I LOVED LOVED LOVED this AW piece on Frank Dick, who was the British Athletics Federation’s Director of Coaching for 15 years and also the personal coach to two-time Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson.
I loved how he:
1) Is always trying to learn more.
2) Realizes the technical aspect is not the only part of coaching.
Dick said :
I think one of the things that maybe has been missing in a lot of coach education programmes in the past has been, not the technical stuff, it’s the people stuff that we’ve got to look at far more. Do we really take time to know our people?
Do we really make time to know their stress signatures? Do we take time to work out: ‘Am I getting my language right?’ Because not everybody hears the same thing from the same word and I think all of that conflict resolution, how to deal with leadership, how to deal with being a member of a team, these things we don’t often talk about when it comes to coach education. But I think that’s paramount.
We’ve also got to be careful that being focused is not the same thing as being blinkered. You can be focused, but you’ve got to be able to scan all the time.
3) Talks about how learning how to deal with success is just as important as failure.
Looking back on it now, two of my best athletes were INCREDIBLE as juniors in college but it was hard once they were king of the mountain.