New Zealand Coach Magazine

Coach links (30 April 2013)

coachadmin — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:51:25 +0000

This edition we look at technology in coaching, and delve into the importance of constructive advice when telling (teenage) athletes they’ve missed squad selection. We also highlight an interesting American volleyball programme that focuses on coaching youth athletes and their parents, consider sport and recreation sector workforce research, and catch up with basketball player turned coach, Paul Henare. We explore some of the key practices of successful volunteer organisations, while a TED talk includes a perspective on balancing individual aspiration alongside team goals.

Technology to use in your coaching

SportsCoachUK

The best coaching is essentially a human enterprise, but modern technology can certainly help. This SportsCoachUK article provides a practical guide to using technology in your coaching. For example, you could improve your players’ fitness levels by downloading the Yo Yo Test from iTunes. (PDF)

How to Successfully Teach and Train Athletes 10 and Under

The Art of Coaching Volleyball

“Bring Your Own Parent” is an American Volleyball programme that focuses on the under tens. Ruth Nelson developed it while searching for a new way to train the little ones, noting that “parents and athletes at this stage of development are very receptive and absorb information like sponges.”

Paul Henare ready next chapter in Southland

Stuff

Paul Henare was an iconic playing figure in NZ Basketball. He’s developing his successful coaching career, with a new chapter unfolding in Southland.

Coaches need to connect for good of game

Griffith University

Communicating effectively with teenagers is always a challenge, but it’s seldom more important than when they’ve missed out on a sports team or squad. Constructive advice can be the key to maintaining their motivation.

Sporting groups face struggle for coaches, study finds

Deakin University

We all know that coaches are vitally important at all levels of sport, but how much do we know about our wider sports coachforce? Sport NZ has begun work on understanding our sport and recreation workforce. This recent research from Australia’s Deakin University offers some fascinating insights into the coaching workforce across the ditch.

27 Best Practices of High Performing Volunteer Organizations

Idea Champions

There is no shortage of research and advice on how important volunteers are to sport in general and coaching in particular. So what do the best volunteer organisations do? Idea Champions provides a list of 27 key practices, including the importance of “not leaving people hanging’”.

Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

TED

One of the great challenges in coaching team sports is balancing individual aspiration and team goals. In this TED talk, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies why people evolved to be moral beings, says “the most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation”.

A coach to be counted on

coachadmin — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:18:12 +0000

When the hunt was on for regional nominations for the 2012 Sport Volunteer Awards, some quite remarkable characters suddenly found themselves under an unaccustomed spotlight. They were more used to dishing out pearls of wisdom to their sporting charges than experiencing a public gaze.

None were more so than Lin Tozer who claimed the Sport Volunteer Award for the Manawatu region. Lin is a number cruncher who lectures on accountancy at Massey University. She has degrees and diplomas, right up to a masters and she’s a chartered accountant but Lin would rather plant beans than count them. It turns out that she likes interacting with ideas and people rather than columns of numbers. Lin also steps forward when others hang back. Such a step, 10 years ago got her into coaching her sons’ cricket and football sides.

“Everybody said, ‘We need a coach,’ and everybody stood around with their hands in their pockets saying, ‘Please don’t pick me’.” So Lin stepped forward and became the cricket and football coach.

The same thing happened at the Ice Breaker Aquatics’ swimming team 18-months ago. With the head coach having died accidentally, the team needed to rebuild under a new coach. They accepted Lin who admitted to no prior swimming coaching experience.

“It was a bit of bluff really, I was just repeating what I heard other coaches tell my kids.” So she read books, used common sense and looked at how other coaches developed programmes and now she is in boots and all.

Broadening the focus

Boots and all means coaching at the pool for two hours each day, attendance at competitions, shepherding her swimmers around the region to compete and studying for higher qualification that will allow her to judge at higher competition levels. In between Lin organises carnivals, stages fund-raising events and runs awards and Christmas functions.

“Watching kids changing from being quite scared of the water sometimes to see what they can actually achieve is quite a positive thing,” she says.

Competitive success in swimming can mean shaving as little as one hundredth of a second from a personal best. In a young body, naturally strengthening as it grows, that can sometimes be easily and often achieved. As swimmers mature though, it might take years and that’s where true determination separates the achievers from those who aren’t trying.

