Ben Baroody, of the World Series-winning Texas Rangers delves into the franchise’s holistic approach to player development, which prioritizes well-being.
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“It means a lot to us,” he tells Henry Breckenridge and John Portch on the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our Main Partners Keiser.
“The aim and approach of all of our programs, processes, and our building blocks, is based on the foundation of the human psyche, the psychology of healthy minds and lives. And we try to take that evidence-based research and build it into baseball frameworks and development for the rest of the organization.”
As the Texas Rangers’ Director of Leadership & Organizational Development, Player Enrichment Programs & Mental Health says, the goal is to unlock player potential versus extracting performance.
“That’s what we’re striving towards. It’s an aspiration that’s ever-evolving,” he says,
Elsewhere in this episode, we cover:
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Dr Amal Hassan at Harlequins Women explores a much misunderstood aspect of her players’ health and suggests ways in which coaches and practitioners can help.
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“What I’ve learned supporting rugby players,” she began, “is that periods can be a barrier to participation in the first place, a perceived barrier to skill and technical development through a season, can have health implications that really impact their performance, and it possibly keeps players from developing at really crucial points.”
Hassan was speaking as part of a panel discussion on the physiology of the female athlete at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium. She spoke alongside pelvic health physiotherapist Emma Brockley and Dr Nicola Brown, an Associate Professor in Female Health & Performance at St Mary’s University.
Session moderator Claire-Marie Roberts, who has just been appointed Performance Director at English Championship club Coventry City, homed in on Hassan’s reference to skill acquisition.
“A training season won’t discriminate,” said Hassan in response. “You’ll be needed to train on any given day of your menstrual cycle, if you’re off contraception, for example. So you need to be able to show up the best you can. However, at certain points in certain individuals, it may be that their menstrual cycle fades, where the symptoms or dysfunction they experience may actually be medical and the impact on their ability to train, to show up as the person they want to be to their coaches and the staff they’re working with, and, on game day, you can imagine how that might translate.
“That’s not to say that every day is going to be a different flavour of menstrual cycle dysfunction for an athlete, but there might be really key points in, say, a season or a cycle where they have to be absolutely present and engaged in their training for their skill acquisition to develop at the pace we want it to. If you can imagine not thinking about this component and the effect it has on athletes’ development, we’re just expecting them to be able to cope as long as we control for medical, load and other aspects of sports science, but we don’t consider this other very important aspect that is across the board for all of our female players if they’re off contraception, then we’re missing a trick.
“And what I find interesting is if you ask athletes if they think it’s impacted their skill development, they might say yes and more often than I would expect.”
Hassan noted that it is important to separate menstrual dysfunction and symptoms. “Symptoms could be normal,” she continued. “What we don’t understand fully is what is a normal menstrual cycle for an athlete or not. We’re good at delineating that from their perspective; I can tell you what’s pathology or not according to a certain criteria, but we don’t actually know what’s normal for an athlete. So it could be normal that you do expect symptoms and that’s not dysfunction. That’s just part and parcel of your menstrual cycle.”
In this article, Hassan, who has also worked in ballet, reflects on the support that all teams and organisations can provide for athletes as well as the implications for those female athletes playing collision sports.
Note: Hassan’s responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
The importance of menstrual tracking…
If you’ve got the resources, tracking is important. And that might be tracking done by your sports science team with the consent of the athletes. In the absence of those resources and that expertise in-house, that might look like the athletes receiving some education and taking it upon themselves to track their menstrual cycles. Ultimately, I believe this should be player-led or athlete-led so that an athlete can come to you with any concerns, but what you want to do is you want to pick up any patterns. It’s going to differ between athletes. It might be that you can pick up some really important trends in sleep dysfunction, in cravings, in core recovery, in back pain in certain parts of the cycle, otherwise it can start working proactively against a team, which is there to support an athlete ahead of time so that it doesn’t become a reactive approach. It becomes very proactive and built into a programme.
The gold standard in supporting athletes with their menstrual cycle…
I don’t think we’ve necessarily reached it anywhere and explored the full capabilities. It must span medical and performance because you might pick up some medical issues but it’s very much aligned with your performance programme or your sport. The gold standard within your team will look like setting out everyone’s roles and responsibilities, in a team environment tracking across the team, getting buy-in from individual athletes, collecting as much data as possible so that you can be accurate about your planning. Now, that might be impractical even in some elite settings in women’s sport but where there’s full professionalisation, athletes are full-time, you’ve got the staff resource to do it.
