leaders in the environment and help drive the work. Yes, contexts will be provided for the provider to deliver critical messages and practices directly. Still, as we know, the mental side of performance happens every day and all the time.

To clarify this, I will examine four specific areas related to team performance where the mental skills coach can support key individuals and deliver crucial work.

Coach support

The coaching group, particularly the head coach, will have the most significant influence on any team environment. Their messages shape the players’ mindsets, and if they have the tools, they can be effective real-time psychologists for the playing group.

They must also navigate the pressure of working in a results-based business as a group. Recent research has revealed that the coach’s well-being is a genuine concern. The hours they work, the consistently tough decisions they make, and the lack of ongoing job security create a recipe that challenges and, at times, compromises their mental health.

What this looks like day to day

• Help in shaping the key messages that will impact the environment
• Provide basic mental skills training that enables the coaching staff to shape mindset and empower athletes to navigate through pressure
• Work with the coaching staff on their well-being and energy levels to ensure they can navigate the pressure they face.

Player leadership group

An additional key group that drives the work is the senior playing group. We know that high-performing teams require high-performing leaders. These individuals wield significant influence and are often the “gatekeepers” who determine the rest of the team’s engagement. Their role is pivotal, and their impact is substantial. Without their “buy-in,” the work will fail to embed as it will depend on one individual driving everything.

What this looks like day to day

• Help core leaders learn more about leadership and enable them to become more comfortable with themselves as leaders.
• Meet regularly as a group to discuss the environment and what leadership demands they are collectively facing.
• One-on-one work with core leaders, supporting their growth as a leader and ensuring they are growing in their performance
• Provide the tools to help them regulate the group during pressure moments by using language and practices that are common to everyone.

Creating and maintaining an environment that empowers performance

Anyone involved in a team recognises the connection between environment and performance. Group dynamics and how people feel within a team have the most significant effect on mindset. We are hardwired to seek belonging and need to be connected to the team’s purpose, the people we work with, and what our role is that helps performance.

When these realities are met, people can pour their energy and focus into the team’s shared mission. They can lock into their role and the tasks they are asked to deliver. They can be themselves, feel respected and know that they matter. By feeling included, they become better teammates and performers.

We can provide all the tools, such as breathing, meditation, and visualisation, but we won’t get the most out of our people if we neglect these core needs.

What this looks like day to day

• Design and embed a cultural framework that captures the unique identity of the team and the standards and behaviours that ensure authenticity.
• Work with leaders to create numerous connections to the identity and expectations of the team.
• Monitor the environment and connect with individuals to ensure a sense of belonging, connection and alignment is happening.

Mental performance training

The final aspect to examine is mental skills training. I have written extensively about this in previous articles. However, we have a simple goal with this work: We want our athletes to be able to deliver their best when it matters most. Typically, this work has been viewed through the lens of one-on-one work. These are important, but there is also value in delivering group sessions.

I prefer to periodise these sessions, similar to preparing the body for a season. We can use The pre-season aims to build foundational mental principles and skills. Subjects like understanding pressure, where it comes from, and how it affects us are good starting points. The goal is to have everyone aligned and create clarity around what messages will be Important during the season. I like to keep these sessions to 10-15 minutes and create some. level of introspection and interaction. During the season, we can refer back to this foundation and make it relevant to what happens in any given week. This prevents us from flooding the players with new and unnecessary information.

I use the mental skills framework discussed in the second article for the one-on-one work. I go through this with each player each preseason and ask them to identify some areas they believe will be critical to their performance that year. This keeps the one-on-one focused and purposeful, avoiding another meaningless “catch-up” during the season’s business. We can adjust as needs arise, but the work is mainly strategic and avoids bouncing around subjects as a reaction to any given week.

What this looks like day to day

• Create a personal framework for each player that allows a strategic approach to their mental development throughout the year.
• Player group education sessions focus on specific elements of mental performance, addressing the team’s current needs based on a foundation built in pre-season.
• One-on-one sessions -Personal coaching sessions relevant to the athlete’s needs.