Lin, though, is not looking to grab the elites to herself. She has a down-to-earth attitude to talent.

“The top 10 per cent are going to succeed, no matter what,” she says, so she lets them get on with it.

“Eighty five per cent of those we have in our pool will never make it beyond the local competition circuit. If coaches focus on just the top two or top three swimmers in a group it’s not fair on the rest.”

So the elites will succeed regardless and Lin says she doesn’t measure her success by swimming trophies. She will push and help a kid who wants to make it to the top but she says there’s all the other kids in the pool too and she measures her overall success by their enjoyment and personal achievements.

The naturals and the workers

There are 50 or so swimmers in Ice Breaker Aquatics and Lin says there’s no way of spotting who will succeed when they first start. Natural talent abounds but the swimmer has to crave success and some with huge potential aren’t hungry enough. So, like all coaches, in all codes, before her, Lin has spotted kids with huge natural talent who let it slip away and plodders whose work ethic lifts them up to dogged success.

“There are those who fall into it and still really don’t have an appreciation for what they’ve got or what they can achieve sometimes. Those who have to work for it really appreciate it when they get it at the end of the day,” says Lin, and she’s talking about accountancy students because it applies universally.

Lin’s future in coaching includes having qualified as a race starter and an inspector of turns and her next step is as a referee. It’s her way of following her own children through as they swim competitively, without being their coach.

But other mums and dads who throw their tadpoles in at the deep end will still have Lin’s attention and she has no plans to stop coaching them.

“I am happy to continue doing that as long as I can get to a pool.”

Phew, Ice Breaker Aquatics can relax. Lin is there for as long as they’ll have her.

Young gun cricket coach

coachadmin — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:37:37 +0000

When coaches set out to build a team of youngsters they try to inspire and teach techniques in the hope that they will get through to those who might one day be champions or, at the least, gain some life lessons. But it’s not just the message that the young minds absorb as the coaches look them over and sift the gifted from the journeymen.

The youngsters assess the coaches. They understand and remember what coaching styles work, that bellowing doesn’t, that favouritism sours the team, and that inspirational coaches are to be treasured.

At only 16, the Bay of Plenty’s Lucian Clark has already had enough experiences to decide what sort of coaching style works and what doesn’t. He needs to know because, young as he is, he’s a coach; an inspirational one, according to those who have observed his style.

Lucian is one of those sports-mad young men who have enough resilience, when illness or injury strikes, to continue contributing to sport. A Bay of Plenty representative cricket player from age 12 for 3-years, Lucian became ill following a burst appendix. He is saddled now with chronic fatigue and, although he expects its effects to lessen and disappear completely, he’s unable to sustain the effort for participation in his chosen game. So, he coaches.

He coaches cricket and hockey at intermediate school level and applies what he learnt from good coaches and leaves out the bits that he disliked.

“I don’t stand and bark at them. I spend a lot of time just talking. I’m not one of those coaches that stands there and yells,” he says, recounting lessons learned.

Lucian says he just sort of fell into coaching. His sister wanted to play cricket at a school that didn’t offer cricket and so he stepped in and several years later continues to coach the year 4 team. He took on the coaching before his illness so the role attracted him even before he found that it would be his sole pursuit while he recovers.

His aims as a coach are to rise to a representative team after, that is, he makes a bid for a professional cricket career. Lucian is attracted to a sport that’s great for statisticians. He says he’s good at maths and physics at school and one of his traits, according to his admirers, is that he’s great at providing statistical reports for his young charges.

The statistics of his own that he remembers best are the 10 wickets in 4 games that he took while playing representative cricket. Meantime, while playing is out, he’s a coach.

“I think that if I can’t play then I might as well stay in the game and do something that will help everyone else in the way that everyone else has helped me,” he says, summing up his motivation to coach in a sentence.

And his philosophy as a coach? As a player, he says it was, “More about me taking wickets and me scoring runs.” Now, he trades the desire to win against the need to build a team, even to the point of giving the less skilled a go and risking the outcome.

“At training I just work on the whole team and if we can get that working then during the game we will play to win but the team comes first.”

