An Answer to a Fellow Coach
I had a message the other day from my mate Mike Mulvey – a Soccer coach of some renown here in Australia where he mentioned this – “Teyah Goldie: Fifth Arsenal player out with an ACL injury. I think there might be something in this.”
My reply.
For 30 years we have known that ACL and other serious knee injuries often happen in a multi-directional, multi-plane, multi-amplitude, reactive movement pattern. Often illustrated when braking, cutting, or landing in a reactive situation.
Moreso, we have known for decades that females are predisposed to be more vulnerable due to things like Hip Q-Angle, menstrual influences, and earlier puberty windows than boys – but the most pronounced problem is the female's lack of exposure and adaptation to a movement pattern learning journey that builds their physical (in this case mechanical) efficiency, consistency, and resilience (robustness).
This latter limitation affects males in a similar way but their development through puberty sees testosterone get the upper hand to at least create a musculature that offers some physical resilience. Testosterone helps but the underlying factor for both sexes is that they must create a physical competence platform that always stays one step ahead of the challenges laid down by the sports-specific patterns created in the technical and tactical journeys of sport. In a controlled learning environment little risk is seen but in the chaos of a game/competition-specific situation when the reactive technical movement patterns are under ‘speed, fatigue and pressure’ the risk is considerable for those with little or no movement efficiency, consistency, and resilience. This failure to create a buffer between the reactive, complex movement patterns and the individual’s mechanical competence and resilience is the cornerstone of many of the problems witnessed along the Development continuum.
Over the years as many knowledgeable practitioners informally explained this set of circumstances and appropriate solutions to the coaches in the field further limitations were exposed. While many understood the arguments for these catastrophic tissue failure injuries, they were clearly ill-prepared to change the content of their training sessions. As often witnessed, many would try to create a mechanical efficiency journey but once faced with the “what do I do next in the long term?” they gave up and returned to the technical/tactical status quo. Others were more fortunate, and support arrived to allow some remedies to be ‘bolted on’ to the existing technical/tactical pathways. They attempted to bolt on small training units (often called ‘movement breaks’) to the warm-up and main session but the selection, teaching and progression of such units were plainly alien to them. After a short while, with little apparent progress, it was easier for them to revert to the status quo of technical and tactical.
The answer lies in a complete overhaul of the mission statement, language and vocabulary created by adults that currently compromise the vital journeys to physical well-being that is coupled with the journey to long-term, successful sports participation (pssst! this includes the content of Physical Education in our school's systems). At the centre of such an overhaul is a commitment to placing mechanical and metabolic efficiency, consistency, and resilience as the foundation of all journeys in this Development sphere. It is time to cancel the current ineffective, short-term, trinket-seeking mission.
These 30 years of failure have meant a plague of athletes stricken with catastrophic injuries, the rehabilitation from which is another tale to tell that also reeks of incompetence by adults. Never forget that it is adults who have created this skewed, ineffective, inefficient, and unbalanced strategy for our young participants. While the layers of negligence are never hidden, they amazingly keep on being repeated in the adult's quest for winning at all ages, results, ranking and reward.
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Where to start?
It is way past the time when the career bureaucrats running our sports need to be held accountable and replaced by those with a different set of values. The key is to finally focus attention on the coach-athlete interface – the training session, the learning and progression facet of the journey. These vital components are ignored by the career bureaucrats and in their place are the sickly, repetitive, misleading, announcements of their ‘new plan’. They spew out inappropriate statistics showing a greater number of coaches, greater numbers of certificates being awarded, new appointments of Directors, Assistant Directors, and Board members (all those willing to continue the bureaucratic narrative) and promises of putting the coaching/teaching fraternity at the centre of all decision-making. If you look back in time you will see this biennial strategy in all its glory. You can predict when a new plan/strategy/appointment/mission statement is due when some pressure is brought to bear on the bureaucracy. It is so predictable it is laughable.
The key is the ‘coal face’, the coach-athlete interface. This is the site requiring the greatest investment. For every Athlete Pathway version promulgated so there must be an equivalent Coach Development improvement. The problem is that the career bureaucrat knows very little about this place of action. Look closely at all the appointments at the administrative level and you will quickly see a plethora of like-minded appointments loyal to the narrative determined by the bureaucracy. Even those who join the bureaucracy from the coal face seem to quickly conform to the unwritten lures and rules of these high-level positions. They are either quickly dismissed or have to capitulate to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats beget bureaucrats. I have recently witnessed, again, one of Australia’s leading high-performance operations appoint a person with a history of failure at the coal face. The attraction? Probably a malleable individual willing to give up all semblance of integrity in the hope of long-term employment. Seldom do the tough, consistently effective coal-face mavericks ever get the chance to make a realistic contribution to the administrative strategy. Those days are long gone.?
20 years ago, when I worked at the Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS), those of us at the coal face determined that while we were chasing the medal tally at one end of the performance continuum, our best investment had to be back at the State Organisation level, those responsible for the Development journey. The intention had to be to create a Coaching Pathway that was equipped to drastically reduce the limitations we were seeing at the QAS level when the talent had been identified and recruited. The strategy had to be to build that athlete ‘from the ground up’ across all four pillars (Technical, Tactical, Physical, Behavioural) and utilise the ‘efficiency to consistency to resilience’ platform as the essence of the individual’s journey. This meant an investment in existing Coach Development education content and a plan of lifelong coaching improvement utilising a local, area, and regional workshop/mentorship system. While the cogent arguments for such change were delivered to the bureaucracy, they never saw the light of day. This was 20 years ago.
Safe to say that the pertinent cornerstone of this chat (ACL injury) is but a small part of a larger issue in terms of the Athlete and Coach journeys currently in place. As usual, the answer lies not with waiting for the career bureaucrats to change their ways but with those in the field to meet and share with each other all those remarkable coach-athlete interactions that are working. While it will not be appropriate to simply copy into your personal coach-athlete environment they will surely make you think. Few can ever stop you from changing your sessions for the better. You may try some simple manipulations of session content; you may not feel confident to keep progressing, but the more we all share the direct learning / organizational / progression practices, the easier this change might become. Spend some time sharing/examining practical things like:
Should the adult coaching community put together a journey aimed at the goals of efficiency, consistency, and resilience in multi-directional, -plane, -amplitude movement answers to the reactive movement puzzles occurring frequently in the chaos of the competition environment, we might see a reduction in injuries as well as a more seamless transition along the continuum from well-being to high performance.
Sorry for the ramble!