Reflection questions

1. Do you have clarity around the role of a mental performance coach and what is expected of them?
2. What are the key areas where you see a mental performance coach having an impact?
3. Are you providing enough time and space for this to occur?

Further reading:

Your Mental Skills Work Must Be Simple, Relevant and Applicable

A podcast brought to you by our Partners

You may have a great performance structure for your men’s team, but simply cutting and pasting that to your women’s team does them a disservice.

That is the view of Arianna Criscione, the Head of Football Operations at Mercury/13 and Como Women. “It’s not enough,” she tells this Kitman Labs podcast. She explains that there are a range of services, from nutrition to psychology, that need to be tailored to women players.

Criscione continues: “You also have to have access to medical [support], but a lot of clubs don’t have access to a gynaecologist, which is a major part of the female body and really needs to be addressed a lot more.”

Dentistry is another area of oft-neglected consideration. “If you have an off-bite, that can actually affect your structure and how you’re running, which could cause injury.”

It is, as Sarah Smith says, about “making sure that we have a good foundation of support around our athletes.” Smith, who is the Director of Medical and Performance at Angel City FC in the NWSL, joins the conversation alongside Stephen Smith, the Founder of Kitman Labs.

In addition to discussing holistic female player development [10:45], the trio delve into bridging the gap in data and understanding in women’s football [15:45]; how talent identification is evolving [20:15]; as well as the existing disparities in data collection [28:10] from club to club and league to league.

This is episode two of a three-part series. Please go back and check out episode one, where the Leaders Performance Institute and Stephen Smith spoke to Paul Prescott of the International Football Group and Morten Larsen of Danish Superliga side Aarhus discussing talent pathways in the Premier League and beyond.

Further listening:

Kitman Labs Podcast: What Factors Drive Talent Development in the Premier League and Beyond?

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

By Aaron Walsh

While no-one doubts that mental skills are important, conversations with colleagues led me to believe that mental skills programs were rarely integrated successfully.

I wanted to understand the perceived gap between value and impact and embarked on a research project whereby I contacted 35 head coaches and performance directors and asked three questions.

The first two were ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions:

• Do you think mental skills play an important role in the overall performance of your team?
• Do you currently have a strategy to integrate this work into your team environment?

The third question was open-ended:

• What major obstacles prevent mental skills from being integrated into your team?

One of my significant findings was that the information delivered to the players, coaches, and staff wasn’t consistently effective. This is understandable; psychology is a vast subject, and translating the principles that underpin the work can be difficult. However, the last thing a provider wants to do is add a layer of complexity for athletes who already have the burden of processing a lot of information.

To address this, I will examine a couple of areas we can focus on to ensure the content we deliver is meaningful and impactful. We want it to enhance performance and provide the necessary information, tools, and support for our players and staff to perform at their best when pressure is present. The first area of focus is determining what content is needed for our teams.

To illustrate this, I will look at the different natures of the sports our athletes participate in and how that shapes what we engage them with.

Looking for the clues

When determining what content to deliver, our first reference point will be something other than a textbook or theory. We will use what we know about psychology extensively, but we need to ask a more critical question before we dive into it.

What are the mental demands of the sport? 

This seems a simple question, but it forces us to eliminate supercilious issues and allows us to identify where we can bring value to the athlete. To help us answer this question, I have divided sports into three categories. The reason for doing this is the nature of the sport will tell us what challenges the athlete is likely to face.

The categories below are not black and white in their definition; for example, in some sports, you have moments when you are required to initiate the movement (A lineout throw in Rugby, a free kick in football, a free throw in basketball). Still, most of the time, you are responding to movement. In other sports, you only initiate the movement (golf, archery, jumps in athletics).

Defining these challenges allows us to tailor our content to meet those needs. In other words, we become relevant.  For the sake of brevity, I will define the mental challenges of the sports involved and give three mental skills to enhance performance. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list but rather a snapshot identifying the demands and skills required to succeed.

1. Endurance sports

The name and nature of endurance sports give us immediate insight into their challenges. How do you mentally stay engaged in a mundane task that is causing significant pain?!! Endurance athletes are different beasts. To be successful, they must develop the ability to tolerate discomfort and resist the temptation to back off or quit. This becomes essential during long-duration efforts.

