Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Twenty-Eight – Sport Has Changed, so we Need to Work Together
Hello and welcome back to Brain In The Game. Brain In The Game is a podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain In The Game is that missing champion DNA, and I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 28, we're going to learn how to work as a team. Let me start off by saying this is not a coach-bashing podcast. This is an opportunity for us to re-assess how we work with our athletes. This topic is very dear to my heart and a bit of a soapbox item for me. There's no denying a lot of coaches are technically phenomenal at what they do: they understand the sport, the coaching aspect, and the technical requirements for an athlete to succeed.
But sport has changed. The dynamics of sport has changed. The requirements to create a successful athlete has change. When I was an athlete back in the 80s, coaches did know everything there was to know about the sport; or at least, there wasn't any support specialist to add to that dynamic. Back in my day, you had a physio that worked with the national team, and maybe a specialist doctor and maybe a choreographer in the gymnastics program I was involved in.
But that was kind of the extent of it. Today you have physios, chiropractors, psychologists, mind coaches, strength and conditioning, biomechanics, nutritionists, just to name a few – who all have an integral part in training an athlete. This changes the dynamics and the role of many of those playing the game. It used to be a coach and an athlete. Today, that entourage team could be 10, 20, or even 30 people deep.
If we look at the motorsport industry, the number of support crew and specialists is phenomenal, and each of them have a very defined and controlled role to play in creating that athlete's environment so they can do what they do best. In the last month alone I have watched four different athletes miss out on opportunities because their coach wouldn't work with support specialists. All this is doing is denying the athlete the opportunity to achieve what they know they can achieve.
This is not a podcast about bashing coaches, but about opening the eyes to all those involved, enabling them to see that the role of a coach today is as specialized as a chiropractor, choreographer, or nutritionist. I don't know about you, but I never met a coach who knows everything – the physio aspect of maintaining the body; the biomechanics aspect of getting an athlete to perform better; the mind-coaching or psychology aspect of getting an athlete to perform consistently; the strength and conditioning or nutrition – all the parts that go into making an athlete – and still know everything there is to know about the sport itself.
It's humanly impossible to know everything about all these different, very important aspects, to create the right environment for an athlete. Back in the day when a coach had to be that one and only person involved with the athlete, they were kind of expected to be jack of all trades and master of none. Sport today is different, it's a high-demand, high-intensity business. In order for that business to be successful we have to put the right people in the right jobs.
I started by saying I've seen in the past month four athletes miss out on four big opportunities because their coaches didn't see past their role. That's a shame. It's something I find repugnant about the sporting industry, my industry. This industry is about letting the athlete achieve their greatest potential, and we do that by working as a team. How do we know where the coach's role begins and ends? The parent's? The support specialists'?
Building an athlete is like building a high-performance motor car. You have to have your auto electricians, your mechanics, designers, ergonomics, fuel specialists. When all these people come together and it works seamlessly, you get this quality product that can perform. We need to think of our athletes in the same context. To understand that in order for our athletes to perform at the highest level time after time, we need to put the right environment around them. That all comes down to understanding what our role is.
If we're asking a coach to step back at times they maybe felt they should be stepping up, then where does their role begin and end? Their role is to deliver specific, relevant information, at the right time and in the best and most effective format. Essentially, they're the information station. They're there to teach the athlete how to perform the skills, how to bring all that together to make a routine or driver faster or hit a ball further or jump higher. That's what they're specialists in.
Within my coaching and lecturing roles, I often talk about parents having a very specific and precise role, too. That's to make their children feel loved – they're almost the manager. Often in the early days, they had to make the hard calls of what an athlete will or won't do, who represents them, who interacts with them. A parent has a very specific role. In the old days the parent would hand the child over to the coach and let the coach do what they wanted to do; but in this high-drive sporting environment today, the parent has a different and more demanding role.
Then of course there are spots support specialists: physiotherapists, psychotherapists, chiropractor, mind coach, strength and conditioning coach, biomechanic, nutritionist. All these people have a specific, targeted role to play in enabling their athlete to be optimum. As a mind coach, my role wouldn't be to step in and tell a coach their technical aspect of what they're trying to teach their athlete. However, my role could be to say “The way you're communicating, we could be doing that better”. The strength and conditioning coach, their role is not to step in to tell the coach how to teach the athlete to learn a new skill; but they can step up by saying “By using this set of conditioning exercises, we can get that athlete to jump higher, run faster, and swim stronger.” and so on. When we look at the physiotherapist, how do we prepare an athlete's body so it doesn't suffer the fatigue or injury that yesteryear athletes were often sidelined over or lost careers over.
They're specialists in their field and we need to be able to integrate their specialties into our coaching program. The same with biomechanics and nutritionists. I often talk about needing to have nutritionists onboard constantly, because we want to get the best out of these athletes and that comes down to what we put into our bodies. Everybody has a very specific role to play, including the coach, and ultimately including the athlete. The athlete is there specifically to perform sustainably and replicate success after success. They can only do that when they can focus 100% on their role without having to worry about what they're eating, or what their body's doing, or their mental/emotional/cognitive development.
That's the peripheral's job, of us in the entourage, to feed them the right information and skill set at the right time. That includes the coach. We need to work as a team and build this environment around our athletes that feeds every aspect of their development.
If we think of this in the context of a surgical team, you have the head surgeon – that's the coach, the ones in the front who ultimately have the responsibility, and everyone in that theater respects that role. However, the surgeon couldn't do their job if they didn't have the anesthetist, or the nurse who had all the instruments ready to go. Everyone has a specific, targeted role. We need to remove the belief of the yesteryear coach where they believed they had to be every role. All the responsibility and accountability was on them and their shoulders.
We've evolved. We're in a new era of sport and performance. The role of a coach is to coach. They're not the whole orchestra – they're there to conduct, and to allow those with the specific roles to play the right instruments at the right time. If you're a coach and you're listening to this, I want you to look at your coaching program and look at those you have on the peripheral around your athlete. Are they enabled to do their job? Are there sports-specific specialists that you've got there and you're allowing them to do their job? Are you asking them the right questions? Are you across what they're doing so you can feel comfortable? Do they have the right accessibility?
I had to stand back and watch these four athletes miss out. It was an awful feeling. I had to stand back and watch it because they weren't my athletes and I had no right to step in. But those coaches have hindered those athletes. Not intentionally – you could see they were there and wanted the right thing for their athletes, but it was almost like a smothering of the athlete. They didn't want to let anyone else in just in case they take away some of the 'shine' of the coach, or stepped on the coach's toes, or if they didn't fit 100% like a glove.
That comes down to communication and working as a team. Finding out your role, how you communicate, how you work together. Step back and look at your program and understand who you have around you. The skill sets you may not be utilizing. Look at your athletes and figure out what they need and if they're getting it.
I hope you've enjoyed this very passionate episode of Brain In The Game. Until our next episode of Brain In The Game, enjoy the ride, and train smart. My name's Dave Diggle, I'm the Mind Coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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