Episode 4: Is Technology Ruining the Athlete-Coach Relationship?
Dr Martin Buchheit and Lisa Alexander break down the art of coaching with and without data.
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Coaching is something we've long seen as distinctly human – a powerful and emotional exchange between coach and athlete. But like almost every other role in sport, coaching is now being augmented by technology. Is this non-stop stream of data helping our coaches and athletes? Or is it getting in the way of what really matters?
To break things down, host Professor Sam Robertson is joined first by Dr Martin Buchheit. Martin spent seven seasons as the Head of Performance for Paris St Germain Football club, has published of 170 scientific papers, and is now Head of Performance Intelligence Research at Kitman Labs.
Next up, Sam speaks with renowned coach Lisa Alexander. With 30 years of coaching under her belt, Lisa is perhaps best known for her decade-long tenure as Head Coach of the Australian Diamonds national netball team, with her 81% win rate marking her as one of the most successful coaches in Australia's history.
Together, Sam, Martin and Lisa discuss how coaching has changed over the years, whether coaches have become too reliant on technology, and what skills we'll be looking for in coaches of the future.
Want to dive deeper into this episode? Start here:
HIITScience - The Science & Application of High Intensity Interval Training (Martin Buchheit)
Wearable Tech Will Transform Sport - But Will It Also Ruin Athlete’s Personal Lives? (The Guardian)
How Technology Has Changed Coaching (Work in Sports)
Understanding the “Gut Instinct” of Expert Coaches During Talent Identification (Taylor & Francis)
Full Episode Transcript
Intro
Sam Robertson (Host): Picture an iconic sports coach. What do you see? Perhaps a rousing speech delivered in the final break in play of a championship game? Or maybe an attentive observer, refining the technique of an athlete trackside?
[00:00:13] Whatever you see, chances are it's distinctly human, a powerful and emotional exchange between coach and athlete. But like almost every other part of our lives, what we may have once seen as strictly human is now being augmented by technology. It's recent influence on sport has been all encompassing, rapidly changing, and often polarising.
[00:00:31] The position of the coach has not been immune to this change. Technology has given the coach the ability to be constantly informed about the performance, health status, and even the mood of an athlete, often in close to real time. It's also transformed the way their jobs are organised, the way they communicate, and even how they're evaluated.
[00:00:49] So what does this mean for the types of skills we look for in coaches of the future? How does this affect the athletes and the games we love to watch? And is our quintessential view of the coach as a great communicator, now simply a thing of the past?
[00:01:01] I'm Sam Robinson, and this is One Track Mind.
(Music Interlude)
Interview One - Martin Buchheit
[00:01:11] Hello and welcome to One Track Mind, a podcast about the real issues, forces and innovations shaping the future of sport. I'm your host, Sam Robertson and on this episode we're asking: Is technology ruining the athlete-coach relationship?
[00:01:26] My first guest is Associate Professor Martin Buchheit, who is the Head of Performance Intelligence Research at Kitman Labs. Prior to that, and up until this year, Martin was the Head of Performance at Paris St Germain Football Club for the past seven seasons. And before that, a physiologist and sports scientist at Aspire in Qatar. He has published over 170 scientific papers and is perhaps best known for his work in fitness assessment in football and high intensity interval training.
[00:01:53] Martin is also the Co-Founder of HIITScience - The Science and Application of High Intensity Interval Training, which includes a web platform, course and book, and is also the Co-Editor of the open-access scientific journal 'Sports Performance & Science Reports'. Martin, thanks for coming on the show.
[00:02:09] Martin Buchheit: Hey Sam, thanks for having me.
[00:02:10] Sam Robertson (Host): Now, to start off the conversation, I wanted to talk about technology adoption. I think sports scientists and high-performance managers, and these types of roles, have always been kind of considered as forward thinkers in terms of technology, and obviously there's a lot more around now than there was at the start of your career, but do you think there can be too much technology in a sporting organisation? And how do you know when you've got the right amount?
[00:02:32] Martin Buchheit: Well, that's a good one to start with. Too much? Of course, of course. Especially if you have money and if you're working in a wealthy club, it's easy to get into that trap and just think that technology will be the solution. But I think, yeah, what I'm seeing here now and everyone will agree, is that technology it's only a part, it's a tool only. It's not the solution, per se. How do you know when you have enough? I would take the question more as with time as the centre of the response. So if the technology allows you first to save time in what you do, and of course make better decisions, inform your decisions, that's obvious, but the time is maybe the tipping point. If you spend more time using the technology than actually answering your questions, it's probably the wrong technology, or you have too much, or too many things to do with it. So I really think about the efficiency of the process.
[00:03:29] So, you should take the example of an athlete management system, not being biased at all at the moment with my role, of course, but an athlete management system of course makes you save time. Because that will just put things together and in this case not only time, it's maybe also resources or skills. Because there are many people working in clubs able to merge databases or enter, in real time, data in the system. But again, this is really helping people to save time first, to get the data together.
[00:04:00] But now, if you have to put sensors everywhere in the gym and spend an hour setting everything up to get some data for your monitoring, but then you need a couple of hours after to analyse those data, or you are only able to analyse the data three days after that decision has past, this is probably where you're losing it.
[00:04:18] Sam Robertson (Host): Yeah, there's no doubt that time really is a crucial consideration I think, with technology. And you actually just got me thinking about something I say a lot to some of the research students I supervise. I talk a lot about the impact that technology has in being represented in three different ways, and they probably get sick of me talking about it a little bit. But firstly, there's the completely new insights that it sometimes brings - for instance, things that we didn't have before it existed. And then second, there's these enhanced insights - for example, tracking systems, they do a better job and a faster job than an old stopwatch and tape measure. And then of course, there's those efficiency gains, which you mentioned there, which help us to save time and basically just move faster in general.