Key mental skills required

• Managing focus: The ability to maintain attention on the task so the athlete can push through fatigue and distractions during long events.
• Self-talk: Encouraging and affirming internal dialogue to counteract negative thoughts, especially in challenging moments.
• Adaptability: Being flexible and able to adjust plans or strategies in response to unexpected conditions (weather, terrain, etc.)

2. Sports where you respond to movement

Most sports require the athlete to respond to movement to be successful. This includes both a moving ball and opposition. The nature of the games, from basketball to football to rugby, is fast-paced, and participants must make numerous decisions under fatigue and pressure. This is often accompanied by strategic demands, with various game plans that must be executed for the team to perform well. As the introduction mentions, these sports are intertwined with moments where the athlete must initiate the movement.

Key mental skills required

• Clarity: Being clear on the athlete’s role in the team, understanding the key areas to focus on, and being aware of crucial game plan responsibilities.
• Decision-making: Ability to make the right decision at the right time. The clarity above needs to be married to in-game calmness. It will be necessary to trust their instincts and preparation for this to occur.
• Moving on quickly: Mistakes will occur in a fast-paced game where multiple decisions are made. Athletes must be able to reset mentally, let go of the past, and refocus on the next task they need to excel in.

3. Sports where you initiate movement

These tend to be the sports where perceived mental failure occurs. How many of us have watched an athlete with a putt to win or a kick to seal victory, and those athletes succumb to pressure? What makes these sports so demanding is that you have time to think when you initiate the movement. Unlike responsive sports, where you are primarily instinctive and reactive, these sports ask the athlete to prepare for a difficult task, fully aware of what is at stake.

Key mental skills required

• Pre-performance routine: Most of the tasks in these sports are repetitive. Even if the environment in which they function has variables, they would typically be described as closed skills. A consistent routine underpinning the task allows the athlete to build a process for dealing with pressure.
• Task focus: having time before the movement is initiated gives space for the athlete’s thoughts to wander. They can drift to the outcome and the potential consequences of failure. The routine explained above gives a place for the thoughts to land; by focusing on the task and the associated requirement, they can mitigate against the temptation of outcome distraction.
• Staying present: When you are required to repeat an action numerous times, it’s difficult not to be impacted by the past. If an athlete remembers a poor shot, throw, or kick, it can significantly affect the next one. Therefore, the athlete must be able to reset and stay engaged with the present demands.

One further layer of having demand-based content is making it positionally specific. In a team sport, what will be required will be different. A goalkeeper will be different from a forward, and a front rower in Rugby will be different from a fly-half. A quarterback will be different from a lineman. The more we can dig into these demands, the more relevant our content will be.

Three principles to guide our content

The second aspect of enhancing engagement is related to how we present to the athletes. Once we identify what needs to be delivered, how do we maximise our time with the athletes so the work is meaningful to them?

Below are three principles I have leaned on to make this happen:

1. Simple — Psychology is a complex subject; however, there is no need to make the content inaccessible by using language and terms you don’t need to. You don’t need to impress them by demonstrating your knowledge of the subject matter.Additionally, I have made the mistake of presenting too much information. The more information you have, the greater the chances of being confused. If you keep the language simple and try to cover only a little, you enhance the audience’s ability to grasp the key messages.
2. Relevance — Any content we deliver must apply to the athlete’s needs. The athlete cannot integrate irrelevant mental skills into their performance. Not everything you know will be relevant to what they need. One good question for us to ponder is, “What do they need to know that is relevant to the challenges they will face?”
3. Applicable — The content needs to be translated into practical solutions. No one wants to be told they are “doing it all wrong” and then not have a roadmap for growth to occur. They should be able to walk out of a session with some tools they can apply to their performance that meet the demands they will face.

Reflection questions

• What are the mental demands of the sports you are engaged with?
• What mental skills will be critical to meet those demands?
• How do we ensure the information is simple, relevant and applicable?