Steps that all teams can take…
It’s important to recognise where you don’t necessarily have the expertise in-house. So some sports may have doctors as part of their teams, they might be full-time, they might not be, they might be junior doctors in their training, or they may be consultants, they may be consultants in orthopaedics but have no medical training in terms of gyno health or endocrinology. So it’s really important to understand where you’re at and that if you don’t have that expertise in-house you have onward referral pathways in place for any pathology that you pick up. In the middle, you’ve got the option, for example to use a platform like Fittr Coach and be able to access that with the resources that you have; your performance medicine team might be able to do the tracking, involve the athletes in collecting the data, and you can try to pick up any patterns there. At the other end of the spectrum, athletes can use a free app to track their periods, check their cycles are regular, keep a diary of any issues, any symptoms, try and relate that to training, to any recovery, nutrition, their psychology. It can get quite complicated but if you just have a structure around it and you do it every day it becomes simple. You will then want to signpost to that individual’s GP if there are any issues. Obviously a GP is not going to be experienced or qualified at discussing performance but there are quite a few resources available for athletes to read or podcasts to listen to. It’s not going to do any harm for them to consider that the menstrual cycle might be a component in planning their training or their recovery.
The ethical considerations…
If you’re encouraging a practice, there’s got to be a structure around it. So who’s leading on that? Who’s driving the education? Who’s the go-to person for questions and answers? I think you have to be really intentional in the rollout of teamwide services or strategies like this. Everything needs to really be in place so that you don’t come across issues by surprise. I think you could have this problem even within an environment that has a great structure. Ultimately, the big one is supplements. A lot of athletes will think about particular supplements that might help them with symptoms, with recovery, and they just need to make sure they’re not breaching anti-doping guidelines; and that you are encouraging across the board, you’ve got nutritionists, doctors, etc. open communication about anything they want to try. We do want to empower athletes to be the best they can be but just within the realms of safety.
On athletes approaching pregnancy and birth…
This is a space that’s continuing to develop and that development should aid and increase the confidence within the performance medical team and within athletes in approaching training through pregnancy, continuing to be part of your sport during your pregnancy and then return, post-natal, post-partum. If you think about it from a framework perspective, it’s really important that pillars that include HR and contractual factors, the players’ wishes, their psychology during pregnancy, the skillset and experience within your team managing that athlete, your protocols, your emergency action plans from a medical perspective, your forward planning and programming from a rehabilitative perspective towards return-to-play and the facilitation of preparing for birth and the early post-natal phase, which is a really crucial period of time in any woman’s life, are proactively managed. It can seem really overwhelming if you’ve never done it before and I would encourage any institution who has never done it before to not wait until it does happen; to be proactive in building policies and protocols ahead of time and developing the skillset you have in-house, so that you are ready when it does happen, because it eventually will. If you think of the period of life where an athlete’s fertility is peaking, it’s merging with the performance time in their careers generally.
The impact of a collision sport on menstrual dysfunction and symptoms…
What we tend to see in sports that are typically endurance sports or aesthetic disciplines like ballet is that greater maturation is at risk of being delayed because of the energy demands and the chasing of an aesthetic goal from a physique perspective. So in those sports you might see there is a delay that might impact bone health, they might go on to be at risk of stress fractures, broadly speaking. In rugby, what you have to consider is the load, the impact of stress on the endocrine system, and then you’ll swing more towards menstrual dysfunction and symptoms and poor under-recovery impacting their endocrine system. What you also tend to see, and this is really anecdotal from my perspective, having worked in ballet and having worked in rugby, what we see in ballet is a lack of periods and amenorrhea as a risk. What we see in rugby is you’re more likely to be struggling with something like PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome]. With PCOS, you see higher androgen levels, that will translate into some sport-enhancing metrics in terms of how strong you are potentially. And this is not proven, this is just anecdotal, with that what you get is more menstrual symptoms relating to the hormonal imbalance. So I think it’s down to really understanding our sport. We don’t have that data, we need to understand across the board what the typical issues girls and then women playing senior rugby are struggling with and I guess it’s a call to action for research. I can just rely on my own anecdotal experience at my club. It needs more effort across the board.
Lúcás Ó Ceallacháin of the Australian Institute of Sport delves into his work with teams across the Australian system.
Main image: courtesy of the Australian Institute of Sport
“If I were to describe it in a nutshell,” he says, “It’s a facilitation method. A novel way of having great conversations.”
