AFL is back!! Aussie Rules Footy has been in heavy focus over the past few weeks; with the release of “Making Their Mark” earlier this month, it brought back focus to one of Australia’s top team sports in time for AFL’s Round 1 over the weekend. Something I enjoyed from the documentary, which may not surprise you, was the contrasting coaching styles between clubs. Couple in particular really stood out for me; Damien Hardwick of Richmond and Matthew Nicks of Adelaide Crows. During the series, I looked at the differences and eventual similarities of the coaching styles.

How can mentorship or better understanding yourself allow you to be more attuned to your athletes needs or help you create a player led environment? What techniques or critical friends can you welcome into personal reflection of yourself and your methodologies to better serve the needs of your athletes? Identifying and approaching a mentor or critical friend to reflect and review your coaching methodologies may be a great new or next step for your coaching development. Developing strong athlete relationships needs to be continually addressed and worked on, understanding people, personalities and environments shall change. Through personal reflection, be willing to change ideas or structures to match what your athletes or players need today and be reflective and flexible to change to what they need tomorrow and in future.

Super Bowl LV is upon us; the match up sees arguably the greatest ever quarterback vs the man whom shall challenge his title. We all know the immense achievements of Tom Brady yet Patrick Mahomes is coming up….fast

In these debates of GOAT status, the areas I like to dial into include what learning environments were offered or created for Brady to excel and have these expectations or sense of self belief? What complementary factors or details within connection can coaches offer to create a perfect storm and have players such as Brady or Mahomes excel to the levels they do? What can or do the coaching support network offer these highly driven, extremely successful players to continue to drive high standards and meet their performance expectations?

Following on from December’s blog post, looking at the importance of questioning, throughout Christmas period and start of this year, I have worked on and finally complied my question cheat sheet, accessible via link in blog post or via research page. As previously mentioned, I feel asking the right questions can both build relationships and close the gap through understanding athlete’s motivations, areas of importance for their development and how can the environment be structured to suit their needs.Asking questions using the linked document as a start, understanding the answers and whom they’re coming from will give you a snapshot for today yet this needs to be continually addressed and worked on, understanding people, personalities and environments shall change.

Following a few recent conversations I’ve had and other articles I’ve read recently, it made me revisit the power of questioning as coaches or teachers; are we asking or being asked the right questions? I wanted to revisit my notes, share some ideas and reach out to sports coaches, group leaders or teachers alike to try and find what’s the best questions we can ask in different contextual environments.

I have challenged coaches in the past to only use questions in training sessions or practice to allow the players or athletes to drive purpose and planning whilst developing understanding and connection of player’s background and decisions respectively as a coach. However, I have always wanted to dig a bit deeper and see if we as coaches, educators or administrators were asking the RIGHT questions to promote skill development, athlete commitment and closeness within coach-athlete relationships.