Further reading

Your Team’s Mental Performance Program Will Only Be Effective with a Clear Strategy. Here’s What you Should Do

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 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

An article brought to you in collaboration with

By Luke Whitworth

While it is important for analysts to have a minimum technical skillset, it is not the be-all and end-all – emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills are just as important.

This is just one of the misapprehensions that continue to dog the world of performance analysis; a range that spans from data collection and reliability to value capture and integration.

All were addressed in the third and final session of a virtual roundtable series hosted by the British Association of Sport & Exercise Sciences [BASES] and the Leaders Performance Institute.

Dr John Francis of the University of Worcester and Dr Denise Martin from Atlantic Technological University in Ireland were on hand to lead a discussion titled ‘Advances in performance analysis: what the research is telling us’ that sought to provide insightful tips for attendees.

Integrating practitioner and academic expertise

In a straw poll, more than half of attendees declared that use academic resources to support processes and projects. It’s a promising start, but Francis was in no doubt that the applied world and academia can and should work closer together.

He and his colleagues surveyed 175 analysts on the time they spent collecting good, accurate and meaningful data and how they tested that data before providing key insights to the end user. The cohort delivered several insights:

• Experienced practitioners excel in aligning KPIs, team goals, data systems and accuracy due to their expertise.
• That said, both experienced practitioners and those early in their careers need refined operational definitions and firm reliability checks to ensure KPIs reflect true performance and provide actionable insights.
• System familiarisation and reliability checks take time – streamlined processes and adequate time are both crucial.
• The same system familiarisation and reliability checks differ from user to user. Standardised training and reliability testing methods could improve consistency and accuracy.
• Regular data checks could make data clearer and crisper – too many teams test only at the start or end of the season.

The PRECISE Framework

Francis and his colleagues have devised a framework aimed at delivering recommendations related to validity, familiarisation and reliability. Their research is currently subject to peer review but does shed light on the question of integrated approaches.

The PRECISE Framework addresses those issues listed above:

• Promote collaboration – in practice sessions; periodic manual checks.
• Rely on expertise – deliver regular feedback; rely on automated processes.
• Employ video clips – guarantee exposure time and ensure an efficient resolution process.
• Customise adaptability – encourage collaborative learning and continuous cross checks.
• Illuminate definitions – enable incremental learning; reliability standards should be individualised.
• Synthesise philosophy – provide structured learning; pursue the systematic identification of issues.
• Ensure effective software processes – set comprehensive guidelines; enhance with video.

Who writes your team’s job descriptions?

As discussed, the search for unicorns is counterproductive, but then that is often a by-product of poorly-conceived job descriptions. Is enough time being spent on positioning them in the right way?

Attendees swiftly pointed out a series of challenges:

• The HR challenge: too often there is a lack of understanding from those without the expertise. Other times, the issues is the creation of the job description and the hiring process.
• The pursuit of ‘unicorns’: it bears repeating. Emphasise soft skills – hardly any descriptions mention soft or interpersonal skills.
• Verbal and visual communication: those softer skills in action – good communication skills are integral to building good working relationships as part of a broad team.
• Who needs to be involved? It depends on the context, but you may need the performance director, technical leads, research & development and HR when hiring an analyst.

The research of Francis and his colleagues also observed that too few job advertisements provide a feel for the environment in which someone will be entering.

On this front, they have recommendations for both organisations and applicants across four areas:

1. Employer familiarity information

Organisation: outline values and goals, provide infrastructure, staffing and philosophy.

Applicant: understand the organisation’s goals and how to contribute.

2. Description of job-related tasks & personal specification

Organisation: list job-specific tasks and required skills; list specific academic or coaching knowledge and software competencies; emphasise evidence-informed processes and the need to understand feedback and learning strategies.

Applicant: gain clarity on role tasks and responsibilities; highlight relevant experiences in application and determine their fit. Identify areas for personal and professional growth.

3. Salary & renumeration

Organisation: clearly present salary bands and rewards.

Applicant: assess job value and potential rewards.

4. Opportunity for advancement

Organisation: detail career progression and CPD activities.

