In July, talent pathways, performance under pressure and the importance of a smartly implemented strategy were all talking points.
Having joined the Spanish federation in 2013, he worked with many of the same players through the Under-19s, Under-21s, the Olympic Games, Euro 2024 and now a World Cup triumph, making him one of the rare international coaches to oversee an entire generation from adolescence to the sport’s biggest prize.
“When I was made seleccionador I said that if I had an advantage it was that I knew the players. That allowed us to ‘bet’ on the future,” he told the Guardian in 2024.
It is a model many sports organisations would love to replicate. Yet, as performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler observed during a recent Leaders Performance Institute roundtable: “I don’t think anyone’s solved this. That’s why we’re still talking about it; we’re still trying to work out how to do it most effectively.”
Spain would not claim to have cracked the code. Nevertheless, their success focuses attention on one of the most enduring questions in performance: how do organisations consistently develop talent capable of succeeding on the biggest stage?
That discussion was just one of the standout conversations among Leaders members in July.
We share some of the choicest cuts in this month’s Debrief.
Insight of the month:
When it comes to talent pathways, are we designing programmes around the needs of the athlete, or around the needs of the system?
Brunnschweiler wrapped up his presentation during the aforementioned roundtable with a reflection on his career working on elite talent pathways:
At the upper end of the talent pathway, the highest potential athletes can get the ‘worst’ programme.
An athlete may look as though they are receiving the best possible opportunity when they are training with senior professionals, yet if that exposure comes at the expense of match minutes, individualised development, physical preparation and psychological support, they may actually be receiving a worse developmental programme than peers lower down the pathway.
“They were being utilised more as a training mechanism for senior performers rather than a really high potential young player,” said Brunnschweiler, who worked with his colleagues to find a solution.
“One mechanism we did put in place was having a transition coach whose specific role was to go with that high potential player or group of players when they went into the senior training environment.”
Read the full roundtable report here.
Myth buster of the month:
Strategies don’t deliver outcomes – that’s the reality.
Michael Bourne, the Performance Director of the Lawn Tennis Association, admitted he loves a strategy. But as he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy in April, ideas count for little without coherent actions.
He continued: “I’ve talked about a strategy that was written in 2018. So the idea of that being accurate to what we have to do today, well, a realism needs to be brought to that. The critical factor in those clear and coherent actions is if you still believe in your basic principles, you’ve got to have rapid review cycles that can tell you what you need to do today against the mission and the vision that we’ve set ourselves.”
These reviews are tracked on a dashboard, which contains 56 metrics that enable the LTA to link their strategy to “the bigger picture, to what everybody’s doing.”
Last month, with Wimbledon underway, we returned to that session to explore Bourne’s role in delivering the LTA’s ten-year performance strategy.
Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association, spoke first and set out the hard truths confronting British Tennis back in the mid-2010s. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
Good to know:
My work has taught me that you cannot overcome biases by simply trying to be more rational. The optimal path is to create processes that prevent us from succumbing to them.
Behavioural economist Dr Benjamin Kelly used the start of rugby union’s Nations Championship to run the rule over the biases that most commonly present themselves in the sport.
He advocates a structured intervention, as depicted below:
‘By understanding how these biases manifest, leaders can design and implement structured processes to counteract them,’ he wrote. ‘The journey to mastering the mental game is one of discipline and a commitment to process over outcome. The critical insight is not to eliminate bias, but to build systems that account for it. For any leader, in any field, that is the ultimate competitive advantage.’
Read the full article here.
Quote of the month:
Do the common things uncommonly well.
So said performance specialist Rachel Vickery at a roundtable on the topic of performance under pressure.
She argued that an ability to manage pressure is less to do with fancy tricks or even an attempted recreation of pressure moments in training, and more to do with reducing an athlete’s allostatic load – the accumulation of stressors and demands over time that push a person into a heightened state of physiological arousal.
“What they end up seeing in finals is not a sudden, unexpected failure of performance,” she said. “It was something that was actually built because of that accumulation in the system as a whole.”
The secret lies in increasing an athlete’s ‘buffer’ – the spare capacity between a person’s current arousal level and the point at which performance starts to deteriorate. When someone has plenty of buffer, the pressure can rise naturally, their arousal can increase, and they can still stay below their threshold.
Vickery argued that many organisations make a fundamental mistake by treating sleep, recovery, relationships and gratitude as wellbeing initiatives rather than as performance interventions that create buffer.
