Regular readers will notice that things look a little different for this edition of Performance.
We have temporarily moved away from presenting a single coach or executive as the face of the journal because, during this pandemic, there is no individual holding a blueprint for sport’s grand return and we felt it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Instead, our cover story is a selection of insights lifted from our At Home With Leaders podcast series, which has featured the likes of England Rugby’s Eddie Jones, the Toronto Blue Jays’ Mark Shapiro, and Chelsea’s Emma Hayes speaking directly from their home offices. Every week, guests discuss performance challenges that simply did not exist when Jill Ellis took pride of place on the front cover of Performance 20 back in November.
As we have found here at the Leaders Performance Institute, these challenges have also led to opportunities. Our Leaders Virtual Roundtables, for example, have come into their own in a performance world dominated by Zoom. Check out our ‘Community Knowledge’ feature for a bunch of the best insights.
There is also an increasingly growing picture of what sport will look like in a radically altered environment.
The NRL’s Melbourne Storm hosted the Canberra Raiders on the weekend of the league’s grand restart back in May and Frank Ponissi, the General Manager of the Storm, agreed to keep a diary of the day for Performance. In keeping with the NRL’s spirit of cooperation, Ponissi suggested pitching the idea to his Raiders’ counterpart, Matt Ford, who graciously came onboard. You can read the results on page 28.
Elsewhere in this edition, we explore the power of coaching cues and their impact on teaching athlete movement, how cricket is embracing analytics, why efforts to future-proof the coach must be led by the coach themselves, and how you might develop your team’s creative capacity in the manner of Google.
We hope there will be a slither of insight contained within these pages to assist in your ongoing projects as you come to terms with performance during a pandemic.
Stay safe and healthy.