It’s those days as a junior soaking up all that the coaches had to offer that taught Lucian his style, one that helped him receive the top Sport Volunteer Award in the Bay of Plenty in 2012. While some of his coaches picked players on reputations instead of form, he picks those who have the form. And he’s guided by that firm belief learnt years ago, that teams win team sports, not individuals.

Riding the coaching wave

coachadmin — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:24:20 +0000

On any given weekend, heads bob in the surf at New Zealand’s beaches and look from afar like little more than anonymous dots in the briny. But there’s a select group of athletes who dote on them as a duck fusses over ducklings.

They count them, fret when the count differs from the last one, herd them along the beach away from rips and throw themselves into any sea to help them when they sense trouble. There are 15,000 such lifeguards spread across our beaches, marshalled, rostered and trained by 73 clubs.

They don’t discriminate amongst the bobbing heads between drunks, foolish young men, unfit older men and women and naive children, most of whom have never known what a few hundred tonnes of water smashing onto the shallows can do to a will to resist.

In between the mother duck routine, they train and swim and run and improve their skills and stamina. They compete as hard as any elite athletes and when they grow up and get jobs and start families, many leave and never come back.

To some lifeguards, the mostly voluntary patrols are a sport while to others it’s a community service given gladly. There’s another bunch too, for whom the coaching bug has bitten, who love the sport but who love the recruitment and training more than standing on podiums at the many surf carnivals that happen in summer. Someone has to teach the next generation of lifeguards. These are the ones who do come back.

Zara Smith, of New Plymouth’s East End Surf Life Saving Club is one such surf lifesaver for whom the coaching bug has bitten and inflicted a 20-year plan, at least, to stay with the sport and help manage it to a brighter future. Zara is only 23 but she’s set herself short and long term goals, none of which include shaving tenths of seconds from obscure world record times or buying a cabinet to stack with silver plates.

Zara wants to coach. Not just coach, she wants to stick with the entry point to surf lifesaving; the youngsters who they call ‘nippers’. Nippers are precocious little 6-year olds who join clubs because their parents were once members or because they take to water like a salmon fingerling. They progress to juniors and, at 16, hit the beach as fully fledged life guards, with all the responsibilities and sometimes shocking events that that entails.

Zara likes coaching them and juniors so much that she’s worked her way up to become the national junior surf coordinator with 170 juniors aged under 14 years. It’s her task to ensure that the training programmes equip them with enough to progress to full life guards on a beach some where in the country. She also chairs the Taranaki junior regional surf committee.

This is no short term aim. To further her plans, Zara’s halfway through a Bachelor of Sport and Exercise at Massey, majoring in management and coaching. At 23 there’s no hint of drifting into coaching because an injury or lack of speed has prevented her from competition. This is what she wants to do.

“I hope to see myself working for Surf Life Saving New Zealand sometime in the near future,” she says. Should she gain that career, her degree majors will exactly mirror the path she’ll pursue. “That’s the plan, anyway.”

Zara says she loves everything about coaching. “It’s an amazing feeling when you get a kid that can’t go in the water when they start and then, by the end of it, they’re swimming out around the cans and back in, winning races.”

Like so many competitors inspired by great coaches to begin to train others, Zara cites Sport Taranaki’s Guy Honnor.

“He was a huge influence for me,” she says, as was an East End club member, John Dent. Perhaps, without knowing it, these two and others fired a spark in a junior that looks like it will burn long enough for her to lead others on to help build both the sporting and service aspects of surf life saving.

In mid-February, Zara returned from attending the Surf Life Saving Australia national leadership course having been nominated by Surf New Zealand. There she says she found further inspiring characters who have intensified her desire to help the sport in a management and coaching capacity. She says she’s happier as a backroom person.

In other words, Zara is a coach who likes the beginners, whom she can inspire to gain acceptance as seniors, not a coach seeking a handful of elite lifeguards with whom she can share a spotlight. Generally, that’s called a grass roots coach, a vital role that every sport needs.

Goals of a women’s football coach

coachadmin — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:22:16 +0000

It may or may not be instructive to read on Wikipedia’s entry on New Zealand football that the page dedicated to women’s football is a scant four paragraphs. Men’s pages, other than just lists of players and results, proliferate. Things, though, are changing and Wikipedia, let’s not forget, is as accurate as the last person to edit it, no matter their qualifications.