Read the full story here.
Best advice:
There’s this quote: every time you say ‘yes’ to something, you’re saying ‘no’ to something else. You’ve just got to make sure you’ve got the energy and the headspace to provide the appropriate level of support that your performance team need.
Ian Costello became the General Manager of Munster Rugby in 2025 and, in assuming the role, took a strategic leadership position after two decades of coaching on the grass.
He admits it has been a steep learning curve, but with a shared vision he has allowed Munster’s domain experts to flourish while finding the space to spot performance trends and nip issues in the bud.
Read our interview with Costello here.
Ian Costello (centre) has been the General Manager of Munster Rugby since 2025.
What’s coming up for members
Why Succession Planning & Sustainability of Handovers is Critical
At a recent virtual roundtable, members of the Leaders Performance Institute discussed the elements that enable young athletes to thrive on talent pathways.
If your programme is too standardised, you risk producing technically proficient performers that struggle to adapt when confronted with new challenges. At the same time, an overly fragmented pathway can create confusion and hamper development.
“I don’t think anyone’s solved this. That’s why we’re still talking about it; we’re still trying to work out how to do it most effectively,” said Iain Brunnschweiler. “However, I’m sure there are certain systems who are doing this more effectively.”
Brunnschweiler, who has held coaching and pathway leadership roles in football and cricket, recently led a virtual roundtable on the topic.
He kicked off with reference to the 2016 work of Vincent Webb, David John Collins and Andrew Cruickshank titled Aligning the talent pathway: Exploring the role and mechanisms of coherence in development.
Drawing on their paper, Brunnschweiler illustrated three contrasting approaches to talent development.
This, Brunnschweiler explained, “is a pathway where it’s very similar as you transition from one age group to the next. Things are kept incredibly tight. The methods are very similar.”
Athletes encounter the same coaching ideas, training methods and expectations throughout the pathway. Transitions are smooth because little changes.
“The implications of this sort of pathway are that there can be quite fast progress, but it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to adaptability, independence or resilience.”
This is completely at odds with the first.
“There are major differences one year to the next. There is not really any handover. There isn’t much communication between coaches, sports scientists, support staff etc,” said Brunnschweiler.
Athletes bounce from one training or coaching methodology to the next, which can hinder progress and cause confusion. However, “for those players who do manage to make it through that sort of pathway, they become very self-motivated and adept at reflection; and actually it can lead to high levels of adaptability, independence, resilience.”
“Having some variance in how a performer experiences transitions can be a really good thing,” said Brunnschweiler while sharing the following slide:
“The coaching would be different, but not too much. The training environment would be different, but not too much. The sports science methods and performance staff methods would be different, but not too much. The challenges players are facing would be different, but not too much.”
The variety athletes experience is built into the system. “One of the key tenets of this model is it is logical, intentional and progressive,” Brunnschweiler continued.
This led him onto five considerations:
Brunnschweiler wrapped up his presentation with a final provocation inspired by his experience. It focused specifically on young athletes called into senior or first team environments:
At the upper end of the talent pathway, the highest potential athletes can get the ‘worst’ programme.
As he observed, an athlete may look as though they are receiving the best possible opportunity because they are training with senior professionals, yet if that exposure comes at the expense of match minutes, individualised development, physical preparation and psychological support, they may actually be receiving a worse developmental programme than peers lower down the pathway.
“They were being utilised more as a training mechanism for senior performers rather than a really high potential young player,” said Brunnschweiler, who worked with his colleagues to find a solution.
“One mechanism we did put in place was having a transition coach whose specific role was to go with that high potential player or group of players when they went into the senior training environment.”
His story raised a further question: are we designing programmes around the needs of the athlete, or around the needs of the system?
At that point, Brunnschweiler asked the members at the table to share their experiences. Their contributions covered several areas:
The step up to the first team
“Young players generally had no chance of playing, but we just felt that understanding the cognitive load and pressure load and all those things was really advantageous,” said one attendee with experience managing at a successful international rugby programme. Another member, a performance lead in the world of cricket, agreed on the value in exposure. “They will be around some of the best players to have ever played the game, and picking up the conversation, seeing how they go about their training,” he said.
The ideal approach offers the best of both worlds. As Brunnschweiler noted, “there are examples where the club as an organisation have decided that development is a part of what they do and therefore they will recruit managers or coaches based on a deliberate intention to get players through.”
