Informed Coach, Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner
Paul Gamble
Crimes Against Critical Thinking in the Face of ...

As the saying goes ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’. But it truly is quite remarkable how readily we will override our capacity for critical thinking in the face of a story we want to hear. As we will see, if the message on offer appeals enough to a particular desire or bias, it appears we will happily overlook whatever shortcomings in methodology and inconvenient flaws in logic are apparent. In this way, we can be active participants in ‘group think’.

We might then question our roles in upholding the conventions that abound in performance sport. Upon closer inspection, there is rarely logic in convention. It is beguilingly easy to fall prey to participating in such group delusion. On some level, we could argue that we willingly enter into this to prop up a particular tenet of our belief system in relation to theory and practice.

Crimes Against Critical Thinking in the Face of a Good Story
Informed Coach, Informed Sport Parent, Informed Leader
Paul Gamble
Uniting Participation and Performance

There is a strange insistence that participation and performance are entirely distinct and never the twain shall meet. But is there really no common ground to be found here? I will argue that participation and performance are NOT in fact mutually exclusive - especially in the case of youth sport. There is in fact plenty of overlap. So why should we keep them apart? Is it possible that bringing participation and performance back under the same roof might provide benefits in both directions?

Uniting Participation and Performance
Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner, Informed Coach
Paul Gamble
The Tyranny of Safeguarding in Sport

A provocative title, so allow me to specify at the outset what exactly I am highlighting and the limits of the argument. Firstly and most importantly, let me make it clear that I am excluding from the discussion the necessary and vitally important domain of child-protection and the protection of vulnerable adults under law. What I am specifically referring to is the concept creep that has seen the safeguarding approach extended to sportsmen and women at senior level, who are otherwise (in the eyes of the law) deemed responsible adults capable of providing informed consent, making decisions and advocating on their own behalf. I am also excluding clear cases of misconduct that unamibiguously violate professional ethics and the boundaries of the athlete-coach relationship - for instance, sexually inappropriate behaviour or physical abuse. What I am also highlighting is the mission creep of those charged with investigating such claims and the present danger of over-reach. Why I feel these trends need to be challenged is that the safeguarding system if left unchecked threatens to penalise coaches simply for carrying out their proper duties.

The Tyranny of Safeguarding in Sport
Paul Gamble
Special Post: Choosing the Right Programme

EDITOR’S NOTE:

To celebrate the imminent release of the new title ‘Sports Parenting: Negotiating the Challenges of the Youth Sports Journey to Help Kids Thrive’ we are sharing this special post. The excerpt featured is from the chapter ‘Choosing the Right Programme’.

Environment is everything when it comes to developing talent. Parents are naturally highly motivated to find the programme that provides most optimal conditions to allow their child’s talents to flourish. Seeing past the sales pitch and making the right choice is however not a straightforward proposition. Being successful on this endeavour begins with understanding the key features that make for the most conducive setting to enable young performers to realise their athletic potential. In this chapter we aim to provide parents with some criteria to guide the search.

Special Post: Choosing the Right Programme
Informed Coach, Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner
Paul Gamble
Ingredients for Progress: Heretics and Dissent

The inclination to question is not common - looking back, most of us would admit that we uncritically accepted what we were taught. There is a general assumption that authority figures know what they are doing, so it may not necessarily occur to us that the consensus view that is espoused might be flawed or even untrue. Yet it is always worth allowing for the possibility that the prevailing view may not necessarily have a sound basis or at least might be missing something important. It might serve us well to consciously foster in ourselves and others a readiness to challenge preconceived ideas and the received wisdom, simply in the interests of our own enlightenment. More broadly, it merits highlighting that willingness to question and to offer competing ideas are necessary ingredients for progress. Clearly this has some important implications for leaders and organisations, as well as for the professions and fields of study that we are part of.