[00:04:58] But the irony isn't lost on me that there are probably a whole lot of jobs that exist now in sport that never used to, that really the sole, or at least the main purpose, of them is to administer and look after a piece of technology. And I think sports scientists are one of those roles, in a lot of sporting codes, that have basically become applied technologists, almost. Do you have a view on whether that's a good thing or are we selling sports scientists a little bit short by loading them up with GPS and sensors and other things that you mentioned then, and that's become almost too large a part of their role?
[00:05:33]Martin Buchheit: I just apologise, I can't remember who wrote these blogs I just recently read, but it was around 'sports science is more than a GPS', of course. And as you said, you associate almost a role to a technology and GPS being the culprit in the team sport environment. Of course you can't reduce sport science or you can't reduce a profession to a technology, even though the profession uses the technology a lot to make inferences on tracking load, helping hopefully to make better decisions, and so on. But sport science is a process. Sport science is an approach of observing things, is an approach of using science to make better analysis, better decisions, and the technology is only a part of it and it serves the overall goal, let's say. Again, there's a trade-off. Obviously you need to be trained to know how to use this technology. Otherwise you're not efficient and you spend hours or you don't extract the best you can from the technology.
[00:06:30] I'd like to mention my great friend, another Aussie, Ben Simpson, who I was working with in Qatar, and I was super lucky that he would be happy to join me in Paris as well. And he's been handling the GPS, he's the first in Qatar and in Paris. And more than let's say, a skill, that became his touch. Obviously we worked with the best system you could, because we could afford it, be it in Qatar or in Paris, but the job that Ben has been doing with GPS has been outstanding at all levels because he had the ability, he was so precise, so consistent. There will never be an error, there will never be a missing file, or if a missing file will be screwed for any reason, he will be able to replace that file so that everything will be smooth and well done. And then, we all collectively could use his work to do whatever we had to do on our side with the coaches, make decisions, evaluate load, tracking, monitoring, everything.
[00:07:26] So this is not happening at the technology level, in the end. The most important part was what Ben was able to do with the technology to make the data clean - you know, you talk about data health, consistency, and so on. So this is something we forget, because you just turn on the machine, fine, you get some data, but then you handle those data, you prepare those data - first level. And then of course you have all the interpretation of the data, you see where we can talk about all the statistics aspect, assessing changes, how much is enough, and so on. And this has nothing to do with technology. These are still what's happening in our brains. So again, it's just a tool and I kind of sometimes get a bit pissed when I hear those guys referring to themselves as GPS experts. What does it mean? You know how to run the software or you change the battery? So, it's way more than that.
[00:08:17] Sam Robertson (Host): Yeah, it is. But of course there are all sorts of different titles out there, and maybe we can talk about some of those in a moment because I do want to talk to you about how some of the roles have changed across sport science, and other disciplines for that matter. But first I wanted to pick up on something you just said around the role of GPS. If I consider the question posed in this episode and the influence of something like GPS - to me, even with its limitations, that is a good example of a technology that has helped in the prescription of exercise or training. And now I have a view that we've probably become a little bit overly reliant on it, but that's maybe a conversation for another day. Would you agree though, that athlete tracking systems are perhaps the most influential technology in football that you've seen in your time and that it's made your job easier? And maybe you have a detrimental example as well, something that's made your relationship with athletes worse.
[00:09:03] Martin Buchheit: Yeah, that's the only thing I'm a bit worried about is that we all tend to, again, speak about GPS as if it was the only technology. So obviously there are way [more] other types of technology that are very useful in that football context. I'll be back on the GPS quickly, but just to go off on another route quickly, the software aspect, again, mentioning the AMS or those apps, you can communicate, you enter data through an app that goes to a cloud. This is still IT technology, but I think this is something we sometimes forget that it has helped a lot of clubs.
[00:09:36] Gym equipment, like you have an approach of velocity-based training, whatever you do, a heavy lift, but you just use that as monitoring readiness. This is pretty, pretty cool. And we sometimes just go straight into GPS because this is the main part of the load, but how cool is that? You're starting a gym session and after the second rep, if the athlete is in his usual power mode, he still lifts the bar at the usual speed, or for the last two weeks has been lifting faster the same load, you know you can increase the load. If you don't have that, how do you know that the player has improved until you do your next max in three weeks? In three months? So this is an example of something very, very simple that makes a big difference, but we don't use it daily in every session as we do with GPS. That's why GPS always comes first, you know?
[00:10:28]But of course, you're right. Of course, GPS has been the biggest impact because that's the biggest part of the load and that's why we do [it] more. But again, I've worked with a lot of coaches, not only in my recent role, who didn't care, you know? Very successful coaches, that if they know how to plan well, they have an idea of the load dynamic in the week, it's fine. It's fine. And then playing minutes, a player played three games in a row, with congested fixtures, it's probably time to rest him anyway, whatever has been running load. When you respect some very basic programming principles, whatever your micro-cycle, you have some clear periods of rest, periods of overload. If you respect that, you don't obligatorily need to have constantly this feedback, or we've done this amount of high speed running, this amount of load.