Applicant: make informed decisions about career path within the organisation; consider your long-term aspirations.

Ensuring value capture in applied performance analysis

Martin and her colleagues have conducted research into value capture in performance analysis and alighted on three key questions:

What? Organisational capability to generate, curate and translate data to co-create knowledge and insight.

How? Skills and contextual intelligence allow practitioners to embed effectively in the performance ecosystem.

Why? These lead to what Martin calls the ‘lightbulb moments’ – where value is added to decision-making processes and contributes to performance.

The ‘Lighthouse Model’ for practice

Martin explored her ‘Lighthouse Model’, which seeks to showcase the ‘how’ (the base of the lighthouse) and the ‘what’ (the tower). As you reach the top, the ‘light’ emphasises the learning opportunities derived from understanding and better-informed judgements.

“Developing a Framework for Professional Practice in Applied Performance Analysis”

😎Very proud to see the capstone project from my PhD published this morning.

👉We define the role of an Applied PA, the components of practice and the expertise which underpins this pic.twitter.com/32vMGSYxN7

— Denise Martin (@deniseanalysis) July 26, 2021

To do the ‘what’, you need to establish the ‘how’, which includes:

• Contextual awareness
• Building relationships
• Performance analysis and sport expertise
• Technical expertise
• Professional behaviours

Martin emphasised contextual awareness i.e. what is needed from your environment to then have an impact on athletes, coaches and executives – those you are trying to create the ‘lightbulb’ moments for.

The following are cornerstones for the ‘what’:

• Establish relationship and define roles
• Needs analysis and service planning
• System design
• Data collection and reliability checking
• Data management
• Analysis
• Report to coaching team
• Facilitation of feedback

Gaps and opportunities: how do you get the lightbulb to shine?

• Identify learning opportunities: there is a lack of knowledge and guidance on how to best design learning opportunities and environments in sport.
• Develop a ‘service mindset’: there is too little service review and evaluation, which limits value capture.
• Find ways to showcase ROI: seek ways to better develop the profession in the eyes of both practitioners and those leading performance departments.

By Aaron Walsh

In recent years, there has been a focus on the mind’s crucial role in achieving peak performance.

It is almost impossible to listen to an interview with or watch a documentary about successful individuals and teams and not hear them refer to the role of mental skills and their significant impact on performance.

As this awareness has grown, we have seen roles created and resources dedicated to help drive and support this vital work.

But is this upswell in demand being translated into effective work? I was curious and began to ask other mental performance coaches I knew and enjoyed some valuable interactions.

From these conversations, something quite clear and surprising emerged: though the work had been normalised, it needed to be integrated better, and as a result, the impact that both these coaches and the teams they were engaged with was not occurring to the level they hoped.

This graphic from the 2016 Rio Olympics captures this perfectly:

Image: Aaron Walsh

I wanted to understand the perceived gap between value and impact and embarked on a research project, which I’ll discuss throughout this series.

Each article will build upon the next. Here, I will define my approach to mental skills; the second will examine the need to have a framework in place for delivery; the third will capture the content that needs to be in place; the fourth will address the actual delivery of the work; and the final instalment will help you to find the right person for your team.

The mental side of performance is not 90 per cent, but it’s not insignificant either

Where does the mental side sit within a team’s overall performance?

Many coaches and athletes say it is 90 per cent but I think the real figure is much lower and, in my view, we need to correct this discrepancy because it significantly shapes the work at hand.

To compete at the highest level, your athletes must be physically capable, possess the necessary skill level, and have an effective game plan. We can measure this for most teams and benchmark ourselves against the best we play against. Sports science as well as game film and analysis give us tremendous insight into this; and we can track the growth of our teams. You can’t outthink a lousy body, lack of skill and poor strategy.

However, when everything is equal, a mysterious performance aspect relates to your ability to deliver your best when it matters the most. It’s hard to measure and quantify at times, but we all know it makes a difference.

In the insanely competitive world of high performance, the mental aspect is a competitive advantage, and if you are not investing in it, you are leaving performance on the table.

