Whole coaching simply means coaching the whole athlete having an holistic, broad, whole of life, whole of family, whole of environment, approach to the way we connect with, engage and inspire the hearts and minds of athletes.

It asks some core questions of our coaching:

How do we build relationships with athletes?

How do we think past their physical talent, their skills, their physiological capabilities?

How do we look more holistically at the athletes that we coach, and how does that translate into the way we design and deliver training programs and competition schedules?

Whole Coaching – PART 1 – Full Transcription

I’ve been involved in sport in a broad range of capacities since the late 1980s.

My kids like to joke that it’s probably more like the 1880s or 1780s. But no it’s just the 1980s!

And over that time, it would be fair to say that the one thing that’s kept me going is a passion, an appetite, a hunger for learning. It’s always been part of who I am. It’s been part of my daily life.

There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t learn something or where I don’t play with different ideas.

And I like nothing more than sitting down with coaches, or athletes or parents or sports scientists, sports administrators, sports leaders, sports philosophers – anyone who’s connected with the industry and just kick ideas around. It’s energizing. It’s exciting.

My whole day, and certainly most of the last 30 years – has been one long continuous learning and improvement process, trying to figure out where sport is, where it’s going, and to try to understand how we can make the industry better: specifically how I can help coaches be better at coaching, help sporting parents be better at parenting, and help athletes improve in their performance.

I’m now in a place where a lot of things have started to come together.

I’m now in a place where instead of looking particularly at one area or a different area, like sports science, or coaching or sports parenting, there seems to be a picture of emerging of how everything might fit together, and how they could be a better way, a new way, a different way of thinking about how we work with athletes, particularly young athletes – and all athletes.

And so what I’m going to present to you today, (and in Part Two of this special series of Sports Thoughts), is a new concept that I’m calling Whole Coaching.

So what is Whole Coaching?

Well, there’s a lot of things happening in the sports industry that have been progressively evolving over the last five or 10 years.

Many of those things have been by necessity accelerated by the challenges we’re all facing through the COVID-19 period.

Whole Coaching is saying:

We’ve got to rethink the way that we work with athletes.

We’ve know that before COVID hit the number of kids are involved in organized competitive sport was dwindling. It was a big issue for sports all around the world.

In 2019 BC (i.e. before COVID) when we could still travel freely, I travelled to the United States, to Canada, to New Zealand, across Australia and also went to Europe, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales.

Everywhere I went I was having the same conversations with coaches and sport leaders about where the industry was heading.

Even at that stage six months before we had to face the realities of COVID and wearing masks and vaccinations and travel restrictions and so on – even at that stage around the world, the dwindling number of kids being involved in traditional forms of organized competitive sport was apparent.

I recall over two month period in the middle of 2019, talking with people involved in rugby in New Zealand, soccer in England and ice hockey in Canada.

Three nations, on opposite sides of the world, three completely different sports synonymous with each of those nations – and in each of those three nations having conversations about what are we going to do to get kids back to rugby, to soccer, football and back to ice hockey.

I was having the same types of conversations all over the world about how frustrating it was and how do we get kids to re engage with sport, what can we change, what can we introduce etc. and largely all of those nations and all of those sports (plus all the other sports) are all looking at things very similarly.

Sporting organizations were playing with ideas – such as what we call micro sports or alternatives for sports and different versions of sports – i.e. adapting sport in some way to try and meet the changing needs (or the perceptions of the changing needs) of people.

We saw rugby with 5 players, 7 players, 10 players and 12 players.

We saw cricket, going from five days to one day to 20 overs aside to now 100 runs.

We’ve seen a trend towards making sport smaller and faster and shorter and sharper and more entertaining and requiring less equipment – to be more interesting, entertaining and engaging.

And that pattern – i.e. trying to get kids and families to re-engage and reconnect with organized competitive sport was something that was sweeping the world.

And then COVID came along!

COVID hit and those issues became accelerated because all of a sudden, so many kids and families realized that there was a life other than sport.

And when I talk to people in sports, like swimming, in athletics, in rowing, gymnastics, diving – all those big time commitment sports, the number of kids who are involved in those sports, doesn’t look like recovering anywhere near to the level that it was before COVID.

And if you remember, before COVID, it wasn’t that good anyway.

So clearly, changing sport, changing the way we market sport, changing the environment, evolving sports to make it faster, changing rules, adapting sport – has been tried for many years and sadly – those things, in my view, are unlikely to work, and certainly will not have the effect that so many sports leaders believe that they may have.