During his sessions, attendees will be encouraged, using un-themed Lego (“no Star Wars”), to build a model based on a thought, question or intention.
Lego Serious Play’s reputation as a tool for solving complex problems stems from a project in 1996 when Lego Group owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen worked with two professors from the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, to explore ways to stimulate imagination and creativity within his organisation.
It has proven popular as a strategic planning tool, with Lego bricks physically standing in for issues and challenges faced by companies across the corporate world. The method is also making inroads in the world of sport thanks to the work of individuals, such as Ó Ceallacháin, who has observed high levels of engagement with athletes and coaches.
“The amount of cortex devoted to any given body region is not proportional to that body region’s surface area or volume, but rather to how richly innervated that region is,” he continues. “Your hands have a disproportionate representation in your brain. Sports people use their hands and body more than the average person so these senses are trained to a higher level.”
Some of sport’s challenges are ideal for exploration through Lego Serious Play. “Where it works really well is with things like high-ceiling, low-threshold questions where everybody’s got an answer, everybody wants to contribute. If you’re talking about strategy, culture, values or vision, it’s a good tool.” Lego Serious Play also encourages people to be curious rather than judgemental, and is designed to give everyone a voice, from the head coach to the kit person.
It is not, Ó Ceallacháin stresses, a mere team-building exercise. “There’s definitely a team-building element because you build connection, but if someone says ‘we’ve done paintball and we’ve done go-karting – let’s do Lego next’ then I know they’re just trying to fill a couple of hours with a fun activity. I’ll quickly say no to those kinds of things, but if someone says ‘we’re struggling to understand why this is a problem in our organisation’ that’s where I get curious.”
Here, Ó Ceallacháin explains how he uses Lego Serious Play with teams across Australia.
How does a typical session pan out?
LÓC: A typical session lasts for two hours – this is to ensure we have time to build the skills they need to use the method. The first 30 minutes are dedicated to introducing the method, the background and how to communicate through metaphor and storytelling. Then we get cracking! The method follows four steps – Question, Build, Share and Capture. We use the Padlet App to capture our work as we go.
Is there an optimal group size?
LÓC: I like to work with smaller groups but it can be done on a large scale. The challenge with large groups is you won’t have enough time for everyone to hear what is being shared – so you need extra help on tables or in the room.
How do you use Lego Serious Play in your sessions?
LÓC: I’ll take a group through the skills first; ‘what do you need to be able to do?’ and the skills are not about ‘how do you connect these pieces or how do you do that?’ The skills are about ‘how do you tell stories, how do you use metaphors?’ So something as simple as an orange brick might hold a lot of meaning for somebody because they’ve put meaning into it. We ask questions, we build the answer, we reflect and share the answer together – that’s how we generate insights – then we capture, we’ll take pictures and keep a record of it and break it all down and build something else. Typically they’re building for five minutes. It’s not hours of building. The bulk of the session is always about the discussion that they have about whatever they’ve built.
Image: Australian Institute of Sport
With what issues does Lego Serious Play work best?
LÓC: Questions that need creative answers. These are typically around vision, strategy, culture, values, UX design, innovation, team development. What’s exciting now is how people are taking this to their own environments and applying their owns skills to enhance it. It unlocks the creative thinking of the wisdom in the room.
What is a good type of question to ask?
LÓC: High-ceiling, low-threshold questions – future-focused questions where everyone has an answer and can contribute. I use an assets-based approach so I will often frame the question in a positive way. My approach is to understand what their challenge is currently and also what they may have tried previously. The flow of a session builds to a bigger question but all the steps on the way contribute to the momentum of a session.
How does that look in practice?
LÓC: For example, one technical director asked: ‘how do we get the best out of each other?’. Their team was new and had few opportunities to be in the room together. So there was a bit of ‘who am I and what am I about? What do I care about and what are my values? What makes me tick?’ All of that came out in a three-minute build that we did and they started talking about that. Then we said ‘think of a time when you’ve been part of a really successful team – what did it look like? What did it feel like? What helped you to be your best in that team and what are some of the things that you bring to that team that no one else can bring?’ Lots of stuff came out and then they were then able to talk about ‘what are the things that are common? What are the things that are different? How do we get to those next steps for what we want to build?’ And they’ll continue that conversation long after I’m gone. But it just kind of gave them a primer rather than just coming in and asking ‘what are your values?’ and they look at their logo or their crest and start talking about whatever had been written down by corporate leadership a couple of years ago. They asked of themselves: ‘what are our behaviours? What does that look like? How do we want the players to experience us as a coaching team as well?’
