Working with coaches and their teams in youth and collegiate sport in the USA: An interview with Dr Andy Gillham

Early experiences with coaching

SPRJ: Let’s start with the football coach in high school with his chewing tobacco…

AG: As a typical American I played football growing up and the head coach who was also the PE teacher was a big fan of chewing tobacco. After a day of teaching and talking about healthy behaviours, he would head out to practice and not hold up his end, so there was an obvious incongruence there.

SPRJ: Can you think of some of his coaching practices that were good or bad?

AG: Good and bad is so relative, but it’s the nature of American football. It’s not bad overall, but the younger guys, the less talented guys end up being tackling dummies for the older guys. The only way to change that is to get more people out and have more talented kids, and that’s more buses and more equipment. It’s not cheap to run American football, so that’s not really a viable solution, so the coaches have to do more; change the way practices are run.

SPRJ: Your track coach who was also your maths teacher, how would you describe his coaching?

AG: Haphazard! He was a very smart man, particularly being a math teacher, but when he was in coach mode, he taught in a very hierarchical way – ‘I give you this…’ – top-down approach and all the assistant coaches were (if I remember correctly) local college students. I don’t think any of them wanted to coach. The job of being a coach paid well for a college student, especially when considering the schedule was flexible, it was outside, and provided a way to remain connected to sport.

SJ: What was your first involvement in coaching?

AG: Baseball. I was probably only 16 or 17 when I was asked by a friend’s father to help coach the eight-year-olds or 10-year-olds. It was organised babysitting, keeping them safe – hey, don’t be scared of the ball. All perspective taking for an eight year old, because baseball is very scary to a lot of kids.

Bachelors and master’s degrees at Wisconsin LaCrosse

SPRJ: From high school into university, your undergraduate degree – what did you do that was relevant to coaching?

AG: At Wisconsin LaCrosse they have a Bachelor of Science degree in fitness and I took a concentration – like a mini minor – in coaching. The teacher was Barry Schockmel and I stayed in touch with him all through my PhD. He was the defensive coordinator for the football team and also the swimming and diving coach (diving, specifically). He cared. If I remember correctly, it was one of the schools in the South West he started doing his PhD and he never finished. I can’t tell you why he didn’t finish. But this man cared and he seemed to have a very realistic outlook – not too academic, not too knucklehead from a football standpoint. I did a Masters in Human Performance at Wisconsin LaCrosse and I was still coaching track at middle school level and a year of little league baseball.

SPRJ: With the strength and conditioning there was some applied practice, any big lessons from that?

AG: I got the certification from the NSCA thinking of becoming a strength and conditioning coach, but I realised the hours that those folks put in at the collegiate level or higher and I didn’t want to do it. The day-in, day-out 5 am start times, traveling with teams and seeming to always be on-call for some coach or athlete just didn’t seem like a viable career for 40 years. I went to health clubs in town and did personal training for more money and more flexibility. There was an official ‘strength and conditioning’ track at UW-L but that required a significant investment of time spent in the facility working with the athletes, and (i) I wanted to go make money; and (ii) in the broad scheme of life there are more people who are not talented athletes who can use help so I felt the job prospects would be better if I was able to work with the general population and wasn’t overly focused on solely helping athletes.

SPRJ: What did you learn doing the personal training in the health clubs?

AG: I worked at both for-profit and not-for-profit clubs, and in the latter especially we had some paraplegics that would come to work out, we had some stroke rehab folks, 50-year-olds returning to exercise for the first time in 30 years, and we’d have the highly motivated high school athletes come in after class trying to do more. You don’t know who is walking in the door, so you better know your stuff, you better know the basic principles to deal with diverse populations.

SPRJ: What did you learn in that period of your coaching track and baseball?

AG: That athletes seemed most motivated by fun. Boys wanted to hang out with the girls, the girls wanted to hang out with the boys, I’ll go run this event, but I’m here to have fun. It was not a very competitive environment. The head coach of the middle school team was a goof ball. He was an adult version of the class clown. And he was actually the health teacher as well. He was conditioned from having to teach drug education and sex education, and really the heavy stuff to the middle school students who don’t want to have anything to do with that but absolutely need that information. He got his information across through humour and that carried over to the atmosphere with the athletics which took place at the same facility at the same time as the high school athletics with the same head coach I competed for and mentioned earlier. I saw some really poor examples of coaching. The biggest one was a high school football head coach, and I had just joined as the freshman level coach who (as is typical in American football) also had responsibilities of doing the grunt work for the varsity coach. But you are there and you get to sit in on all the meetings and hear discussions about players, opponents and schemes. This head coach, despite being a PE teacher, despite having won multiple state championships, and being successful in all those sorts of metrics, he referred to every player, every day as a masturbating monkey – on a good play, on a bad play.

