Will Vickery [00:00:02] Hello and welcome to our Coaching and Officiating podcast series. My name is Wil Vickery and I'm one of the Senior Coaching Advisors at the Australian Sports Commission. Today I'm on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the cooler nation and along with some special guests. I'm here to talk about some of the important topics that exist within community coaching.
Today we're going to try and answer the question what is participant-centred coaching? I'm joined by Professor of Education at Flinders University, Shane Pill, who's an expert in all things sport and physical education, along with being a seasoned football coach. I'm also joined by Doctor Mitch Hewitt, who's the National Youth Programs Manager at Tennis Australia, as well as a long-time tennis coach.
Thank you both for joining me.
Shane Pill & Mitch Hewitt [00:00:49] Thanks for having us.
Will Vickery [00:00:50] Now, when some people hear the phrase participant-centred coaching, they might think that this means that the participants have total control over a session. Others might think that it has to do with the coach simply being a bystander and just watching chaos unfold because there's no interaction with the participants, whereas others might think it's actually something different altogether. Given the potential for confusion here, can you maybe explain to us what participant-centred coaching actually means?
Shane Pill [00:01:16] I think the common misconception that you've outlined there Will, and it reminds me of similar conversations we're having with schools in education participant-centred, student-centred, athlete-centred, all pretty much mean the same thing that the starting point is the player that you have in front of them. You need to understand what that player knows, what they're capable of doing, and what they understand about the game and their performance within the game in order to build from there. So a participant-centred approach is a constructivist perspective that starts from constructing where the individual is at, and that's across all of the domains of learning the cognitive, the physical, social, emotional, as well as the, the cognitive dimensions that they're able to bring to their understanding of performance. So coaches need to have a really good, background on the players that they're working with in order to build the training from their capability so they can be better tomorrow than they are today. Better people, better players, better team-mate, better participants in the club. But that misunderstanding that a participant-centred approach is just let them go out and play and it be unguided or weakly guided discovery, is not understanding, the, both the theory that sits behind the assumptions of a participant-centred approach. It's also misunderstanding what a participant-centred approach is, and it's an out for the coach not to do the coaching.
Mitch Hewitt [00:02:38] You know, I think Shane's summed it up beautifully. I think the word that comes to mind for me is empowerment. That's for sure. And this sort of, I guess, provision of age-appropriate empowerment. So looking that, I think participant-centred can occur with children all the way through youth to adults and, providing that level of choice, empowerment, within that, within that conversation. I also, I think that participant-centred coaching can often be misconstrued, as you know, taking all the power away, you know, from a player. And it should be really based around, well, you know, what the coach is sort of doing, I guess.
Will Vickery [00:03:26] So essentially what we're trying to say here is that, people need not be worried that the coaches is going to lose control or the the participants are just going to take things over. There's actually quite a lot of nuance in there about what participant-centred coaching actually is in reality.
Shane Pill [00:03:43] Yeah. Can I jump in there? I think what you've described is in the old coaching literature, when I talked about styles of coaching is the less I fear coach who lacks planning direction, hasn't scaffolded progressively for the students to move from where they are to where they can be over a period of time laissez-faire coach. Who lacks planning, direction, hasn’t scaffolded progressively for the students to move from they are to where they can be for a period of time. Laissez-faire coaching is not participant-centred coaching. Participant-centred coaching is quite informed, explicit, and requires a knowledgeable coach to put it into action. In, in one sense, if you do not have a pre-testing and I'm not talking about formalised testing, but if you don't have an assessment of where the players that you have are currently at with their cognitive, social, emotional and physical parameters of performance, you can't build from that participant to further their capability because you're just guessing at what they need rather than having, an understanding upon which to plan for them to be better tomorrow than what they are today. So it's actually a really, well-informed, explicit and structured approach to the holistic development of that individual. And as Mitch said, we want to take that player on a journey of becoming a more capable, independent, self-regulated learner over time.