[00:11:21] Of course we ourselves, me definitely included, have developed almost a parallel way of programming using the technology. And so far, we don't know if it's actually superior. That's the stuff I wrote about. Okay, the actual weekly load in terms of high speed running, in theory, should be between two and three times game load. So that's, if you have a game on Saturday, no game on Wednesday, but during training you build up the load of the second game. The next week, when you have this second game, you will be kind of used to this load and that means no spike, and so on. And if you are completely into this model, of course you'll need your GPS is because you want to know how much metres are missing from the Wednesday session so that you can catch up on those amounts of running.
[00:12:09] So that's completely the GPS-oriented approach of prioritisation. Where you put your daily buckets. Okay, this is an acceleration day so I need this amount of [acceleration]. But this is very sports science and I think before we had GPSs, I think they were more injuries. People are getting more injured, but the game has accelerated. So, if you actually put the ratio between those increased injuries versus the ratio or the increase in running, we actually get less injured now. Injuries have less increased than the running demands. So I don't think it's obligatory, it more depends on what's your approach. You give me the key of the periodisation, because it's Martin, because I have this sport science approach, of course I would like to see GPSs after every session. Of course. But you give the keys to an old coach who has a very good feeling of what a good periodisation is, you don't even need to turn them on and that will work.
[00:13:01] There are still areas where I see GPSs as really impactful, or, let's say, technology overall. And I think return to play is the best example of that. When you really want to validate certain criteria, would be a level of strength, would be a range of motion, and you use again, encoders, whatever technology, to measure your angles. So strength maintains players within a certain speed range related to their stride length. Hit certain targets in terms of speed, in terms of game volume, in terms of game intensity. That helps a lot to give confidence whether the player is progressing as he's supposed to. So, because the return to play process is way more surgical, is way more precise, you have those benchmarks, in this regard, that technology really, really helps to make everyone's confidence. In this case, the athlete himself can actually see where it's going. So you build the trust as well and you see where we're going - yesterday you were there, tomorrow the target is to go there. So then you have the discussion and so on. So, as I said, I'm happy to take off the GPS for the team sessions if the coach knows how to program and you don't need to show him some numbers, say "Hey guys, can we maybe do a bit more tomorrow?" Or "What about hitting those targets?" But RTP is a good example of where it's really helpful.
[00:14:22]Sam Robertson (Host): Listening to you then, it occurred to me that utility of GPS, or any technology, seems to be quite closely linked to the level of precision that you need for prescription and you talk about return to play as a good example of where you do need that precision. And I would agree with that. I guess a problem does arise though, when you have a system in your club or organisation that's very centered on having a regular input and the ability, or perhaps the inability, of that system to operate once you take that input out, in this case let's say GPS data. It does give you gaps and I think that's a trap a lot of organisations fall into because they become reliant on it as a result.
[00:14:59] And also another point you mentioned there around gym loads being considered in these systems or models, I think this also illustrates a need to account for things that aren't being measured consistently, or even particularly well, or maybe not being measured as often. Whereas, as you mentioned, the GPS is being measured every day, quite regularly, and as a result, almost more weighting gets placed on that - even more so than other things that a coach might intuitively, normally be looking for.
[00:15:24] Now, whilst we're on that topic, I wanted to talk about something else related and you almost hinted at it there in your response, which is what would happen if we took the technology away? Now, I think it would be an interesting experiment that will probably never happen in high performance sport, and it's probably hard to answer as it causes us to ask the question really like, what is technology? I mean, a dumbbell in the gym is still a piece of technology, as is a paper and a notepad. But if we took away, let's say, all of the more recently developed technology, do you think we'd see catastrophic reductions in performance or increase to injury rates? What would happen?
[00:16:00] Martin Buchheit: I would say nothing. Nothing at all. On the one side, because if you drop the technology, you drop a few people as well. You drop the GPS specialist, you drop those guys who - actually if you want to include me in those categories, fine - you drop a lot of people who without the technology would not be there. See what I mean? So that's stuff I heard from my very nice colleagues at some stage that I was in my position because I had this research background, that I had this knowledge that I developed over the years, I was missing the legitimacy to be there because I was not a former player or coach, you know? So you could take this route saying I made this position, kind of I cheated, I made this position through another route and if this route is not legitimate, fine, let's work without people like us. But the truth is that I tend to agree, not about the legitimacy, because I still think we can bring a lot, but it really depends on the dynamic, again, of the coaching staff, of how people operate with my example of which angle you take when you approach programming.
[00:17:03] But a good example about what happens when you take technology out. If you think about a club that is very, very, well-equipped - so the GPS, the encoders, all the strength sensors in the gym. You have those NordBords, those goniometers, those isokinetic machines, you have everything. You leave for camp for two or three weeks, it's unlikely you can move the whole training ground with you. So, what you're actually taking with you is already a first triage, first selection of what really matters. Or sometimes it's about what you can move, of course. Are you taking the force plates with you? Pfft, if you had the former German force plates we were having in Qatar. When we were traveling, camps, we were taking the force plates with us. Doing those post-game jump assessments and those force plates were just ridiculously heavy.
[00:17:52]Sam Robertson (Host): I was going to say, do you remember how heavy they were?
[00:17:54] Martin Buchheit: Can't remember, it was a joke. But again, we just had too many resources. We had too many kit men that were able to handle them, you know. So yeah the things you don't take with you, not only because of the weight of those force plates, but because it's okay, we can do without for a couple of weeks. Or sometimes the technology breaks, or there's a stadium and the GPS don't get the signal. It's fine. No one will die. It's always nice to have this information. If you have, again, people like yourself coming more from a scientific background so you want all the synergy to be nice because you believe that it is definitely important. But again, I work with an amazing coach. For him, the most important was the management of playing minutes. And that was the coach we had the least number of injuries, managing well playing minutes.
