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Responsibility for Performance in Professional Football: Where the Buck Stops!
Responsibility for Performance in Professional Football: Where the Buck Stops!
Sports Coaching, Winning

The key to understanding why professional football teams win or lose is understanding who is most responsible for the team’s performance at any point in time. In this article, we suggest there are four key points in every football season where the primary responsibility for the performance of team can be clearly identified. Ultimately, the players must accept the responsibility for winning or losing the big games at the end of the season but it is the responsibility of the non-playing members of the team to make sure the players are ready: physically, mentally, technically and tactically to win when it matters.

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Great Coaching – Great Coaches: How to Be the Best of the Best.
Great Coaching – Great Coaches: How to Be the Best of the Best.
Hot Topics, Sports Coaching

Greatness is something that all high performance coaches crave. They pursue it with passion and strive to be considered one of the coaches who achieved success at the highest level of their sport. But what is greatness? Where can you find it? What does it look like? And can you measure it? This article discusses greatness in coaching and presents ten fundamental characteristics of greatness to help every coach realise their potential and fulfil their destiny.

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Training Based Research Studies: the Biggest Con in sport since the Muffin.
Training Based Research Studies: the Biggest Con in sport since the Muffin.
Performance Science, Sports Coaching

Remember how when we were kids everyone liked to eat cupcakes.

Then when we got older and a bit more health conscious we were told to give them up because of the sugar and flour and other stuff in them.

Then along comes a sports nutritionist who said “Muffins are a great food for athletes – nutritious, high carbohydrate energy foods”. So we all started eating them again even though they are basically still just big cupcakes.

What a big con.

Almost as big a con as Training Studies in Sports Science Research.

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Sports Psychology: Integrating Mental Skills Training in Effective Coaching.
Sports Psychology: Integrating Mental Skills Training in Effective Coaching.
Performance Psychology, Sports Coaching

We all agree that developing mental skills is an essential part of being a successful athlete.

The ability to perform under pressure, the capacity to remain confident and resilient when competition conditions get tough, the skill to be able to relax and stay focused when feeling pain and fatigue in competition, concentration, visualization……coaches and athletes are unanimous that spending time developing mental skills is time well spent.

However, figuring out the best way to develop mental skills – particularly mental skills which can directly enhance the competition performance of athletes is another matter.

We all think working with a Sports Psychologist is a good idea but Sports Psychologists are like life partners……we know that having one is probably a good idea but it is next to impossible to find a good one.

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The Top 20 Tips on Being the Best: 20 years of experience in 500 words!
The Top 20 Tips on Being the Best: 20 years of experience in 500 words!
Hot Topics, Sports Coaching

I have been lucky to be involved in high performance sport for the best part of 20 years.

I have been very very fortunate to work with Olympic Gold Medalists, World Champions, World Record Holders, Premiership Title Winners, World Cup Winners…champion athletes, teams and coaches in many different sports and in several different countries.

Quite often, when I do professional speaking or training with corporate or sporting groups, someone in the audience will ask, “What do all the winners have in common” or “From your experience, what things do all the great athletes, teams and coaches do that makes them the best”.

There are indeed some things all the great ones have in common: The Top 20 Tips on Being the Best: 20 years of experience in 500 words!

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The Rebuilding Phase..the biggest cop out in sport.
The Rebuilding Phase..the biggest cop out in sport.
Hot Topics, Sports Coaching

In professional sports where teams are subject to a “draft” system, it is common to talk about a “window of opportunity”, i.e. a year or two when the team has the realistic opportunity to win the title owing to the talent, maturity and experience of their players. For many teams “outside the window”, coaches and management will often talk about the “rebuilding phase” – a period where the team is re-building their playing ranks with the aim of giving them the opportunity to win again sometime in the future. This article looks at the concept of “rebuilding” and challenges it as a valid philosophy in professional sport.

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Improve your Coaching by NOT Coaching
Coaching Tips, Sports Coaching

By Wayne Goldsmith |

You read right – improve your coaching by NOT coaching.

Coaching improves performance.

But too much coaching – over coaching – can have a negative influence on performance.

Who OVER coaches?

Typically five types of coaches OVER coach:

  1. Young, inexperienced coaches who are trying too hard;
  2. Coaches who lack real belief in themselves and who try to make up for it by giving too much information. These coaches will often want to be liked – and feel the more coaching they do, the more the athletes will like them;
  3. Coaches who lack belief in their athletes and feel the need to control every element of preparation and performance;
  4. Coaches who are being evaluated or assessed and aim to impress by being SEEN to control every element of the training session, i.e. they believe that great coaching is talking more;
  5. EGO driven coaches who see athletes / players as a vehicle to promote themselves and their reputations.
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The Player Potential Profile – an integrated, practical approach to Talent Identification and Recruitment in High Performance Sport – Part One
The Player Potential Profile – an integrated, practical approach to Talent Identification and Recruitment in High Performance Sport – Part One
Performance Science, Sports Coaching

Every now and again, a client will ask me to come up with a new way of doing something to help them achieve their performance goals.

In recent years, a real focus for me has been developing innovative talent identification, recruitment and retention strategies for professional sporting teams.

These next three posts will outline a concept called the Player Potential Profile – an integrated, practical approach to Talent Identification and Recruitment in High Performance Sport.

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Coaching Self-Confidence in Sport: An Evidence Based Approach.
Coaching Self-Confidence in Sport: An Evidence Based Approach.
Performance Psychology, Sports Coaching

There is no doubt that developing self-confidence is one of the hottest topics in sports coaching. Coaches universally agree that helping athletes to develop a strong sense of self-confidence: one which is resistant to the pain, pressure and fatigue of preparation and performance is at the core of what sports coaching is all about. So how do coaches help athletes to develop self-confidence? This article presents some practical ideas for helping athletes to develop a strong, real sense of self-confidence: self-confidence which is built on a solid foundation of evidence rather than on hollow rhetoric, shallow praise and cheesy motivational sayings.

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Making Sense of Testing Athletes
Making Sense of Testing Athletes
Performance Science, Sports Coaching

Testing athletes has become a multi-million dollar industry. Coaches and athletes can buy testing programs, testing equipment, testing manuals, testing systems and testing tools to test any athlete, anywhere, anytime and for any reason. But, it’s not the testing that’s important: it’s how the testing applies to enhancing the competition performance of the athlete that really matters. This article discusses testing from a holistic perspective and challenges coaches, athletes and sports science professionals to think before they test.

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