Tag: Swimming

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.

As the new decade starts, it is time to face the realities of the sports experience around the world.

The last decade, saw the most significant changes in society, in learning, in education, in technology and in social change that the world has experienced. 

And, in general, sport has not kept pace with the extent or speed of the changes.

New Sport: Old Sport. The Decade of Client Focused Sport is Here.

Coaching is one thing.

But Reverse coaching?

What the heck is Reverse Coaching? Has this Sports Coaching Brain guy gone completely mental?

The concept of Talent Identification – TID for short – makes sense.

Do some standardised testing and screening of lots of kids, find the ones who can run faster, run further, jump longer, stretch better than the rest and bingo- you found talent!

It all grew out of the now “mythical” talent identification systems of the old Eastern Block (and more recently China) – and the countless stories we have all heard for the past 30 years about how the centralised government systems put every child in the nation through a series of TID testing protocols and then funnelled them in to the specific sports where their talent was most likely to be developed to its full potential.

But in the western world, in spite of the hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at TID in Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Western Europe, with the exception of a few minor and specialised sports – it has failed and failed badly.