SPRJ: Those were his actual words…

AG: Those were his actual words – repetitively, consistently.

SPRJ: And presumably you saw how that affected the athletes …

AG: Absolutely. They became numb to it, to be honest, but it just struck me as wrong. It didn’t matter if the parents were on the sidelines, the principal was out to watch practice. There were no repercussions; there was nothing to indicate this was anything more than standard accepted behaviour.

SPRJ: Was this down to his power and status in the school?

AG: This was just a public high school, nothing special. He’d won state championships, so that probably got him more status. This struck me at the same time I realised that a college strength coach was putting in 12–14 h days, and that would be hard to raise a family and do other things. I didn’t like it so I started to look out for other options.

Doctoral degree at Idaho

AG: One of the options became Dr Damon Burton at University of Idaho and I saved the letter that he sent me before my acceptance. Paraphrasing, I don’t usually take students without any psych background, but you have such a unique background of coaching, athlete, strength & conditioning, I would love to have you on my programme. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, but you are welcome into the programme. He gave me an assistantship and we became fast friends. It was a great experience and I can’t thank him enough.

SPRJ: What did your assistantship involve?

AG: Like most graduate teaching assistants, I ended up teaching activity courses – racket ball and weightlifting classes in particular… I made it clear I was not okay with that, I’d already done that and felt that more babysitting was a waste of my time and wanted to move on. I proposed a new intermediate weight training course and they let us go over to the athlete weight room and teach a class in there. This was because with NSCA certification and two degrees from Wisconsin LaCrosse I could exist in the strength coach world. I had the paper background for sure to walk in there and have the strength coaches – I don’t want to say respect, but I was at least able to walk in the door. Strength coaches are a pretty closed group to outsiders but once you’re inside, you’re one of the crew. They’re really sceptical of the outside and the relationship between the athletic department and the academic side at Idaho was really poor – years worth of it being poor, but I got to teach that class and it went well so they added more things where I got to do classroom courses, including teaching the undergraduate sport psychology class while doing my PhD in sport psychology.

SPRJ: What courses were in the PhD itself?

AG: The programme was split, as many are, between the sport science wing and the counselling wing. Idaho was unique in that it would count your Masters level courses towards fulfilling the total number of courses before the dissertation and they did that, my understanding, to account for – let’s not have people take redundant classes. I had to pick up more psych courses – a hypnosis course, a counselling theory class, a multicultural counselling course. It was set up to get the AASP certification and I had a lot of psych courses to catch up on, including counselling ethics courses. I also took alcohol and drug screening courses. Even at that time it was clear that the NCAA was heading towards wanting to employ people who could do those sort of intro counselling sessions for athletes when they first get to campus, assessments. All of my sport psychology specific courses were taught by Damon. Fall semester was always a night class that served as his introduction to the world of sport psychology to the incoming Masters and PhD students, eight or 10 altogether. In the Spring semester he would do his motivation course and then he would teach something in the summer of your first year. That course rotated and when I was there it was a team building course. As the degree went on, you saw him less as a teacher and more as a mentor.

SPRJ: Where did the idea for your PhD study come from?

AG: Damon had a number of projects that irritated him; that he never finished or didn’t work out the way he had originally hoped or expected. We were going through a couple of things and one of the projects that he presented me with was an initial version of a coaching success questionnaire, the CSQ. He had picked this project up two other times. I think he started it when he was still in Illinois coaching high school basketball, around 15 years prior to me being at Idaho. He had a student that overlapped with me who was very much a stat guy and he reorganised it, reanalysed it and in order to get the empirical results to where they were publishable, it didn’t make sense any more. There was a problem that when all the items and subscales were left intact, the empirical results were not acceptable. And rearranging items and subscales to arrive at suitable empirical results left a mess that didn’t really conform to the literature. He presented me with this project and I’d never even heard of factor analysis before. To be honest I leaned towards the qualitative side of the world and Damon’s term for this was ‘fluffy dark side’, always with enough of a smile that he saw value in qualitative research, but he and I were close enough that he had no problem openly suggesting I could do more. He said I was capable of doing an excellent dissertation and what really sparked it was an informal conversation about why good coaches get fired. We started talking about how in sport psychology and sports coaching we want to yell at athletic directors because they base everything on win–loss record thereby neglecting all the other pieces to coaching, but we haven’t yet provided them with a tool to make it better. I now had a project I could sink my teeth into, learning about psychometrics, the importance of measurement, the importance of how items are written, writing it specific to the population and reading the books.