 

Whole Coaching – Coaching is Sport.

I’m a strong believer that coaching is fundamental to the success of sport.

I often say to people, that your sport is basically your coaches.

Why?

Because it doesn’t matter what your leaders come up with, what your strategic plan is, what your board decides, in most sports, it’s the coach who delivers the experience of sport to kids and families.

It’s the coaches who have the role and the responsibility of delivering the experience of your sport to your “clients” – i.e. your participants, the children and families that you want to have engaged in your sport.

In spite of that, one of the most frustrating things I see is, in spite of national sporting bodies and sports leaders talking about coaching being important and coaching being fundamental to success and how much they value and appreciate the profession of coaching, in reality most sporting organizations marginalize coaches and coaching.

It is very rare that any sporting organization invests 5% or even 2% of their total budget into coaches and coaching.

But I believe this has to change, because coaches and coaching have never been more important.

It’s interesting, too, that following the impact of COVID, so many governments around the world, from national, to State level and even at District / local government level, who see the impact on sport, who can see the number of kids who have dropped out and can see how slow those numbers are to rebuild and recover, have decided to try and address it by giving clubs and giving sporting organizations more money for – wait for it – infrastructure and facilities.

Imagine you knew a 15 year old rower who was already looking at rowing negatively and was thinking of dropping out and then COVID came along and they couldn’t row with their friends regularly.

During lockdowns they have learnt to sit on the couch and watch TV, play Xbox and PS4 and just connect with their friends electronically.

Do you honestly believe that that athlete that rower is going to turn off the electronics, take off their headphones, run to mum and dad and say “You’ve got to take me down the Rowing Club Because I’ve just heard they’ve got a new timing system?”

What about those hundreds of thousands of young swimmers around the world who gave up swimming in the last year or so?

Do you honestly believe that they will be motivated to go back to the training and the grind and the long meets on weekends because they’ve just read that their club has a new grandstand and some new starting books?

The reason people play sport is they love it.

They enjoy it.

It’s rewarding.

They feel value and benefit in it.

They get friendships from it,

They feel loved.

They feel welcomed, they feel supported, they feel accepted, like they’re part of a special tribe.

They feel part of something, they belong to something and none of those things can be delivered by investment in infrastructure or facilities.

Those things – the things that matter – are largely provided by club administrators, parents, officials, but most of all, by coaches.

So what I’m introducing today, and I’m about offer a course on, and a series of webinars on this same topic, is called Whole Coaching.

Why now why would I be introducing this now?

Well, there’s a simple reason. It’s timing.

It is time that we looked at coaches and coaches a lot more seriously.

It’s essential that right now, we invest a lot more time, energy and resources into the development of coaches and coaching skills.

And that we finally realize  in most sports coaches are the driving force of change, of connection, of relationships between the sport and the people you want involved in your sport.

It frustrates me that sports will continue to spend huge amounts of money on infrastructure, facilities, marketing campaigns, advertising programs, administration staff, and ignore coaches and coaching and wonder why things are not getting better.

It’s because for the most part, your sport is all about coaches and coaching and the relationships that they create, and build and sustain with the athletes and families you want to have connected.

So how do we go about creating this thing I call Whole Coaching?

Whole Coaching simply means coaching the “whole” athlete by having an holistic, broad whole of life, whole of family, whole of environment, approach to the way we connect with engage and inspire the hearts and minds of athletes.

What We Need to Change and Why.

The challenge is how do we think past their physical talent, their skills, their capabilities?

How do we look more holistically at the athletes that we coach, and how does that translate into the way we design and deliver training programs and competition schedules?

First, let’s go back just a little bit.

Back in the 1960s 1970s, there wasn’t a lot of structured coach education.

Most coach education was anecdotal. Rugby coaches would tell rugby coaches how to coach rugby, who would tell rugby coaches how to coach rugby, who would tell rugby coaches how to coach rugby etc. etc.

It was very much about passing down ideas and knowledge plus every so often we got a magazine or we might get access to a television program on a coach or a coaching idea.

But for the most part in the 60s and 70s, Coach education wasn’t prominent, and certainly wasn’t very systematic, methodical or scientific in nature.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, coming from Eastern Europe and then into Canada and then introduced into places like Australia, we started to see the emergence of national coaching accreditation / national coaching certification systems with a simple linear and levels model, e.g. level one, level two, level three.

