The Sports Coaching Skills Podcast: Learn from the best coaches and experts in sports James Parris

Recorded in 2020, my guest is Robin Williams MBE, a coaching legend! He helped Helen Glover win an Olympic gold medal in London 2012, with her rowing crewmate Heather Stanning, after only two years in the sport. Also, Robin was steering the ship (no pun intended) when they repeated the feat four years later at the Rio Games. All this even though Heather famously had to stand on tiptoes to be accepted into the GB rowing’s performance programme. The pair, along with Polly Swann, won an unbroken sequence of twelve gold medal victories at world level and became world record holders under Robin’s tutelage. 
Robin had a 7 to 4 win/loss ratio in the Boat Race as Varsity Head coach at Cambridge University during the 1990s and early 2000s. 
Robin was appointed a Member of the Oder of the British Empire in 2013, for services to rowing.
We talk about how writing makes you a better coach, how to collaborate with your athletes, creating a framework for your sessions with a narrative, coping with a severe illness when coaching … and stick around to the end to discover how you should be communicating with your athletes.
Robin was the first person on my list of “dream guests” when starting the podcast, so I’m incredibly honoured to be speaking with him. He’s one of my heroes, so I’m playing the fan-boy in this episode. I also completely screw up a question I felt I needed to ask him, but found it very difficult to ask. How do you ask a hero of yours about his dealing with cancer? Anyway, I do get around to asking, but in a very roundabout way…

Recorded in 2020, my guest is Dr Karl Stagno, Director of Hockey at Whitgift School and Head Coach at Wimbledon Hockey Club. Under his tutelage, Whitgift School Hockey has been National Outdoor Champions 15 times and National Indoor Champions 11 times across age-groups in the last 10 years. Currently, four Whitgift school alumni play for the Great Britain Hockey team and were hoping to compete at the Olympic Games in Tokyo this year before Covid-19 intervened. There are also currently 9 Whitgilft boys in the U16 and U18 England Hockey squads, with three in the England U23 team (remember these are schoolboys and good enough to play with the University age group). However, Karl doesn’t measure success by wins or the number of players to make the National team, he measures the true success of his programme by how many boys play Hockey long after they have left school. Karl talks with me about his experience of coaching, how he teaches skills across age groups up to the Senior players at Wimbledon Hockey Club and how he breeds character in his players. He also reveals what mistakes he has made along his coaching journey and how he learns and improves his coaching.