Sports Thoughts

Wayne Goldsmith
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Real talk on coaching, leadership and sports parenting from Wayne Goldsmith — 30+ years working with Olympic programs worldwide. Challenging conventional thinking. Building better coaches, better parents, better athletes. waynegoldsmith.substack.com

  1. Sep 1

    Hard Coach Or Soft Coach Is A False Choice.

    By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * The hard-versus-welfare debate is built on a false choice and it’s costing good coaches their confidence. * Both approaches get the athlete to try again. Only one makes them want to. * You can be relentless about standards while staying relaxed, smiling and at ease. That’s not softness. That’s a coaching skill. I was talking to a coaching colleague the other day about what I think is the biggest challenge coaches everywhere are wrestling with right now. I think it’s this: How do you balance hard work, discipline, dedication and consistency with an environment that’s increasingly focused on wellbeing, welfare and mental health? And what I keep seeing is coaches treating those two things as a contradiction. I’m a hard coach Or I’m a welfare coach. I’m a tough coach who demands the work Or I’m a soft coach who doesn’t push athletes. Colleagues, that’s the wrong way to look at it entirely. They’re not exclusive. They’re linked - if you’re prepared to think about your coaching differently. The Stereotype: what we think a hard coach looks like: Let’s start with the picture in everyone’s head. The frowning coach. The loud voice. The yelling and screaming. Not listening to kids. Not engaging with athletes. Just standing there, demanding. Some of us grew up with that and a lot of people still think that’s what a hard coach is. Those days are well and truly over. There are still pockets of it around the world, but increasingly it’s the minority. You just don’t see many coaches working that way any more. But here’s what a lot of people got wrong when that style disappeared. They assumed the toughness went with it. It didn’t. There are coaches out there right now who are enormously demanding, challenging, completely uncompromising - and they do it with respect, with care and with love alongside a total commitment to excellence. Two Ways: same outcome, completely different journey: Let me show you what I mean. An athlete is working on a skill. They have a go. You know it isn’t good enough and you know it isn’t as good as they can do. And you believe it matters that they do it again. Old coaching sounds like this. Is that the best you can do? You’re going to do it again. And you’re going to keep doing it until you get it right. (Possibly with a few expletives in there). And we used to say - now that’s a hard coach. No. Times have changed. Here’s the same situation. I like the way you had a go at that. I think you’re improving. What do you think? Let’s try it again - but why don’t we do it this way? What do you think will happen then? Is there another way we could do it and see if we can get it working a bit better? What do you think? Yeah? Yeah. Let’s have another go. Both of those achieve exactly the same outcome. The athlete does it again. Comply Or Own: the only difference that matters: So if the outcome is identical, what actually changed? In the first one, the athlete felt compelled to comply with what you told them to do. In the second, they’re doing it because they want to learn. Because they’ve got skin in the game. Because they own that piece of their own growth. They’re working with you. They don’t feel coached at. In old coaching, every failed attempt pushes your voice up a notch. Is that the best you can do? Are you kidding me? There is no need for any of that! Fifth attempt and it sounds like this. Look - I know you’ve given it everything you’ve got. I feel it’s really important we get this right. What do you think? Yeah. Let’s have another go. I am still being completely uncompromising. I’m still setting very high standards. I’m still telling my athlete we have to hit this, because it matters. I’m just bringing them along on the journey. Whose Journey: the bit that changes everything: It is their journey. That’s the whole point. I’m a guide. I’m a mentor. I’m a director. I’m a facilitator. But ultimately they’re the one on the journey and my job - and your job - is to present information, learning, feedback and ideas in a way that makes them want to learn. Coaching with them. Not coaching at them. Summary: I have this discussion constantly - the one where somebody tells me coaching has gone soft and there’s no room left for a relentless commitment to excellence. I disagree completely. We still need athletes who can push themselves to extraordinary levels. In elite and professional sport the standards are still high and they keep shifting upwards. What’s changed is how we coach them to get there. You do not have to be a hard coach or a soft coach. You can be the most demanding, challenging, committed, dedicated coach in your sport, determined to succeed at the highest level - without ever raising your voice and without ever being sarcastic. You can be uncompromising on your standards and completely relaxed, at ease and smiling while you hold them. The two things live together perfectly well. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Record yourself at your next session and listen back. Not for what you said - for what happened to your voice on attempts three, four and five. Volume is a habit and most coaches have no idea they do it. * Replace “do it again” with “what do you think?” Same standard, same repetition, completely different ownership. The demand doesn’t move an inch. The athlete moves a long way. * Write down the one standard you will never compromise on. One. If you can’t name it, your athletes certainly can’t - and softness isn’t the absence of yelling, it’s the absence of a standard. I’d genuinely love your comments on this one. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne mentors a small number of coaches each year and works with clubs, federations and schools on coach development. wayne@moregold.com.au Further reading: The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow. For sporting parents: Raising Athletes - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe

    Hard Coach Or Soft Coach Is A False Choice.