My research

I contacted 35 head coaches and performance directors and asked three questions.

The first two were yes/no questions:

Do you think mental skills play an important role in the overall performance of your team?

Do you currently have a strategy to integrate this work into your team environment?

As you can imagine, 100 per cent answered ‘yes’ to the first question, but only four (11 per cent) answered ‘yes’ to the second question.

The responses I received showed that mental skills were acknowledged as necessary, yet integrating this work effectively remains challenging for many teams.

The last question was open-ended, and I wanted to know what prevented these teams from integrating this crucial work:

What major obstacles prevent mental skills from being integrated into your team?

From this question, four major themes emerged:

1. Lack of support from key stakeholders.
2. The work often became siloed.
3. The provider did not understand the demands of the environment.
4. The information presented was often too complex and not relevant to the needs of the athletes.

The research also revealed two critical realities:

1. Most teams don’t know where to begin

Most organisations and teams, though genuine in their desire to equip their teams with mental support, did not know where to begin.

When a team did engage with a potential provider, the nature of that work was often unclear. The work could become random, misaligned, and therefore ineffective.  As a result, the provider frequently felt siloed and isolated and usually lacked alignment with the core messages of others in the environment.

Alongside this, the lack of understanding, support and buy-in from key stakeholders (coaches, players, and support staff) created confusion about what the provider was there to do; in some cases, their role was reduced to fixing underperforming athletes, far from an ideal model and approach.

2. A lack of clear application

Secondly, a provider who engaged with a team without integration felt a lack of connection to the needs within the environment. This meant the information they presented to the team was only sometimes relevant. The theories were acceptable, but the ability to translate them into simple information for the athletes to apply was lacking. The failure to integrate meant providers, at times, were throwing darts at a board and hoping they’d hit the bullseye.

The research raised an important question: how can we integrate this work more effectively? After all, teams value the work but are unsure how it fits within their setting.

To better understand the challenges facing most teams, it is worth exploring the five broad approaches to mental skills services:

1. No program

Recognition of the need is almost universal, but knowing how to address it is challenging. Some teams struggled to find the right person, to have a model that fits their needs or to have a budget to invest in mental skills. They would often conclude that no program is better than one without clarity, intent, and appropriate resources. They are right.

2. The Minimalist approach

Someone engages with the environment intermittently. They may do a few workshops. The workshops may be helpful, but they must be more strategic and embedded into the environment with follow-up for impact to occur.

The danger with this approach is that it stirs up the possibility of growing in the mental side of performance but does not effectively answer the need.

What this looks like: someone in the environment 3-4 times a year for 1-2 days

3. The Deficit approach

This is the most common approach for teams who have begun some work. Mental skills are presented as something that is reserved for players/ teams that are struggling. This approach further drives the negative stigma associated with the mental side.

With this model, mental space can quickly become a performance scapegoat. If the team does not perform, it’s a mental issue, but the ability to address it and grow can’t occur with a deficit approach.

What this looks like: someone in the environment a few hours a week or when needs arise

4. The Skill approach

A skill-based approach is when a team sees mental skills as something everyone needs to work on. The scope of the work consists of the team’s general mindset, providing tools to help people grow, and doing a lot of one-on-one work.

The result, however, can still be siloed from the rest of the coaching team; it is still person-dependent rather than program-dependent. Rather than having a strategy and model that shapes the provider’s work, the work relies on a person to come into a context and decide what needs to occur.

What this looks like: someone in the environment 2-3 days a week or on important tours/ fixtures etc.

5. The Integrated approach

This is the optimal scenario and most immersed model. There is a clear strategy that everyone agrees on, buys into, and drives. Mental skills are a critical pillar of performance, and financial resources and time reflect this. They work across the whole team. The focus areas would be coaching performance, coaching the other coaches, coaching the way culture is developed and lived, and coaching the leaders in the environment.

What this looks like: they are fully integrated into the team and viewed as critical to success as a skilled coach. They are part of the environment regularly, have genuine input, and are seen as a valuable resource.