[00:18:42] Sam Robertson (Host): Yeah to me, this is a scientific approach to it or a very structured approach to it, which again, can be criticised by people in sport because it can take the joy out of sports, so to speak, and I have been told that myself from time to time, but it strikes me that it's almost like there's principles and there's considerations relating to the player that you know are important, which includes the load and their mood and their previous injury and these things that we know are important to consider, but we get a little bit hung up on how we measure them. Whereas in reality, the way we measure them in five or 10 years is probably going to be completely different anyway, because of the rate in which technology is developing.
[00:19:17] So to me, it's always about more that we have an understanding of those things in the back of our mind, or even at the front of our mind. That we need to consider them and we're thinking about the athletes' loads and when they train and when they play, rather than taking the force plates on the road. And I'm sure there's things with your eye or with your own experience that you can see, which come from a force plate, without having the force plate there. Maybe not to the same level of precision of measurement, but there's things that you can see with your eye about the way the athlete's moving. It's important that we keep those things in our model of what we see as performance, but not necessarily get wedded to the way that we always measured them, because it is going to change and it's changing very, very rapidly, isn't it?
[00:19:53]Martin Buchheit: Yeah, everything has been changing so, so quickly. If you take just heart rate, the simple measure, we've all been using heart rate at some stage, but when you see how before the precision has been incredibly developing - but actually no, I'm just joking in this case because heart rate is still the hardest measure. It's still the variable that we struggle to measure, even after 20 years. You still need to wear a heart rate strap. But players don't want to wear [them]. Every club you talk to tomorrow, they would say either they don't measure heart rate or they measure it every second day, because again, players don't want to wear the strap. Or if they're measure it, they have poor data, they have gaps in this stuff. So we may have increased the frequency of the GPSs, reduced the size of the accelerometers in the gym, well, heart rate is still a pain to be measured. And I've discussed that with all my colleagues throughout the time because I had an interest in heart rate and I just can't understand. So please investors, please technologists, we're in 2020, close to 2021, we need a solution for heart rates. You know, it's far from being the best measure of internal cardiovascular loads because we know there's heaps of limitations, but it's better than nothing. So, just help us to measure heart rate properly, you know? But anyway, that was a bit of sidetrack on heart rate.
[00:21:11] Sam Robertson (Host): No, I agree though, and I think it's a really good one and a great example of something that hasn't changed very much.
[00:21:16] I'm conscious, before I let you go, I did want to ask you about the future. It's something on the show that we want to spend a lot of time on, particularly what's coming next. So, you mentioned earlier the role of intuition in the coach, and we've also discussed technology, and really those two themes have run through our entire conversation. I think often we place them as polar opposites, but I actually think measurement and judgment is actually a bit of a continuum. And I mean, you will have seen the emergence of new technologies, which are starting to blend between human and technology or machine anyway. And I guess the one I really think of is data to text or natural language, which as an example is something that we can take quantitative data on an athlete and actually turn that into a computer-generated written report. So it seems to me that there might actually be somewhat of a blurring of the lines between what is actually human coaching and what is actually derived from a piece of technology. You mentioned heart rate as something earlier that you'd like to see improved, but do you have another view on what this world of coaching could look like in the future?
[00:22:18] Martin Buchheit: Taking as a central point of improvement, or the direction, the efficiency. So on one side you have the time and the other side, you have the results. So, if you get more connected to share an access to information, I don't see how that can be a negative aspect. So, the easier the access to information, the faster you get those data that you collect in the gym, in the field, whatever, into the system. And everyone can look at that through their phones and everything, that's great. And this is where, again, we've been making clear progresses. On the ability to access the information and analyse, and so on.
[00:23:01] Then in terms of the technology per se, in terms of stuff we measure, to be honest I don't care if now GPS moves from 50 to 100 Hertz. That will happen, but that won't change the practices because again, we may be able to measure better decelerations, but who really cares? It's about finding where the technology has really an impact, and almost going backwards. Where you really want to make sure what you measure is actually very precise, again, example of RTP. So I would rather say how [does] technology help us to make better decisions at the end of RTP? And then you look backwards. Okay, what do you need for that? You need to make sure you can measure this level of strength, or assess the capacity of the passive structure of the hamstring to stretch when you're running at high speed. Okay, so maybe ultrasound now needs to be able to take those measures in an active way, which is doable, but it's a pain. Or let's measure pelvic tilt during high speed running. That's technology, that's something that doesn't exist and that will help to solve problems. But increasing the sample rates, increasing the sensitivity of an accelerometer, it would be nice, but it's not as impactful. It is not going to be a game changer.
[00:24:12] Sam Robertson (Host): Yeah, I absolutely agree. Something, I think a lot about, ways in which we can evaluate the actual impact we're having, not only in coaching but in other roles in sport too. And obviously there are many ways in which we can do that now, but I think we're only scratching the surface in many ways, particularly on things like how athletes learn, especially over time, because it is such a difficult thing to do in the field, as we know. Martin, thank you so much for joining us on the show, it was a pleasure.
[00:24:36] Martin Buchheit: Cheers, thanks for the chat and thanks for the invite.
(Music Interlude)
Interview Two - Lisa Alexander
[00:24:44] Sam Robertson (Host): My next guest is Lisa Alexander. Lisa is perhaps best known for her tenure as the Australian Diamonds national netball team Head Coach, which she led for almost a decade up until this year. Her record whilst in that role marks her as one of the most successful team sport coaches in Australia's history, with a winning success rate of 81%.