Ingredients for Progress: Heretics and Dissent

Informed Performer

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Resolving Running-Related Injury

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Resolving Running-Related Injury

Running is an activity with vast participation. Running features prominently in sports and athletic events. Aside from athletes in running events, running is the primary mode of locomotion for the majority of field and court sports. Even when this is not the case, running often still features in the dryland training performed by athletes in ‘non-running’ sports. Beyond sport, we must also consider the enormous numbers of recreational runners and those for whom running is a popular form of exercise for health and fitness. Part of the popularity of running is its lack of barriers to participation: it is low cost and does not require any facilities or others to participate, so there is a low bar for entry.

Yet despite all this, we have a persisting problem in that despite being a ‘natural’ form of locomotion there are disproportionately high rates of injury associated with running in each of these populations.

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Captivated by Virtual Success

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Captivated by Virtual Success

I cannot recall exactly when I first had the realisation that the validation derived by performers within the virtual realm might have the power to displace their drive to achieve in real world competition, but it was certainly within the past decade. These suspicions have only been strengthened over the recent period from observing how performers (including high profile athletes) are choosing to conduct themselves online and in person. What is also becoming all the more apparent is the tension between two realms. The behaviours that are cultivated and encouraged in social media land are in many ways contrary to what is required to compete successfully against real life competitors and navigate real world challenges in the sport. Chasing social media fame is proving somewhat incompatible with pursuing real world goals in sport. Unregulated social media use in itself is also emerging as a threat to the performance and wellbeing of the individual, serving to make performers more fragile and exposing vulnerabilities. The rapid rise of these new features of performing in the digital era has caught many of us off guard, such that coaches, support staff and administrators are still grappling with what to do to manage and regulate performers’ online activities. Certainly we have been slow to recognise the dangers and to date we have largely failed to come up with effective countermeasures to mitigate the potential harms.

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Coaching in the Era of Cheerleading

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Coaching in the Era of Cheerleading

Observers have noted that the spirit of the age is trending towards safetyism, or the assertion that challenging situations and discomfiting experiences are something we should seek to protect young people from. Recent evidence suggests this trend is continuing apace; indeed the calls for such protections are coming from young people themselves - or at least from a vocal minority who claim to represent different sections of the population. Moreover these requests are often granted with some enthusiasm by increasingly indulgent institutions. At the very least trigger warnings are deemed necessary for anything that has the potential to cause upset or offend increasingly delicate sensibilities - unless of course the term ‘trigger warning’ is itself found to be too triggering for the individuals concerned.

Against this societal backdrop it was somewhat inevitable that those operating in the realms of coaching and performance sport might start running into issues. Perhaps the closest cousin of coaching is teaching. Those of us in the coaching profession would therefore do well to heed the alarming ideological shift in higher education (and education in general) notably in North America. There is a storm on the horizon.

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Returning from ACL Injury: A Hero's Journey

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Returning from ACL Injury: A Hero's Journey

In a number of ways the quest to return to sport after suffering ACL injury has all the hallmarks of a classical hero’s journey. The hero of the story faces a long and arduous journey to get back onto their feet after the original injury and then the daunting challenge of attempting to return to participating in the sport - and from there the epic-length saga continues as they must first survive the initial period after their return and then strive to get back to their best thereafter. As with any hero journey, the outcome is uncertain and success is far from assured. Indeed the element of uncertainty extends to the journey as a whole: whilst we can forewarn the athlete of some of the challenges they are likely to face, it is nevertheless something of a journey into the unknown. From the outset choosing to embark on this quest calls for a great deal of courage on the part of the athlete. What is assured is that the journey will test them and their resolve will certainly be challenged along the way. Whilst all this may seem like hyperbole, portraying the quest in these terms I think helps us to understand what the athlete faces and how we might best serve them in the endeavour.

