Doing the simple things but doing them repeatedly and to world class standard is a trick that the greatest sport’s coaches have mastered. Repeat the behaviours of these elite coaches and they’ll become your habits too…
Create a Winning Environment
Winning is all about your athletes being the best in everything you do. It’s about the members of the team having ownership – creating its rules and benefitting from its culture of excellence. It’s what Sir Dave Brailsford focuses on with his philosophy of marginal gains – creating the best possible environment to produce the best possible performance.
Be Adaptable
A good coach plans, a great coach has structure, flexibility and adapts to the needs of individual athletes. Create a coaching environment that achieves different results by doing things differently. Analyse your coaching sessions to understand how you can innovate to achieve. Mark Lammers, coach of the greatest women’s hockey team in World Cup history, used GPS tracking to analyse the sprint patterns of his players and adapted their training accordingly.
Performance Practice for Perfect Performance
Great coaches know that there’s a huge difference between acquiring a skills and using that skill in the right way in competition. Let’s say you plan to use soccer drills during a coaching session, perhaps using a visual aid like a soccer drill video by Sportplan. Now give the players the opportunity to practice the skill. That’s the practice makes perfect approach. To take it to performance practice level, however, drill your players to respond at the speed, intensity and under the same pressure as in a match situation.
Develop Your Players as People
Trust, care and communication are all hugely important values in developing your athletes holistically. Taking time to view the whole person beyond the athlete will reap rewards by giving you the insight into their personalities to get the very best from them in performance terms. This is the difference between great performance and a truly outstanding athlete.
Be A Leader
A great coach is a leader, an innovator, a risk taker. He or she is prepared to take the responsibility of leadership on their shoulders and involve themselves in every aspect of their athlete’s development. Most of all, a great coach is a visionary, knowing that what they do today will breed greater success in the future.