Questions to ask yourselves:

• Does your team currently have a mental performance strategy?
• What approach best suits your team and meets the mental demands it faces?
• Are you setting up your providers to be successful and have an impact?

Aaron Walsh is performance coach and consultant. He is currently the Mental Skills Coach for Chiefs Rugby in New Zealand and Scotland Rugby. If you would like to speak to him, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By Esther Goldsmith and Dr Natalie Brown

We know that females are different to males, and that we need to take that into account when working with female athletes – but what does this really mean in practice?

As we mentioned previously, there is a lot of myths and confusion about what you should or shouldn’t be doing as a practitioner or coach in sport when working with females. Unfortunately, similar to all sports science practices, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Every athlete that you work with is going to be different, and female athletes are no exception. In fact, when it comes to menstrual cycles, we know that this increases variation as every individual will have a different experience of their menstrual cycle, and this might even change from cycle to cycle.

At Sport Wales we work internally and externally to ensure that every female athlete in Wales can access support when it comes to female athlete health. However, this looks different depending on the context.. We have a dedicated team of practitioners who work together to provide a multidisciplinary approach to support female health and performance. As a team, we have four aims:

1. Enhance knowledge and awareness
2. Establish open and supportive environments
3. Embed positive behaviours
4. Equip with solutions and management strategies

Whilst menstrual cycles have previously been a big focus of research and delivery at Sport Wales, we also appreciate that this isn’t the only area that female athletes need support in! Pelvic health, pregnancy, breast support, female puberty, menopause and RED-S [relative energy deficiency in sport] are areas that we have expertise around and are working with sports to consider. We also make sure that female-specific factors are considered across all practitioner disciplines, and collaborate with other teams in Sport Wales, such as the coaching team, for consistency and a whole organisation approach.

Female-specific factors do not have to be standalone or demand a lot of time and resource. Instead, we promote integrating and embedding into ongoing work to support the individual athlete. Some good examples of this might be:

• A nutritionist considering menstrual cycle symptoms alongside their nutrition advice (a female athlete may experience premenstrual nausea that means she finds it hard to fuel)
• An S&C coach factoring in menstrual cycle phase to physical testing notes for an individual who experiences considerable fatigue during her period to account for any changes in testing results

Another approach focusses on providing education to athletes and sharing the importance of considering and talking about the menstrual cycle. The menstrual cycle has been, and still often is, a taboo or topic that isn’t often discussed, the first step to working with female athletes is to help them feel comfortable talking about periods!

This is even more of a challenge when talking about pelvic floor health and stress incontinence. We encourage female athletes to track their own menstrual cycle so that female athletes understand what their cycle means for themselves; what symptoms they experience, how that relates to training and competition and how to manage or reduce symptoms. In addition, we help support female athletes to understand the importance of having a regular menstrual cycle and when to seek help if periods become irregular or symptoms are severe. Tracking can also be a useful starting point to initiate conversations about female health.

We also work with coaches and support staff to educate them about the menstrual cycle; we have created four online e-modules that any sport and practitioner across Wales can access. Whilst education for athletes, coaches and practitioners helps improve their knowledge which we know can help everyone feel more confident to have conversations, we also provide education and support on ‘how’ and ‘what to do next’ to encourage conversations and support to be translated into practice.

From a behaviour change perspective, education and training are two possible interventions. However, enablement and environmental restructuring are additional interventions and approaches we take to support female health and performance.  For example, helping sports contemplate the environment they provide and whether it is set up for a menstruating athlete (e.g. are there period products available during camps?).

Over the last five years, there has been a lot of progress internally amongst the practitioner team at Sport Wales to better support female athletes in Wales. We have worked hard on:

• Increasing normalised conversations related to female health internally and externally
• Engaging sports around female-specific monitoring (and facilitating this)
• Challenging practitioners to consider sport science and medicine support through a female athlete and health lens
• Building trust with athletes to talk about female-specific topics
• Creating an open culture where people are receptive to learning and asking questions

Embedding female health support into practice does not have to be complicated or require additional time and resource – it should not be an ‘extra thing’. It is important to support the individual athlete, and female-specific considerations should be incorporated into this as normal practice. A huge amount of support can be provided through open conversations and environments between the athlete, coaches and practitioners.