  2. Sep 1

    THE THINGS THAT UNITE US!

    By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * Facilities, money and equipment get named as sports’ biggest obstacles. Your real constraint is invisible. * The biggest problems I see in sport are personality conflicts and petty political squabbles. * The things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us. It’s one line, and it works in every country I’ve used it. Ask anyone in sport what their sport needs to be bigger, better, more successful and you’ll get the same three answers. * Facilities. * Money. * Equipment. I understand why. You can see them. You can price them. You can put them in a grant application. If we had a bigger pool, we’d have more swimmers and the club would thrive. If we had a new grandstand, a new weights room and new change rooms - we’d have more players and better players. Colleagues, in most cases those are not your real issues. The Real Constraint: things you cannot put in a grant application: The biggest problems I see in sport, anywhere in the world, are personality conflicts and petty political squabbles. You know exactly the sort of thing I mean. Two people who don’t like each other and don’t speak and who quietly put obstacles in each other’s way. Club A hates Club B for a reason that neither Club A nor Club B can actually remember. The coaches never collaborate or even acknowledge each other at competitions. A state won’t deal with the national body. The national body won’t communicate with the state. Two states won’t work with each other. I’ve seen every one of those, on every continent I’ve worked on. Ireland: the hardest room I’ve been asked to bring together: A few years ago I was in Ireland and I was asked by the GAA to bring their clubs, their parishes and their regions together to talk about how they could work collaboratively in the interest of the sport. It was always going to be a tough ask. There are some very deep historical and very passionately held reasons why some adjoining parishes and counties don’t get on. But it’s not an Irish problem. I’ve seen the same thing in Australia. In Canada. In New Zealand. In England. People decide, for whatever reason, that their petty politics and their personality conflicts matter more than the things that actually matter in sport. One Line: what I use to get them in the same direction: So how do you get a room full of people who don’t like each other to work together? I use one line: The things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us. Then I make them do the work. Don’t tell me why you don’t like them. Don’t tell me what she said one day, or what he didn’t do, or what happened in 1997. That’s rubbish. Tell me what unites you. Rugby: what the list actually looks like: Take rugby. What unites everyone connected to the game? * We love the game. * We want every kid in the country playing it. * We want them to learn to be skilful. * We want them to fall in love with the experience of it. * We want them still playing in their fifties. * We want them bringing their kids back. And their grandkids. * We want them to get everything out of this game that we got out of it. That’s the list of what unites them. And the “divides us” list? “We don’t like you.” Put those two lists side by side and the argument is over. Honesty: you don’t have to become friends: Let me be clear about what I’m not asking for. We may never come together and buy each other a beer. We may never go to each other’s weddings. We may never go to each other’s birthday parties. And that is completely fine. Collaboration is not friendship. You don’t have to like someone to want the same thing for the sport you both gave your life to. Summary: Sport around the world is in crisis mode right now. Participation is falling. Retention through the early and mid teens is a serious problem. Finding and keeping coaches, officials and volunteers is genuinely difficult. The cost of sport keeps climbing. And if we’re still fighting among ourselves through all of that, it’s like throwing punches with one hand while hitting yourself in the head with the other hand. You cannot present the sport you love in a positive light while you’re beating up people inside it who share your values and your love of the game. It just doesn’t work. Those petty political issues don’t only fail to help. They’re a constraint. They’re actively getting in the way of the experience you say you want to provide for kids and families. The things that unite you are greater - much, much greater - than the things that divide you. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Name the club, region or body you don’t get on with - then write down why. Actually write it down. Most people get halfway through the sentence and realise they can’t remember the original grievance. * Now write the “unite” list. What do you both want for the kids in your sport? Put the two lists side by side on the same page. That’s the whole exercise and it takes about ten minutes. * Start with one shared thing, not a merger. A joint coach education night. A combined come-and-try day. One thing you do together that neither of you could do alone. Collaboration is built on a result not on a reconciliation. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with federations, states, regions and clubs on bringing fractured sporting communities back together - the work that doesn’t fit in a grant application. wayne@moregold.com.au Further reading: The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow. For sporting parents: Raising Athletes - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe

    THE THINGS THAT UNITE US!