Things are changing because of the support and coach training from Football New Zealand and of the desire of players like Auckland’s Rebecca O’Neil to move from player to coach to try to build the beautiful game’s interest for girls and women.

Rebecca has been participating in Football New Zealand’s female coaching school. She’s enthusiastic and she wants to coach. It looks like a perfect match.

Rebecca, now not much over 30, wants to continue her involvement with the game even though she can see an eventual end to her playing days. Her involvement will be in coaching where she can try to inspire younger players, right up to international level eventually.

Marconi and Michigan

Rebecca, grew up in Wellington where she progressed through age grade representative sides to play at senior level and then to the National league for a decade. To gain experience and improve her game, Rebecca shifted to Sydney, where she played for Marconi for 3 seasons, winning the league in each of them.

In one of those seasons she also represented New South Wales. A long-haul airline flight took her to the powerhouse of women’s football, the USA and a three-month stint with the West Michigan Fire.

“The game for females is absolutely huge over there, “Rebecca says, “There’s a really good career pathway and it’s one of the strongest countries in the world for the game.” The league was semi-professional when Rebecca was there but now she says it’s gone fully professional.

That is a long way off in New Zealand but Rebecca joined 25 other coaching hopefuls to attend Football New Zealand’s coaching fundamentals course last year, with a refresher earlier this year. The aim is to send qualified women back to their regions armed with Football New Zealand coaching principles and skills to attract and retain players.

“Most of the people who came to the course were pretty motivated” she says. “Most will go back to their federations and coach at various levels”. And for her future, Rebecca says she’s banking on a long-term involvement as a coach, starting slowly and working up.

“I want to take my time and learn. I don’t think that just because I have been a player at a high level that I can become the best coach around.”

She is more interested in coaching females than males but says the option is open to her to choose either. She has coached boys’ teams in the past and found that once they’d seen her game skills she was just the coach and things went well.

Rebecca has a new baby and plans to continue as a player in Auckland’s premier league so it’s early days for her coaching career. Her inspiration comes, as it does from so many across different sports, from amazing coaches who lift their teams and individuals up to higher levels than they could have imagined.

Rebecca has captained many teams and so she’s experienced parts of a management role and worked closely with her coaches, absorbing which techniques work and which don’t.

“As a coach you’ve got to lead from the front and be accountable and learn how to get the best from the team,” she says.

Just as Rebecca has begun the task of guiding and inspiring the next generation of players, Football New Zealand is also working on the current crop on a larger scale.

Judging by Rebecca’s enthusiasm, they have begun well. Rebecca says in the past, female coaches didn’t see a clear career path. That has now changed.

“Football New Zealand is definitely heading in the right direction by wanting to bring more female coaches in. I think it can only be good for the game.”

With New Zealand women’s teams at the last two world cups and Olympics, the profile of the sport is high. Youngsters can look forward to participating in a sport that, increasingly, offers a career, not just a game.

Rebecca’s not holding her breath about earning a full-time living from coaching, but she says longer term, the way the game’s growing, that might well be an option without the present need to go overseas. She credits her optimism to Football New Zealand’s planning and programme.

She and the other 25 from the coaching course are at work now, in clubs and federations around New Zealand. The results of their enthusiasm are coming to a football ground near you soon.

Coaching for the thrill of the skill

coachadmin — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:45:42 +0000

When spring arrives this year a long-time Hawke’s Bay gymnastics coach will qualify for a pensioner’s Gold card that will grant her free bus trips. That’s fine except that she spends so much time at the gymnasium, administering and coaching that she will almost never be out on the streets to catch a free bus during the qualifying times.

Jane Sheldrake arrives at Napier’s Omni Gymnasium every weekday at 8am and is still coaching, sometimes until after 9pm each day. In the weekend she coaches the coaches and sometimes hosts foreign gymnasts here for training and competition. She has done this since 1975 and has no plans to give it up. Until a few years ago, this was all unpaid and voluntary and now only most of it is.