SPRJ: What were the influential books for you?

AG: Things on measurement and error. The Sage Handbook of Measurement ¹ – understanding that if the foundation is poor, you keep on increasing error terms as you go. So you need to fix as much as you can early on. It became a puzzle. We consciously tried to keep on writing better items, to improve the model. While working on the project, we kept picturing being in the stands watching a coach. When you’re sitting in the stands it wouldn’t take long before you’d reach the conclusion that was a good coach, that was a bad coach, but we can’t send an expert into every practice, every competition, to make those judgements. The athletic directors don’t have the time. So who does have the most information – the athletes, they’re there every day. But who has the least education about coaching and what this looks like – the athletes again! So you have to be specific about what the athletes can talk about. We’d like to think that coaches have wonderfully detailed practice plans, are organised, and so on, but the athletes won’t pick up on that. What they will pick up on is if they’re waiting in line; do they feel they’re stuck and practice is boring. Not necessarily waiting in line, but waiting for their turn, waiting for the coach to decide what’s next. That is evidence of a latent, higher-order variable, the coach is unorganised. You can’t ask if the coach is organised or not, because that is not specific enough, it provides too much measurement error issues. I tried to adopt a scholarly systems approach by focusing not just on the coach but what the athletes would experience, too.

SPRJ: In terms of the theoretical side, where were the divergences in your and Damon’s thinking?

AG: The overarching perspective was how do we find a way to give good coaches credit and document that even when the win–loss record maybe doesn’t show it. For us, Damon especially, we always tried to keep the applied reality into the project so we always had a subscale that was just ‘winning’. Damon’s experience working with coaches and administrators had cemented his belief that to have any degree of buy-in from the coaches and administrators, ‘winning’ must be part of any scale measuring coaching success. So we included the items focused on the coach’s impact on winning competitions, such as ‘Did your coach help the team win?’ Winning is important to most coaches, athletes and administrators so it made sense to keep that subscale as part of the tool. But at the same time trying to make it more theoretical based and more consistent with the academic literature. We picked some pieces of Self-Determination theory and Achievement Motivation theory, but without going down the full path of those theories.

SPRJ: After publishing your article in IJSSC about the questionnaire, you started using it in your consultancy work with coach evaluation becoming part of the coaching process…

AG: It started just with athletes filling out questionnaires and it doesn’t sound terribly ground breaking from a research perspective. But in the applied world so many coach evaluations are simply check boxes. The athletic director might go to one practice, he might have heard three complaints from parents and the budget came in even – so, yes, he’s a good coach. They started to pay me to be the independent, outside observer, even though my primary tool at the time was my dissertation instrument. So not a whole lot of insight from me, but I provided them with a service – a tool – and I would give them some descriptive statistics and graphs. But that was more than they ever had before. We tried to move towards best practice, such as maybe we shouldn’t do this just at the end of the season. Soon it moved on to – if we’ve identified these poor scoring coaches, what are we going to do about it? The conversation I have with the athletic director is that every coach is going to leave the organisation; the question is whether you are going to fire them or whether they leave of their own volition. When they leave of their own volition, do you want them to look back fondly of their time and say that your school was a springboard for them which means they want to say nice things about your school and they want to send young coaches there and they want to credit some of their success to what they developed there? Or do you want them to be pissed off and say bad things? Okay, so you need to give some professional development for the coaches – the idea of becoming more professional in your approach. It became a relatively easy way for me to market my skill set and provide professional development for coaches, but it all started with the coach evaluation work.

SPRJ: An emphasis on professionalism…

AG: Absolutely – you’re not just this knucklehead with the whistle, yelling and screaming; you’re doing things on purpose and paying attention to what’s going on. One of the things I find with coaches is that they often don’t really know why they’re doing something, so asking them why they did something gives them that moment to reflect, to be more aware, and – they may still end up doing the same thing – but knowing why you do something can help you be more systematic and to find dead time; I’m only doing this drill because I was taught this drill, but I don’t like it and the athletes don’t like it, which means this is dead time training, wasting 10 min. So cut out the dead time and we can move on to something that I am doing now which allows for more effective training. With my strength and conditioning background, and also theoretically through Bandura’s self-efficacy theory, when athletes put in that little bit more effort and they experience that little bit of success, it feeds back to the system; they want to put in a little bit more effort, they want that little bit more buy-in, and for the coach, those little moments that you can spin forward, now you’re really cooking.