Will Vickery [00:04:59] I just want to jump back to something you said earlier, Shane, about coaching styles and how there might be some confusion about where participant-centred coaching fits into this modern coaching environment, if not following a participant-centred approach. What do you think our coaches, are using or doing now?
Shane Pill [00:05:15] What I see in community settings is a turnover of coaches, because often the coaches in community settings are the well-intentioned parent or the parent that, not only is well intentioned and well-motivated towards assisting their child and their child's friends in that sport but might have a real passion for that sport. So they bring that enthusiasm for the sport. They’re there with their child's, they might have a teaching background, they may not. And so they're there and available to do the coaching. When their children stop participating, or if they're in a club that only allows you to, coach for 2 or 3 years and then somebody else needs to come in. So they're getting a, a different voice and, and different knowledge to come in. We're going to have a turnover of coaches. So we're, we're always re-educating the coach workforce as a consequence. Now, if you haven't got training in how to do either formatively or summatively that assessment of where the individual is at as a starting point or your coach accreditation or your coach development hasn't provided you with the grounding that it all starts from your understanding of the participant that you have. You're not going to start with that perspective because it's foreign to you. So if you're a teacher, you you are taught that that relationship piece of understanding the person in front of you is the starting point of that educational experience. Now, sports coaching is a specialised field of education. So exactly the same skill set that a phys-ed teacher needs it's just what a sports coach needs. Phys-ed teacher will go through four years of specialised training to be able to do their job. A coach might do a two-hour online course to get the accreditation, to be able to go and work with the under-eight, under-nine, under ten team. So what we find is that the coaches have been socialised into a way of coaching by what they've experienced as players, and that's their, formative experience. That becomes a habit of behaviour and they replicate what they know. That's what we do as humans. We replicate what we know. So often the coaches are guessing on what is good coaching rather than actually knowing what good coaching is?
Mitch Hewitt [00:07:27] It's interesting Shane isn’t it, from from what I see I guess on the ground is that this, this notion of coaching is still perhaps and particularly within a tennis setting, I guess if I reflect on my own practice and what we're seeing in the challenge we have, that coach’s is still developing players in the physical domain. So primarily it's about the technique and the tactics, and not so much as you referred to Shane, is this holistic development, in terms of the personal, social, emotional, domains as well. And I think to to really grasp this notion of participant-centred, it's a very humanistic way and saying, well, I want to develop the individual as a whole, not just traditionally in the physical domain. That's been one of our challenges, is to try and include these other aspects of development within that individual. And, and to sort of press upon coaches. It's not just about the physical, but we are developing other aspects of that, that individual on that journey as well. Yeah. And it's that other notion of, as Shane alluded to before, this not sort of finding out or seeking information about the person in front of you. It's more of an idiosyncratic approach which, which Sarah Ashworth and, and Moston talked about that coaches and what I believe the person requires rather than asking that person, what what do you want ? What are your motivations, in this experience as well, which which I think is key to keeping people playing sport, obviously. And and catering to the individual differences that we have. So it doesn't.
Will Vickery [00:09:17] Yeh the fact that you bring up motivation is a really important thing, I think, because, yeah, if we really do want to understand participants themselves and that the true calling of coaching is to kind of help somebody improve with whatever sport they happen to be involved in, actually understanding why they're there in the first place, to me anyway, seems to be the obvious place to start in a lot of ways for a participant-centred approach because, well, if you don't really understand why they're there, then it's very hard to do anything, anything with it.
Mitch Hewitt [00:09:50] Very difficult to achieve. And I guess what most sports are trying in most activities to get retention is to keep people around and keep them playing and keep them fit and healthy and active. But if we don't ask what they want, and we make those decisions and, and again, it could be based on how we were coached, what our motivations are, and it might not match with the player or the person of the individual, which then we have drop out and they they go and do something else.