Jane is 2012 Volunteer of the Year for Hawke’s Bay. It sounds like a title she could easily have won annually for nearly forty years, such is her dedication to teaching youngsters how to hurl themselves around gymnasiums and apparatus. Jane’s charges range in age from two to adults and all points in between. She becomes a different style of coach depending on the age group.

“It’s a very rewarding sport, watching children develop. It just gives them so many skills for so many others things,” Jane says.

Solid ground

Gymnastics is all based on the movement patterns of landing, spring, rotation and balance so a grounding in those skills is of benefit in other sports. That’s apart from the life-skills of learning how to achieve goals and blend talent with determination and hard work. There’s also the need for money, and more.

Gymnastics is not a sport that will make anyone wealthy in New Zealand, even if they could find someone willing to pay them. To become good or even great requires the commitment, not just of the gymnast but also of the family and coach.

Jane sees newcomers to the sport who might have the natural ability to become household names but who lack either the ambition or the support network that they’d need to progress. They also need to find the money to pay for their pursuit of fame.

“They can have the physical talent but there are just so many other things that contribute to whether you go right on to the fullest development.” Jane says a coach will often spot natural talent but also realise that, for whatever reason, the gymnast will never make it over all the hurdles.

“We can choose two paths for the gymnast. There’s an international path and there’s also a national path.” Jane says if the gymnast’s circumstances, including the family’s ability to provide support and pay for the campaign don’t stack up to the extreme difficulty of becoming internationally competitive then they’ll be guided into a national career. They can, by willpower, lift themselves up but the commitment and cost means without family and financial help that they are likely to fail.

The cost of committment

The need for money and the nature of gymnastics combine to make it a sport fit for amateurs. Jane gives as an example rugby players, who can hold down a job while they play their sport.

“Our top gymnasts are training 28 – 30 hours a week so there’s no time for much else after that,” she says.

Besides, to be really good requires competition at the top level and that involves expensive trips overseas.

The rewards for those who do pursue this sport? They come with success in competition and achievements.

“The thrill of the skills,” Jane says, “Some of our skills are death-defying at times.”

The thrill of teaching those skills led to Jane and her husband paying their own way so that New Zealand teams could travel to competitions in Australia and Hawaii over a period of 10 years. Officials had to travel with the teams and there wasn’t (and still isn’t) any help with the cost.

“It was often difficult for gymnastics to find people to take those teams away and rather them miss that opportunity my husband and I did several of those tours to ensure that they went ahead,” Jane says. It’s fortunate that her husband shares her enthusiasm for gymnastics and also spends many hours with her at the gym coaching and administrating.

The coaching regime in New Zealand, Jane says, is better thought out and performed to a higher standard than in the early years. She cites the many gymnasts who have grown up in the sport and returned to coach. That and the availability of gyms that are open every day. While the new generation of younger coaches has begun Jane is not about to retire. She’s still flat out coaching and when the physical requirements get too much, she’ll do other work at the gym.

This volunteer is not about to sit around doing nothing, even if she could swap long hours in the gym to ride the buses for free in spring.

Talking about the 10,000 hours

coachadmin — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:46:45 +0000

Most coaches will be aware of the idea popularised by Malcolm Gladwell that, on top of some natural talent, it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in any sport or other activity.

Gladwell’s book on the subject, Outliers, builds on work by Anders Ericsson, and draws seemingly equal amounts of support and scorn. Our Christmas edition features some thought-provoking and at times amusing responses to the theory.

The original pitch: Outliers

In Outliers, Gladwell claims that while exceptional people have natural talent, they must also practice for about 10,000 hours before they are considered an “outlier”, or someone whose brilliance places them outside ordinary life.

Five responses

Bill Gates on Expertise: 10,000 Hours and a Lifetime of Fanaticism

Bill Gates adds personal detail to Ericsson/Gladwell theory. Apart from acknowledging luck, timing and an open mind, Gates suggests that a successful person survives many cycles of attrition to make it to 10,000 hours of experience. “You do have to be lucky enough, but also fanatical enough to keep going.”

The Dan Plan

In April 2010 the extremely average Dan McLoughlan decided to quit his job photograhing dental equipment and, with zero previous experience in the game but a devotion to Gladwell, dedicate 10,000 hours of practice to golf. (Website)

Tim Ferriss Scoffs at Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours

In the battle of the gurus, 4-Hour Body author Tim Ferris takes aim at the 10,000 hours claim. ”For most people, they do things the wrong way.”

