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Coach driven, Athlete Focused, Administratively supported? Isn’t it time we did something different?
By Wayne Goldsmith | In Hot Topics
Thanks for visiting the Brain today while doing your daily web surfing.
While you are in the surfing mood, go and check out some other sporting web sites.
Specifically check out the web sites of the funding agenices, Institutes and Academies of the major Olympics sporting nations.
You will see something like this - on ALL sites:
“Our philosophy is to embrace an athlete centred, coach driven and administratively supported high performance environment”.
This is a fantastic philosophy……….for about 1993.
Isn’t it time we did something different?
Athlete centred / athlete focused: Sounds like a great idea but it rarely means the athletes get lots of money and real, relevant, meaningful support at appropriate times. Most of the time athlete focused means: “Our administrators have set up programs which we think will meet the future needs of our athletes based on our benchmarking of what other nations and systems (and we) have done in the past”. Few of them are innovative, even fewer have ever asked the athletes themselves what they really need and most of them are set up for ease of administration and accountability rather than real impact on performance.
Coach driven: Again - sounds perfect. In all effective elite sports systems, coaches are the driving forces of real change. However not ALL coaches have the skills, experience, knowledge, leadership qualities or abilities to drive the change process. So empowering all coaches with a mystical ability to drive programs just because they coach good athletes is insane. Nations and systems adopting a coach driven philosophy must invest heavily in elite coach development to ensure the system drivers have all the tools to do it successfully.
Administratively supported: And here is the big problem. Administrations do not drive high performance sport - in spite of what they might believe. Where a “big push” is on, e.g. increased funding for a home Olympics, the funding agencies and government sporting administrations provide some start up expertise, some catalytic funding and a basic framework to kick start a high performance system. After that, their primary function is auditing.
But central funding agencies and national systems do not create excellence or genius. Within a short time, the REAL change drivers - Coaches and athletes - accelerate their rate of improvement and knowledge faster than the national funding agency or Academy or Institute so that they - the administrators - become “handbrakes” to success, overly bureacratic and increasingly report and audit driven more than performance focused.
The answer has to be somewhere in a combination of:
- Clearer, more direct funding channels to athletes;
- Better educated coaches;
- Less administration, bureaucracy and reporting requirements.
But what’s the best way?
How would you change it?
What are some examples better ways of doing this?
I would be interested in your views.
Wayne Goldsmith
October 1, 2008
Tags: Athletics, Baseball, Basketball, Boxing, Cycling, Diving, Equestrian, Football, Gymnastics, Hockey, Netball, Soccer, Softball, Swimming, Track and Field, Triathlon
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One Response to “Coach driven, Athlete Focused, Administratively supported? Isn’t it time we did something different?”
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Wayne,
Another very interesting and stimulating article.
I certainly think that our athletes / players have to be the focus of the programs and given the nature of Gen Y and likely characteristics of future generations this will become increasingly important. The demand expertise, because on so many fronts, they are more advanced than many of us who are coaching them. They are far more comfortable telling us what they want, so in turn coaches and administrators need to be constantly asking them for their thoughts and feedback. That concept is nothing new, making people feel valued has always beena key to succes, i think what has changed now is that if players dont feel valued, they quite comfortable just up and leave or change club or stop playing all together and go and do something else. They have so many choices and are quite happy to chop and change, where as in the past, even if players were not entirely happy, I feel people would stick it out.
I believe coach education is the critical factor in your discussion. But not coach education in the traditional form or technique change and skill acquistion. This is obviously very very important for athletes to become technical proficient. But the more elite sport i watch the more apparent it becomes, that consistent success is determined by what is going on above the neck, not below it. I believe our coach education programs focus too little on understanding people, understanding their thought processes, understanding how they learn best and how they prepare. All of this is very much an individual thing and needs to be addressed as such. A blanket approach to team warms ups does not suit the variety of personalities in any given team for example, the same applies to types of training.
The two concepts mentioned above tie in together so tightly. Players are increasingly aware of their individuality and are not afraid to express that. We as coaches and administrators need to respect and reflect that in our program, while managing at the same time to manintain a team cohesion and harmony. Our coach education programs need to teach and discuss how to do that!
Just a few thoughts for you to add to your collection.
Cheers
Richard