[00:25:02] Lisa has been involved in coaching for 30 years. However, her eclectic CV also includes roles as a physical education and mathematics teacher, textbook author and small business owner. Most recently she has taken on the position of Specialist Consultant to Leading Teams. Lisa is renowned for being especially forward thinking and I'm very much looking forward to her unique perspective on this question. Lisa, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:25:26] Lisa Alexander: Thank you, Sam. I'm really looking forward to this topic and discussion. It's dear to my heart, actually.
[00:25:31] Sam Robertson (Host): That's one of the key reasons I was keen to get your thoughts on this topic. I mentioned in your introduction there, that you've coached at a high level for quite some time now, and no doubt along the way, you've met some very different and unique athlete and staff personalities. What do you consider some of the most important traits that basically any good coach should possess?
[00:25:49] Lisa Alexander: Well I think the major one is understanding human behaviour - and I say 'human' very deliberately, because I believe coaches can be men or women and they can coach men or women, or mixed teams. So I'm talking about coaching from an overall perspective, but definitely learning about and understanding human behaviour in all its facets, I think is extremely important because your job as a coach is to help somebody else and support somebody else to be the best that they can be.
[00:26:21] Whether that's in a high performance setting or even in grassroots setting. So understanding human behaviour. And then the other side of that is being able to communicate, both speaking and listening, in all its different settings. I think listening is very underrated. In our active communication process, coaches talk a lot. But I think coaches need to have more of that perspective and circumspection when they're talking with athletes and also with support staff, or people that they're trying to influence as well. Whether it's board members or educating the public about high-performance sport, for example, That level of communication. So being good at all aspects of that, both in group meetings, large settings, where you might be presenting to a whole audience of coaches about particular areas, and then on the individual basis as well, being good at listening on a one-to-one basis. Although I would recommend that coaches never be in a situation where they're on one-to-one, because I think it's our duty of care to our athletes, that we have somebody else in the room with us, always. It's always been a very clear pathway for me as a teacher.
[00:27:41] I believe that understanding sports science and statistics, I'm going to say at an undergraduate level, and I know that'll tick a few people off, but I think actually having that really good, basic science and mathematics understanding is just a prerequisite nowadays for, particularly, elite and high-performance level coaches. Because there is so much sports science and data analytics and all the realms of technology, that information that's coming to head coaches. For me, it's not good enough nowadays to just be the technical coach who just gets the game. You really need to be a program manager as well and understand all the facets that go into performance. I'm not saying you have to be the expert, but I think a very good solid understanding is important so you can ask the right questions about the information that's being delivered to you from the professionals in that area.
[00:28:41] And the other thing is having a thirst for it. The thirst for learning. Like, you really want to know more about better preparation of athletes, in all holistic views of how we prepare athletes. I think that's definitely a prerequisite and there's two more. There's the do no harm, physically and psychologically. I think there needs to be the great moral and ethical framework. I think that is totally now missing in a lot of our coach education. It might be given to coaches in a sheet, or they're told to read it on the computer. Not good enough, as far as I'm concerned. It needs to be much more rigorous. It needs to be a great debate about, for the person, what do they value in terms of how they treat other people? Because I believe that you can treat people well as people first and still get great high performance out of athletes. And then the other one is just be curious and learn to ask really good questions.
[00:29:42]Sam Robertson (Host): There's certainly a lot in your response there, Lisa, and I wouldn't say I disagree with any of them. As you were speaking, my mind turns to the sports-specific nature of some of your points, but some sports are particularly well-resourced, especially at the high performance level, and you're able to have 10 or 15 coaches working and some of them can be more specialised than others, obviously. And of course, then we've got other sports where a coach might really need to have that full suite, I suppose, of both hard and soft skills that you mentioned then. And if you don't have those, you're probably not going to do your job as well as you would like.
[00:30:12] I wondered also, as you were speaking, about how much some of these skills might've changed throughout your career, or at least whether the importance of some of them have? I mean, from my experience, I would say that the data analysts is example of one that has, mainly because we have more data being generated than we used to. Is that something that you've noticed as well? Or is it just being more experienced that you've picked up on certain things and emphasise them more as you've gone through your career?
[00:30:34] Lisa Alexander: Yeah, it's a really good question. I think definitely the data analytics area has provided much more information. As we know, big data then has to be analysed and presented to in terms of trends or important pieces of information that can really affect change in performance. I'm all for that. I've always been for that probably because of my science background. I'm very much a sports science coach and I've been that way since 1986, since I finished my degree. And so, in my sport, in Netball Victoria, we have been offered support from physiotherapists and from strength and conditioning coaches, and even from movement analysts, quite early in the piece. So way back in the early nineties. And I've been one of those coaches that always embraced that, I never looked at it with suspicion. I always thought, how can we use this information to better prepare the athletes for what they're going to do? And I guess I'd had good training, whether it was from my teaching background, but also in our education of our coaches in netball, about the communication process. About how to use that and what is also, what I would call really, the authority levels, at the end of the day.
[00:31:54] Particularly in sports medicine, I think from my point of view, the doctor knows best. And I've been one of those coaches that has always followed the medical practitioners' advice about athletes. So if an athlete wasn't able to play for whatever reason, I never pushed that. But I, at the same token, I was probably part of the generation of coaches that had the first generation of sports medicine doctors. So they were what I would call common sense doctors. They understood sport, so they understood that the body's going to be in pain and it's going to be pushed to the limit. So how can we make this work for that player to best enable them to perform, but then also do not end up not being able to walk when they're 60, for example.