  3. Aug 28

    Ten Second Coaching.

    By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * Nobody consumes anything in long form any more, including your players. * Connect, Engage, Inspire - ten seconds each and all three fit in half a minute. * Twenty athletes. Twenty minutes across a week. That’s the whole job. In the distant past, coaches would get a group of young athletes together and run a “motivation” session for forty-five minutes to an hour. Stories about the greats of the sport. An old player invited in to talk about the good old days. Somebody successful from another team or sport talking about what it took for them to get to the top. And the players sat there. For an hour. Then the coach would say - “well, that just goes to show anyone can do it”. There was nothing wrong with it. It was how we all connected and communicated. Times have changed. Nobody watches the whole game any more: Think about the world we actually live in now. When we were growing up we sat and watched an entire game. Football, basketball, rugby, cricket, baseball. The whole thing from start to finish with our parents or our mates. Look at how sport gets consumed today - by kids and by adults. One-minute highlights. Three-minute highlights. Even the extended highlights package is ten to fifteen minutes at most. We’re consuming what we love about sport in smaller and smaller pieces. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just the environment we coach in. One Video, One Minute, One Message: I was talking to a colleague who works in supermarkets and I asked how she trains her casual staff. She gave me a line that I haven’t been able to shake. One video. One minute. One message. She said there’s simply no point running fifteen-minute or half-hour sessions on how to pack shelves or connect with customers. Her staff are young and there are a lot of them. She has to land it in about a minute or it doesn’t land at all. I walked away thinking - she’s right. And we’re in exactly the same business. Ten Minutes: the meeting rule that makes clubs flip out: When professional football teams bring me in, one of the first things I tell them is to cut their team meetings to a maximum of ten minutes. Ten minutes for everything…. Head coach feedback, assistant coach comments, analysts, manager, captain’s talk, general business, travel information: All of it. Ten minutes. Max. And they flip out. Because they’re used to having a captive room for an hour. All of your information is important. I get it. It’s critical to what the team is doing. But your average professional player is somewhere between eighteen and thirty years of age and they will not give you an hour. They won’t give you forty-five minutes, or thirty, or even twenty. They want the “highlights package” of what you’ve got. They don’t want the whole game. Ten Second Coaching: three moves, ten seconds each: Connect, Engage, Inspire. Think of coaching like TIK TOK. Can you make a point, can you deliver a message, can you coach a player in less than a minute? You can: It’s called Connect, Engage, Inspire. Connect - ten seconds. Use their name and step towards them. “G’day Bill. Good to see you. How are you today?” I’ve said your name. I’m looking at you. I’ve stepped towards you. Everything about that says - “I’m here, I know who you are and right now you are the only person in the world who matters to me”. That’s the easy one but almost nobody does it deliberately. Engage - ten seconds. Ask a question. “I was watching your play on the video the other day. When you go left - why do you do it that way? What would happen if you went right there instead?” A question engages the problem-solving part of their brain. I’m coaching with them, not at them. And when they solve it, they own the solution - which means they’ll take responsibility for executing it at training and on game day. Inspire - ten seconds. You may be the only person in that kid’s life who says anything positive to them. The only one who says “I believe in you. I believe you can do anything”. Ten seconds. That’s all it takes to be that person. Thirty Second Coaching: what it actually sounds like: “Hi Susan. Great to see you training this afternoon. How was school?” Not bad, coach. How are you going? “I’m great - thanks. Listen - I was watching the game video the other day. You know when you take that long shot. I love the way you take it from deep. I had an idea though - what do you think would happen if you took it a little wider instead of where you usually take it? What do you think?” Athlete replies - coach listens. “Interesting. Interesting. Do you think we could work on that this afternoon? I think it’s really going to benefit you. I think it’d make a big impact. What do you think?” Yeah. Yeah. “But your shooting is amazing. I love the way you shoot. And it lifts the whole team - when you score from that far out, man, I love it. Keep up that fantastic work.” That’s Ten Second Coaching. I connected with the athlete. I asked her something that made her think - something that could make her better - a problem she could solve. I left her with a “wow you’re amazing - I believe in you”. My friends - that’s where coaching is now. Summary: Think about what this means. Twenty kids in your team - all you need is twenty minutes across everything you’ve already got planned this week. You don’t need extra time. You need a different plan for the time you’ve already got. We can spend our energy trying to drag the world back to the one-hour team talk Or we can be smart, adapt and coach in the world our athletes are actually living in. Connect. Engage. Inspire. Ten seconds each. You can change the life of an athlete in your team in thirty seconds: I promise you that. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Cut your next team meeting to ten minutes. Everything - coaches, analysts, captain, travel, general business. You’ll find out fast how much of that hour was habit rather than quality information. * Run the maths on your own squad. Can you find one minute for each of the players in your team this week to connect, engage and inspire? * Practise the step-towards. Name, eye contact, one step forward. It’s the smallest thing in this entire post and it’s the one that changes how a kid feels about walking in the gate. Let me know how you go with Ten Second Coaching - and with changing the way you connect, engage and inspire. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with professional teams, clubs, federations and schools on coach development and communication - and mentors a small number of coaches each year. wayne@moregold.com.au Further reading: The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow. For sporting parents: Raising Athletes - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe

    Ten Second Coaching.

  4. Aug 25

    Culture Is What You Do.

    By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * Value words are free. Any organisation can produce ten of them before morning tea. * A value only becomes real when it’s backed by observable, measurable, learnable behaviours. * Responsibility is about me. Accountability is about you. You need both or neither works. Part of how I make a living is being invited in by professional football teams, sporting clubs and Olympic organisations to help them build a culture. It usually starts the same way. A big group in a room and the question on the whiteboard behind me. Who are we? What are we about? What’s our trademark? What do we want to be known as? And almost every time, the group decides the job is to come up with a set of words. Words: the two minute part of the job: Out come the post-it notes. Up go the words on the wall. * Honesty. * Integrity. * Humility. * Courage. * Discipline. * Fun. * Connection. * Friendship. * Enjoyment. You can generate a million of them and every one will sound right. Then the words go on the boards, on the stationery, on the T-shirts and on the placards in the gym. And everyone points at them and says - “look, there they are, that’s us. We’re a values-based organisation with a strong culture.” My friends, those words mean nothing. Coming up with them is a two-minute job. Seriously. Email me and I’ll send you a list of my top 100 values words. Pick any three, any five, any ten. It doesn’t matter which ones you choose. That part takes no effort at all, which is precisely why it’s worthless. Honesty: the word everybody picks: I’d say 99% of the organisations I’ve worked with put honesty at the top of the list. And they’re right to. Honest people build trust. Trust builds real working relationships. In a high performance environment those two things matter more than almost anything else you can name. So somebody in the organizational values meeting shouts out “honesty”, somebody else writes it on the board and the room feels good about itself. Here’s my comeback, every single time. “That’s Wonderful. I Love it. But….now tell me”: * What does honesty look like? * What does honesty look like in the gym? * What does honesty look like out on the field at training on a Tuesday? * What does honesty look like on game day? On match day? On Olympic final day? * What does honesty look like in the pub at ten o’clock on a Saturday night after you’ve had a win? * What does honesty look like in the way you conduct yourself socially and in the respect you show people? Because until you attach action and behaviour to the word, the word does nothing at all. Responsibility And Accountability: the two halves nobody separates: Here’s why the behaviours matter so much. Once we’ve agreed we’re about honesty - and once we’ve agreed what honesty actually looks like in the gym, on the field and in the pub - then something changes. I can take responsibility for living it. And I can hold you accountable for living it too. Responsibility is about me. It’s what I choose to do. Accountability is about you. You need to be living the value through behaviours I can observe. I am watching, I am supporting you and I am encouraging you to live those behaviours. You cannot hold anyone accountable to a poster! You can only hold them accountable to a behaviour that both of you agreed on and both of you can see. Everyone: not just the people in the tracksuits: And when the behaviours are clear, this stops being a playing group exercise. The players. The coaches. The officials and administrators. The people in marketing. The people who sell the tickets. The people who park the cars. Every one of them can say - “I take responsibility for living that value through my actions and I will keep you accountable exactly as you keep me”. That’s an organisation with a culture. Not a room with words on the wall. Summary: It’s not that difficult but it’s also very difficult. The words are easy. The concept is easy - everybody nods along. The real challenge is understanding that values are what you do. Culture is what you do. The hardest part isn’t the workshop. It’s living those behaviours when things aren’t going well, when things are falling apart, when nobody’s watching and nobody would blame you for letting it slide. That’s where culture is actually decided. The words mean nothing. The actions mean everything. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Take your existing values off the wall and put them on a page. One value per page, nothing else on it. If your group can’t fill the page with specific behaviours, you don’t have that value yet. * Ask the pub question. What does this value look like at ten o’clock on a Saturday night after a win? The answer tells you whether your culture is real or ceremonial and it takes about four seconds to find out. * Split responsibility from accountability out loud. Most groups use the words interchangeably and it’s why neither happens. Name which one you’re asking for, every time you ask. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with professional teams, clubs, federations and corporates on building cultures that hold up when things get difficult - not just when they’re going well. wayne@moregold.com.au Further reading: The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow. For sporting parents: Raising Athletes - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe

    Culture Is What You Do.