Getting parents out of the way of coaches in figure skating

SPRJ: Can you describe a specific example where you experienced a really positive change with a coaching staff?

AG: One of the most unique ones was in figure skating. It was a figure skating club in Canada and the club was having trouble with parents always in the way. They were always there, before training, before competition, where the coaches didn’t want them to be. We went through all the questions I could come up with and possible solutions. How do we deal with this? Is it parent education? Or what? It’s not about questionnaires, it’s about getting in there and seeing what’s going on. What was happening, these kids, let’s say under 10s, they couldn’t tie up their own skates. If they can’t tie their own skates, mum and dads have got to come into the locker room to help them because the coach is there just to provide the session and typically was already out on the ice with the prior group of athletes. The parents are in the locker room and they know each other and they’re hearing things with the athletes coming in from the previous session, complaining about this, complaining about this other stuff, so the parents had information they didn’t really need to have, because they were in a space they didn’t really need to be in, and it was because the kids couldn’t tie their own skates. So the coach was always fighting an uphill battle, how did they get this, who is gossiping, where’s this coming from and trying to empower the athletes was a nightmare because they couldn’t even tie their own skates. When I put it to the coaches this way, look it’s really hard to empower athletes when they can’t get on to their facility without mummy and daddy’s help. So then it was how can we set up boundaries, how can we set up guidelines, so for the next two weeks, the coach started – and I know there’s all the John Wooden stories about always start with tying the shoe laces – but that’s what happened. The coaching staff sat the athletes down on the ice and said, ‘You all need to know how to tie your skates. If you’re the older kid and you can, then you’ve got to help the others.’ So we really built this into a self-determination theory, relatedness component, model and specifically targeted this community approach across the athletes within the club.

Negative player power in soccer

SPRJ: You’ve been involved quite heavily at the collegiate level in doing your coach evaluation, have you picked up on any hazing?

AG: There’s only one contract that I’ve effectively been fired from – told not to come back. It was a college soccer programme and I was brought in to do some leadership training. The team was very young – 15 freshmen, 10 or 12 sophomores, on a 30 or so roster. I noticed – I wasn’t terribly familiar with soccer – it seemed that the balls were flying off the pitch, out of bounds, a little more often than I’d seen on TV. I started paying a little more attention. It turned out that the seniors had a monetary bounty on if the players could hit the coaching staff with the soccer ball during training. If you think about that from a leadership standpoint, from a team standpoint, from a cohesion standpoint, from any standpoint…because your senior captains are telling you these things, the younger players are more than likely to fall into line in order to cement their in-group status. You get your positive social reward from hitting the coach with the ball. I sat on this information for a while. I wanted to make sure it was really happening. Some athletes were brazen about it. How the coaches didn’t know, I don’t understand. The athletes were not worried about me hearing it. I was able to blend in well enough. I sat on the information because I knew the coach was not going to be happy about this and I wanted to be absolutely sure this happened. I was on the team bench for matches. So I was in there with the squad, which is why they felt so comfortable to talk with me and say whatever they wanted. After two or three weeks, having worked with the squad at least twice a week, I approached the head coach with the data. I said,

I’ve got some information I don’t think you’re going to want to hear, but it’s bothering me and I think you need to hear it. This is what’s going on. You’ve brought me in to teach leadership, and from the data collection phase I’ve been working through this and I can see we have a substantial problem here. And the coach became very angry and very frustrated, because the senior captains were the daughters of two of the biggest boosters in the school. So he couldn’t discipline them; he couldn’t cut them; he couldn’t do anything about it. So it wasn’t that he didn’t know it was happening – I think he knew but he believed he had no power to change the situation. He was probably afraid of his job or having his budget slashed or even the potential recruiting ramifications.

SPRJ: So he was driven by fear and presumably that manifest in the motivational climate?

AG: Absolutely, but he was a really upbeat guy. He was a fun coach, a player’s coach, they liked him, they generally worked hard for him, but there was this piece there that was poison.

He said, ‘That’s it, we’re done, I don’t need your services, thank you for your time.’

SPRJ: How did you get the work in the first place?

AG: Through the graduate assistant, I had met him in previous work.

