The Invisible Resource

At the start of 2011 England Athletics commissioned research on the development and retention of young athletes, specifically u20 year olds who had been ranked in the top 20 at u15.  The resulting report, Bridging the Gap (Shibli and Barrett, Sport Industry Research Centre) was published in July.  There are few surprises in the findings, which largely back up what is already apparent from general observation or indicated from previous athletics and general sport research. That is not a criticism; basic research of this kind is essential as a sound foundation for further enquiry, providing of course that additional research questions are objectively framed and not slanted by assumptions rooted in current policy or tradition.

There is much to discuss in Bridging the Gap, but for the moment I am focussing on a topic which is on few development agendas in athletics although much researched in sport generally: that is the influence of parents on sustained participation.

In this report athletes and coaches identified 3 critical success factors that drive achievement: intrinsic motivation, coaching and the support of family and friends.  Obvious?  Yes of course, but worthy of emphasis all the same, because in terms of what athletics provides and prioritises, the first two items are often, wrongly, taken for granted and the last – family support – is generally ignored.  Yet, in my experience, in particular as a recent county team manager but also as a close observer of coaching over many years, it is increasingly the case that parental support is the essential component for ANY level of participation, if only due to their possession of sets wheels.  Furthermore, the need for informed parental support increases as young athletes progress, and the higher the level of potential the youngster has, the higher is the requirement for that information to available and acted upon.   Yet the oft heard cry from clubs and coaches about parents is that they use athletics services as crèches.   So, what effort are we making to inform and support parents?

I spoke to a friend of a friend who lives in a large conurbation many miles from my home in Cumbria.  Ann (not her real name; I don’t want to embarrass the athlete) whom I had not previously met, is the mother of a gifted youngster, a national champion in his age group.  She is a thoughtful and highly supportive parent, but by her own admission has little background in sport.  Her child is also gifted in other sports, so, inevitably, comparisons are made. We spoke at length over the phone.

“He always showed great aptitude, but there was not much help from the primary school.  It was at a summer play scheme that his ability was first noted and I was told to get him to a club.  But I didn’t know what to do or how to contact one.  Meanwhile he went through the schools system and got 2^nd in the county u15s when he was only 13.  At that point he met his current coach “Graham”.  Graham took him to various clubs and entered him in small competitions.  But there was no information from those clubs.  They didn’t explain how you got selected for the competitions, or what they were.  There was no information about county or area competition or what to expect from coaching.  When he went to club sessions he was bored. If Graham  is not available he gets very disappointed at what the club gets him to do, which is more or less “what do you feel like doing?”.   Graham is not attached to a club, but if it wasn’t for him the boy would not be involved in the sport at all, because what the clubs are offering does not appeal.   And that would be a tragedy because he absolutely loves it.  But it is down to luck, luck, luck that he met Graham at all and stayed in the sport.  Athletics seems to be very disorganised compared to rugby.  The people in the club are very nice, but there’s no obvious structure and they don’t offer any information. I was really surprised.”

I asked Ann what kind of information she think clubs should provide.

She reeled off a list:-

• How much training should he be doing and what kind?
• What competition is available and how do you get into it?
• What about area and national championships, what are the standards like and how do you enter?
• Other sports have academies to provide structure, information and progression; athletics doesn’t seem to. Why is that?
• Why is there an inter-counties competition for combined events, but not for other events?

“I am also concerned about how much it costs coaches in terms of money and effort to provide this coaching and support.  Our involvement also costs us a lot, which is a worry because we have two other children.   I have a full-time job and it’s often a real rush to get him to training – a time and financial pressure.  He is coming up to GCSEs, and although I am determined not to be a pushy parent, and anyway I don’t need to be because he is a grafter, but I can’t help wondering if it’s worth him bothering with athletics, longer term. Where’s the gain? Is he going to have to put in so much time that it detracts from other things?”

In these bullet points and in Ann’s additional comments we have a summary of questions and concerns that any thoughtful parent will be thinking about, if not directly asking.  Considering the absolutely vital role of such parents to the future participation and athletics well-being of their children – and therefore of the future of the whole sport – could not clubs and coaches have access to an approved leaflet for parents giving simple and practical answers to these questions?

Then there is the debate about the more qualitative aspects of Ann’s concerns.   It is all very well to underline the value of “intrinsic motivation, coaching and the support of family and friends” and few who are versed in this sport would question that these are indeed the fundamentals of sustained participation and achievement, but unfortunately we seem to be seeing these qualities as static requirements rather than the outcomes of dialogue with all concerned.  Whilst happy, well coached young athletes will indeed be primarily motivated by wanting to be as good as they can be,  parents, especially those under financial and time pressure (and who isn’t?) and with other children to consider, are bound to ruminate about the extrinsic purpose and future of their whole family’s commitment to their child’s participation and progress.

A few years ago I was asked by a member of the regional development staff of England Athletics to run a workshop for parents at one of the now defunct regional academies.    This was on the basis of my then day job, together with my athletics and personal experience (managed a Children’s Services team working with difficult teenagers and their families: delivered the personal development element in the Mental Preparation Foundation Courses with psychologist Alma Thomas, mother of an elite potential athlete..oh yes,  nearly forgot, ex-Olympian) .

The objectives of the 90 minute session where to:

• Identify the benefits and demands of being an athlete
• Discuss the consequent role of the parent
• Assist the development of balance and emotional well-being as the foundation of success and healthy family life
• Outline the basics of effective communication

Jess's parents; more nervous than the athlete?

Whilst the workshop gave  information, its main achievement was to give parents a structured opportunity to discuss these issues in a supportive atmosphere and share their own personal challenges, such as dealing with their own and their off-spring’s pre-competition nerves, to manage the difficult boundaries between support and pressure and the parent/coach relationship.  The workshop ran a couple times and got excellent feedback. I have considered posting the PowerPoint presentation on this site for clubs and coaches to use, but decided against it because it needs supporting notes which are well understood by the facilitator in order to be safely and effectively delivered.   If anyone is interested in further information about this workshop, just drop me an email.

Success in sport depends on partnership between the governing body, athletes and, in their formative years, athletes’ parents.  Even the most gifted youngsters are unlikely to succeed without parents who are able and willing to spend time and large amounts of money providing appropriate support.  Most parents are left to do the best they can, but that appropriateness frequently also requires input – of basic information but also of help to manage the stresses and emotional and behavioural challenges of what, for a tiny but very visible minority is an escalator to fame and wealth, but for the majority is simply a highly testing tightrope towards being the best that you can be for your own satisfaction.   Parents who get it wrong can easily drive their children out of the sport, but in the absence of any structured guidance, whose fault is that?

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Sunday, December 11th, 2011 in Track Chat
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365 Continued: the most important debate a sport can ever have

How can it be that the sport that created some of the world’s most successful induction packages: – Sportshall Athletics (George Bunner) 5 Star Award and 10 Step Award – remains so inept at selling itself to the next generation?

This piece raises a vital question: In its rush to intellectualise and conform to an over literal interpretation of LTAD models (Long Term Athlete Development), is athletics failing children and young people and sabotaging its own future? If so, what can be done? It is the most important debate any sport can have and every club and coach has a responsibility to consider it and their own contribution to a better future.

FORTY YEARS ON

Tom McNab

I occasionally look back at what I wrote as a young man, as a National Coach, forty odd years ago. My major work on teaching was “Modern Schools Athletics” (1970) an early attempt to deal with the class-teaching of the sport. At the time, I and my co-authors, (men like Alan Launder and Wilf Paish), fondly imagined that the book would trigger off an explosion of interest in the P. E. profession. We would soon, we assured ourselves, be drowned in letters from teachers from all over the country, offering us alternative methods of teaching athletics, ideas on teaching facilities and modified equipment, a host of things which we could insert in the next edition.

Forty years on, and not a single letter, indeed not a hint that the P.E. profession had given the issue of class athletics a single thought has emerged. For, strangely, it has rarely shown much interest in bread and butter issues such as this, as has been clearly revealed in other sports such as swimming and football.