  5. Aug 18

    AI: It's Your New Assistant Coach!

    By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * AI is a tool. We have done tools before and we survived every one of them. * The brief you give AI determines the quality of the information you get back. * It will never replace coaches - but it can hand coaches their time back and that’s the real prize. It’s the question I get more than any other now. Every week, in every country, in every sport. New Zealand. Canada. Ireland. The UK. Doesn’t matter where I’m standing. A coach puts their hand up and asks me about AI. So here’s what I’ve learned - from using it heavily in my own work, from working with professional teams and from talking to people who understand this stuff far better than I do. Tools: we have been here before, my friends: The stopwatch was a tool. Just a tool. The handheld video camera was a tool. Just a tool. The laptop, the tablet, the GPS unit. Just tools. All of them were going to change coaching forever…yet here we still are. AI is just another tool. Assistant Coach: the brief determines the session: Here’s the way I want coaches to think about it. Imagine you’re the head coach of a rugby team and a new assistant coach walks in. If I say “go over there and coach those kids” - that coach will go and do whatever they think is right. Based on their experience. Their training. Their understanding of the game. Might be great. Might also be nothing like what I needed. If I say “go over there and work on defence, work on tackling technique, work on how they apply tackling forces, work on how they arrive at the tackle” - now that coach can run a training session that is of far greater value to me, the players and the team. And if I sat down with that coach the day before and gave them the background on every player, their strengths and weaknesses, where we sit in the competition and where we’re heading.... Now the coaching they deliver is more precise, more accurate and more relevant to that group of players. AI is exactly the same. Ask AI to “Write me a strength training session” and it will go into the vast pile of everything ever written about strength training and give you something genuinely interesting, but it may also be completely irrelevant to you. That’s the equivalent of “go and coach those kids over there.” Now try this instead: I’m a high school coach. I work in the gym. I have football players coming in aged 13 - 15. I’m looking for a strength program, particularly focused on core strength, leg strength, balance and coordination. We’re pre-season. Same tool. Better brief. Better output. Better session. Clarity: know the problem before you open the laptop: Your first step in using AI is not going to AI. Your first step is working out what is the problem you’re actually trying to solve. Too many coaches are turning to AI with no idea what they’re looking for and just hoping that some sort of miracle solution is going to arrive. It’s like walking into a library and going “I don’t know what book I want, what genre, what author. I’ll just wander around and hope something decent falls off a shelf”. You can do it that way - Or you can walk in knowing you’re interested in history, and specifically the history of art, and more specifically Leonardo da Vinci. Have a philosophy. Have an approach. Have a method. Then give AI what it needs to give you something back worth having. Mistakes: it will get things wrong: I do a lot of data management and data analysis for the organisations I work with. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve looked at an AI built analysis and thought - something doesn’t look right to me. So I go back to the AI and say “can you have another look at that, I think that’s wrong, that reference isn’t right” or similar follow up questions. And AI often comes straight back with “yeah, you’re right, Wayne. I should have looked at that”. Don’t assume that every AI answer is accurate. Ever. Coaching Yourself: ask it how to work with it better: Here’s a great AI tip few people use but that everybody should. A few weeks ago a job I was working on took me far longer than it should have. Lots of questions, lots of back and forth, lots of dead ends. So when I finished the report, I went back in and asked the AI - “is there a better way I could have worked with you to get that same answer faster or a smarter way to get an even better answer?” And it told me. “If you’d asked that question that way at that point, we’d have got there quicker and it would have stopped me going down those two rabbit holes”. Use AI to coach you on how to use AI. Summary: The question I always get is - “will AI replace coaches?” No. Coaching is the art of inspiring change through emotional connection. It’s the relationships. It’s the connection that lets us help athletes do amazing things, believe in themselves and believe in us. A machine cannot do that. Yet! But here’s what it can do. Coaches are crazy busy. Coaches are often stressed. Coaches have no time for the parts of the job they actually love. Analysing data. Ordering data. Reviewing sessions. All the admin that quietly eats your evenings, your family time and your own recovery. AI can take a lot of that off you. And - best of all - AI can give you your time back to coach and to inspire kids to believe that anything truly is possible. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Write your next AI request as if you were briefing an assistant coach the night before. Who the athletes are, their ages, their performance level, what you’re working on, where you sit in the season etc. If you wouldn’t send an assistant in with that little information, don’t send AI in with it either. * Name the problem before you open the app. One sentence. If you can’t write the sentence, you’re wandering around the library - and no tool fixes that. * Debrief the tool the way you debrief a session. When something takes too long or comes back wrong, go back and ask how you could have asked better. That five-minute habit compounds faster than anything else you’ll do with it. Let me know about your own AI journey. Where has it helped? Where has it fallen flat? Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne If you want the toolkit for the rest of it - the coaching AI can’t do - it’s in The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now. Seven modules, built for real coaches with real time pressures.https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow And if you’re a parent watching your kid navigate all of this - Raising Athletes (includes The Talent Myth book).https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe

    AI: It's Your New Assistant Coach!

  6. Aug 14

    It's Different Here!

    Three important messages: * The crisis is no longer local - every sport in every country is reporting the same four problems. * The solution is no longer contested - fun, friends, families, experience. The research is in and it’s growing. * The hard part was never knowing what to do. It’s making it work where you are. I’ve travelled around the world working in sport for a long, long time. Professional football codes. Olympic sports. Community clubs in towns you’ve never heard of. And for most of those years, the genuinely interesting part of the job was the differences. Australia had problems that England didn’t have. Canada had problems the United States didn’t have. South Africa was at one point in its sporting evolution, New Zealand was at another and Asia was different to Europe. Different countries. Different stages of sports system development. Different conversations. Not any more, my friends. Convergence: four problems, every sport, every country: Everywhere it’s the same: * The number of kids in organised competitive sport is falling - in spite of population growth. * The dropout rate between junior sport and the start of high school - ages 10, 11, 12 - is very high. The dropout rate again in the mid to late teens is very high. * Every sport on earth is struggling to gain, train and retain coaches, officials and volunteers. * And the cost - the cost has become ridiculous. In some football codes parents are paying five - ten thousand dollars a year or more for their kids to play youth sport. Ten thousand dollars!!! For youth sport! I’m having the same discussion with touch football that I’m having with rugby. Same conversation with swimming as I have with triathlon, with tennis, with rugby league. Same conversation everywhere. Sport is in crisis globally. Response: everybody is turning the same way at the same time: Here’s what’s fascinating. We’ve all landed on the same diagnosis. The performance pathway, implemented at young ages, hasn’t worked. (I’ve been saying that for twenty years and it’s now close to consensus). And we’ve all landed on roughly the same prescription for change: * Sport should be fun. * Delay specialisation where we can. * Take the heat out of early high-level competition - minimise the significance of junior rep teams. * Build community around clubs. Embrace families and parents rather than treating them as a nuisance. * Support coaches and volunteers so they actually enjoy the experience and stay. We are shifting from performance-focused sport to experience-focused sport. Same problems everywhere. Same solutions everywhere. Bizarre, really - but good in a lot of ways too. Pushback: the three most expensive words in sport: Now here’s the real issue. The sports and the governments trying to introduce sport for fun, sport for experience, sport for relationships, are copping serious pushback. From clubs. From private operators. From every stakeholder with something invested in the way we do it now. And the pushback almost always arrives in the same shape. “Yeah, that might be true. It might be about fun and enjoyment. The world might be moving...but it’s different in our club.” “It wouldn’t work in our club”. “It wouldn’t work in our sport”. “It’s different in our country, we do things differently here”. Seen it all, my friends. Seen it in a dozen countries just in the past year. Evolution: it’s coming, just slower than you want: So if you’re the progressive, innovative thinker in your club - (and I don’t mean progressive in the political sense) - and you can see what’s happening and you want to move.... Don’t expect everyone to jump on the sports experience bandwagon immediately. Don’t expect anyone to say, “wow, you were right and we were wrong and we’re all going your way now”. It’s not going to happen. It’s going to be a progressive evolution, not the revolution you think it needs to be. But it’s coming. Summary: There’s a great line that goes - it’s no good coming up with a great solution to the wrong problem. We don’t have that excuse any more. We know what the problems are. We know what the solutions are. The research is sitting right there in front of us. All that’s left is making it work. That is the real key. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Name the four problems out loud at your next club meeting. Falling numbers, early dropout, teen dropout, no coaches, unaffordable cost. Half the pushback you get comes from people who’ve never had the problems stated as a set. * Expect the pushback and plan for it, don’t take it personally. “It’s different in our club” is not an argument, it’s a comfort. Have one small, visible, low-risk change ready that people can see working inside a season. * Decide where you sit - and decide this year. Sport is going through a period of radical transformation. Drifting is a decision too and it’s the only one that gets made for you. So tell me in the comments - whereabouts are you as a club, as a coach, as a sport? Where are you with sport for fun, sport for enjoyment, sport for the experience? And what pushback are you getting? Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne If you want the toolkit for actually making this work - not the theory, the how - it’s in The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now. Seven modules, built for real coaches with real time pressures.https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow And if you’re a parent watching your kid navigate all of this - Raising Athletes (includes The Talent Myth book).https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe

    It's Different Here!