SPRJ: Was the coach just throwing his toys out of the pram, was it a reaction?

AG: Yes, it was a reaction. But the coach was a nice guy, I still talk with him and I do believe he absolutely cares about the girls. I think he then wanted to keep the circle tight. If we get in and mess with this…

SPRJ: But it might have been a tradition…

AG: Yes, and that’s why I went there when you said hazing. It’s not the traditional example of hazing at all, but we’re teaching those poor cultural habits.

Goal setting and peer assessment in soccer

SPRJ: Can you think of an example in your work where a coach didn’t buy into something?

AG: How about didn’t buy in at first, but bought in later? This was college soccer and there had been a paper we published in Journal of Sport Psychology in Action about team goal setting. The problem that this team was having was that they were playing really well in matches, but then losing 1–0 at the end. It wasn’t so much of an anxiety thing where they just couldn’t finish the game or a fitness thing. What happened was that they got some unlucky bounces and they started to think, ‘We can’t affect the outcome, we can’t do that’. And it was fairly pervasive throughout the team. So I asked the coach a simple question, ‘Can you lose a well-played game?’ The answer of course was yes. Then I said, ‘Okay, when you guys have just lost, had your hearts ripped out sort of thing, when you stand up after the match and tell them how proud you are of them, you played well, I’m sorry, but we lost, do you think that message gets through?' No, it doesn’t get through. Okay, so we need to find a way to get that message through to them. So the plan we put into place was a goal-setting plan. We had some team level goals and some individual level goals. What was unique was that they put together a position specific, peer assessed, competitive package. What made this unique was the players on the field knew their goals, and the reserve players on the sideline on the team bench had a checklist of the goals and clipboards. They were assessing their peer’s performance during the competition. What this resulted in, especially from a coach standpoint, the coaches on the sideline did not have to discipline the reserve players any more, ‘focus on the game’, ‘quit talking about chemistry class’ – how can you help your teammate out there, tell her what’s going on – they didn’t have to, because the girls wanted to assess it. It was a little competitive – maybe if they’re not playing so well today, the goals don’t show up so good, coach will sub me in; there was certainly a little bit of that, especially at an individual level. But across the team, what happened was those reserve players were a little more engaged, so that was less distracting for the coach and the reserve players – whichever ones did get subbed in – they were ready to go; they knew what was going on in that game. That’s why it was so cool that the position groups were assessed by their own peers.

SPRJ: Were they assessing performance with respect to those goals?

AG: Absolutely. A process goal would be (say) forwards making runs if the ball didn’t get to them – that is better assessed by someone out of the game, just watching. There were performance goals such as connected passes. One of the most powerful things was at half, when the coaching staff wanted to get together and have their debrief and adjustments (would they do anything different in the second half), prior to this goal package being put into play, all the starting players wanted to go over to the coach and ask how they were doing. When we put the package in, the starting players didn’t go to the coach but they went to their position group and got the feedback they wanted on their performance in the first half from these checklists. More engagement, more team relatedness. From the coaching perspective the coach actually was allowed to coach; he got to have a conversation with his assistant, ‘What would you do different?’ Uninterrupted – he didn’t have to yell, ‘Go away, I’ll be with you in a minute’ at players soliciting feedback. Which made the game feel smoother and less rushed because the coach could focus on interactions with the coaching staff and then move on to address the team instead of trying to do both concurrently. I would argue it made him a more effective coach in that situation. That was the second season I worked with that team. The first season was when I had the whole conversation of can you lose a well-played game, etc. We could do this with goal setting, here is what it will look like. ‘No, no, no, goals don’t work! Goals don’t work!’ It took him to the second season after the season, when he and I could debrief and reflect.

SPRJ: What were his arguments against goal setting?

AG: He had two arguments. First, the capital investment of time. If you’re going to add something into the coach’s world you’ve got to find ways of making efficiencies. He saw it as an add-on, and one that he felt was unlikely to succeed. The second one had more to do with him thinking that goals – however he was construing them – he had this conception that goals were entirely disconnected from the soccer performance. I don’t know if he was looking at it from an outcome-only perspective.

SPRJ: In the first season did you try to present a rationale for using goals?

AG: Yes, I did, on multiple occasions – away from the team, by ourselves. He was also in charge of lining the field, so I would go out to meet him so no one else was there. He and I would walk around the field and have some of these conversations in the soccer environment, but away from everybody else. We could talk a variety of soccer topics, a variety of players, but as soon as I mentioned goal setting, it was the big flashing lights, not going there. That was not real soccer, he might say.