Thirty years ago, F. A. National Coach Allen Wade devised a means of teaching football which would enable teachers to work more effectively with large classes of children. This involved the creation of grids, in which small team games and practices could be pursued, giving children of all abilities the opportunity to get many touches of the ball in opposed and semi-opposed situations. I defy anyone to find a set of teaching-grids anywhere in his neighbourhood, for teaching method has changed not at all in a century, and consists simply of dividing the class up into two teams and to referee the resultant game.

It has not been much different in swimming, where most of the ideas on teaching have come, not from the universities who train teachers, but from A. S. A. swimming coaches such as Hamilton Smith. They have been the ones who created award schemes; they are the ones who have developed teaching method.

It is at this point worth summarising what teachers and coaches are attempting to do in their different contexts. In schools, where the teachers can guarantee attendance and assign time with confidence, the aim is to provide an athletic education, teaching children how to perform within the rules and testing them in competition, using an essentially Five Star approach.

What presents them with problems are large numbers, relatively primitive facilities and lack of commitment on the part of many of the pupils. But what also limits them is an understanding of the nature of technique at this level, the need to modify equipment and facilities, how to organise large groups in different activities, what events to teach and what to leave. Athletics teaching has hardly moved forward in any way since I was first exposed to it as a boy in 1945, for all of the development of educational theory and all of our greater technical knowledge. But school athletics will be, for most children, their only experience of athletics in their lifetimes, and it is sad that the experience is often so shoddy.

The aim of the club coach in dealing with novices is in essence not that much different from the P. E. teacher, the three big differences lying in numbers, commitment and time. Of these the only negative is time, in that club coaches have no idea how long their children will stay with them. Here, one answer is to have clear blocks of induction tuition for which children sign up and pay, followed by programmes( jumps/ throws/ sprints-hurdles relays) with clearly-defined objectives. Central to all of this is to have a Director moving children from one programme to another. This kind of organisation is, alas, anathema to most clubs, and most of what I witness in clubs is closer to Chaos Theory.

As I have said, the main problem is the uncertainty. We have 24k children in our clubs in the 11-15 age range, and this probably represents a turn-over of 2-3 times that number. I make this as an estimate, for no one has ever troubled to track this population, so we simply do not know. What we DO know is that they are by no definition athletes, and to try to treat them as such, as if they all have long-term aims, is madness. And what we also know is that though the level of ability in this group is higher than in schools, the technical parameters are similarly narrow. This means that most children in this age-group will never reach more than an absolutely basic technique in any but a few events. But if they stay with us long enough, then they will leave our clubs having competed in runs, jumps and throws, will have some understanding of the rules, and a feeling for the nature of athletics – in other words having received an athletics education.

When the coaching scheme developed under Dyson in the 1950s, it was quickly embraced by the P.E profession, for this was science, this was status. Thus, our teaching magazines were soon full of abstruse articles on the mechanics of the hitch kick and the Western Roll. It mattered little that their authors had never coached a jumper. Neither did it matter that little of the biomechanics were important to the class teaching which physical educationists were employed to deliver. This tendency to concentrate on theory and on technical minutiae accelerated twenty years later, when physical education became a degree subject. For there were no professorships to be gained in dissertations on practical teaching, on the problems of dealing with thirty children of all shapes and sizes. But there were plenty to be gained in the exploration of the science of that which was not worth knowing.

This issue was compounded by the fact that those who DID succeed at practical level rarely if ever committed themselves to paper. I was fortunate in having Alan Launder in my area, for though he was at that time not a writer, what he had done at Dr. Challenor’s school showed me what could be achieved with the right approach. My own ideas on class-teaching (indeed on how to deal with novices) had not matured at that point, simply because I had gone straight from teaching into national coaching. I nevertheless provided expression to what he had done by creating the Five Star Award; here my mistake was to omit teaching-notes which might have given more detailed practical example of Alan’s approach.

My book “Modern Schools Athletics” (1970) went some of the way to dealing with this, but not far enough, for although the philosophy was clear, and the technical advice reasonably sound, I failed to address the central issue of class-organisation. Practically expressed, this means “what do you do with the other twenty odd children, while you are working with a group on shot put?” And I made no attempt to make it clear that certain events (discus, vault, hammer) were unsuitable for class-teaching, or to press teachers towards modification of equipment in events such as shot and javelin. Neither did I give any idea of how many events should be tackled in a summer season, the balance between technique and competition, or what different forms that competition might take.

From this distance, the reasons for these omissions are obvious. I was no longer teaching, no longer putting my early thoughts into action. For there is no substitute for practice or for the reflective thought which follows that practice, when bringing new methods to the table.

The lack of any response to the ideas brought up by “Modern Schools Athletics” left a vacuum and left room for anyone to offer any speculative thoughts which entered their mind. Thus we had “How to Improve Your Coaching”, a Sports Coach UK publication back around 1997. This was a bland, generic document, clearly written by someone with little practical experience of coaching and was issued by UKA to all of its coaches. Alas, in its earlier form it had clearly related to netball and its pages were dotted with references to that sport. It was understandably treated with contempt by the senior coaches to whom it was presented, and passed quickly into deserved obscurity.

A few years later, Levels One and Two coach education materials were produced, and Wilf Paish, John Anderson and I were asked to comment on them. These related essentially to the introduction of athletics to novices. We said that they were rubbish, poorly- presented, badly-written and unrelated to the work that coaches were required to undertake in our clubs. As I remember it, the beginners’ session on triple jump featured pre-jump routines which were more difficult than the event itself! Needless to say, we heard no more from the UKA Coaching Director. It reflects the lack of informed opinion that there was no comment in our athletic press on the inadequacy of the coach education materials. Neither was there any response by the governing body to Wilf Paish’ detailed critical observations.

Then there was a series of event posters (purporting to be visual aids) but choked with thousands of words, and often simply factually incorrect. For no, high jump was not on the programme of the Ancient Greeks, and no, women did not appear in Olympic athletics in 1924, but in 1928.

Elevating Athletics then arrived, a work of fantasy, which development officers understandably found it impossible to place in schools. Undeterred, but without admitting error, UKA then ordered its Coaching Director (who had never previously committed to paper a word on schools athletics) to create a second version. I was shown a draft, and finding it no better than the first, advised against publication, but was ignored.

What all of this describes is an organisation convinced of the quality of anything that their employees produce, regardless of evidence to the contrary. There could therefore be no knowledge, no wisdom other than that which they or their minions created. And any criticism necessarily derived from ignorance, envy or simply a failure to keep up with the times.

Running through all of the above was an aversion to consider past experience. For the just-employed coach/ administrator inevitably, invariably felt it essential to make his mark by offering something new. Thus we recently had “What we are going to do and how we are going to do it”, an EA strategy document purporting to provide a vision of club athletics in the future. This portrayed a British female winner of the Olympic high jump (some mistake, surely?) lecturing to parents. Outside, a “hammer guru” took a session in which several hammers appeared to be in the air at the same time. Meanwhile, at the other end, javelin throwers launched their implements in rage towards the hammer throwers, themselves only a few dangerous feet away from a row of shot putters. Out on the track, hurdlers chased each other in the same lane and high jumpers leapt over unsupported crossbars on what appeared to be a long jump approach-run.

What troubles me most about all of these follies is first the cost; second their irrelevance to our present coaching/teaching situation, but most of all their relentless mediocrity – the fact that there seems to have been no mature editorial control, no pause for reflection at any point – no reality check. And, beyond all of this, worse still is the lack of informed response from the athletics community.

I can say categorically that none of these materials could possibly have passed muster with Dyson and his colleagues, who would have given their right hands for similar funding. Nor could they have been considered seriously in my time as National Coach; simply laughed out of court. This is not to say that all of the National Coaches’ booklets were of good quality, but what identified all of them is that they described what their writers had actually done, rather than what they thought should be done.

But only a handful of National Coaches were interested in the teaching process within schools, and only a small number were interested in the instruction of club novices, a group who were not by any definition athletes. This was a major omission because, by the late 1980s, this group had become by far the biggest sector within the club population. The vacuum in these areas, together with the decline in the quality of governing body appointments has, alas, brought us Shine, Elevating Athletics and 365.

We appear to have reached a point where everyone’s opinion has validity, even if it derives from little or no successful experience. Thus I am already reading blogs where the thoughts of coaches such as Launder and Paish are given equal status with writers who have achieved nothing in coaching, and who have never previously put up their ideas for scrutiny. Launder’s comments come from someone who rarely expresses criticism in print, and who has no hidden agenda, but they will pass through athletics with little comment.