Shane Pill [00:10:18] If I can just pick up on that, retention piece because it's something that we've, with our research here at Flinders been quite interested in and have done some work with a couple of sports on, particularly during the adolescent years, the, retention and attrition. And we found that the coach is central to the retention and attrition decision during the adolescent period. And in other words, if the coach is not helping to develop the individual, knows what that individual is interested in, gives time to that individual and plays the individual, then the individual is going to go and seek to do something else because they're not getting the enjoyment. Therefore the motivation to continue.
Mitch Hewitt [00:10:58] I mean, that's really well said Shane a term that comes out of that, I guess, in particularly that youth space is that relational. So if if we pick out some terms, what could be associated with player-centred, approaches that it's highly relational. And that's clear in that youth space that, the coach having the ability to not only be a good coach of technical or tactical ability, but also getting, this humanistic, you know, a culture of care is often another term, attached to, to this total, approach to coaching. So genuinely caring about the person in front of you. And I suppose in my case, one of the retention pieces in our business was that you take an interest in, in the children, and the people would come in, you ask how their day was. It's as simple as that. And I think the parents covet that sort of thing as Shane indicated that, and certainly now I have a nine-year old daughter, who might be sitting in that deliberate play space that, unless she hears this, down the track Will she won't mind me saying this, but she's, she's a, you know, average mover, but she loves going to gymnastics. She loves going to to tennis and swimming. It's not about the activity as such. It's more about the coach that's there and the people that are around her. And from my perspective as a parent. I'm really happy about that because it's giving her confidence, which, which I covet. So and all those other skills, collaboration, which is, you know, communication collaboration, which is a big part o- player-centred approaches as well.
Will Vickery [00:12:42] Just on what both of you said. I mean, I'm not picking up whatsoever, like, neither of you mentioned anything to do with the technical, the tactical, the what you would call the skill-based elements of sport. And obviously they're very important, but it doesn't sound like the front and centre or they're not as they're not out in front in terms of the importance or the focus when it comes to this player, this participant-centred approach. Would I be right in saying that?
Mitch Hewitt [00:13:09] Yeah, I think to pick up from Shane's perspective, there's a certain approach is what I which are in this sort of area of participant-centred, I should say, and that sort of game-based approaches, which I guess we could, including in the ingredients to, to what we would see as participant-centred. And that's highly involved in playing and playing the game. But also there's attached to this inquiry and problem solving, piece to it, and that's decision making around technique and tactics. So it's shared development in those areas. But I don't think it's, I don't think it's really called out as a kind of a pillar on its own. The, you know, it's within this play based, game-based approach that those things get developed.
Shane Pill [00:14:00] Just picking up on what Mitch said there, that athlete-centred, participant-centred, player-centred approach and that I think about the work that Lynne Kidman did, you know, 20 odd years ago that directly connected a game-based coaching approach to an athlete-centred approach, because in a game-based approach, you're putting the emphasis on the individual developing what they know you can do and understand. And to do that, you need to be able to make their thinking visible. The way that you make their thinking visible is in two parts. One, when you observe their performance, you see their thinking in action. The other part of it is to find out whether their, how deep they're understanding is you need to ask them questions. So it's not about filling them with information as the starting point. The starting point is actually finding out where the current understanding exists, where the gaps in their understanding are, and where the next piece of information can come in in order to build, from where they currently are. And, for those people that are listening, I'll direct them to Linn Kidman's work on athlete-centred coaching and linking into a game-based approach. If they're into interest and following it up. And then from a teaching perspective, I read just recently this phrase that I thought was a really nice slogan, you know, connect before content. And I think that's what Mitch and I are discussing, that in order to be an athlete-centred, participant-centred, player-centred, which you have a phrase, you got, you're running with, you need to connect with that individual. And as I said earlier on, in order to be able to understand what they know they can do and where their level of understanding is in order to be able to intentionally design purposefully, build from where they are so they can be better tomorrow than what they are today. Otherwise, as I said, you're just guessing based on, as Mitch said, the idiosyncratic understanding of the coach and what they think the players should be learning rather than what the players need to be learning in order to incrementally build them towards a better person, a better player, a better teammate. I bet a member of the club that a member of the community.