Then, as one pathway lead noted, his job is to develop athletes who are better than the previous generation. “We deliberately say we don’t want to play the game the way the first team play the game,” he said. “If you imitate, you’re never going to be able to be the best version of yourself.”
The challenge posed by tradition
The risk is assuming athletes should simply survive because previous generations did.
“Creating the sink or swim environment is so dangerous when you’ve invested so much in it,” said a national talent manager working in international cricket. Challenge should increase, but support should not disappear. A team, he continued, must find “the right balance between having some of those support structures in place, some of those systems and processes, in order to inevitably allow them to fail, but catch them before they hit the floor.”
Athlete autonomy
Systems risk producing athletes who are adapted to one environment rather than adaptable to multiple environments.
“Sometimes we create athletes for one system versus [preparing them for] any system,” said a head of performance pathways working at a national level in Australasia. Her work with athletes focuses on “creating the conditions for them to have that autonomy, self-management and real sense of ownership”.
Similarly, a pathway leader working in an individual sport observed, “we need an individualised approach of being able to have flexibility and adaptability to what that player needs”.
Pathway misalignment
Another risk is the dangers of different parts of the pathway pulling in different directions.
One participant reflected on having worked in programmes where different stages of the pathway were ‘philosophically miles apart’. This led to players being rewarded for behaviours at one stage and criticised for them at the next.
The key, as Brunnschweiler said, is to ask: “How do we as a system create a combination of player engagement and autonomy and support and appropriate challenge so that as they move through each stage of the pathway, they’re ready to go in and survive and then thrive?”
What to read next
With a little help from Saya Sakakibara, Ellyse Perry and Anna Meares, we reflect on what enables better execution in the moment.
High-performance specialist Rachel Vickery made this very point at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable in early 2026 when she discussed the science behind a missed free throw in basketball or a simple putt on the eighteenth green in golf.
“Typically, the cause has less to do with what’s happening in the arena and a lot more to do with what’s happening everywhere else,” said Vickery, who helps teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure.
She explained that pressure is a daily accumulation that adds to a person’s allostatic load, which is the cumulative ‘stacking’ of stressors over time that erode the amount of physiological ‘space’ an athlete has between their current arousal level and their personal stress threshold. Vickery refers to this space as their “buffer”.
“We know from the environments that we work in that pressure is actually the constant,” she continued, “but it’s the physiological stress response that is often the variable.”
The stressors in question can be personal (e.g. a lack of sleep), organisational (e.g. misalignment), performance-based (e.g. being outside your comfort zone), or physiological (e.g. reduced ability to hear or absorb information).
Crucially, “as long as your arousal state stays below your threshold, your negative performance will not show up.”
At Leaders Meet: Australia in February, we invited three champion performers to the stage with a view to interrogating how they found their A games under pressure.
The trio in question were Olympic BMX gold medallist Saya Sakakibara; Ellyse Perry, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest female cricket players of all time (she is also a former Australian soccer international); and two-time Olympic track cycling champion (and Paris 2024 Australian Olympic Chef de Mission) Anna Meares.
(Left to right) Moderator Fabio Serpiello with Anna Meares, Ellyse Perry and Saya Sakakibara onstage at Leaders Meet: Australia (Photo: Albert Perez / Leaders Performance Institute).
Below, they tackle the topic from a systemic and cultural perspective.
1. Preparation that frees up mental space
Saya Sakakibara crashed out of her BMX semi-final at the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but the experience set her on the path to gold at Paris 2024.
“Tokyo was my first time racing at an Olympic level,” she said. “I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I think in hindsight I was very underprepared and I was out of touch with my race routine.”
This realisation would make all the difference in Paris where she interpreted the track conditions better than her opponents. In preparation, Sakakibara visited the Vélodrome de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines two months before the Games to learn the “ins and outs” of the track, as she put it.
“I also took my GoPro and put it on my head and I did a race run, like a full lap, so I could take that video with me and went home and used it as a tool to really visualise the race,” she continued. She also filmed her walk up the hill to the track. “I was able to rehearse the things I’m saying as I’m walking up the hill. There was a telegraph pole halfway up to the start hill; and I was like, ‘every time I look at that telegraph pole, I’m going to tell myself to smile and I’m so grateful to be here’. I rehearsed that over and over.”