10,000 Hours as an infographic

The blog Ziontro has put together an infographic that illustrates the 10,000-hour rule as it applied to the Beatles and to Gates. (Click for the big picture.)

Beyond 10,000 Hours: The Constant Pursuit of Mastery

Forbes contributer George Bradt claims to have improved the 10,000 hours idea. He says he has combined Gladwell’s work with that of Marcus Buckingham (in First Break All the Rules) and Robert Greene, and with his own thinking, to create three new prescriptions:

Embrace your own unique talent
Develop it into a strength
Devote yourself to a cause

Coach links (4 February 2013)

coachadmin — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 21:25:31 +0000

In this edition, we invite you to sit down with all-time coaching guru John Wooden for a fire-side chat without the fire. There’s also new thinking on mental strength from Andy Puddicombe, Dave Diggle and Dr Steve Peters. We’ve included thoughts on the coaching pathway from Sport Coach UK and the International Council for Coach Education, a story on the “winningest coach you’ve never heard of”, and Nike’s international basketball director on where wisdom and innovation come from.

John Wooden: the difference between winning and succeeding

TEDTalks

You may have seen it before but it never loses its impact. Sit down with all-time coaching guru John Wooden and hear why he defines success like this: “peace of mind obtained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable.”

Mental strength through personal awareness

The ability to keep a calm mind in tense situations is much sought after in sport. Andy Puddicombe is an expert on mindfulness, a popular way to clear the mind through alertness exercises that can take as little as 10 minutes a day.

Former high performance coach and mental skills expert Dave Diggle takes a slightly different, though related, approach in his podcast “A Lesson in Mental Toughness”. Both Puddicombe and Diggle emphasis the need for an athlete or coach to assess their emotional condition as a key part of their game.

Listen to Diggle below.

Dr. Steve Peters – elite sport psychiatrist

BBC HardTalk

Sports psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters has a long association with elite UK sport, having trained Victoria Pendleton and Sir Chris Hoy, worked with Liverpool FC, and most recently, with the British cycling team in their Olympic build up. Peters talks about coping with enormous pressures, and with success and failure, in the evolutionary battle to manage our “inner chimp”.

Identifying Excellent Coaching Practice along the Sporting Pathway

Sport Coach UK

The NZ Coaching Strategy outlines how coach development can be aligned to different stages of participant and athlete need. In the UK they take a similar approach, and this excellent piece of research conducted Sport Coach UK provides some great insights into what “best coaching practice” looks for each participant community.

International Sport Coaching Framework – 1 Aug 2012

International Council for Coach Education

The International Council for Coach Education (ICCE) is a not-for-profit, international organisation promoting coaching as an “internationally accepted profession”. The ICCE says its new framework gives an internationally recognised reference point for the education, development and recognition of coaches.

The “Flipped Classroom” and Sports Coaching

Coach Enhancement Platform

As a coach, does it frustrate you that much of your message doesn’t sink in with the athletes? This presentation from the Coach Enhancement Platform, a commercial online video sharing application, outlines the idea of the “flipped classroom” as an interesting approach to engaging athletes.

The Winningest Coach You’ve Never Heard Of

Grantland

You have to love those stories about successful coaches. “The football team at Division III’s Mount Union is one of the most dominant collegiate programs in history. How? A man named Larry Kehres.”

Wisdom and Innovation Often Come From Unexpected Places

George Ravelling

If true growth only comes from stepping outside your comfort zone, can you get comfortable with being uncomfortable? George Ravelling, George Raveling, Nike’s Director of International Basketball, thinks you can.

“I firmly believe that I am more likely to learn something of value from a janitor than a CEO. Janitors’ views are never clouded in the way most CEOs’ visions are. Janitors do not suffer from the curse of knowledge that befalls many CEOs either. Additionally, very few people take the time to listen to what a janitor has to say, so if they do share something of value it will likely be unique and of added value. Whereas when a CEO talks, the majority share in whatever he has to say, so therefore its value is diminished.”