Empowering the pitcher in softball

SPRJ: Do you have an example in your professional work in dealing with a coach who has a poor relationship with one or more of his assistants?

AG: The biggest one that jumps to mind there is women’s softball and I was working with a squad where there was a disconnect between the head coach and the pitching coach. It’s not uncommon for those two particular coaches to be in disagreement. What made it worse in this case, was the pitcher and the catcher on the field also; one was in agreement with the head coach and one was in agreement with the pitching coach. So we had bit of a problem! The catcher agreed with the head coach and the pitcher agreed with the pitching coach.

SPRJ: So what was the nature of the disagreement?

AG: Pitch selection, how to attack batters, more aggressive…it was strategic or tactical, not technical. Anecdotally, pitchers – in both baseball and softball – would often report that they don’t feel comfortable throwing a particular pitch. Those conversations have always struck me as a bit of a self-serving bias as the pitcher would later report he or she was unhappy with the pitch selection, but threw it anyway, and that was why that pitch ended up on the wrong side of the fence – out of the park. I don’t know if we’ll ever get a study to show that, but anecdotally that’s how they believe it. So in this situation I actually said to the head coach – this was a unique situation where I worked with multiple and individual players, coaches individually, coaches as a staff and the whole team together; it was a whole lot of moving pieces on this one – I can really help with this, but I would like you to give me two weeks. My solution was to work with the pitcher; I want her to feel comfortable, because if she feels comfortable with what she wants to do, she would be better able to express that, and she’s the one that ultimately is making the pitch – in college softball, those girls don’t usually come out of the game unless there’s a big problem; they may pitch the entire game – I really needed her to be comfortable with what was happening. We had a few pitching sessions with no coaches. We even had one where we didn’t have a catcher; it was just me and her, we actually did it in the gym. It was cold, so we stayed inside! The reality was, talking through each pitch that she was making in this training session, ‘What do you want to do on this pitch?’

SPRJ: So you were getting her to think more about what she was doing?

AG: Trying to, yes. At the end, she put together – I think she called it – ‘her rules for pitching’. It was very empowering for her to be able to do that.

SPRJ: Did it make her more assertive?

AG: Yes, we sat down, pitcher, pitching coach, head coach, she presented it and I talked a little about the work we did. She talked about her newly created rules for pitching.

SPRJ: What was an example of one of these rules?

AG: She wanted, as the game progressed, more control. If you want to call some different pitches from the dugout early in the game, let’s see how things are going, I’ll cede you some control there. But the later the game goes, presumably the more important the pitches are, I need to feel more comfortable with that. She was not really looking for control, it was just – I hate to call it anxiety – unease.

SPRJ: And the coaches accepted this?

AG: Yes, and I cannot express how the head coach was blown away. I think if the pitcher had said anything other than ‘I quit the team’ she would have been okay. ‘You clearly spent the time, you’re clearly expressing it to me.’ I respected that head coach before this event, but even more afterwards. The coach did a lot of things right and I believe she positively impacted the lives of her players.

Culture change in a figure skating club

SPRJ: Can you think of a situation where there was a conflict between two or more coaching staff that wasn’t resolved?

AG: Another figure skating story. The programme director, director of the club, or whatever, needed some culture change across staff members, athletes, competitive and recreational levels, truly a culture change within the whole facility. There was a staff of four coaches – director, assistant, they were doing the same thing; the other two, not so much – one was nearing retirement as a figure skating coach, no interest in any change. I’m short timing it, I’m on my way out. The fourth coach was too good to make any changes, and she told that to my face, she told me that through e-mail, she told me that in -- as many ways as she could – there’s no way you can help me, I’ve been coaching so long, there’s nothing you can say that will help me. Okay, I’m not going to bang my head against the wall with you. So we ended up finding different ways through club policies – what we (the director and I) ended up doing was rewriting the club coaching contracts; we put in specific markers such as can’t miss more than these number of days, can’t have vacation at this time of year, must go to five competitions in a year, these kind of contractual obligations, and when she didn’t meet them she was out the door. In this particular case, she knew she was not going to meet those contractual obligations, so she left the club.

SPRJ: That almost comes across as setting her up to fail, but I suppose she wasn’t committed anyway. The contract was signed on a yearly basis…

AG: Correct.