Her preparation enabled her to stay present. “Usually if you don’t have a system in place or if you haven’t rehearsed something, you go into panic mode and you act on emotion and not logic. So having those little things like smiling at the telegraph poll or making sure I’m saying like, ‘just fucking go’ or whatever it was.”
Saya Sakakibara (Photo: Albert Perez / Leaders Performance Institute).
2. Consistent leadership
The trust Sakakibara could place in her process helped her in more vulnerable moments too. “I still struggle with self-belief,” she told the audience. “I really don’t think all high performers have this unshakable belief that they’re going to win all the time.”
Consistency in leadership – vision, purpose, goals – is just as critical, as Ellyse Perry explained. “I think the way that that’s done with clarity and hopefully with some calmness over a long period of time is what really makes a difference,” she said.
It is something that has benefited Perry and Australia, who won the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup at Lord’s last weekend (5 July) for the seventh time in ten editions. The tournament was very much in Perry’s sights when she spoke in Brisbane; and Australia’s renewal is something Head Coach Shelley Nitschke has discussed on the Leaders stage in the recent past.
“People know what they get, they’re not guessing today how you’re going to respond to something, what the outcome is going to be.”
Ellyse Perry (Photo: Albert Perez / Leaders Performance Institute).
3. Safe learning environments
Anna Meares, who overcame the challenge of home favourite Victoria Pendleton in the sprint cycling event at the 2012 London Olympics, spoke of using less prestigious competitions to hone her performance in the build-up to those Games.
“I needed to understand Vicky better in order to make myself competitive in that environment with her and feel capable of surviving,” said Meares, who then described her work with her coach. “We went through a very long and tedious process of breaking down old habits, old skillsets; doing everything wrong deliberately and then going through a very frustrating process of learning new skillsets; starting to put myself in environments where I could trust those skillsets.
“I remember we went to a World Cup competition and my coach would not let me race not confident in the front, not confident in the back; but these were where he gave me the scope to make the wrong decision under pressure.”
It takes away any fixation on the process. “What that then does is it teaches you that this was not the right decision to make in that situation. Next time I’m there, I’m going to make a different decision. It slowly starts to change the pathway that you can create, but also the trust in making that up.”
Anna Meares (Photo: Albert Perez / Leaders Performance Institute).
4. Repetition and mastery
“When I was at the top of the start hill in Paris, I felt the most ready I’ve ever been,” said Sakakibara.
Meares then reflected on her own experience and went some way to explaining why efforts such as hers or Sakakibara’s look so ‘easy’ from the outside.
“Your intuition or your autopilot comes from the work that you have done,” said Meares. The best systems and environments reduce panic, uncertainty and cognitive overload so that people can read the situation, trust their preparation and make better decisions.
“The mental preparation is just as important in order to get out of your own way, in order for the intuition to lead the way.”
In other words, the best systems or processes enable better judgement in the heat of the moment. “I rehearsed all those things so when it came to crunch time, it was just like, ‘yeah, I know what to do’.”
What to read next
Pressure Doesn’t Make you Better – it Reveals what’s Already There
Artistic Director Alexander Campbell explains his academy’s approach with reference to his own experience as a professional ballet dancer.
“The reality is that not any one teacher is going to know, if you’ve got ten people in front of them, what’s best for each individual person in that class,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey last year.
“It’s about having that humility or that understanding that it’s OK not to know that definitively, for it to be a work in progress.”
Campbell, who spent 19 years at the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet companies, retired in 2024 to take up his current role, which gives him responsibility for the academy’s teaching across more than 80 countries.
It’s a position that grants him insights into the expectations, motivations and development needs of the next generation of dancers; and, as a self-proclaimed “sports tragic”, he was delighted to address an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members at the Royal College of Music in London.
The Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall at the Royal College of Music in London where we hosted Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey in April 2025.
Below, we explore, through the lens of Campbell’s own ballet career, his approach to meeting that challenge head-on with the RAD.
Meet students halfway
Campbell’s teaching mindset has been influenced by his underwhelming student experience at the Royal Ballet School, which he attended on a scholarship between 2003 and 2005.
The main problems were the teachers and the environment. “I struggled so much that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in ballet,” he said.
He had arrived from his native Sydney mid-term, which didn’t help him to settle, but it was also down to the type of prescriptive teaching that routinely irks younger generations today.
“We weren’t really encouraged to step out of our lane. It was like, ‘you know the steps, you focus on this, and we’ll worry about everything else,’” he added.