It gives me no pleasure to observe that Alan Launder’s work at Dr Challenor’s still represents the high point in schools athletics after almost fifty years; or that works like Elevating Athletics and “365” are being presented as realistic ways by which the teaching of athletics in clubs and schools should be pursued. It shows that, unlike coaching, this is not an area which has been vigorously pursued by teachers and coaches, and this is sad, for it deprives children of the pleasure in athletics which I once enjoyed.

A Question of Interpretation: for Maslow substitute LTAD?

Long Term Athlete Development Late Specialization Model
FUNdamental stage
Learning to Train
Training to Train
Training to Compete
Training to Win
Retirement / retainment

“Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs will be a blunt instrument if used as such. The way you use the Hierarchy of Needs determines the subtlety and sophistication of the model.

For example: the common broad-brush interpretation of Maslow’s famous theory suggests that once a need is satisfied the person moves onto the next, and to an extent this is entirely correct. However an overly rigid application of this interpretation will produce a rigid analysis, and people and motivation are more complex. So while it is broadly true that people move up (or down) the hierarchy, depending what’s happening to them in their lives, it is also true that most people’s motivational ‘set’ at any time comprises elements of all of the motivational drivers. For example, self-actualizers (level 5 – original model) are mainly focused on self-actualizing but are still motivated to eat (level 1) and socialise (level 3). Similarly, homeless folk whose main focus is feeding themselves (level 1) and finding shelter for the night (level 2) can also be, albeit to a lesser extent, still concerned with social relationships (level 3), how their friends perceive them (level 4), and even the meaning of life (level 5 – original model).

Like any simple model, Maslow’s theory is not a fully responsive system – it’s a guide which requires some interpretation and thought, given which, it remains extremely useful and applicable for understanding, explaining and handling many human behaviour situations.” (Businessballs.com: ethical work and life learning)

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Sunday, November 13th, 2011 in Track Chat
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365 Ways to Bore the Kids

ATHLETICS 365 is the latest of the basic teaching programmes initiated by our governing bodies. Here ex National Coach Tom McNab expands on the critiques of Alan Launder (also reproduced below) and others, explaining how 365 perpetuates the misapprehensions of Elevating Athletics and SHINE Awards regarding the nature of children’s engagement with sport, and argues that, like them, 365 is doomed to expensively fail.

Athletics has only a fleeting window in which to captivate youngsters – “tourists” as McNab calls them, who often visit track and field for only a matter of months or even weeks – a reality which these programmes ignore. Furthermore, children’s instinctive understanding that the purpose of athletics is to test oneself – how fast, how far, how high – is betrayed by these ill-judged attempts to inculcate technical expertise which they are not ready for, and which, says McNab, is anyway organisationally inept and technically inappropriate. Schools and clubs must, he argues, involve youngsters in an athletics culture centred on satisfying competitive/testing opportunities rather than hours of “training”. This is the crucial stage that most children need to experience if they are to commit long-term and make the transition from “tourist” to “athlete”.

McNab also argues that our sport’s misunderstanding of these issues underlines fundamental concerns regarding the management of coaching, and makes some clear cut recommendations for the future.

Backwards Into the Future

Tom McNab

Alan Launder’s observations on “365” and Elevating Athletics derive from his status as a world authority on physical education and athletics coaching. His pole vault manual is recognised as one of the great technical works of the English language. Launder’s comments carry all the more weight because UKA agreed that his book would be the yardstick by which their own future materials would be judged.

So what can be done with “365”? Many works which are badly-written but with sound and relevant content can be salvaged. This is impossible here, simply because the content is equally weak. There is, in effect, nothing much to salvage.

For “365” totally fails to address in a practical manner the instruction of children in club-contexts, and relates to a fantasy world which I fail to recognise. It divides into four sections. The first (exercises) and last (psycho-behavioural) are unsuitable for or irrelevant to children before they have made any formal commitment to athletics.

The central technical section is poor, an uneven and badly-presented jumble of diluted coaching materials, devoid of sequence diagrams, unrelated to the group situations in which club coaches engage with beginners. The fourth section (games) is better, though its illustrations for some reason show children in their mid-teens for whom such games are irrelevant. “365” is essentially a patchwork of activities taken from other contexts, most of them irrelevant to novices, and lacquered over with a gloss of educational theory. Callow and immature, it reads like the work of a first year P.E. student.

All athletics teaching programmes must relate directly to the practical situations which club coaches face. This means in the main dealing for a couple of hours weekly in the May-July period with transient groups of novices in the 10-13 age-group. Some of these children stay for a few weeks, some for a few months, and a minority stay the course into their mid-teens. It is this last group who form the basis for our adult (20-35) population, and are usually those who reveal some athletic ability. “365” makes no claim to relate to this group, who could reasonably be called athletes; rather it is a programme which purports to offer a short-term athletic education for novices. In this regard it totally fails.

The problem is the mistaken belief that some remarkable new method of teaching children the basics of athletics has been discovered. Alas, it ignores the fact that the narrow technical parameters are dictated by the nature of the children themselves. For there is only so much a coach can do with a mixed group of twelve year olds who run from 14-21 seconds in 100m, long jump in the 2m.50-4m. region, have never thrown an implement, whose high jump will vary from 0.5m to 1metre, and whose 800metres will travel from 2minutes 50 seconds to over 5 minutes. And with whom there is no certainty of anything other than a short-term experience of athletics.

This means that I can be quite categorical in my programmes for children in this context. For instance, all high jumping should be done, scissors-style, into a sandpit, because the height of a standard high jump area is a deterrent to jumping for many children at this level. And long and triple jumping should be done en masse into the side of the pit, so that children can get lots of jumps. Similarly, shot and javelin should again be done en masse, but with non-standard implements. And hurdles should be modified in height, and distances between varied according to ability.

So there is simply no room at this point for Fosbury, O’Brien, back-facing discus or any of the stuff of senior athletics, with the possible exception of those few children who show exceptional early talent. And certainly no place for conditioning exercises or solemn discussions about future aims, for that is leagues away.

Thus, if after three months and twenty odd hours of teaching, twelve-year old Sally has a three stride approach “scissors” high jump of 1m.10., a 100m of 15.5, a 15m standing discus throw and a 3minutes 20 seconds 800m, great. And if she has had a taste of competitive athletics and understands something of its rules and ethos, then the club has done a good job. Anything more than that can come next year, after a winter experience of Sports Hall Athletics.

What both a coach and a teacher does from the start is to create a rich environment dedicated to personal achievement, a Five Star approach in which effort is valued above all other things. That is just as important as any technical development; indeed, it is the foundation on which all such development rests.

“365” lies firmly in the tradition of Shine and Elevating Athletics, failed initiatives which disappeared without discussion. All of these callow initiatives derived from the same impulse, the desire by freshly-appointed coaches and administrators to produce something new without first studying what had already been successful.

At this point it is worth making comment on Elevating Athletics, an expensive programme (£832k), created by someone who had made no previous practical contribution to schools athletics. It represented, in essence, what he thought should be done in schools, rather than what had already been successfully achieved. But Alan Launder had already clearly shown the way at Dr. Challenors School. His ideas had been embodied in Five Star, then fully expressed “Modern Schools Athletics”. Nothing has occurred in recent years to require any radical change to the basic teaching philosophy described in that work.

Central to it was that children, just as they came to football clubs to play football, came to our sport to experience competitive athletics. And that both in club and school the balance between technical training and competition had to be balanced towards the latter, if only because the athletic experience is so brief. And that equipment and facilities would have to be modified to relate to dealing with large classes of children. So there was no time for conditioning or training-programmes, and for only the most basic of technical training. This approach was equally valid for clubs, even if numbers were smaller and the quality of talent better.

But all this mattered little to our novice coaches and administrators. They thus advanced vast sums to P.E. theorists to produce fantasy programmes and showed not a shred of guilt when these initiatives were soon reviled and rejected. Elevating Athletics was quietly kicked into the long grass, and a fresh, equally impractical version created. This too is now slipping away without comment.