SPRJ: The change in contract was couched in terms of change in culture…

AG: Correct. It was kind of the Jim Collins ‘get the right people on the bus’ and if you don’t have the right people, then get them off the bus and once you get the right people then move them in. We revived a junior coaching internship type of thing, and as part of that the younger coaches had to meet with me for staff development, professional development, get them onto the right foot, so I could send this culture change message to the new coaches. So the one coach left in the middle was being pressured by the young, energetic coaches who were saying you have to do this, you have to do that, it’s coming from the director, etc. The grumpy one was offered a new contract, but she said, ‘I can’t do this’. So out she went, and the one who was on her way out, I’m retiring, sort of thing, her stance softened and she wanted to coast into retirement; she didn’t want to do anything different. But she started getting pressure from above and below.

Excessively competitive soccer club

SPRJ: Can you give me an example of where you’ve had a conversation about a job and you’ve not wanted to accept it?

AG: How about one that I’ve turned down and one that I’ve reluctantly accepted? There’s a soccer club that was essentially a conglomerate. I did some work with them – one club in the area refused to join. I went out there a couple of times. This club was completely outcome driven, under 8s and above, no training to train, no train to improve, these guys were just focused on winning – every day, compete, compete, compete; every drill was competitive. I just said, ‘No, good luck’. Of course I talked to them, and I would ask a probing question like, ‘You were competing really hard out there today, is this what a normal practice would look like?’.

SPRJ: We’re they all volunteer coaches?

AG: Not all volunteer, I think there was one paid coach; but they were all parents of kids at this club. They folded within a couple of years. They were gone.

The private and public faces of a basketball coach

SPRJ: What about the one you reluctantly accepted?

AG: It was a men’s basketball programme. I got to know the head coach, just the smallest amount, through one of the graduate assistants and he was a nice guy, marginal success here and there, one or two good years, but overall fairly mediocre. He talked a big game to me in private about the role sport psychology and specifically I could have in his programme, so I got the idea he was going to buy in and that we were getting some progress made, he wasn’t terribly on the old school far end of the continuum, but he was definitely on that side; a little hesitant to change but not outright no forever! But in public – I mean with the other coaching staff or with the team – he wasn’t supportive and I saw that. He was so interested and engaged in a private setting, just me and him, I thought maybe this was one of the tasks we were going to have to deal with. When a coach is reluctant to change, it is in part that they are admitting that they are wrong about something, because we were doing it this way, and now we’re going to change, and I don’t want to be seen as weak or as wrong. That happens a lot, and I thought this was going to be one of those situations. It became clear a few weeks in that he wasn’t going to change, so every day I was showing up to training and – not really getting the cold shoulder – I was largely talking to myself it seemed. The contract lasted about six weeks. I did my best, but I do know now that I am more selective who I work with and which battles I pick. I’m not sure it is worth my time to go and fight every battle with every coach or athlete trying, pleading with them, to give mental preparation or mental skills a chance. It certainly isn’t fun and I always end up feeling like I’m pushing a sale and I don’t like that feeling either.

Team cohesion in volleyball

SPRJ: What differences have you found working in male versus female environments?

AG: The most masculine sport is American football and my in [access] has always been through strength and conditioning – through my background, my training, with the NSCA certification, I’ve been welcomed into their training facility. Most S&C facilities I’ve seen are card key access, number codes and generally locked-down secure, so if you are a person in there and you’re not just passing through, when you’re in there and you spend a day there the sport coaches take notice and it has certainly opened other doors for me. I’ve met four or five NFL players because they’ve been hanging around the facility, and because I was in that space (and by that, I mean handshake, hello – I’m not claiming anything beyond that, but had I been outside that space it wouldn’t have happened). I have met other NFL guys in a more social setting and the feeling is different. It’s almost like in the social setting they were wondering what I was going to ask of them, whereas in the S&C facility it was more calm or at least less apprehensive. It’s a gender difference because the most masculine area for the American football crew is the strength and conditioning facility. On the other side, I worked with a college volleyball team for a bit, and the unique thing here was the players asked to bring me in – the players as a team. I don’t know if the coach was reluctant or not. The team reached out to me; the team sent me an e-mail. I then approached the coach, but I kept the e-mail in my back pocket (no need to share information if I don’t have to at that stage). I wanted to get an unbiased opinion from the coach and she was really ambivalent, she was really neutral, like ‘I’ve never worked with a sport psychology consultant. I don’t really know what to make of this.’ But she responded and followed up with e-mail to have another chat and that’s when I showed her the team e-mail. There were five days or a week between the two meetings.