  7. Jul 30

    There Are No Ten Year Old Champions.

    Three important messages: * The idea that every child is destined to be an elite athlete never made sense - and never will. * Success in junior sport isn’t talent. It’s retention. The only kid who can’t improve is the one who isn’t there. * After conversations with national bodies around the world, the pathway model is finally being abandoned. Better late than never. I’ve been writing about sport’s biggest problem for about twenty years now. The “pathway” model. And I’ve got no doubt in my mind - none - that almost every major challenge sport faces today traces straight back to it. The falling numbers of kids playing junior and club sport. The teenage dropout rate. The soaring cost of sport, driven by youth academies and clubs selling “professional” coaching to children. The mental health issues rooted in kids losing their identity when the sport lets them go. The impossible parent expectations. All of it. Traceable to the performance pathway model the world blindly chased for thirty years. Here’s the argument I’ve made from the start: Every kid who picks up a ball is not destined to be elite: The whole model rested on a fantasy - that every child who picks up a ball, jumps in a pool or grabs a racket can be, should be, must be, is somehow destined to become - an elite athlete. It never made sense. It’s like saying every kid who picks up a crayon will be Picasso. Every child who plays a recorder in kindergarten will be Mozart. It’s ridiculous. It always was. And yet we built entire systems - selection, academies, representative programs, “talent identification” - on exactly that fantasy. Retention is the real measure: Ask any elite athlete why they do what they do. Almost unanimously, the answer is the same: “Because I love it.” If they love what they do, they do what they love - and they keep coming back. Which tells you everything. All the talent, power, speed and skill in the world is worthless if a kid stops turning up. So success in junior sport was never about identifying the gifted few. Success in junior sport is retention. Who is the only kid who can’t improve? The one who isn’t there. And what’s at the heart of a child playing sport? Fun. Friendships. Learning. Feeling safe. Feeling like they belong. The experience of sport, built on quality relationships. The pathway model forgot every one of those things. There are no ten year old champions: This is the one that should have stopped us years ago. The pathway model had everyone - coaches, clubs, parents, whole sports - hunting for child-champions to identify early and fast-track. But we’ve known for decades: early rise, early fall. The precocious ten, eleven and twelve year olds - the biggest, the strongest, the earliest to mature - rarely make it to the top. And while we worshipped that early physical talent, we quietly neglected the kids who couldn’t make the cut for the under-9 football team or qualify for the under-10 state titles. How many of those kids would have been our best athletes, if we’d only kept them in the game? Summary: So why write this now? Because after recent conversations with national government sporting bodies around the world, I’m finally - finally - seeing the revolution sport has needed for two decades. The abandonment of the performance pathway model. And the arrival of experience-focused sport, built for every single participant. I’m genuinely excited about where sport goes from here. And I’m still a little sad about what it cost. Because how many kids - how many extraordinary athletes we’ll now never know about - did we lose forever, because someone looked a child in the eye and said, “You’re not good enough for our pathway”? Better late than never. But let’s never forget how late it was. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Measure your season by retention, not results. At the end of the year, don’t count the wins. Count how many kids still love the sport and are coming back. That’s the number that tells you if you did your job. * Coach the kids who didn’t make the cut as if they might be your best. Because the research says some of them will be. The late developer you keep in the game today is the athlete who proves everyone wrong at twenty. * Build the experience, not the pathway. Fun, friendships, belonging, a coach who believes in them. Get those right and the talent takes care of itself. Get them wrong and it won’t matter how good your pathway looked on paper. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe

    There Are No Ten Year Old Champions.

  8. Jul 30

    The One Choice You Never Lose!