Shine was a disaster from the outset, replacing Five Star, the world’s most successful award scheme, with an abstruse, Byzantine programme which never got off the ground. Thus an award scheme which had made a fortune for athletics and had influenced millions of children throughout the world was replaced by Shine, which cost a fortune and achieved nothing. And all without comment from sponsors, governing body or the athletics population. The total cost of these two early projects has almost certainly been well in excess of £2 million.

It may seem remarkable that such expensive programmes could simply vanish without discussion. Yet that is what occurred, and it will happen once again, simply because of lack of informed scrutiny. It will be so with “365”, because coaches at levels one and two are too inexperienced to assess it, because coaches at levels three and four do not consider it important, and because our administrators do not feel qualified to comment on it.

I describe these failed projects to highlight the fact that at the time of their creation all were vigorously propagated and accepted without question by coaches and administrators. The same is now happening with “365”, because it is assumed by our leaders that those whom they have appointed could not possibly produce programmes of no worth, and that any critics must therefore be Yesterday’s Men, or driven by envy. This can easily be put to the test. I suggest that the creators of “365” meet with Launder in the presence of England Athletics, and allow our administrators to arrive at their own conclusions.

But there are immediate practical and economic considerations.”365” has succeeded in making confusing and complex a teaching process which is actually relatively simple. Coaches will find that the psycho-behavioural section cannot be pursued, and will therefore leave it alone. Some will nevertheless attempt to pick their way through the rest of the programme. A few of the games will be embraced, though most are at best peripheral to athletics. Some of the exercises will be practiced, but to no good purpose. And coaches will struggle to give practical expression to profoundly inadequate technical advice, and assume that it is all their fault. In the end, “365”, like the other initiatives, will simply collapse under its own weight, but not before many PowerPoint man-hours are devoted to its propagation, and not before thousands of children are exposed to it.

“365” has other serious implications, in that it was sanctioned by the coaching department of UKA. Let me again be categorical. No one who knew anything of value about the teaching of children could possibly have sanctioned such a programme. The fact that UKA did so encourages no confidence in its capacity to deliver work of quality in any other area of coaching.

England Athletics is a client in this regard, deploying as coach education whatever UKA brings to it. What it signally lacks is the expertise in track and field athletics to make sound judgements on such programmes. This is compounded by the lack of practical coaching or teaching experience in those employees who act as its advisors. I therefore strongly recommend a comprehensive independent review by England Athletics of UKA coaching services, to be completed within the year.

I say so because England Athletics is the hub of the sport in the United Kingdom, and any substantial flaw in services to it therefore reverberates strongly throughout athletics. Coach education has been polluted in the first decade of the 21st century by dysfunctional programmes, created by coaches and administrators with little practical experience of coaching. There is a danger that history will continue to repeat itself with work of similar mediocrity. This will result in damage which will endure into the next decade, far beyond the careers of their creators, who will by then have travelled on to pastures new. There is now the opportunity to take breath before we travel further along this path and “365” may have done us some service in forcing us to face reality.

Let me end by making an analogy to business practice. If “365” were a car or a bar of chocolate, then it would be withdrawn from sale, and purchasers requested to return it to the manufacturer. The problem here is that those who created “365” are perceived to be the only people capable of assessing it. The big problem here is inertia, for any such challenge will involve placing the issue of “365” before a group of decent, well-meaning officials who will dread the thought of a debate of this nature.

But “365” merely highlights a much deeper malaise travelling far beyond coaching, serving to underline the need of England Athletics to pursue a more independent path in other areas of policy. The arrival of Lottery in the mid- 90s meant an influx of inexperienced professional staff, and this has resulted in the calamities which I have described. In coaching, it has caused the severing of a relationship between the voluntary sector and the National Coaches which had lasted half a century. Here I must admit that it had been my belief that professional leadership, indoor facilities and funded athletes would improve both participation levels and international performance. I was wrong. It is therefore perhaps time to review where we now are and in doing so to create a fresh balance between the professional and the voluntary sector.

The danger is that we continue to set up all manner of consultative groups and initiatives without first standing back and coolly reviewing where we now are, and 2012 is surely an ideal point at which to take stock. My proposal is that England Athletics commission an independent and holistic review of our present athletics ecology, as a prerequisite to post-2012 planning. This will provide board –members with the information, a sort of Doomsday book, on which they can base their future plans. Mere consultation with individual specialist groups will not achieve this; what is required is an over-arching view, embracing knowledge of other sports, physical education, the state of world athletics and changes in society. It is only that perspective that will give both depth and realism to any future strategy.

To summarise-

• Bring the attention of the Board to Launder’s observations and have selected Board-members attend a discussion between him and the creator of “365”.
• Conduct an independent review of UKA coach education.
• Set up a one- year England Coaching Advisory panel, until the Coaching Review is completed.
• Commission a survey of the state of the nation, prior to the creation of a fresh national strategy.

Teaching Athletics

By Alan Launder

In the past decade, UK Athletics has produced two sets of materials designed to help teachers and coaches introduce youngsters to track and field. Given the cost involved in producing both Elevating Athletics and Athletics 365 ( well in excess of £1million), one would expect high quality information and detailed practical knowledge, along with the necessary modicum of wisdom needed to help young teachers and coaches survive in the world of track and field. Unfortunately, despite their high production- quality, both projects tell me that the authors possessed no depth of experience, no real idea where they were going. As a result, those who attempt to follow these programmes may find themselves in a place they do not want to be –dealing with bored youngsters who will look elsewhere for more exciting ways to spend their time.

Perhaps the clue to this lack of a clear direction is provided in the introduction to “Elevating Athletics”, the expensive exercise that preceded Athletics 365 and based on similar misconceptions about the nature of track and field, indeed on the expectations of children when starting up in any sport. These misconceptions are summed up by the statement, “Mastery of skill is more important than measurement of performance”, that was listed as one of the supporting principles in the introduction to ‘Elevating Athletics’.

This statement raises several issues. First, it betrays ignorance of the fundamental nature of athletics, which is not primarily concerned with the ‘mastery of skills’! No, athletics is essentially a series of physical challenges that have been assembled to create a sport to be enjoyed by people of all ages and abilities. Equally telling, this statement reveals a complete lack of understanding of what young people expect when they are introduced to sport of any type.

First, despite all of the beautiful colour illustrations, these materials appear to underestimate the complex nature of many of the techniques involved and the difficulties young people face in mastering them. As any experienced teacher or coach would know, not only do these techniques require many hours of committed practice for mastery but, (and this is critical), they also require highly- developed physical qualities.

And finally, perhaps of the greatest significance, there are no suggestions in any part of Elevating Athletics on how to build an athletics culture within a school; yet this is the critical factor in inducing youngsters to enjoy or to make a commitment to athletics. For, without such a culture, few if any of even the most talented youngsters will do so; instead, they will opt for sports that allow them to play more freely with their friends and without the demands imposed by athletics, a sport with a poor training to competition ratio.

If we consider each of these issues in turn, the limitations of these materials become ever more clear.

Children intuitively understand that athletics is not a series of skills (sic) to be mastered. They instinctively ‘know’ that it means trying to run as fast as you can, jump as far or as high as you can and throw weights as far as you can. And, while they enjoy finding out what they can achieve, they are not too concerned about how ‘correctly’ they perform. Nor should they be, because track and field is not gymnastics, but simply ‘how fast’, ‘how far’ and ‘how high’; so while ‘good’ technique is important to ultimate performance, it is only a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

Anyone with any experience of teaching athletics in schools knows that only very talented and committed youngsters can master the advanced techniques that are described and illustrated in some of these materials. And they can do so only if they commit considerable time and effort to the process under the guidance of someone who understands those techniques. The reality is that “mastery of skill” in athletics,
(by that we presume the authors mean the mastery of the techniques of track and field), is a very demanding task. This is because the advanced techniques employed by elite performers in many events are often complex, and usually require highly- developed physical qualities such as power and flexibility. They involve years of dedicated practice for absolute mastery – which in reality is rarely achieved, even at Olympic level!

Here it is worth remembering that time is always going to be limited in both the club- coaching environment and physical education programmes. But the reality is that many children could never master even modified versions of these advanced techniques, no matter how much time was available.

