Navigating Team Perspectives

This week, I was honoured to speak at the Australian Institute Of Sport Performance Teams Forum in Canberra to share my thoughts on how to work with a PST (Performance Support Team). I represented the athlete-to-coach view; Jason Bartram represented the Sports Scientist to Coach to Senior Performance Scientist view, and Eric Haakonssen represented the PhD student, physiologist/coach to Performance Support and Podium manager view. Interestingly, we have all worked in cycling at some point in our careers with different disciplines, and whilst now we are each in other sports (myself still in cycling, Jason in Swimming and Eric in Surfing), I felt like we shared similar views on what optimal looks like thanks to our collective experiences.

Allan McConnell facilitated the panel, and it was great to work with Allan, who not only asked great questions, but I felt was able to engage the crowd differently by getting us to move our chairs closer or further away from each other for how connected or not we thought to each other by what we were saying. We started by suggesting that the crowd were the athletes, so I sat a little further out in frontt, closer to the crowd at the start of the talk; as the conversation progressed, we became more aligned and closer.

I understand that I operate differently from other coaches around me - for better or worse. I am continually asked by upcoming coaches what they should do to get an edge, and my response is always the same: go and do a teaching degree or a certificate or diploma in education. My educational background has influenced how I approach coaching and working with the people around me. It was not only the pedagogical knowledge that I learned in my degree and how to scaffold learning, assess for learning, think critically and engage learners who don't care about your session contact, etc.; it was also the fact that a teacher is not just a teacher. A teacher needs to learn how to connect with students of such vast and varying backgrounds, work with faculties to design and implement vast and complex curriculums and work within a school to deliver the values and ambitions of the school. What does that have to do with coaching? Well, everything! Coaching is teaching, and teaching is coaching.

Coaching courses primarily revolve around coaches learning things like sports science when we have PST who already have PhDs in these spaces! I would like to see more coaches learn about pedagogy, how to plan, data literacy and how to lead. The next revolution in sports could come with improved coaching applications. A lot of coaches are ex-athletes with very little, if any, formal education, who have a significant amount of domain expertise, who I think become bogged down with all the other things that coaches are responsible for and never really learn how to transfer all that excellent knowledge that they do have. Sometimes, I think we would only hire a nutritionist with formal education - why do we hire coaches without formal education? There is no right or wrong answer to that. I know that there are competent coaches out there who have won lots of medals without that - it's simply an observation, a question.??

I realised very quickly when I stepped onto this side of the fence as a coach that I was not just responsible for the hopes and dreams of the athletes but also for empowering and enabling the PST. High-performance Sport mostly really only considers the athlete, and whilst the athlete is the most significant piece of the puzzle as they ultimately are the ones who go and perform the PST, are in their own right's high performers themselves and, if enabled to be the best that they can be the athletes benefit as a byproduct. One of the questions we pondered was: 'Is it a coach's job to manage the PST?' The simple answer is probably no, but the more complex answer is that the team (athletes and PST) ARE looking at the coach to lead them, so yes, the coach has to have a degree of skill in managing the whole team. My experience is that when the PST is managed well, my job becomes much easier as I can delegate tasks to the team and so I have not found the job of leading the whole team all that overbearing when its established and going well.??Whilst my degree also majored in Sport Science, and I am a qualified S&C coach as well, I could take on a lot more than I do, I do not want to do those things.??My domain expertise lies in the technical and tactical components of Track Sprint Cycling and being able to transfer knowledge to all kinds of learners. I am more than happy to provide the performance problem to my team and have them find the solution, and if it doesn't work, we go back to the drawing board.

How was it possible to take the GB women's team from being 21% off the predicted winning targets to delivering them to a new coach 10 months out only 4% off the target???Then, watching them go on to win? It was, in some ways, quite simple:

• Identify the performance problems and prioritise them
• Develop a plan/intervention and assign the roles for athletes via IAPPs and assign the PST to the performance intervention
• Educate the team (athletes included) on HOW we were going to go about it
• Deliver the intervention/plan
• Debrief

Part of that process included robust performance discussions with a head coach (performance manager) who enabled me to live my vision and who coordinated and directed the major debriefs and budgets, identifying what measures we would use to track success so that we could pivot if we needed to and having very thorough planning and debrief processes. With clear plans and strategies in place I was then able to do the bit I like the most - connect with and coach the athletes and connect with my staff. It seems straightforward. Winning is not all that complicated, and when I say win, sometimes that means an 8th place because that is what an athlete is capable of. My leadership philosophy centers around maximising people's potential; if 8th place is that, then that's a win to me. If that means a PST member actually enjoying coming to work, then that's a win to me.

Now that my non-compete clause is over with GB, I hope that I will be allowed to deliver my vision within Aus Cycling because the potential within the system is so great, as evidenced by a lot of work done behind the scenes this year with the women's pathway which resulted in a team who was not afforded the opportunity to go to the Olympics, which was contentious in my opinion as the talent was always there, to winning a bronze medal in the Team Sprint at the World Championships. The future is bright for Women's Sprint in Australia, and I look forward to finally starting the journey of working with the athletes and PST within AusCycling in the new year.