Eddie Jones; a fascinating bloke and a curious coach still looking to develop, learn and grow himself while engaging and testing his players with new, creative ideas, which is a great lesson for all coaches at all levels. In this blog post, we look at his role as as growth environment architect, creating environments to perform, grow and enjoy.

“Gen Z and Millennials” on the sports fields and in the workplace are getting coaches, managers and business leaders alike to re-think both how we approach and encourage the pursue of the boundaries of their sporting and innovative potential. Importantly, I believe greater understanding of the importance of this developmental age needs to be understood. While we acknowledge the multiple transitions of life, education, work and sport occurring, developmentally these people and players shall be starting to reconstruct personal past, perceive the present and anticipate the future in an internalised and evolving self-story, searching for psycho-social unity and purpose, something not worked on until these adolescent years. Supportive practices such as acknowledging and incorporating SDT and autonomy supportive practices to allow space to learn, support to understand and time to explain attitudes and beliefs for these age grade athletes and people.

“To excel, you need to love the game first”. This was one of the message conveyed by Ken Martel, technical director of USA Hockey’s American Development Model which works on coaching education and player development projects in the organisation’s youth hockey department, whom I was fortunate to spend time as part of a coaching group at University of QLD earlier this week. Martel is spending time in AUS, offering insight and outlining his ADM program and how his game based practices have increased and retained age grade hockey players to assist the NRL’s introduction of Player Development Framework.

One of the points made by Martel was “competition structure always dictates the development structure”; therefore, following his research, USA Hockey incorporated age-appropriate principles within the adopted ADM which included Practice and competition environments that are fun and engaging and Games as a significant portion of the practice environment as examples

Where is the point of difference to elite age grade athletes to high performance sportspeople?

We as coaches need to empower athletes to combine those achievement strivings with endurance, gratitude, happiness and appreciation as opposed to resting on talent or potential and being distracted from the effort required. We need to remind our young leaders that true success comes when we devote ourselves to endeavours which give us joy and purpose and that traits such as self control, character and perseverance is what shall set us apart.