Dan chats to Kevin Mulcahey about his experiences coaching both novices and experts and how you need to change to meet their needs.
Kevin coaches Gaelic football and hurling, Ireland’s national sports as an assistant or head coach at all ages and levels. He has also worked in multiple roles on three continents as a coach of various stripes like assistant coach, S&C coach and performance coach in Aussie Rules, basketball, soccer, rugby, tennis, volleyball, hockey and in numerous other 1-2-1 roles over 28 years.
He also runs Designing the Game on Facebook where he challenges coaches to think about their approaches to coaching. His main role is an owner-operator S&C and sports performance coach at TMC Performance Coaching. You can catch Kevin @movementcoachkm on Twitter where he is active and responds to DM’s.
In the podcast, they discuss the following:
How much does your team coaching approach change when you are dealing with experts and novices?
Using “pivot” players in any sport.
A principle of play has normally been set by coaching experts from the past, no matter what sport you are in. How much do players need to know about a principle before you start working on it? And how do you introduce it?
How to use deliberate practice in the right context.
How long do you let a team or player do something which is clear to you that is inefficient, and despite your nudges, they continue to do it?
Dan Cottrell chats to Owen Woods, Community Rugby Coach for Gosport & Fareham RFC.
Owen was previously in the Air Force for 4½ years and then the police for 17 years. In June 2021 he started up his full-time role to promote rugby and its core values, the vision being to put the club and values at the heart of the community.
He has coached his son's rugby team for the last six years. He is a level 2 coach, a qualified referee working in schools in the local community delivering rugby sessions to children from 7 to 13. MORE
Dan chats with former Fiji captain Deacon Manu, who's now coaching in Singapore.
Deacon has traveled the rugby world, representing Fiji and the Maori All Blacks, as well as playing for Waikato Chiefs and the Blues in Super Rugby and then for the Scarlets in Wales.
They chat about the coaches he's experienced and now coaching with developing players and new players to the game. MORE
Dan chats to Jacob Ford about his remarkable journey to becoming Bury St Edmonds RFC and Ipswich School's director of rugby at the age of just 23.
The topics covered included:
The best way to speak to players to allow them to grow
What makes the players respect a coach
What efficiency in training and a game looks like
Being mentored by your dad (Mike Ford, former England and Bath coach)
The differences and similarities between coaching professional players and school players
Should bench players get paid the same as the starters
Working with players who are older than you
Developing a style of play that suits your team
Can a coach make excuses for a poor performance MORE
Dan Cottrell chats to top sports psychologist Dan Abrahams about how even non-expert coaches can make a difference in their players' mindset.
Dan Abrahams is the author of four best-selling sports psychology books and is the founder of both the Dan Abrahams Soccer Academy and The Sport Psych Show podcast. MORE
Dan hosts a discussion between Professor Rob Gray and Dr Mike Ashford about how players make decisions.
The discussion is based on a paper that Mike wrote reviewing different academic approaches to decision-making:
Understanding a Player’s Decision-Making Process in Team Sports: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence
https://doi.org/10.3390/sports9050065
Rob Gray suggests that the role of ecological dynamics needs to be viewed differently from the paper's conclusions. MORE
Dan speaks to Paul Gustard, now defence coach at Benetton, formerly England defence coach, Harlequins head coach and coach with Saracens.
Paul, who won two England caps and represented the Barbarians, also played for Leicester Tigers, London Irish and Saracens,
They reflect on Paul's journey to Italy and how he feels reinvigorated. MORE