What they do like to do is to try out a variety of sports in environments which are structured to ensure early and continuing success. For, while they like to be challenged, they do not like to fail or be beaten and they certainly do not want to finish last in a competition. But even in the tough, competitive sport of track and field, all children can succeed if the emphasis is indirect competition ( a Five Star approach), one where each child strives to beat their own best performance is emphasised, rather than in direct competition with others.

Of course, it is possible to find snippets of wisdom in both sets of materials, a hint that some capable and experienced individuals were at some point involved in the process, but there is no evidence of any coherent, overreaching philosophy that ties everything together. Nor is there is any evidence of the coherent pedagogy that is absolutely essential if young teachers are to solve the problems of introducing to athletics large groups of children of widely- ranging abilities and attitudes.

Instead we have a jumble, a grab- bag of tips. These take the form of phrases that have been handed to us down through the ages (“Chin, knee, toe, make a bow and watch it go”, an old favourite of the great Wilf Paish), fragments of patois (Landing “so that there is a credit card width between heel and ground.”, or “run as if there is a balloon attached to your head”), which are liberally sprayed throughout the document. These clearly come from higher up the coaching chain, but often have little relevance for novices.

Unfortunately, Athletics 365 is simply a sad mess, a mix of undigested sports science, training theory and psychobabble, with random lacings of coaching materials from a different context. Of course, there has clearly been some input from experienced coaches, but one suspects that most of them will come to wish that they had avoided the project. Unfortunately, it has clearly been drawn together by writers who have had little if any successful teaching or coaching experience; most likely, young sports scientists who have confused information with wisdom. Inexperience shouts to me from every page.

Central to 365 is the mistaken belief that every child who joins a club is an “athlete”, when only a tiny fraction of them( probably less than 5%) ever go on to become athletes. For these children are not on the first rung of some Long Term Athlete Development programme, but rather tourists for whom athletics is only one of many sports to be visited. This is the San Andreas Fault that runs through the entire document, rendering most of it invalid. Thus, the writers have produced a massive theoretical sledgehammer in order to crack a nut, resulting in a sludge of partly-digested training theory and edubabble.

Elevating Athletics and 365 have apparently cost well in excess of £1million, and will both probably vanish at pretty much the same speed, because neither will work, simply because they will collapse under their own weight. And if I know anything after over thirty years in teacher-education, I am certain that if a school or club purchases either document, it will soon be relegated to the dusty upper reaches of office shelves.

The sad thing is that, at the time that these materials were produced, Britain had three of the most experienced and successful coaches in the world in the form of Anderson, Paish and McNab, who have between them coached an Olympic Champion, a World Record Holder, numerous Commonwealth Games medallists and hundreds of international athletes. Above all of this, unlike most coaches, they all remained committed to teaching, to developing the sport in schools and at club- level. All three were involved in the preparation of the book “Modern Schools Athletics”(1966), by Tom McNab, one which outlined a rational approach to teaching athletics, and his Five Star Award was the world’s most successful athletics award scheme.

Unlike senior athletics, little has changed since back then, in that the Five Star culture and the narrow technical parameters in class teaching and the instruction of novices are as valid now as they were back in 1966. Nothing that has therefore occurred in sports science since then has offered us anything that would cause us to seriously question what was written in Modern Schools Athletics. Thus, it is ludicrous to be told that a series of conditioning exercises are required before a child of twelve can run a 100m. in 17 seconds, scrape his backside over 0.5 m in high jump, or long jump 3m. And as for the badly -written sections on “psycho –behavioural” and “life-style and support”, these relate to a world which I fail to recognise, even after half a century of teaching and coaching. And surely no instructional materials can be totally devoid of sequence-diagrams, or afford to deploy photographs which sometimes contradict the text? It is also difficult to understand why the games-section shows not children, but clearly young adults, for whom such games are irrelevant. This is to ignore a game involving ball-pushing which aims to “raise the pulse” and one of whose technical objectives is apparently “ smiles and laughter”. No, I solemnly swear that am not making any of this up.

So, why, I ask myself, was the input from these experts ignored? I suspect it is because the novice writers simply had to make their mark, to produce something “new” and apparently “scientific”, unsullied by the 150 years of teaching experience of such veterans. It is a question that those at UK Athletics, who allocated the funds for the creation of these materials, should surely be required to answer. Of course, that will not happen, so we can only wait with bated breath for the next episode in the saga.

The opinions expressed above are merely the views of a single individual, albeit one who has lived his professional life in this area. They do, however, embody the beliefs of great coaches such as Wilf Paish and John Anderson. I would therefore suggest that if anyone decides to embark on a similar project they should first find out if either of these programmes have made any significant contribution to track and field athletics.

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Monday, October 10th, 2011 in Track Chat
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Next Stop, London. All Change, Please.

In his final TV interview from Daegu, Charles Van Commenee declared himself happy with the GB team’s performance, but he neither looked nor sounded it. He referred to the 7 medal target as mainly in place to please the press and public, and deflected questions about the decline in top 8 placings (09 World Champs produced 20 top 8 placings including medals; Daegu figure; 12) with, frankly, rather lame comparisons with much earlier (and much less lavishly funded) teams.

In subsequent press interviews, however, he acknowledged “disappointment”, specifying men’s jumps and relay performances, the women’s 800, and reserving particularly scathing comment for the men’s 4×4.

“Looking ahead to the Olympics in London next summer” Van Commenee is reported as saying, “I’ve always said that at the end of these championships we wouldn’t have a finished product. I said we needed three-and-a-half years, not two-and-a-half, and it shows. The good thing about now is that I know what to do. It’s not finished, there’s work to be done and I know where to identify the ones who didn’t perform.”

We onlookers can only agree. This is certainly not the finished or even nearly finished product that we might have expected for our £11,000,000 per annum investment. Notwithstanding the national delight at the medals accrued by Mo’s maturity, Greene’s composure, Ennis’s courage, England’s joyful and elegant opportunism, Idowu’s solidity and Turner’s luck, there is much to be concerned about one year away from London.

Personally, I am deeply uncomfortable with public finger-pointing at individual athletes who have under-performed, especially by a head coach reputed to have a strongly “command and control” style. Van Commenee “knows who they are…and knows what to do.” Well we all know who they are and of course so do they, and most of us can guess how they feel. Further public criticism, on top of what they will be putting themselves through, can hardly be helpful.

Furthermore, specialist psychologists interpret the behaviour and presentation of underperforming athletes objectively in terms of mental performance skills. Blame and judgement have no useful place. If these athletes have failed, the system that didn’t provide access to the skills they need bears significant responsibility.

I spoke to one such specialist, a highly informed source. “I am seeing learned helplessness in some of these athletes. It’s what you get when authoritarian, “tell” rather than “empower” styles are used. The performer finds it hard or impossible to be sufficiently self-reliant. Then when things don’t go or feel quite right there is no plan B, no adaptation. I am also seeing athletes appearing to be drowning in stress and am guessing that no-one has spoken to them about how to manage this through the rounds. And yet again we are seeing athletes with medal shots under-performing, because they do not have a mental plan to address their known and stated difficulties.”

But the real worries go far beyond the ups and downs of Daegu. A couple of medals more or less in London might be a side-issue if the system that has been so expensively put in place was strengthening the sport’s infrastructure so as to consistently produce talent able to realistically vie for top 8 status. But the Shakes-Draytons, Morses and Williamses are thin on the ground. In sprinting the stream of male talent no longer seems to be making it through. Women’s sprinting, Williams apart, is not continuing the gentle improvements of recent seasons. With the exception of two pole vaulters and recruits Aldama and Proctor, women’s jumping is all but dead in terms of global standards…and so on and so on.

Why is this the case? Of the many contributory factors, the state of coaching must be the most fundamental. It seems rare to find a coach who is happy with the system these days, and my experience is that the nearer to the top the coach functions at, the less happy in the sport he, or very occasionally she, is likely to be. I have the impression that the higher echelons of coaching can be a bit like the court of Henry VIII. Fear and insecurity, suspicion, power-play, manipulation, who’s in – who’s out, opaque decision-making, shifting goal posts….mixed metaphors not withstanding, not a particularly happy ship!