Mitch Hewitt [00:16:10] Does that to change, sort of change. And and I know this is, this has been happening for a while that our, our role as coaches coach as educator. So I guess it we've moved on from being coaches, you know, developer of technical and tactical. We are now seen, as coach as educator across all was domains, I guess. So at the point of making is probably our role has shifted as well to that. And the expectation of it now is to, is to be really participant-centred in this holistic, or have this holistic angle, or approach to what we're doing.
Will Vickery [00:16:49] Say you've got the ability to kind of shape and mould a brand new coach. They've got no coaching experience whatsoever. They've got no coaching, I guess biases or anything like that at all, which I know is very unlikely. But, this person is coming in fresh. Let's call it that. How would you get them, firstly, to take on board this participant-centred approach. And what knowledge would you actually pass on to this individual?
Mitch Hewitt [00:17:20] Gee that's. Why don't you ask a more difficult question? Well, I think if it if it was true that this person had absolutely no baggage, if I can call it that. From a coaching perspective, I think, player-centred is is far more engaging and a whole lot more fun for the coach as well. And I guess I guess from our previous discussion and answers is that there's so many good things about this athlete-centred approach or player-centred approach, or I did read the other day an article and there was a sailor-centred approach, so it must have been sailing and they've used this, which I've which I love, because it was, I was fascinated about, well, gee, how can you have a sailing which is often an individual that can be one player, but how can that be? Anyway, I digress. I guess reflecting on writing some courses for tennis and starting off with, people that have come in and had no coaching background at all. It's a far more engaging and fun way to do things. I think is it alleviates to this focus Will on, it just all has to be about technique and tactics, which is a real fear for people that I don't know enough about the sport to coach it. And, and I think if the other pieces are thrown in, about well there's holistic development. It's we're developing good players or I should say good movers, but also good people. I think it's far, easier for people to learn how to do that, because as humans, we're every day we're trying to presumably to be better people and nicer people. So it takes away from a tennis perspective that notion of, gee, I have to know every single thing about the sport, when you don’t at all. And if we think about problem solving and inquiry and allowing people to discover and co-construct the answers to some of the problems, this collaboration too, I'm asking the person in front of you to come up with to, it's a shared responsibility, I think as well. So if we're looking for a a community coach, someone fresh coming in, but equally from a professional coach, if you're trying to change the way they do things, it's it's releasing that notion of, well, to be a great coach, you need to take that perspective with the person in front of you. You don't need necessarily to know every single thing about sport.
Shane Pill [00:20:01] On building on what Mitch said, I, I've got three perspectives and I borrow from education. I'd be advising the coach to be really clear on their boundaries of expectations of behaviour. If the players don't know what's expected of them, then they can't perform to those expectations. So from a cognitive perspective, we're actually setting the cognitive expectations on behaviour. And for those people that are teaching, that's classroom management 101. That doesn't mean you have to have a prescribed list of behaviours. From an education setting. I tend to talk about, Bill Rogers work, where he talks about we've all got four rights, we've got the right to respect, we've got the right to feel safe, we've got the right to learn, and I've got the right to coach. So if we're pressing on any of those rights, we need to have, an awareness conversation, because it's not creating the optimal environment for us to have a really good engagement piece here. And then we need to be able to explicitly teach and reinforce those behavioural expectations. Now, one way of doing that is we can have an awareness talk at the start of training and say, what does a respectful, interaction with your team-mates look like, sound like, feel like today? And then at the end of training, ask the players to rate how did we go with our respectful interactions with our team-mates today? Let's give ourselves a rating of 1 to 5. Where five we were awesome, borrowing from the teaching personal social responsibility model of health and PE. We can bring that into our sports coaching. And I've listened to some podcasts recently where coaches, in American elite sport, have been doing this explicit teaching of behavioural, awareness by doing exactly what I've just described. And I've also seen it work really, really well with young kids. So it's not something that is at either end of the spectrum. It's across the spectrum of age groups. So then the second part of it is they need to know the player. And as part of knowing the player, there's an assessment of where their technical and technical and game ability within that sits, because we're wanting them to play the game with a greater sense of of agency so they get more joy out of it. Then the third part of it is what motivates them to be there for this sport, so that we can actually work with what motivates them. So for some kids and some adults, that's going to be the social nature of the sport. For others, they're going to be wanting to test themselves and be on a pathway towards a particular goal. Playing in the senior team, getting into a development program, being picked up for a state squad. But we can't help them with those dimensions unless we actually know what motivates them. And then we can build our relationships with those players around what motivates them to be there. So we can be differentiated in the conversations that we have with the players. We can be differentiated in the type of training we're asking groups of players to participate in, because we have a really good understanding of where our players are at personally, socially, emotionally, cognitively. And we've done that through conversations because what the the literature tells us, and my personal experience would be, the players want to connect with their coaches. And the way we do that is by having conversations with them.