In our next article we will explore conversations with female athletes in more detail.

By John Portch

When the Leaders Performance Institute asks Vignesh Jayanth what tool would enable him to do his job better, his answer is both light-hearted and instructive.

“I’d like a robot that could do my job and I just tell it what to do,” says the Head of Sporting Insights at AS Monaco with a laugh.

Time, resource and support are precious commodities for data analysts. They can only be earned through trust and belief in the value of the insights they provide.

“Data can help to make decisions, set directions and add value to people’s opinions,” Jayanth continues, “and it’s also there to ask the right questions. The important thing is to create a holistic picture to help a player or coach understand what they’re doing and why they should be doing it.

“Numbers sometimes speak louder than simply saying things.”

But what makes those numbers the right numbers? With Jayanth’s help, we explore how your analysis team can turn insights into a critical performance edge.

For better integration consider: is your insight ‘great-to-know’ or ‘good-to-know’?

How integrated is data analysis within your multidisciplinary work? If you struggle you’re not alone; it is arguably the analyst’s most enduring challenge. Where it exists, integrated analysis can provide insights that will inform decision-making, both for the match at the weekend and looking further ahead.

But it’s often tricky to reach that point. “Maybe overtime you gain that sort of trust, but in football, it’s quite hard because there can be lot of turnover,” says Jayanth of European football in general.

How can the analyst better help themselves in a volatile world? A clear data strategy with the right support structure helps but, too often, data analysts struggle when making the distinction between what Jayanth terms “great-to-know” (“something that could influence the next few games or the next two to three months”) and “good-to-know” (“something that could influence future practice”).

“Analysts get pulled into the tendency of everyone putting their heads down and working towards the weekend ahead,” he continues. “It’s always nice to take a step back and look at things from a global perspective.” Indeed, you should reiterate those good-to-knows occasionally. The frequency may depend on whether or not you are running data analysis from your academy through to your senior team or whether you are part of a wider team quietly running models in the background.

Take athletes and coaches through a ‘process of realisation’

Data must be relevant and consumable at the right times. The data, in Jayanth’s case, needs to be football-relevant and, ideally, will be “encapsulated in one or two points.”

There is what he calls a “process of realisation” for coaches and performance staff. He says: “What I’ve learned over time is it’s better to ask questions with information that you have and then the coach can try to understand what’s needed by themselves. It has to be a process of realisation because no-one wants to be told what to do”.

As a coach begins to make their decision, they might also bring other members of staff into the conversation. “Eventually, it’s like a circle where you say ‘I found something interesting, what do you think?’ and then the coach gives you their perspective, which could be completely different from what you’ve been thinking about.”

Such a difference in opinion is not necessarily a bad thing, even when pursuing coach or athlete buy-in. “It helps you, once you build that relationship, to go back and analyse elements for the future; and you can always bring back this conversation and say ‘this is what you mentioned, this is what I took away, and this is what we analysed’.”

Here, Jayanth’s advice for analysts is simple. “Know your audience,” he says. “Know exactly what their role is and what they are doing and eventually see how you could give them an impactful suggestion or an impactful way of making yourself more useful.”

‘No-one cares how, they just want it done – so prioritise’

As a data analyst, what is the key to working under pressure? “Prioritising helps,” says Jayanth, referring back to the great-to-know versus good-to-know balance. “It also depends on how you’re structured as an organisation”, he adds, alluding to the fact that no two clubs are the same.

Moreover, if the performance team comes to you with a request that sidelines your current projects, it is an opportunity to strengthen the standing of your work.

“The idea is to be able to communicate clearly and find a solution at that point, so if there’s something that breaks down in the process, you can just tell them ‘OK, let’s find another way’ and continue to include them in that process; but ultimately no-one cares how it’s done, they just want it done, so prioritising really helps.”

To wrap up, the Leaders Performance Institute asks Jayanth for one mistake he’s made that other analysts should avoid. “I would say finding the right place to speak to someone at the right time and then picking your battles.”