If this is an anywhere near accurate reflection of what it can be like to work with elite level athletes, it is not surprising that coaches are voting with their feet. And how long does it actually take for a coach to acquire the knowledge, skill and reputation (the latter is of crucial importance) to work effectively at global level? Arnold, Moore, Buldaro and Minicheillo are the men of the moment. Arnold coached John Aki-Bua to gold in Munich, 1972. Aston Moore has coached solidly since before his own competitive career ceased in the 80s. Bud Baldaro has about 30 years experience with international athletes, and Toni Minichiello has coached Jess since she was 12 years old. Just a few indications that short-termism – alongside a perpetually half completed coach education system – might not be the way to plan for a robust sport.

If we are to secure an adequate supply of effective coaches for the future there has to be a radical rethink. There needs to be a professional career path for coaches that offers security, respect, fair and ethical line-management as well as rounded professional development. This needs to supplement and merge with the voluntary workforce so that volunteers can cross over to paid work if they are good enough and so desire. All this needs to revolve around formal coach-athlete contracts (which may or may not include payments) stating clearly what is expected by both parties and the terms on which the partnership will break up. A mediation system for disputes could be devised, ideally by a coaches’ association; this would not be fool proof but it would be a strong indicator of acceptable behaviour.

The knee-jerk response to this has always been that it is not affordable. In fact, the sport can’t afford NOT to address this. Is it not time that the huge development budget was scrutinized for effectiveness and its worth weighed against a similar investment in jobs for coaches?

This would mean stripping away some unexamined conventional wisdoms; for example:

• If we can just get the clubs right, coaching will be right too
• It is distasteful or unrealistic to suggest that athletes should pay towards their coaching
• Sport development is a career, but coaching is fundamentally voluntary and synonymous with clubs

Upon these ancient axioms is based every development strategy the sport as ever had and it seems to me these have mostly failed. The notion that your average athletics club functions in order to “develop the next generation of champions” is based in faith, not reality. The idea that a club or even a cluster of clubs can supply an adequate coaching service to cover all events and levels of talent in its area is based in hope, not experience. The assumption that, even if and when a state of the art coach education syllabus is available, sufficient numbers of intelligent, caring and athletically ambitious individuals, with just the right event group and geographical spread, are going to fund themselves through the system, donate all their spare hours to the detriment of family and career, and then happily give up the talent they develop to a highly paid, controlled and pressurised “elite” is deeply unrealistic.

And lastly, can a single coaching saviour, the ultimate man with a plan who always knows what to do, impose himself so indelibly on 70 or 80 athletes, papering over the myriad cracks, omissions and ethical dilemmas of a system based on faith, hope and not much charity, regularly deliver unto the British public £11m per annum’s worth of gold, silver and bronze? No wonder Charles has a reputation for crossness.

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Sunday, September 11th, 2011 in Track Chat
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Quotas for women in the corridors of power

In my athletics life-time, which started in about 1956 in a period marked by very dominant and plentiful female administrators, I have seen women virtually wiped out from strategic and middle management levels of decision-making. As a member of the 1964 Olympic team I took for granted British women athletes’ superiority over British men in terms of World rankings, though probably acknowledging somewhere at the back of my 20year old mind that most of the world’s women didn’t have the chances we had. But British women were up there with the other pioneers, leading the way, because athletics is a great sport for women.

So, I have been shocked to see women’s profile shrink and women athletes’ performances fluctuate against the world stage due, often, to their being increasingly in the shadow of men. Among the causes have been the amalgamation of male and female associations and commercialisation. In an age of profession administration, we should have been able to depend on high quality management to mitigate the negative effects on women of those otherwise positive changes, but instead the issue of gender diversity has been largely ignored, except for a little half-hearted tokenism thrown in now and again to make sure the box can be ticked.

The setting up of an advisory group for women in coaching, for example, with unclear powers and remit, is, with all due respect to the excellent women coaches who are involved in the group, likely to make little difference to the dearth of women in decision making. The male dominated corridors of power will not be troubled.

As with all bolt-on approaches to equity (i.e. tack on a bit of extra activity for the low profile group) it puts the responsibility for the exclusion of women from the mainstream onto women themselves. It totally disregards the unconscious centrifugal force within organisations that have no other response to diversity, to further exclude those who are already under-represented. Responsibility for gender balance must be placed fairly and squarely on the polished desks at highest strategic level in UKA. The management of diversity is a very well researched, documented and applied subject. The pity is that our sport’s governing bodies and its funders, UK Sport and Sport England, haven’t noticed.

30% of FTSE 100 board appointments female

But many other organisations have noticed. Lord Mervyn Davies has been appointed the government’s champion of female board representation, and has set a target for a quarter of senior bosses to be women by 2015. FTSE 100 companies are responding, with 30% of board appointments this year being female. If representation of women is seen as so important in commerce, how much more crucial must such representation be in sport organisations which have to cater for the needs of both sexes – but have not recognised the importance of women’s contribution to that! Perhaps UK Sport will now at last insist on gender balance in the governing bodies that they so generously fund.

Why is this needed? Because women are severely under-represented, if not totally absent, in decision making at both employed and voluntary level. Tanni Grey-Thompson is the only female at strategic level in either UKA or England Athletics. There are no women on the EA Board of 7; no women on the National Council of 11; and 2 women on the senior management team of 10. There are no women in positions of influence in coaching. What a total disgrace.

This unforgivable imbalance has remained unaddressed in spite of promises from England officials prior to the 2009-2013 funding round that gender diversity was to be addressed. It is a scandal because the absence of female influence in decision making affects athletes; the bottom line is that there are fewer women athletes and they perform less well because their differences from male athletes are ignored. Any resulting under-performance is seen as evidence of their shortcomings, not the fact that they have had a handicap imposed on them. There are fewer female coaches because a male perception of what coaching is and how it should be done is so dominant.

Gender balanced companies perform better

But the new evidence from commercial and financial organisations brings a radically different perspective. In 2010, McKinsey, the top management consultancy, published a report, “Women Matter”, which showed that companies with gender-balanced executives are 56% more profitable than those with all male boards.

The salient point here is BALANCE and this is what the governing body of a dual sex sport should ensure, not only because this would be fair, and because the history of sport has produced “by men for men” organisations with cultures that are handicapped when trying to cater equally for women, (as proved over and over by statistics) but also because, gender balance creates a more effective organisation for both men and women.

Now research into male and female brain chemistry has provided insight into why this is the case. Even in the financial sector, long the domain of unfettered testosterone, there is now evidence (the new science of neuroeconomics) suggesting that gender balance is essential. When Michael Lewis, author of the best selling book on the credit crunch “The Big Short” was asked at an LSE lecture what single thing he would do to prevent the financial catastrophe of 2008 happening again he said, “I would take steps to have 50% women in risk positions in banks.”

An author of some of this evidence was quoted in The Observer recently; “There’s a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they’re doing, even when they really don’t know what they’re doing. Men typically believed that they could make sense of every piece of economic news. Women, never embarrassed to ask directions, were on the whole far more likely to acknowledge when they didn’t know something. As a consequence women shifted their position far less frequently and made far more money as a result.”

Part of the neuroeconomics investigations, led by two Cambridge researchers, looked at the brain chemistry of young men working on trading floors. They found that the all-male environments distorted the men’s approach to risk, especially when they were on a winning streak. “They (traders) became euphoric and delusional… they where putting up trades with terrible risk-reward profiles” reported the researcher. “But I noticed that women did not buy into the dot.com bubble at all. You couldn’t find one that did, hardly. And that seemed like a pretty cool fact to me.”

“The curious thing about banks” one of the researchers told The Observer, “was that they know all about computers and systems and markets but they know next to nothing about the human machine sitting in front of the screens making decisions. Nothing. We aim to correct that just slightly.”

All male board rooms in athletics

So, what distorted perceptions emanate from the all male board rooms of athletics? On reading about the researcher’s observations about banks, I could not help wondering if the shift towards an exclusively biomechanical and physiological approach to coach education, which seems to amount to eliminating the human experience – the art of applying the theory – altogether from the syllabus, would have been made if women had had any influence on the decision. (Some might say that the decision wouldn’t have been made if male coaches with more experience had had any influence – but that’s another argument.)