[00:32:39]Sam Robertson (Host): I want to pick up on something you said there. I think in some sports, that I've worked in at least, there seems to be this almost resistance to other practitioners from coaches. Sometimes I think there's been probably quite a really simple reason behind that, which is largely economic, basically. For example, I think if we look at some of the smaller or at least less well-resourced sports, an athlete paying another practitioner to work with them, let's say a physio therapist or a trainer, could literally be taking work, and that's obviously income as well, away from the coach.
[00:33:09] And I think this ties into something you loosely talked about earlier, which is the notion of the generalist versus the specialist. And what I mean by that is that often in some sports coaches are kind of forced to be the generalist and almost causes them to be at odds with other practitioners and they then end up being less likely to defer to these people. It almost causes a clash, doesn't it?
[00:33:28] Lisa Alexander: Oh, definitely. It did for me in the early days. I was a phys-ed trained, human movement-trained, skill acquisition- trained coach. So, in many respects, I probably could have arranged and organised strength and conditioning sessions for my players. And I had to actually, in some circumstances, because we didn't have that specialist in my regional team. We actually ended up getting somebody who came in to help us with the physical preparation of the athletes, but I used to do it on my own and just based off my experience as an athlete, but also what I'd gleaned from coach education workshops, et cetera. So yeah, there is that danger that you end up thinking you know more than the people who are out there because you've got a bit of knowledge. So this is when a bit of knowledge can be dangerous.
[00:34:18]However, I think what I learned, and as I said to you before with the sports medicine doctors, I certainly didn't have the level of training they did, and I would always defer to them. And definitely over time I would want to access and have the experts telling me what is the best way to go about this. But it didn't mean that I didn't ask questions and want to critically analyse and get evidence from that practitioner about why their way was better, perhaps in the way that I thought it should be. There is always discussion about the crossover points, though.
[00:34:52] My strength and conditioning coaches I've worked with in the last five years, Lee Smith and Jason Howell, there would always be a crossover between on-court training that was netball training, plus on-court physical preparation. And how I tried to do that was more about working together collaboratively in that. Because I was the expert in netball, they were the expert in the physical preparation, we found a common way to work together in that area. It is something that is, I think, one of the areas that can be used as an opportunity to exploit more from in the future, is to use that expertise from a technical point of view, tactical point of view, with the experts and how you can work together, not in just your little silos of specificity.
[00:35:40] Sam Robertson (Host): Yeah and I would say that there's the growing body of work and some of it's not particularly new, but it seems to be at least growing in popularity now, around that recognition of the athlete and the team as a complex system. And also that there really are no netball or strengthening and conditioning sessions per se. They really are both just physical training for the athlete. And really every practitioner, I would say, that is involved in that process needs to have an understanding of how the athlete's responding to that training.
[00:36:04] Now, I wanted to ask you about judgments and decisions, particularly with this rise of technology and how particularly that can be reconciled with the instinct or the gut feel of the coach. So the question I have is, do you think that coaches can become overly reliant on technology and how do they get that balance right between using that instinct and feel versus what they're seeing from technology? Because I think, in one way, technology is really just providing another opinion, in many respects. It's just that instead of coming from another person, it's coming from data.
[00:36:34] Lisa Alexander: Yeah it is, and it means the specialist is using that data to put their point forward and use evidence to convince and influence the coach about a particular way we might change an annual training plan or what we've planned for a week's preparation leading into a test match situation. I think that's an ongoing process all the time. I know myself and with the Diamond support staff, we would always review, very thoroughly, in terms of the dynamics of how the team worked, not just working on what we were working on, the mechanics. So, I guess it was part of that ongoing review process all the time that was built into how we systematised our system, that it became part and parcel of how we had conversations about high performance. What did we learn from this test series preparation that we can now use, based on the evidence we've collected? But also we might've done a project where we've collected more data about a particular area, and we use that to make decisions, to change things for the next camp or the next tour, or particularly for how we prepare for a benchmark event. So we would use all of those pieces of data together to make decisions.
[00:37:51]I would want my staff to present their views from their particular specific areas. Then I would use my, well, I call it metacognition, which is my decision-making ability that I have built up as my stored library of experiences over 30 years, to help me to make those decisions, which are often referred to from coaches as 'gut instinct' or 'gut feel'. They're actually not that. Your brain at the end of the day makes those decisions. It's not your gut that's making the decision. But what I think coaches are saying is they're using their stored experiences in their long-term memory to then make those decisions based on what they've experienced in the past that has worked, and then putting in that data, that information to help them to make the current decision based on the data they're seeing in front of them. And putting that all together, it can take a bit of time, it's collaboration. And that's why you've got to have systems in place to have those conversations and to have that collaboration and to have your staff feeling really valued. That, what they're bringing to the table is actually really important to the head coach. So I think that's a big part of how we're using technology in a much more efficient manner these days. And in fact, I don't think I could have started off my coaching career with the Diamonds, without that data to back up some of the things that I needed to change.