As Campbell explained in a 2017 interview with the Daily Telegraph, “we weren’t encouraged to ask too many questions. I think it took me too long to learn that, because I was naturally inquisitive, and wanted to know why we were doing certain things.”
When reflecting on that time for Leaders members, he said it was “such a missed opportunity.”
His turn-of-the-century experience as a ballet student shows that the need for teachers to meet their students halfway is not new. Two decades later, talent environments in performing arts, and in sport, must be designed to engage a cohort that wants to know ‘why?’
Promote early sampling
Campbell followed in the footsteps of his maternal grandparents, Valma Briggs and Mario Desva, who had both danced with Ballet Rambert in London.
By the early 1990s, Briggs was teaching at Academy Ballet in Sydney; Campbell’s mother worked in the same school as a manager. He began dancing at the school at the age of five.
He played grade cricket too. If his dancing talent was no surprise then nor was his cricketing ability as his father Alan was a professional player.
Campbell might have gone down that path himself had circumstances been different, but there was no pressure from his parents to choose one over the other; his teachers at Academy Ballet were similarly minded.
Of his cricket and school studies (he was homeschooled from the age of eight), Campbell said, “my parents were keen for me to remain interested in other things so that I was ‘Alexander, a person with various interests’ rather than just ‘Alexander, the ballet dancer’.”
Much like the world of sport, the performing arts has increasingly moved away from the idea of early specialisation. On Campbell’s watch, the RAD promotes the type of holistic development he enjoyed; and he is not alone. “Thinking about and knowing certain conservatoires, thinking about their talent pathways and their talent identification, how they train people is being reconsidered.”
The shift towards co-creation
As Campbell explained, RAD teachers must be able to adapt to a generation of students that desire agency in their own development.
“As educators and teachers, it’s really easy to go, ‘OK, I have to have this knowledge and I have to demonstrate to them that I know how best to get from A to B’,” he said.
That isn’t true, of course, but it requires humility on the part of the educators; and much of Campbell’s focus is on equipping dance RAD teachers with the “understanding that it’s OK not to know things definitively, for it to be a work in progress, and that it is going to be different, not just for each individual, but for each year [grade] at the school.”
Campbell’s decision to persist with ballet beyond his experience at the Royal Ballet School was influenced by his “opportunities to work with other coaches and have different experiences” at the Birmingham Royal Ballet. When he joined the company in 2005, it enabled him to see “a different environment and different way of operating that felt much more aligned to the sort of experience that I’d hoped for and wanted to have.”
Campbell demonstrates a plié for an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members, who imitate his movements with varying success despite his words of encouragement.
Care is a baseline expectation
We know that wellbeing is a performance enabler; younger generations sense it too.
Campbell wants RAD staff to be role models of wellbeing. He said: “Educating our teachers on that and the importance of looking after themselves could have the most impact in a fairly short period of time.” It must start with him as Artistic Director; a fact of which he is “acutely aware”.
The RAD has also made efforts to improve safeguarding in its schools and increase the accessibility of its courses, particularly for students and participants with additional support needs. “We’ve got teachers who have parents saying ‘my child has additional needs but they love dance, they really want to be part of it; is that something you can do?’ And a lot of our teachers will find a way or have found a way, but a number of them feel nervous about the responsibility that entails. They don’t want to get it wrong.”
Campbell and the RAD are working to provide those teachers with the right tools. “We give them the support so they can say ‘this is how you go about it or if you want to find out more this is where you would go’. I think this is giving us the best opportunity to broaden our participation in ballet and dance.”
A broader definition of success
Campbell admitted that all his “Plan As” came off in his professional life. He is a prime example of talent meeting opportunity.
However, as he said, “my self-worth and my personality were not determined by whether I was successful in that pursuit.”
He makes sure this is reflected across the RAD’s curricula. “I don’t want to just provide for those people who want to get to the top level and be the very best.” Rather, he also wants to support the career aspirations of students who say, “I enjoy this, I’m quite good at it, but actually I don’t have that real drive to pursue this one very narrow thing.”
Their love of the art form might lead to a career in dance teaching or one of the industry’s that surround the performing arts such as lighting, set design or even physiotherapy with a specialism in dance. The RAD will support those aspirations. “It’s understanding that there are more opportunities than just being the dancer on the stage.”
What to read next
Leaders Performance Adviser Iain Brunnschweiler addresses the complex world of youth sport.
For all the experience in the virtual room – members that have spent decades working with youth athletes – each struggles to balance the elements that help young athletes to realise their potential.