Likewise, the absence of serious attention to mental preparation for performance, and indeed the occasional active hostility to it by some coaches is, I suspect, an outcome of the exclusively male perspective on what coach education should address. (I’d love to hear the views of coaches and athletes on this – especially if you disagree) But it is undoubtedly a glaring omission which seriously hampers many athletes’ ability to perform on the day, and which can be a particular issue for women, especially those coached by charismatic “big” personality male coaches.

But the chances of getting the current regime to accommodate basic mental preparation and “coaching for confidence” techniques at a simple level into their hard science dogma are remote. And of course this same hard science approach makes it impossible to discuss many of the other powerful issues that inhibit female success.

Perhaps neuroeconomics can help us with appropriate emphasis here too. There is ample evidence from sport psychology that males and females approach competition differently, especially at participation and middle levels of achievement. Women tend to be more motivated by wanting to be as good as they can be; males are more likely to be motivated by being “better than..” Although there is no measured difference in the level of males’ and females’ desire to succeed, where these extremes of motivational attitude are present in a female athlete-male coach partnership, the athlete’s approach to competition is very likely to be misunderstood and therefore become a problem. But this has little place in the thinking of many coaches, or indeed in coach education.

Professor Muriel Nierderle at Stanford University has researched gender difference in financial risk decisions over many years. She has found compelling evidence that, although women show an advantage over men in making investment decisions, they do much less well in intensely competitive, short-term, high intensity and results driven situations, either shying away from the problem or simply making less good choices. Perhaps they could be helped to be less freaked by competition by some sport psychology.

Neurological differences

One of the Cambridge researchers who looked at the brain chemistry of traders commented on Nierderle’s work. “What is clear is that there a neurological differences between the sexes. Women, in general terms, are less competitive, and less concerned with the status of being successful. If you want to make women more present, you have to remember that the world they are coming from is a man-made world; the financial (or sport?) world; so either they become surrogate men…or you change the world.”

It is not, therefore, a simple matter of female = good, male = bad. It is more a case of different strengths and vulnerabilities between the sexes that need to be understood and accommodated, for the good of all.

Remember that the judgement about being “less competitive” relates to women’s behaviour in organisations. It does not mean that women are less motivated to succeed in sport – in only means that they approach competition differently – as has been documented endlessly. But if women are to have an equal chance of success as athletes we have to change the organisations…the athletics world …by ensuring that the female perspective has a voice in decision-making at all levels.

But that will never happen by accident. It has been estimated by research and by observation that 30% is the minimum proportion of women required at the top of an organisation to begin to change the culture; below that number women tend to behave “like surrogate men”; above that ratio, the subtle differences produced might begin to influence the way decisions are made.

Quotas; the only way

In my writing and lobbying on gender issues over the years I have always been against quotas for women. I felt that this would be demeaning to women and that they would be seen as tokens not deserving of the respect of the offices they held. I now think I was wrong.

A 40% quota for Norwegian businesses was imposed some time ago. The system has worked for women and changed the culture from one that asked “what is wrong with women that they don’t succeed in business or finance” to one which asks “what is wrong with our companies that that we don’t allow all these educated and talented women to succeed.” That is the change of culture needed in athletics.

Athletics needs a 30% quota for women in its management, on its boards, national and regional councils and, above all in the employed leadership in coaching. The female talent is there, but it has been turned off by what for them has been an ineffective and alienating culture. I now believe that the introduction of a quota system is the only way forward.

This must be imposed in the 2013 + funding round, along with equalizing the other great power imbalance, that between employees and volunteers. Both changes would see a fairer, pleasanter and more successful sport.

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Monday, July 18th, 2011 in Track Chat
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Children don’t win gold medals…

In the last post I reflected on the organisational culture of our sport in the light of structural change, increased professionalization and the nature of relationships between employed and voluntary workers in the sport. Indeed, relationship issues have been central to the concerns of Frank Dick, John Lister and others who have helped me in my attempts to analyse the roots of the current, disappointing state of the sport.

In this posting I talk to Brian Patman, a management consultant who specializes in personal effectiveness in organisations and has worked in many of the world’s largest financial institutions on the interface between the individual, the organisational culture and strategy. In the early 1990s he worked with sport psychologist Alma Thomas on the Mental Preparation Foundation Courses for elite female athletes and their coaches. Participants included Denise Lewis, Paula Radcliffe, Kirsty Wade, Paula Thomas, Bev Kinch and many others. Here he shares insight into this work, the application of similar work in the financial sector and the centrality of leadership style to organisational outcomes.

In 1991, as a result of writing and lobbying about the low profile and relative under-achievement of women’s athletics at that time, I was asked by BAF to set up a Women’s Advisory Group to examine the issues and make recommendations. The then British International team manager, Joan Allison, and I worked with the well known sport psychologist, Alma Thomas, to investigate the needs, aspirations and attitudes of the top 5 placed women athletes in each event. The outcome of this research showed a group of women lacking not only access to and knowledge of sport psychology, but lacking also the fundamental personal skills of self confidence, self esteem and assertiveness, without which metal preparation can only be a hollow exercise. Talented though the cohort was, mentally tough many of them were not, and the research showed that the athletes themselves clearly understood their own mental vulnerabilities and the implications of that to the challenges of performing to their potential on the day.

Amazingly, The British Athletics Federation (BAF) accepted our recommendation that a Mental Preparation Foundation Course be commissioned, and so it came to pass that and I stood in front of a group of 20 phenomenally talented young female athletes at the Loughborough Business Centre to introduce them to Alma, Brian and the concepts behind the programme – the requirements of effective mental preparation.

“I guess that what Alma and I had in common was a genuine desire to help others achieve more and more of their potential,” Patman reminisced, when linked up over the phone recently. “We are both driven by a conviction that “potential” is a concept with no limits. The difference between us is that Alma chose to develop her work with performers in sport and in the opera house. I chose to develop mine inside organisations – specifically in international banks. It was only when we came together that the chemistry happened and we realised that the tools and techniques we each used in our chosen environment were actually interchangeable.”

“That was a relief to me since, not coming from an athletics background, I was concerned that I might bring little of value to the party. But I need not have worried.”

Breaking new ground

Our discussion took me right back. 1993, standing in front of that precious talent on behalf of BAF and introducing the group to Alma, Brian and the purpose of the programme; it felt like breaking exciting new ground– the first overt and formal recognition that the athlete is not just a running, jumping or throwing machine to be commanded by a technically orientated coach.

“When it came down to it,” Patman continued “the work we did for BAF, in those days long gone, could be encapsulated as dealing with two tightly linked subjects – personal communication and relationships, because those things impact heavily on confidence and self esteem.

“It was the very first exercise we did with the group, young female elite athletes (without their coaches involved) that made us realise just how much work there was to do in both those areas.

“We had the women – around 20 of them – stand in a semi-circle and asked them to simply bring to mind what their personal strengths were. Then we asked them, starting at one end of the line, to take turns in making a statement about their strengths. I don’t think we got past number three. All we got was embarrassed mumbling about “what I’m not very good at”.

“Despite the impetus behind the programme being research that Alma had done which showed these women to be problematically unassertive, I had no idea of the depth of the problem until that exercise. But why had these women developed such negative self-concepts when they were so talented?

“For us, all roads led back to the relationships that had evolved between the young women and their coaches. Two factors were salient. The first was that the coaches were very much a “parental” presence. In some cases, they were the actual parent of the athlete. The next was that much of the experience the athletes had of being coached was of focusing on, and “fixing” performance “weaknesses”. No focus on the many things that were working perfectly.

“So – we had “children” learning about their deficiencies and forming the commensurate self-concept. No wonder they were under-achieving.

Children don’t win gold medals – self confident adults do

“Our agenda became clear. We had to involve the coaches as well. Somehow, we had to re-engineer the athlete-coach relationship to become not parent-child but two adult partners with an autonomous performer (children don’t win gold medals – self confident adults do). We also had to help them to use more affirmative, constructive and assertive communication with each other – and with the world outside.”

For many of those athletes and the athlete/coach partnerships who subsequently accessed the programme, it was indeed groundbreaking. Immediate and 3 months post-programme feedback showed improvements in self-belief, personal goal setting, assertiveness, ability to handle conflict and control over performance of between 23 and 28%! This in turn had a profound impact on athletic performance and the subsequent careers of those involved – and not just the athletes. For the coaches who dared take up the challenge of looking at their personal communication style, the rewards where equally significant.

