Sports science blog

The Art of Coaching

I love data.  I’m a trained sports scientist that spent 7.5 years of postgraduate study collecting data, analyzing data, running statistics, and writing up research papers.  I like using science in my coaching, because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.  However, after 17 years of coaching I also recognize that there is an art to coaching we don’t talk about enough.  Spend any time at a sporting event and you will notice what coaches have the art mastered and which ones don’t.  See how they talk to athletes. Observe the body language of coach and athlete.  It is truly fascinating.  As technology in sport continues to evolve it has made me stop and think deeper about the art of coaching and what it entails.  Below you will find my top three values in the art of coaching:

• Approach coaching from the athlete’s perspective not your own

When I first started coaching in 20008, I reached out to my youth swim coach.  I asked him what advice he could give me as I started on this new journey and career.  He told me to approach coaching from the athlete’s perspective not my own.  This was a lesson much harder to learn than I thought it would be.  I took my swimming career very seriously.  I vowed as a 13-year-old that I would get a Division 1 college swimming scholarship.  At 15 I was determined to qualify for Senior Nationals, and at 17 I set and achieved a goal of being ranked top 100 in the world in the 1500m freestyle.  All this is to say that my perspective as a swimmer should not have impacted how I coached athletes.  I am sad to say this was the biggest mistake I made as a coach in the first two years.  I had a very difficult time realizing that this level of intensity and lofty goals is not how every athlete wanted to approach their own swimming.  It negatively impacted many relationships I had with athletes at the time.

However, time, experience and feedback from athletes has helped me gain wisdom and some mastery in this area.  When I first start working with an athlete now, my first priority is to learn about where they are coming from with regards to sport.  Have they been a competitive athlete their whole life or are they new to competitive sport?  Are they motivated by race times and placing, or are they motivated to run in a specific place, mountain range, or have a self-propelled adventure?  Are they seeking to have some alone time in their training or do they feed off having other athletes as part of their training?  Do they want me to emphasize numbers and data in our conversations or do they need a distraction from the numbers and talk more about life-work balance and reassurance that they are doing well?

The questions in my mind are an endless scroll and I certainly don’t bombard athletes with all of this in our first few interactions.  Understanding their perspectives comes from building relationships over time.  Building trust that I am open to hearing what they have to say.

• Your words matter more than the training plan.

I call the two weeks before a big race ‘the pump up’ period.  It doesn’t matter if the athlete has missed most of the training sessions or ticked all the training boxes green – the feedback is similar.

I believe in you 100%.  You got this.  Here is the race plan – plan the race and race the plan.  You have made awesome gains in x,y,z.  I know you can do this.  You are better prepared than most people on the start line.  Did I mention that I believe in you!?  No matter what happens, I am proud of you and here to support you 100%.

The brain is far more powerful than the body.  A coach can have a massive impact on an athlete’s belief system.  You first need to take the time to understand what a specific athlete needs to hear.  Once you understand that, you work to develop their belief system.  You work to keep the athlete calm, happy, confident.  Nerves and some doubts are inevitable.  But if you know what they need to hear, the belief will outweigh the doubt.

A training plan or AI coach does not take the time to understand how an athlete ticks. Only a human can do that.

• You have to care more for them as human beings than as athletes

Early on in my coaching career I held on too tightly to the training plan, the goals, and the results.  I missed that on the other side of the training and goals were complex human beings who had so much more going on in their lives besides training.  I missed an opportunity to build trust and a deeper connection.  This is probably the area that has changed the most for me in the last 17 years.

This is partly why my favorite part of my current coaching service is monthly catch-up calls.  This is when I learn more about them as humans.  Some months we spend most of the time talking about life with very little talk about running.  But life impacts running in a very big way.  If you know more about athletes as humans, you will be able to coach them better.

In a bit of a different perspective, it’s important to acknowledge that in coaching athletes will come and go.  Some athletes I have coached for a decade or more.  Some athletes I will coach for less than one year.  Some athletes drift in and out of a coach-athlete relationship with you.  You have to care about them as humans first to be able to let them run their own journey with you.  It is, after all, their journey first and foremost.  When you care about them as a person it will still hurt if and when they leave you- but you will understand and you will still have a friendship to hold onto.

There is far more that we can discuss when it comes to the art of coaching, but these three are part of my core values as a coach.  They were learned by making mistakes early on in my coaching career.  When I feel a bit lost, I do my best to come back to these values.  I have to trust that they will show me the way.