[00:39:22] For example, I had to leave seven of our top players back home in Australia for my very first overseas tour to England. That was all based on, at the time, athlete monitoring and data that we had - which was the only way we could get data at the time, because we were a decentralised program. I wasn't training the athletes, I had to rely on the clubs in the States to provide that information to us. And then I used my experts in the area, my physiotherapists, my strength and conditioning coaches, my exercise physiologists, to look at what were the long-term effects of us not taking those athletes, or what would happen if we did take them and they broke and we didn't have them available for Glasgow in two years' time. That was a huge decision. It was based on current technology that we could actually gather data and make those decisions. And I could go to the board and the CEO and say, listen, we've got this information, we need to act on this. We can't take these athletes this time. We know that promotionally and for the sponsors and everything else, it's not going to be great. We know for the results, it's not going to be great. So there'll be pressure put on there, but at least you can say those things upfront and have that evidence there because of the technology that gathers that data for you today.
[00:40:43]Sam Robertson (Host): You spoke a lot through there on intuition and obviously there is quite a lot of research looking into how do you know when your intuition is becoming reliable? And as you gave some examples there through your career, it sounds as though you're advocating that almost any coach at the start of their career, when they're starting to make decisions, they should be putting those systems in place so they can make sure that reliability is there as soon as they start their career.
[00:41:09] Now, I also wonder whether you've got a comment on which characteristics of athletes, and teams for that matter, are not particularly well covered by data now. Which things are causing you to still be heavily reliant on your own intuition or your own expertise and that technology hasn't quite answered yet?
[00:41:25] Lisa Alexander: What would I wish for? I'd wish for the heartstrings sensor, the one that tells me who's the athlete that's going to take the winning intercept at the end of the match, who's going to really risk everything to make the right decision at the right time. Those sorts of things, particularly observing match play and making decisions about selection, that is based on more what you would say is intuition. About having a gut feel for which player is going to bring that to your team. I think that's where the craft and the art of coaching comes in.
[00:41:57] But again, I believe it's still based on stored information in the brain, but there is that idea of the, I guess, your psychology as a coach and how you operate as a coach, as a person, you have lines drawn in the sand about the type of personality of a player that you might accept into a team, and whether you're willing to risk bringing somebody in who would behave in a way that went against your values. And this is why I was talking about the moral and ethical code of coaches. Are you prepared to put that at risk by bringing in somebody who you know is going to cause hell and high water within the team? Or are you going to pick for the character of that player ahead of the competency. And I'm always asked that question with the Australian team and I always say to them, I need both. I have to have character and competence. I am attuned to that as a human to another human. That's why I was saying your understanding, your observation of human behaviour has to be spot on. This is when you can't necessarily rely on data. And we have a lot of netball coaches who look at their stats and make decisions based on stats instead of actually watching the game from five dimensions, taking in all the information, rather than just reading numbers on a screen. Coaching is much more than reading numbers on a screen. It helps make your final decisions. But for me, it's always about watching the athlete right in front of me. And some of those things, you cannot measure. I may see someone doing something brave and know they're going to take that risk at the right time, but a machine can't necessarily tell me that, or a piece of technology, just yet.
[00:43:38] Sam Robertson (Host): I just want to switch focus a little bit. I know I wanted to talk to you about learning whilst I had you, as I know you're really passionate about that area. It seems to me that most technology, at least in sport right now, is quite experiential in nature. In that we look at a certain technology and it stimulates an interest, or at least an emotion, in our players. But what I wonder about is whether the athlete is truly reflecting enough to learn, really. And I think the classic example in sport is video. We know it's engaging, it's been used for a long time. And performance analysts these days do a pretty good job of making video interesting for the coach and the athletes as well, particularly in reviews. But I do wonder whether it's actually facilitating learning or not. So how do you see the future of this area and how would you like it to develop? Learning is something that's really hard to measure at the elite level, as we know.
[00:44:22] Lisa Alexander: I guess I see the consequences of you providing footage and then not having the follow-up that's required. I can tell you a number of instances where it's ended badly because we've shown some video and we haven't done the followup required with particular athletes. And those particular two athletes that I'm thinking of, and I'm not going to name names, both of them have got a tendency towards dyslexia. They hide the fact that they haven't learned something. So they definitely need follow-up and I learnt that the hard way. And once the group's done their activity and performance analysis for the Australian Diamonds, I would then have to go and sit with both of those athletes and go back through it all, taking into account their particular learning style, which was much more visual and also kinesthetic, where I'd have to move them through things.
[00:45:14] So definitely was one of the key planks of our performance analysis. I said to Dr. Mitch Mooney, who came on board with me in 2013, I don't want you just being the video operator. I want you being the teacher of performance analysis. So he actually did lesson plans for me to begin with because yes, he's got his PhD, he knows a lot, but can he actually teach? And that to me is the defining feature of our support staff. All of them were able to educate, teach, and support learning, and change in behavior, for the athletes. Otherwise, they're in the wrong business. If they are in it just to show the prettiest video footages, which I often see in AFL clubs, I'd go in and watch their sessions and they would think they were going to show me something really world-breaking and I'd say, oh yeah, that's really nice, how are the footballers taking that in and do they understand that? Can they replicate that out on the field? Know exactly what they're going to do, because you can't get out there on the field with them. And yes, you can send the runner out, but wouldn't it be more efficient if they actually understood what you were talking about and were able to then ask questions back and have a more interactive learning environment.
[00:46:28] So that's what we sought to set up in the Diamonds. It was a very important part of our performance analysis. It also fitted in with our trademark, which was to empower the athletes to make the decisions on the court. Because I could yell at them from the side of the court and tell them a few things at quarter time and half time, but at the end of the day, I couldn't get in touch with them for 15 minutes on that court. We couldn't have timeouts. I can't send a runner out. They have to make the right decisions together there on the court, in their units, individually and as a team. And so we had to be very well versed on each other's expectations and roles, and that meant we had to practice and set up opportunities for reflection, learning, questioning, and ensuring, and even getting the athletes to teach the other athletes - because that's obviously the greatest form of learning, is to go ahead and teach that to one of your colleagues or your teammates. When you do that, then you know that somebody's actually taken on board what it is that you were trying to get across to them.