SPRJ: Was she aware of unrest among the players?

AG: She was aware of unrest with a couple of the players. She invited me to come and hang around the gym. They practiced at 5 am and I was there, but it was a time of year when I didn’t have any other commitments so I did three or four days in a row. I sat on the side and had a cup of coffee, in gym attire, very relaxed, very non-threatening. From there, she engaged me for the rest of the season. Almost everything I did was with the team, not the coaches. They even wanted to have their sessions in their locker room; that was the really unique part of this story. There wasn’t a 10-year age gap between the girls and me, so to be invited into their space – and this is when you remember what you’ve been taught on courses on harassment! – I knocked on the door and I wouldn’t enter the room until multiple players came out to the hallway to get me and say come on in. Everybody’s dressed, everything’s put away…

SPRJ: What did you work on with them?

AG: Some discussion around cohesion. So many volleyball teams have that moment after a point where they just come back to a quick reach in a sort of quasi-huddle. Essentially the problem was that two of the star players on this team were extremely ego-oriented, the rest of the team wanted to be much more task-oriented. So visually it was striking in a game when a point went down, six players would come back – but it wasn’t six because one didn’t really make an effort, so it was five players and one player by herself. The coaching staff and the other players thought, that’s just the way that girl is but it irritated them because it was so visually striking that this one, or sometimes two, players were not in that group huddle. So what we did, because we had the space in their locker room, was to put six starters in the middle of the locker room, ‘Okay, point down, what do you do next? Walk in slow motion’ And, sure enough, five of them walked to the middle and reached out their hands, while one girl just stood still. When I put it to them in that way, in a slow motion, you could tell that one girl wasn’t moving and the other five were. ‘How do you think that makes your team-mates feel when they’re huddled together and you just stood there doing nothing?’ ‘Oh, I don’t mean it that way!’ ‘Okay, that wasn’t my question; my question was how do think it makes them feel?’ And from there it went into a discussion. These meetings in the locker room were scheduled on a weekly basis.

SPRJ: How did you deal with the issue of working with the athletes versus working with the coaches?

AG: I was very clear with the coaches at the time of agreement, I would always ask the athletes first whether I could share something with the coaches and I would be specific – ‘Could I share the topic “X” with the coaching staff?’ No activity, no discussion, no who talked, no who didn’t talk, no who wasn’t there. ‘We worked on team dynamics today, coach, trying to be more together as a team.’ The coach, to her credit, was wonderful with that. Later on in the season, she might ask ‘I’m trying to reach out to Joanne, I’m not happy with her performance, is there anything you can do there?’ I was very careful then to not divulge anything, but as I sat there worried about betraying the trust and being let into the players’ space, it turned out that the coach knew more than I did because everything I knew only came from the group setting and it wasn’t directed towards any single player. So when the coach wanted to talk about Joanne, she had already asked other players on the team. So she had four or five data points, and to her I was just another data point. I was just one other perspective, trying to get data on Joanne and I wasn’t forthcoming on that data. But in a textbook setting, a small slip of the tongue for me could have been a major problem. I would make suggestions to her about what she might do; e.g. ‘Do you remember what it was like when you were a 20 year-old at college, missing your parents?’ I am confident that I never compromised confidentiality.

Evidence-based practice

SPRJ: Your doctoral degree with a thesis in evidence-based sports coaching, involving development of Coaching Success Questionnaire-2 (CSQ-2), ² gave you authoritative status. As time has gone on, have you relied less on your coach evaluation tool?

AG: Absolutely, it’s a tool in a toolbox analogy, which I’m not a big fan of. I used the tool as an entry point, even if it was just a conversation starter. I didn’t use it recently at a NCAA D1 Power 5 school – it was 100% my observation, my strength and conditioning background, knowing what I’ve seen that’s been successful, the three S&C roundtable papers I’ve co-authored^3–5 have really helped me learn from outstanding coaches.

SPRJ: So the roundtable papers were borne out of your professional work?

AG: Yes, they were consulting questions that I reached out to S&C coaches soliciting feedback and really just a conversation, turned it into a paper, which turned into presentations, which turned into more consulting, so all of it comes together. In reality, the biggest difference between my consulting work and publishing papers is just the methods section. There is always a literature review, of sorts, that informs my decisions or interventions, there is some sort of data collection and examining impacts, and then there is a wrap-up or discussion. Depending on the situation some of that is internal to just myself and other times that is used to develop buy-in and additional follow-up consulting work.