Will Vickery [00:23:35] I guess off the back of that. What sort of things might this new, this, this say fresh coach? Expect to see if they do choose to follow this participant-centred approach.
Mitch Hewitt [00:23:45] I guess in answer to that one will I think straight to to to some tennis coaching. And I think that if you're looking at the principles within participant-centred coaching, you would say a lot more action so that that they're just playing more. I think as Shane mentioned before, you know, there's lots more repetition of practice, but that doesn't mean standing in lines and being fed to. So these players interacting with each other, they collaborating and they playing the game. There's some sort of game-based approach there. So you're seeing a lot more action. You're seeing collaboration. You're seeing communication. A lot more co-construction of of the answers or the challenges that the coaches being put ahead. But I think simplistically and to keep it really simple, that's what you're seeing. If you’re stepping up to a tennis court and saying okay, is there is this happening? There are your key parts. I guess this, this socialisation, this hive of activity. But but also allowing the coach to step in and out of these interactions with, with their students, whether it's one or whether it's a group of six, far more facilitation roaming around, but but still getting involved in the activity as well. It's a fairly simple answer, but if I was to construct a an illustration, that's might be something that I would see and expect straight away from the coach. And if they're getting that part, that's a pretty good start to it, I suppose. But there's also a lot of planning behind that Will, and I think there has to be sort of here. The activities here are the things that I'm going to do. But this is plan. Let's plan for all the, the, deviations that might occur if this if this activity is not working as well as I'd like to and we haven't differentiated enough to the players, then I have to have a plan. I have to modify something. I have to do something different. So within that. Within that scope of, I suppose, coaching skills, being able to, think on your feet a little bit, make those adjustments for all people there to, to keep them active and at the right challenge point, I think as well.
Shane Pill [00:26:01] Continuing on from Mitch, the couple of words that I think describe what he's just summarised is the coach will be explicit. So be explicit on how to behave in the broader sense of the word. They'll be explicit on what it is to, we're going to learn. And they're also going to be explicit on what it looks like, sounds like, feels like when we've got it both the behaviour is right, but also the performance of the learning to be a better player what that looks like as well. From a coach educator's perspective, one of the things that signals to me a participant-, player-, athlete-centred environment is the players are doing more talking than the coaches, and the players are doing more interaction with each other, scaffolded because of the nature of what the coach has set up. But the players are talking to each other more than the coaches talking to the players.
Will Vickery [00:26:57] It's important to obviously recognise that, sport for a lot of people happens maybe for an hour or so on a Saturday with a couple of training sessions, maybe through the week. There's a lot of other stuff that goes on during the week. Right? Is so, so the role that the coach and the environment that they create there, it's pretty important, I would think, like as you're saying, Mitch and Shane. It's probably got more to do, if not just as much. Sorry. It's probably got just as much, if not more to do with what happens outside of those those times when they're not just hitting a ball or running or kicking or whatever, right. It's there's a lot more to coaching if we take this path and it has quite long-term impact.