Image: Australian Institute of Sport
Can you outline the science behind Lego Serious Play?
LÓC: I learned from [Lego Serious Play expert] Michael Fearne – who trained me – there are sound scientific principles underpinning the use of Lego in engaging people, changing the conversation and solving complex problems. The way building something with your hands unlocks knowledge you didn’t know you had. There is also the joy and productivity of getting into a flow experience. There is safety in talking about issues through a model rather than the usual business/power dynamic. For example, we might have an idea and we try to make sense of it, but when you put something physical out into the world and you and I can look at it together and say ‘well, what do you see? What do I see? Let’s turn it around and look at it from another side’. We see very different things. And then the flow piece is fascinating with sportspeople because of the connection between the hand and the brain. When you’ve got a big pile of Lego in front of you and your hands are like another search engine for your brain. So you start pulling out stuff that you didn’t even know was there. With my HP hat on – in simple terms, it works!
How might that emerge during a session?
LÓC: So I go back to our orange brick. One coach used an odd orange brick in a model and I asked them about it. They said: ‘Oh… that’s the fire in my belly and that’s why it’s in the middle. My grandad was the first person who brought me to a game. That’s where I got the fire and I take that wherever I go and I think about how important it is to pass that on to the next generation of kids’. That was just a little brick, just the colour, that didn’t look like anything but the fact that we had a quick conversation about it; and the meaning that somebody had put into that brick was really powerful. These stories come up and the power of storytelling resonates here in Australia, where that storytelling tradition is really strong. And I feel like sportspeople just love a good yarn.
How does a second or third session differ from a first?
LÓC: We can get to more complex questions more quickly using different skills, such as rapid builds or you can build with no question or instructions. Then I hand them a Post-It with a theme to explain using the model they built. With the skills warmed up we can tackle system issues or stakeholder maps – the truly complex environment that HP Sport operates in.
How do you encourage introverts or those less likely to talk to actually speak up?
LÓC: I make sure that we let people know that they only have to share what they want to and I also put caps on time. With curious questioning lots of people start to share more. Best of all is that others in the room model the sharing and it gets the rest of the group going. The design of the first hour is all about warming up to get to better sharing – we don’t jump in at the deep end. In my research as part of my Professional Doctorate in Elite Performance at Dublin City University I am also looking more closely at how Lego Serious Play builds the behaviours that contribute to psychological safety.
How do you know when to stop digging with a person? What are the signs to move on to the next person?
LÓC: We put time limits to ensure that we don’t get one person dominating the conversation but I also invite the group to question the model and be curious about it. Often I do very little talking. At the top of the session I make sure that people know that they only have to share what they are comfortable with. The time limit helps with those who are more sceptical too – they get time to warm up to the method and once others share their stories you find the sceptics start to join in. This is also part of the power of Lego Serious Play – it flattens the hierarchy – no one is more expert in your own story and model than you, but you invite others in to see and share your inner world. That demonstrates courage and vulnerability.
Image: Australian Institute of Sport
You said you take pictures. What are you trying to capture?
LÓC: I’m documenting the experience, summarising insights and generating artefacts that can continue to be used long after the session ends. We are also encouraging people to reflect on and retrieve what they have learned. Also, each model is broken down after it is built – so you are constantly breaking down the models to build something new. It also allows me to be fully present in the room and the conversation.
Do you take notes along the way?
LÓC: Honestly, very few. My job is to continue to facilitate the flow of the conversation so that the participants are producing the questions. This is another reason why the live feed on Padlet is important. By the end of the session the group will produce some simple guiding principles to apply going forward.
Do you prefer to be well-versed in the sport or team?
LÓC: I like to have some background and context of the room I am walking into – where does the session fit in for them, what kind of headspace are they in? I don’t want to have preconceived notions about the group or the outcome. As a former athlete, coach and High Performance Director myself, I’m cautious about what I introduce to an environment.
How do you work with leaders to give them the skills to host sessions of their own?
LÓC: I’m doing a large amount of Lego Serious Play facilitator training now. It can be nerve-racking to lead a session with your own team so I’m currently building a community of practitioners who I train. They are very supportive of each other and help to design sessions for each other. I am excited to see how others apply LSP, especially in situations like 1-to-1 wellbeing or coaching sessions. Everyone will come up with their own way of applying this to solve their challenges.
