the High Performance Coach
Until very recently I was the President of a Premier League Sporting Club. I spent a lot of time with coaches and what I saw is that there are different types of coaches required at a club. Some coaches are teachers – they know how the game works, they know how to teach young players, and their role is to teach the team to work together seamlessly, teaching set plays and developing the player’s skills and decision making. Some coaches are mentors – they work with players who have learned how to play but need guidance, instruction and support to rise to the occasion on game day, and to make corrections when it’s all going wrong. The third category of coaches are the high performance coaches. They work with exceptional players who know how to do their job and can motivate themselves to perform. These players are elite athletes and their personal drive and motivation has got them to this level of competition. The high performance coach works with players as individuals to take them beyond what they believe they are capable of in the moment and create extraordinary performers. They elicit results from players that the player doesn’t know they have in them, and often those players haven’t realised (yet) that they are capable of far more than they expect for themselves. The high performance coach is not teaching them to kick, throw or catch. The high performance coach finds the previously unknown and unspoken blocks to the player’s next level of performance and releases the player into their potential.