Mitch Hewitt [00:27:43] Yeah. And I and from my experience there was and we primarily in our business in my coaching background is in that participation area, of of children and youth coming to have some sort of physical experience, so to play a sport because they were very academically minded. And so the parents motivation for sending them was I want my child to be communicating and socialising with other kids, and I want tennis to be that vehicle. I'm not too concerned about whether I can hit a kick serve or do a perfect topspin forehand. That was the last thing on their mind. It was about this socialisation. And we had explicit comment and commentary around that. We had to make sure that their socialising can you create an environment where they're doing it in an athlete-centred or player-centred or sailor-centred approach is exactly that. It is about as as Shane said, the, the, the people on the corner on the field talking more. And that was certainly leading to the the outcomes and desires of that particular parent I guess.
Will Vickery [00:28:50] I really like that example. It actually helps me, frame this next question that I had for you guys, actually. Now want you to try and think back to some of your earlier days in coaching. Now I'm going to assume, and please correct me if I'm wrong here. That, and I would say myself involved in this included, probably not always a participant-focussed coach. Right. I would have at some point thought whether you were the coach or you were the player being coached would have been exposed to the complete opposite of what a participant-centred coaching approach would be, right? I'd be very curious to know what your experiences are with that opposite approach to this, to this thing.
Mitch Hewitt [00:29:39] Well, I guess at my age will certainly like I came in as a player and was coached very, in a direct command manner. The coach had all the knowledge, supposedly had all knowledge. And I was just, he just transferred all that knowledge to me. So I had really no input in, in the experience. I was relatively competent, so I was kind of okay because I was able to do the things that this coach was telling me to do and what I required. The motivation at the time was probably more about being a good tennis player, and that was how it was taught. I suppose the tradition of that you've got to get your, technique right. So lots of feeding, lots of standing in line, not a lot of collaborating and a lot of communicating and socialising. I think the most amount of learning I did, on reflection was the lesson occurred lots of lines, lots of feeding. And then at the end of the lesson, the coach said now go and play some games on your own. And we were left to our own devices to construct singles and doubles, and of which we often modified and did. And that's where the the rich learning and the enjoyment came, I think. So I was I stood in those lines. I didn't particularly like them. I far preferred to be playing the game and having some sort of input. And so I do remember that, quite explicitly. And then when it came to my own coaching, I kept that going, as I, I suppose in the early days I was quite technique-centred. But I still had an understanding of, albeit minor, and an appreciation of well they need to play the game as well because that was my experience. But I'm ashamed to say that it was a lot of technique. But that's going through the courses at the time. It's all about technique.
Will Vickery [00:31:42] I think that's quite an important point to make there is that it's not just individuals who probably feel this way. I think for in a lot of people's experiences, it was the norm that was passed on from the education that we received. But it's not that we didn't know any better. But again, it all falls back into that old, that old adage of like, well, that's just how things used to be done, or that's how things are done. And a lot of the time you don't want to rock the boat or you're just none the wiser. So of course you would get swept up in that and and continue along and just yeah, coach that same way for so long until a bit of a light bulb light bulb moment happens really right?
Mitch Hewitt [00:32:25] Absolutely. And I can recall that where we did as, as an industry shift within education to more of a it was a game-based approach really, and being one element of, you know, there was never any mention of participant-centred or anything like that. It was game-based. So a lot more play, inquiry and problem solving. And I think what happened was then both of these approaches were seen as mutually exclusive. So you're either in that camp or you're in that camp. And we could see that occurring. So, ever since there's been lots of education about trying to, to get a far better interpretation and understanding of it and some recent research, I guess, in the past, within the past 5 or 6 years, was that a lot of coaches in this, in some of this research was found that they covered, and they want to do more game-based and they want to do more of this player- centred, athlete-centred, but they just don't know how. So they want to be able to do that. But they don't know how. So it comes back a lot to now this professional learning and development.