“You’ll never solve it,” says Brunnschweiler, who has worked on successful talent pathways in both football and cricket. “The interesting part is how we make decisions and deliver on a strategic approach that’s appropriate for the context of the athlete.”
For the benefit of the virtual table, he outlined five common tensions that he has encountered on talent pathways:
The list is not exhaustive, but it is representative.
“The headline feedback from everyone at the roundtable is that probably they’re weaving down that ‘versus’ line in the middle when they’re doing this well,” adds Brunnschweiler.
He explains each tension in turn:
1. Group/Team learning vs Individual development
“Within your programme, how much time are you spending on team tactics, team interconnectivity, team culture, etc. versus identifying individual work-ons, individualised practices, individual focused development, individual prioritisation?”
2. Process focus vs Outcome/Match focus
“This is very similar to the first in many ways but, in my mind, is distinctly different. How much are you focusing on the process versus the outcome? And this is really around how you’re monitoring development. So if there’s a pathway lead or an academy director: are you looking at whether teams are winning when it comes to competition or are you looking at tracking progress against process markers that are embedded either within training or within the game?”
3. MDT staff input driving decisions vs Coaching/Technical staff driving decisions
“This is about athlete programming. How much of your emphasis is put on the ologists, multidisciplinary staff, the scientists versus coaching and technical staff? Who’s making the final call? How are you looking to integrate? What are the processes or systems that allow those two things to collide effectively? This was certainly one of the tensions that strongly resonated with the group.”
4. Holistic development of well‑rounded humans vs Targeted development of ruthless performers
“There’s been a massive growth in talent pathways around understanding the holistic nature of development and the growth in player care, support, psychology support, performance, wellbeing, and education off the pitch. The common question is ‘how do we develop well‑rounded humans?’ And the tension is someone saying ‘but surely it’s just about game performers can we spend all of our time targeting development of that ruthless in‑game performance?’”
5. Staff‑led teaching and guiding vs Player‑led discovery
“There’s a perception that it’s slower to do the player‑led, but it might be deeper; whereas it’s quicker and can feel more rewarding to do the staff‑led. ‘Let me tell you, here’s some guidance. Let me solve the problem for you.’”
Brunnschweiler then reflected on some of the available support mechanisms:
1. Consider if the athlete’s experience of a programme matches your teams’ intent. Much will depend on the athlete’s prior experiences, plus how and when they came to your programme.
“There’s a lot of insight generated around young athletes in all sports now and it’s like, well, how do you harness that background information as well as that current information you’re getting on them in order to make decisions around their programming?”
It requires a shared mental model between the different disciplines.
“There were some good examples at the roundtable where team culture means people’s view are respected, taken onboard and valued. And that’s utilised as a part of a decision-making approach.”
2. Retain coaches with age-specific expertise. Too little value is placed on age-group coaches, which can lead to those individuals seeking employment with more mature athletes.
“If I’m the first team coach, there’s a perception I’m better than the under-12s coach; whereas they’re equally challenging in different ways. Someone who’s brilliant at working with 10 to 12 year olds may end up working with older athletes because they get paid more.”
They may or may not be equipped to make that transition but he argues that teams can make it less of a problem by asking:
“Can you manipulate your wage structure to ensure these academy coaches stay valued within the role they’re best deployed in?”
3. Remember: well-rounded athlete can still possess an edge. While there is a desire to ensure holistic approaches that promote well-rounded development, there is a risk in taking it too far.
“There’s a danger that we over-index on compliance within pathways; and, actually, being an edgy, ruthless person is an imperative characteristic for an elite performance athlete.”
4. Development support for coaches. There is a time when a coach needs to be instructional and clear as well as a time when they need to skilfully draw a decision from an athlete.
“How do we provide learning and development support for coaches and other members of the MDT in this space so they can be skilful at learning design and skilful at knowing when to provide which approach based on the context and the athlete?”
5. Give the young athlete a sense of agency. Let young athletes speak in conversations around their IDPs and help them understand why things may feel challenging.
“I’ve seen people saying we want to put on sessions that look slick. That may or may not be the objective. It might also be that we’re really clear as a club that we think the deep learning and progress occurs in messy sessions where it’s clunky and we’re allowing players to play and solve problems. As coaches, we should be the best problem-setters.”
What to read next
10 Ways in Which the Best Environments Support their Pathway Athletes