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Judging What to Prioritise and When for a Young Performer

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Judging What to Prioritise and When for a Young Performer

Getting a handle on a young performer’s present status from a developmental perspective is crucial. After all, without this information we have no real frame of reference for making judgements or deciding on the best way forward. The reason that talent identification policy and development pathways at junior level frequently go awry in practice (as we noted in a previous post) is in large part due to a failure to account for maturation and relative age effects. Young performers at age-grade level are far from a homogenous group. Kids in the same age group may be at very different points in their trajectory. That growth and development curves for young performers can vary so widely inevitably thwarts any attempt to adopt a blanket approach. Whilst individual growth curves eventually converge, during their formative teenage years young performers can differ dramatically in how they present at any given time and this is manifested both physically and in the performance capabilities that they exhibit. Given that much of the variability we see at age-grade is simply due to the fact that kids are at very different stages in their relative stage of development, it follows we need some way to assess where a young performer is on their individual growth trajectory. Aside from the addressing the challenge of parsing genuine ‘talent’ versus maturation effects for sporting organisations, we equally need to be able to evaluate these factors on an individual level to inform decisions on how to best support the young performer. In this post we present a tool to estimate biological age and relative stage of maturation and describe how to use this information to inform the priority areas for development and guide training for the young performer.

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Lessons from 2020: Emergence of the Autonomous Athlete

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Lessons from 2020: Emergence of the Autonomous Athlete

The initiative and intrinsic motivation to train solo successfully for extended periods are rare and vital qualities for any aspiring performer. Over recent months the lack of direct coaching supervision, restricted access to training facilities and absence of training partners posed huge challenges for athletes at all levels, testing not only their will but also their ability to find a way. Regular readers will recognise that these are not new themes - as noted before the biggest test of a coach is what happens when we’re not present. With the unprecedented events of 2020 all of this very much came to the fore. The critical role of agency and the need to ensure that athletes are capable of functioning independently are arguably among the biggest lessons that coaches, practitioners and indeed the athletes themselves can take from this tumultuous period.

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What You See Is Not All There Is

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What You See Is Not All There Is

To explain the title, one of the most common cognitive biases in how we see the world is encapsulated as ‘what you see is all there is’. In other words, we have a tendency to overlook what is not immediately visible or obvious. We tend to assume that what we see in full view constitutes the only aspects at play. We are slow to consider that there might be additional unseen factors at work that might lead us to an alternative explanation for what we are seeing. In most circumstances we are dealing with incomplete information and there is always some degree of uncertainty and ambiguity involved in human performance. These are not bugs in the system that must be fixed, but rather features that we need to learn to navigate.

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Where Do We Draw the Line in Elite Sport?

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Where Do We Draw the Line in Elite Sport?

Recent scandals, including multiple allegations and criminal cases of serious abuse, have rocked sport around the world. Arguably the most egregious example is the case of USA gymnastics, which should serve as a cautionary tale for everybody involved in sport at all levels. Against this backdrop, there has been something of an avalanche of allegations of bullying and improper conduct that are presently playing out in the public sphere. In turn, this has prompted calls for national sporting bodies to be less obsessively driven by winning medals. The perils of the ‘winning at all costs’ mentality have been cited as the reason behind the toxic environments and climate of fear that has been alleged in multiple sports, notably in the investigations that are presently ongoing within the UK. But of course winning on the world stage does come at a cost, both financial and personal. So where should we draw the line?

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Rehabilitation and Return to Performance Following Injury

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Rehabilitation and Return to Performance Following Injury

In elite and professional sports there is obvious incentive to ensure athletes make a prompt and successful return to action following injury. There is a clear impetus to push the envelope in an attempt to accelerate the recovery process and minimise the time spent on the sidelines. The impressive recovery times reported with common injuries in professional sports are testimony to the success of the progressive and innovative approaches presently employed. In a ‘high performance’ setting athletes benefit from having a staff of professionals at their disposal on a daily basis to support the endeavour. Given such dedicated support it is perhaps unsurprising that athletes at the top level also show a far higher likelihood of making a successful return to their preinjury level following severe injuries such as ACL rupture, compared to what is reported with performers at lower levels of competition. The stakes involved might differ below the elite level but there are nevertheless lessons to be learned from their approach to performance rehabilitation and return to competition. In this latest offering we explore the advances in how we deal with sports injuries and consider what lessons we might adopt to improve outcomes for performers at all levels.