This was a very linear model i.e. level one being a beginner coach, level two – sort of an intermediate coach and level three an advanced or high performance coach. That model has remained relatively unchanged around the world for the past 40 years.

In many places around the world, the accreditation certification “levels” model not only still exists, it is still being invested in and in some places, it is even seen as being the cutting edge in something new that the nation has never done before.

Coach education and coach certification systems are based primarily on sports science.

So typically, the beginner coach would walk into a level one, i.e. the beginning certification course and do two hours of physiology, two hours of biomechanics or skill acquisition, maybe an hour of psychology, some Periodization and Planning, a session on how to design workouts, how to enhance skills practices and maybe a little bit of time dedicated to what is coaching – what some call “Coaching Pedagogy”.

Coaching accreditation and coaching certification was mostly built around a SPORT SCIENCE model.

Why? Because SPORT SCIENCE can be learned, can be taught, can be assessed.

Someone can learn what a mitochondria is, can learn how to spell it, and can answer a multiple choice question by selecting the word “mitochondria” out of a group of five other big words.

It was relatively and is relatively easy to teach people sports science.

But if you stop and think and realize that coaching is an art – then sports science isn’t the key to coaching success.

It’s about relationships.

It’s about interpersonal connection.

It’s about listening and understanding the needs of athletes about adopting an holistic approach to their overall humanist development.

Those things are very difficult to teach and those things are very difficult to assess. And those things are quite often very difficult to coach.

So it’s natural, and quite understandable that the training, education and development of coaches since the 1980s, has been mostly built on Sport Science.

The advantage has been is that for many coaches, many millions of coaches around the world who’ve been through coach certification programs, they have at least been exposed to a level of scientific, methodical, systematic thinking on how to plan, prepare, practice, and have athletes ready to perform when and where it matters. That’s been the upside.

The downside has been is that we’ve overly focused on physiology, biomechanics, psychology, skill acquisition, and the other sports sciences largely to the neglect of the art of coaching, relationship building and seeing the person as a whole human being.

I believe now is the time for a global shift away from SPORT SCIENCE dominated coach education, to coach education, training and development activities, mostly directed at the art of coaching, relationship building, and Whole Coaching.

I’ve spoken about this, at length in many, many forms, is all of us in this industry have to let go of the Pathway Model.

Why?

The Pathway Model initially made a lot of sense. It was a commercial product launched by a couple of very smart people from Canada, who I believe are wonderful in what they do, but it was a commercial product that got bought into by many, many national sporting organizations and by some national government funding bodies.

In its purest form, the long term systematic development of physical, mental, technical and technical capabilities in an athlete from participation and just enjoying what they do through to being high performance athletes is a wonderful concept.

However, human beings are human beings – And the pathway model has been twisted, perverted and converted into something of a beast where it is being implemented around the world, as the only way, a linear way.

The Pathway has been promoted and perverted to have people believe that all young athletes will progress from the first time they take up a sport to the an “inevitable” situation where they will be an elite athlete, professional athlete.

That doesn’t make any sense.

Because of that model, the LTAD model, the Pathway model – has overly focused on physical talent and physical capabilities, we are under-focusing and under-thinking about coaching the mental, emotional and if you like even spiritual and cultural elements of the whole athlete.

The Pathway model has athletes defined by their level of progress along their pathway.

It was never linear. And it certainly was never only about physical talent.

The problem that we’ve got and the challenge before us is the Pathway model is so entrenched around the world that we need something significantly better, new and different to break the Pathway Paradigm.

Last week, I heard a CEO of a professional football team who are bidding to become part of the National Football competition with a new club, use the word “pathway” seven or eight times in a five minute interview.

The Pathway model is still being perpetuated as “the” only way.

The CEO used the term “Pathway” in the context that it is all about identifying physically talented kids and progressing them along a linear pathway until they can play a professional level.

And that model is going to be difficult for us to change.

But we have to force change and I’ll outline the way forward in Part Two of this special Sports Thoughts series on Whole Coaching.

We have to move away from the focus on physical talent and look at coaching athletes very differently.

This is Wayne Goldsmith for Sports Thoughts.

Please join me for Part Two of this special series on Whole Coaching.

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to hear more Sports Thoughts, subscribe to our newsletter www.wgcoaching.com

WHOLE COACHING is a unique concept created and owned by Wayne Goldsmith. Strict Copyright applies to this podcast, transcription and all materials and resources connected to Whole Coaching. 

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