Will Vickery [00:33:38] I’d be curious to know your experiences with this Shane.
Shane Pill [00:33:41] Yeah Mitch talked about a light bulb moment very much around a teacher-centred, coach-centred environment where the coach or the teacher laid out the landscape of expectations and developed a curriculum, a program for the players to experience. We were fortunate in our our physical education teacher preparation at that time that we did a lot of level one coaching courses for the different practicals that we're doing at Teachers College at the time. And what I remember those was there was always a performance expectations, so to pass your level one coaching course, you actually had to be able to technically perform in a closed drill situation, the skills as techniques to quite a higher degree of effectiveness. One of the benefits of having done all of those coaching courses was I was accredited with the National Coaching Council, which now no longer exists. But at the time, all sports were regulated through the the National Coaching Council, the Australian Sports Commission would send all accredited coaches the Sports Coach magazine with the latest ideas around sports coaching. And in the early 1990s, this idea of designer games was being written about in one of the Sports Coach’s. And Rick Charlesworth was talking about getting the game design right. You can do technical, tactical and fitness training in the one thing which we call a game and get a higher level of performance than if we just continually separate out from there. And I started to experiment with the idea of the designer games in my football coaching initially where I had limited time to prepare my players, I had one training session a week and then a midweek game. And then the players would be off to train, one night a week with their clubs and a game on the weekend with their clubs. So I had to be really efficient to try and teach the players a particular game style. And they were all coming from different clubs with different expectations to play for the school time. And so I started to take the idea of designer games as game sense games, which were being published in the old Sports Coach Journal. Let's reframe the conversation from drills to games, was an emphasis in the Sports Coach Journal that was going out to coaches at the time, particularly for children and youth sport. And so I started to make the main emphasis of my training sessions game-based so we would teach them how to play particular moments of the game, how to coordinate their collective efforts around, particular principles of play. But I was feeling that my approach was making a difference to both their enjoyment, but also the success that we were having as a football team. So the light bulb moment for me was really the the watching Brian do his, teaching, which was different to the way that I'd been taught to structure and then into that environment came information from the Sports Commission via the Sports Coach Journal to say, hey, coaches, we need to reframe how we're coaching to a more game-based approach. And then later on, I started to write about Linn Kindman’s idea of athlete-centred coaching, which has an emphasis on a game-based approach. And yeah, if you like the the dots were all starting to form into a pattern. That was making sense for me.
Will Vickery [00:36:53] I guess just to finish things off, if there's one thing that you want the listeners to take away about the participant-centred approach, whether it be an outcome, whether it be a way to include it into a session or follow that approach, whatever it happens to be. What's the one thing you want those listeners to know?
Mitch Hewitt [00:37:11] I think from my perspective Will, and we've spoken about it a number of times now. I think we might have even started with this, is that I guess the most important person in this exchange or experience is the person that you have in front of you. And the more you know about that individual, motivations, competence, confidence, all those sorts of things, the, the far better you're going to be, as a coach and far more effective, I think. So, that would be for me in a short, sharp, concise answer. Go ahead and find out as much as you can, because that's going to guide you in what you ultimately do, and that's going to keep that person of those people involved. And that should be our ultimate goal, I guess, keeping people in sport being physically active and over a lifetime.
Will Vickery [00:38:06] Yeah, yeah cool. Words of wisdom from yourself Shane?
Shane Pill [00:38:09] I'll go back to that idea of connect before content, because through connection, you can understand the person you have in front of you, as well as the player that you have in front of you. And it's from that understanding of those two things, the person and the player that you're able to design, to help that individual to be a better person and a better player tomorrow than what they have today.
Will Vickery [00:38:30] Thank you very much, and I think we'll finish with that one.
Thanks for listening. To learn more about community coaching, head to the Australian Sports Commission's Community Coaching web page. I'm Will Vickery and I look forward to you joining me for the next podcast in the Coaching and Officiating series.
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