Sport as a microcosm of life

coachadmin — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 23:34:23 +0000

Drawing on his success at the West Point military academy, Dr Ralph Pim talks about how better sports results can be achieved by focusing on helping team members reach their full potential as people.

Dr Ralph Pim

Long after the final whistle has blown, the empty chip punnets have been scattering to the winds and the crowds have departed, there’s a spirit that sport ignites, that can’t be allowed to fade to black with the flood lights.

That view, promoted by an inspirational US sports coach, expects the spirit that binds a team will be carried not just out into the street by competitors after the game, but into their lives to prevail long past the end of their playing days.

Dr Ralph Pim, a basketball coach for thirty years in the United States, has been in New Zealand talking to coaches about his approach to building a winning sports team that not only stacks the cabinet with silver, but which also prepares its members for life.

Ralph put his theories to the test at US military academy West Point (from which he has just retired) and found that the motivated, patriotic, win-at-all-costs mentality of the elite of military cadets adopted his advice and fairly shone with it. New Zealand coaches have been flocking to hear his theories on his first visit here and decide how they’ll implement them.

Ralph developed his theory, inspired by his mentor, the late, legendary basketball coach John Wooden. Wooden proposed, after years of coaching, that success, while it includes the medals and cups, is to be measured largely by the peace of mind that athletes have when they became the best that they could be.

“It starts with the coaches, to understand that winning is a by-product of things such as character, strong leadership and talent but also great effort and teamwork,” Ralph says. The aim during his years as an athlete and coach has been to refine a model that helps athletes and their teams reach their full potential. He seems to have cracked it, judging by the results that he achieved at West Point.

To put his model into practice, he first took experienced West Point coaches and got them to leave behind their familiar methods. He spent his first three years coaxing the coaches into trying a new way by asking them, “Would you try something that would take your team to a higher level?” If they agreed he led them on, step by step.

Under the Pim model, West Point coaches learned, if they hadn’t thought about it before, that sport is a microcosm of life and the values learnt in the team environment and imparted by good coaching will carry the athlete through the sport and out the other side into life. The values include self belief, how to abide by rules, how to persevere and develop a will to win, how to get up after being knocked down and how to set shared goals with their teammates. This isn’t a win at all costs mentality that many of the coaches were used to, but as they adopted his ways, the results were startling and they needed no more convincing.

In the five years previous to Ralph’s time at West Point, the academy won nine collegiate national championships. That’s no small feat in the vast powerhouse that is the American college sporting system. In 2006 though, in the third year of his programme, West Point won 36 national championships, a fourfold increase, and there was no more resistance to his programme. As well as the sporting triumphs, grade point averages went up, disciplinary problems went down and teams started functioning as cohesive units in concert with the coaches.

Ralph has a BSc, MA and a PhD in education. Despite that intellectual firepower he doesn’t discount instinct rather than education as part of the mix that makes a good coach. It can’t all come from books and theory.

“Coaching is an art and a science and that’s a very, very key concept. We’re in the people business. Coaching is all about relationships, relationships, relationships,” he says.

And what makes a great coach? “Your ability to inspire, to teach skills and motivate people, that’s what makes a great coach.”

When those great coaches sit down with their athletes and craft a culture and ethics under Ralph’s model, he says they need to do it together. This is something that can’t be imposed from on high by a coach. He says at West Point, several years after his model won everyone over, both athletes and coaches have distilled the system to its essence: Win with honour.

Ralph Pim came here under the sponsorship of the Greater Auckland Coaching Unit and Quantum Sport. His visit covered various North island centres. He says he loves the friendly attitudes he’s found here, as well as the scenery. It may not be the last we see of him in person but even if he never makes it back, he’s provided food for thought for many New Zealand coaches who heard him speak at workshops and he’s written nine books expounding his methods, for those who missed him.

Athletes and coaches video: Jo Alehm, Olivia Powrie and Nathan Handley

coachadmin — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 23:39:36 +0000

There’s no better way to understand the relationship between coach and athlete than by talking to those who have experienced ultimate success.

In our first video interview, London gold medal yachties Jo Aleh and Olivia Powrie discuss their relationship with coach Nathan Handley. In the second video, we talk to Handley about getting the best from Aleh and Powrie.

Nathan Handley