    It's been too long since I made something just for you. This is one of the most powerful lessons I teach - and I wanted my paid subscribers to have it. Thank you for being here. By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * The one power we never lose is how we choose to respond to what happens to us. * A setback is neutral - it’s the response that shapes everything. * Your job is to spot the teachable moment, wait for it to cool, then use it. I want to talk to you about probably the most powerful lesson I can teach you as a coach or a parent - and how you can pass it on to your athletes and your own children. It’s a story about resilience and about the power of the choices we make. For all of us, life isn’t always ups. It isn’t always downs. It isn’t always success and it isn’t always failure. There’s a wonderful line I borrowed from the work of a man called Viktor Frankl, who wrote a book a long time ago called Man’s Search for Meaning. Look it up if you’re interested - it’s stayed with me for years. What he said, in essence, was this. In the end, the only real choice we’ve got - the one choice we never lose - is how we choose to respond to the things that happen to us. Sit with that for a moment. The only real power we never lose is how we decide to respond to what happens to us. A story about a girl and a team: A few weeks ago a friend came to me. His daughter had done everything she possibly could to make her touch football team. She’d striven for it, given it everything - and she missed selection. She wasn’t taking it well. Down, flat, demotivated, hard on herself. “What can I do?” he asked. I said, this is a wonderful moment. Because this is exactly where you teach the lesson about the power of the choices we make. Because right now, like all of us, your daughter has a choice. The two roads: She can go down one road. “This isn’t fair. I hate the selectors. I hate the coach. The people who didn’t pick me are wrong. The world is against me. I don’t want to do this anymore - it’s a stupid game.” And as every coach and parent knows, some kids will go there. Or she can take the other road. “Man, it sucks not to get selected. I was really hoping. Oh well. I’m going to train harder tomorrow than I ever have. I’m going to give everything I’ve got. I’m going to sharpen my skills, practise consistently, sleep well, eat well, do everything I can to show these guys exactly how good I am. And next time a team is picked, they can’t possibly leave me out.” Here’s the important part. The situation hasn’t changed. She’s still not in the team. But the effect on her mind and her body - of choosing not to go into the dark, not to sink and beat herself up, but to see it as frustrating and disappointing and then choose to rise above it - is completely different. We’re human beings. We do get disappointed, sad, frustrated, angry. That’s normal. That’s allowed. But then comes the choice. “Yeah, I don’t like it. But I choose to rise above this. I choose to make it the catalyst that makes me extraordinary. I choose to let this be the fire in my belly that makes selecting me next time unavoidable.” Wait for the right moment: If you’re a coach or a parent, it’s tempting when something goes wrong to soften the blow. “It’s okay, let’s go and grab a pizza.” And that’s got its place. But the most powerful thing you can do - when a child misses selection, makes a big mistake, gets injured, when things just don’t go their way - is this. Wait for the right moment. Let it cool. Don’t do it the instant it happens, when the wound is raw. But when the moment arrives, and you’ll recognise it, use it to teach the lesson. “Okay. This is what’s happened. Now - you can choose to be down and dark and miserable. Or you can choose to see it as a driving force, an energy, a motivation, an inspiration to turn everything around.” Why this lesson matters more than any other: Because there’s always going to be something that goes wrong. Always. If your athletes and your kids respond to everything that goes wrong by looking at the dark side, the downside, and getting hard on themselves - then life is going to be tough. Because they will face adversity, difficulty, obstacles and challenges for the rest of their lives. That never stops. But if you can teach them to choose to respond to adversity - to setbacks, injuries, failures, all of it - in a positive way, to turn it into the driving force for something even greater, then they become unstoppable. Summary: Coaches, parents - find the moments to teach this. That it is within their power to choose how they respond to the things that happen to them. Teach them to respond positively to the setbacks, the challenges, the obstacles - and your kids, your athletes, your team become unstoppable. Not just this season. Right throughout their lives. That’s the lesson. And it might be the most important one you ever teach. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Let the emotion happen first. Don’t rush to the lesson. When an athlete is hurting, resist teaching in the raw moment. Let them be disappointed - it’s human and it’s healthy. Watch for the moment it cools, and that’s your window. * Frame the choice out loud. When the moment comes, name both roads for them explicitly. “You can go down here, or you can choose to go down there.” Making the choice visible is what hands them the power. They can’t choose a road they can’t see. * Teach the response, not the outcome. You can’t promise a young athlete they’ll make the team next time. But you can teach them that how they respond is entirely theirs to control. Shift their focus from the thing they can’t command to the one thing they always can. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe

    The One Choice You Never Lose!
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About

Real talk on coaching, leadership and sports parenting from Wayne Goldsmith — 30+ years working with Olympic programs worldwide. Challenging conventional thinking. Building better coaches, better parents, better athletes. waynegoldsmith.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Wayne Goldsmith
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    67
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Wayne Goldsmith
  • Show Website
    Sports Thoughts

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