[00:47:31] Sam Robertson (Host): Yeah listening to that, again, I'm reminded of the sports-specific nature of some of this problem, in many respects. As you mentioned, in some sports, you've got more breaks in play to actively coach, and that may not always be a good thing mind you, but it's certainly sometimes perceived as a good thing. But as you just spoke about, the athlete being self-regulated and also taking ownership of their own learning, and even providing coaching themselves to other athletes, is something that we just don't always see in some sports.
[00:47:56] Lisa Alexander: That's why, when I observed AFL teams starting to do that, like Luke Hodge was seen as the coach on the field, I wasn't surprised. It actually goes back to the tradition in AFL where there was a playing coach, and I was fortunate enough to do that myself with my regional team in Gippsland, I was the playing coach. So, a lot of the strategy and tactical work and decision-making, I got to do on the court. So I was able to talk about that experience and communicate how to do that with many of my captains that have been under me in the teams that I've coached, because I literally was the one that had to do that. So I would coach them to do that as the captain, where they would be the decision-maker and the strategist on the court.
[00:48:42] Sam Robertson (Host): Is that something we need to return to, perhaps?
[00:48:44] Lisa Alexander: I look at how clinical we've become in all of our sports and how we're playing, and one of the things that always you hear the commentator say is, oh for goodness sake, why aren't they changing the way they're doing something? Or, oh, the coach needs to replace them straight away. Well, Joyce Brown always said to me, Lisa, you're a coach, you are expected to coach that player through that. So instead of being always taking that player off and replacing them with somebody else, which you can do, of course, is how about you coach them through this and you might find that if you get them through this obstacle that they're up against, or this inability to read the game or whatever it is, that you might end up with a better player overall, for the team and for that person. So that's actually your job as a coach.
[00:49:33] Sam Robertson (Host): Yeah, I can't disagree with that. Now, just before I let you go, I want to talk a little bit about the future of this area. And in particular, some of the big coaching challenges both now and into the future that you see occurring, and also will technology potentially help answer or solve some of those problems?
[00:49:49] Lisa Alexander: Well, definitely in netball we still haven't got the fine enough mechanisms to test exactly the acceleration and deceleration forces, which show us, I guess, in a more, how would we say this, objective way actually how demanding netball is on a cellular level compared to some other sports.
[00:50:10] The other one is in umpiring. That's the biggest challenge for me at an international level was always the umpires. Truly. And so when you asked me this question, I thought about technology in sport, how it's being used, you know, the bunker in league and netball doesn't have that and we may never have it. But maybe robots actually umpiring might be better, because there's so many decisions to make in a netball game in such a short amount of time. It is actually very, very demanding for humans. So, in order to improve the game on a global level, that might be what we need. The umpires won't like me saying that because of course the umpires do a fabulous job for what they have to do. And our rules for umpiring haven't changed the whole time. Like AFL have added three umpires to their field. We've never done that. So our empires have to cover more contests and the game's faster and more powerful and yet they haven't had any extra help in terms of their brains to umpire better. They've got better at it through practice, but they're still missing stuff. And it's very frustrating when that could be the difference between a gold medal and a silver medal.
[00:51:19] Sam Robertson (Host): You know, I think a lot of employees and officials and referees would probably appreciate the extra resource, because of course they're subject to the same scrutiny. In fact, sometimes more scrutiny than athletes, as we know.
[00:51:30] Lisa Alexander: [Laugh] Yes.
[00:51:31] Sam Robertson (Host): Anyway, Lisa thank you so much for joining us on the episode. It's been a real pleasure.
[00:51:35] Lisa Alexander: Thank you, Sam.
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Final Thoughts
[00:51:42] Sam Robertson (Host): And now for some final thoughts from me on today's question. For many coaches, technology provides a means to information they would not have access to otherwise. However, it should always be implemented with a specific goal, whether that's to automate a process or uncover new, previously unmeasured insights. Without this, there creates a risk that coaches and athletes can become distracted by shiny new toys, or worse still, drawn apart. As a result, technology should be developed with a human in mind - reducing burnout from mindless repetition, freeing up time to innovate and enhancing creativity.
[00:52:14] But it seems as though some of the most difficult scenarios we face are when technology directly challenges our existing practice or long-held beliefs. This can be confronting, at least initially, and often requires us to make a decision about whether to hand over total control or reject the technology completely.
[00:52:30] But it's also clear that technology can't do it all. At least not yet. We've heard in this episode the importance of coaches understanding human behavior - listening, observing, communicating. These for the most part remain very much human-led actions.
[00:52:44] In sport, like many other areas of society, there is a sense of inevitability with technology acceleration. Fighting back the wave is probably not possible, so it is almost certainly better instead for us to ensure we help shape the direction in which it heads. Perhaps one of the best ways we can do this is by reflecting on those areas of the coaching process we truly need the most help with.
[00:53:04] I'm Sam Robertson and this has been One Track Mind. Join us next episode, where we'll be asking: Where will sport be in 20 years?
Outro
[00:53:14] Lara Chan-Baker: One Track Mind is brought to you by Track and Victoria University. Our host is Professor Sam Robertson and our producer is Lara Chan-Baker - that's me!
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[00:53:54] Thank you so much for listening to One Track Mind. We will see you soon.
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