Articles on sports coaching and developments in performance science for athletes and coaches.
The Daily Athlete Training Environment D.A.T.E. is a term which is used to describe the day to day opportunities provided for an athlete to help realise their full potential. This article discusses the DATE concept and why the most important part of the DATE is the A….the athlete.
After the CLOSING ceremony of every Olympic Games, someone should yell out, “let the (real) Games begin”.
The real “GAMES”…………the junkets and fact finding missions the Sporting leaders from most countries embark on to find out what the USA, Germany, Great Britain, South Korea, China and Australia are doing to be successful in the Olympics.
The logic seems simple enough.
“Our country didn’t win any medals at the Olympics” says the Minister for Sport.
“Country XYZ won lots of medals at the Olympics”, says the CEO of the Sports Commission.
“Therefore if we want medals and we copy them we will win medals”, thinks everyone in the room.
“Hooray!!!! Problem solved – let’s buy some air tickets”. (more…)
As soon as someone mentions the words “high-performance” in sport, people start running for their cheque books and credit cards. The most commonly held view about high-performance sport is that you need significant investment and resources to run a successful high performance sports program. However, money alone does not guarantee success in high performance sport and almost any coach or Club can create a sustainable high performance environment by targeting and prioritising their resources on the right things at the right time. This article discusses how to prioritise in high performance sport and how to target the things that matter: the things that will make a difference where it really matters….the performance of your athletes
To the successful coaches of the future, creativity will be a core coaching skill: right up there with communication, passion, empathy, commitment, the ability to engage athletes and sports specific technical skill.
But what does it mean to be creative and to coach creatively. And to coaches who are not naturally creative, can they learn to be?
Or to the coach with a hammer, is every athlete a nail? (more…)
Score Key: 0-10: High performance sport is not for you. Maybe try your hand at pavement painting or hole digging or grass mowing or something else which does not require the consistent application of excellence. 11-20: You might dream about being high performance and talk about being high performance, but Read more…
So much of the world’s high performance sports dollars (or Yens or Yuans or Euros or Pounds or Pesos or Rands depending on where you come from), time, energy, focus and attention is spent on three things:
Or if you like, find them, sign them, refine them.
And most of the world has still got it wrong. There is a better way. (more…)