Jim Harris, a highly experienced, no-nonsense, been-there-done-that Manchester coach was dragged, reluctantly, on to the programme by the athletes he worked with. I ran in to him at a track somewhere several years afterwards.

“Changed my life, that did, y’know” he said quietly, almost under his breath. “Been different since, y’know; coaching, family, everything. Made a huge difference. Just wanted to tell ye.” I was stunned. He brought tears to my eyes…what a lovely man.

There were some significant absentees, though. Although the invitation had been to coach/athlete partnerships, some high profile coaches did not attend. Some where “busy”, some openly reluctant and some even forbade the athlete to attend. The notion seemed to be that the work would “interfere with the coach athlete relationship”. In other words – for them the coach’s control over the athlete was non-negotiable.

But of course, the work did not turn out to be ground breaking in the longer term. BAF declined to continue support, in spite of overwhelming evidence of its success, and grateful athletes giving press interviews after the British Women’s team’s success in the European Cup in 1994, attributing improved performance to the programme.

I can only speculate as to the reasons for this decision, which clearly were not based on an objective assessment of the work’s effectiveness. It is true that it was not a cheap way of working (my contribution was voluntary) but no-one suggested discussing longer term financial viability when the original, clearly costed proposal was accepted.

Upstairs Downstairs

“I felt very proud of what we achieved with that programme” Continued Patman. “ So it was a real shock to realise that the huge boulder we had just thrown into the pond of British Athletics failed to make a single ripple. It simply sank.

“If I had run that programme (with such a positive evaluation of making a real difference to the achievements of the athletes and coaches) with “high potentials” in a global investment bank, the board would have invested millions to develop it worldwide, to capture a significant competitive edge.

“Frankly, in the 18 years since we initiated that original programme, I haven’t seen anything materially change in athletics. I still see the top of sport governing bodies being populated by careerists driven by defensive self-interest – out of touch with, and certainly not valuing, the grass roots. It is like watching re-runs, year after year, of Upstairs Downstairs.

“At the end of this month, I am working with a team of 11 trainers on a programme for 450 summer interns in a major UK investment bank which has 25,000 staff worldwide. We will be helping them to acquire similar relationship-building skills that will help them to fit in to the workplace and create a positive impression with their colleagues and with management.

“During their ten-week internship, they will be required, individually, to set up meetings with four managing directors of the firm, to learn more about the business. All MDs in the firm are primed and ready to get involved. On the first day of their internship, the students will have a morning with the Chief Executive Officer of the firm. He will present to them then meet them informally.

Connection between bottom and top

“So this is a BIG DEAL for the firm. These interns matter. They are “high potentials” – the brightest and the best. These 450 young men and women, by the end of their internship, will know that they are valued. They will be clear about the top management’s vision for the firm. Most of them will be invited to join the firm after they graduate, and they will be keen to do so, given the experience they have had and the relationships they have built. They will perceive a real connection between the “bottom” and the “top” of the firm and they will be very generously paid for their ten weeks.

“This example represents high quality leadership in action. Granted, leadership is more complicated in athletics where you need to integrate the efforts of a substantial, previously dominant voluntary sector, but it is at least as crucial for paid staff and strategists to respect the expertise of volunteers and work consultatively alongside them as it is for the individual coach to include the athlete in decision making and empower her to take control of her own performance.

“Given what I have heard and observed about the overall culture in athletics, I am not at all surprised to hear about falling participation and standards.

“There is a mass of research on leadership style and ample evidence to show that coercive (i.e., “do what I tell you”) and “pacesetter” (ie, “do as I do, now”) styles, which seem to be the flavour of the heavily top down “one size fits all” approach that has been described, have a very negative impact on organisational climate.

“I would say that in the same way that Alma and I had to re-engineer those athlete-coach relationships away from the parent-child dynamic towards an adult to adult partnership, so there needs to be a reconfiguration of the organisational power relationships in athletics. Totally “top down” decision making and a climate of enforcement is demotivating and kills innovation. It is the voluntary sector that is the “shop front”, after all. They are the sales force, and God help any organisation that cuts off and demotivates its sales men and women!”

Therapy Corner: Tom McNab’s Haggis Cornish Pasty

Now, dear friends, I know some of you out there are struggling, really struggling, to know your place in the athletics family. So I am starting this therapy column so that those of you, who, like poor Tom, are having difficulties in being passively receptive to New Methods, can be helped to quietly accept the inevitable.

This may shock you but there are more than a few people out there who, in the face of the requirement of volunteers to, basically, be quiet and do what they are told by Those Who Know Better, still insist on thinking for themselves, using their own world class experience, and even presume that their activities might be worth …OMG – I can hardly say the word….money! Ghastly, isn’t it? Why can they not just lie back and think of England 365, like the rest of us?

But the good news is that Tom has seen the error of his ways and is taking up cookery! There! I knew you’d be thrilled! In order to help Tom get over his unhealthy addiction to high standards of teaching in sports, I am giving him a little bit of space here so that he can express himself more safely and keep his mind off things that ought no longer to concern him. Kindly to a fault, me.

Haggis Cornish Pasty

A Cornish Pasty

Ingredients: 1 fresh haggis, steaming; 250 grams of turnips, wrinkled; pinch of Old Spice; ½ kilo mangel wurzels or other funny vegetable; 1 batch short crust pastry; salt and pepper to taste; beaten egg for glazing.

Method; mash the haggis, stir in the Old Spice. Lightly boil the turnips and mangle wurzels and mash into haggis mixture. Season. Roll out the pastry into a thick circle, dump the filling in the middle and fold pastry over, pinching it together hard with forefinger and thumb. Use a pastry brush to glaze with the beaten egg; place in oven and bake till shiny, browned and very crusty. Eat; don’t talk with your mouth full and certainly not about athletics. Follow with Haggis Cornish Ice Cream. Wash up and shut up.

I understand this recipe is going into full production in Redruth on the 13th and 14th of August. See you there!

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Sunday, June 12th, 2011 in Track Chat
2 Comments »

I volunteer, you volunteer, we all volunteer – but for how much longer?

“Sport England research carried out in Yorkshire found a clear link between increased levels of volunteering and increased levels of participation. With nearly six million volunteers making sport happen in England (that’s 26% of all volunteers), sports volunteers are in a position to make a powerful contribution to the health and well being of their local communities.” Sport England website.

Sport England sometimes likes to state the blatantly obvious in a way that makes you wonder if they realize what athletics volunteers have actually been up to since about 1880. Perhaps SE will soon commission some new research into the contribution British sport volunteers have made to the creation of the governing bodies and whole sport infrastructure, thereby contributing hugely to national culture, achievement, health, welfare, identity and, incidentally, also to world sport. I’ve got news for them; in athletics, the volunteers did it all. How about that for a discovery…. and without a research grant, too!

The history of athletics is a wonderful, intricate example of a “big society” creation – by the people for the people – which has captured and organised the innate response of human youth (i.e. birth to about 80 in some cases) to play, via running, jumping and throwing, when blessed with enough health, security, food, free time and space to do so.

Professionalism is a very recent addition to this contribution, so the patronising, stereotypical image of naive but well-meaning volunteers who are not quite up to working out the link between volunteering and participation, which is reflected by so much of what comes out of Sports Council, is to negate the history of our sport. Dick, Norman, Lister, Anderson, Pickering, Paish, McNab, Arnold, Ward, Bedford; world experts in their various fields, plus dozens of others of similar stature who have shaped this sport are, or were, all volunteers. Some, but by no means all of this elite group, transitioned into professional roles, and then transitioned back to volunteering at retirement or before. Lister, in spite of his enormous contribution to athletics at local, national and international level, has never been and never aspired to be, anything else but a volunteer.

Volunteering under threat

But as we all know, volunteering in the 21st century, in athletics at least, is under threat as never before. Given that Sport England has kindly pointed out for us the link between increased volunteering and increased participation (doh!)  it seems only fair to reverse the process and cite decreased participation as evidence of decreased volunteering. Just in case it is still necessary to quote statistics around this, I’m told that one southern county’s male championship entry has declined steadily from 208 entries 6 years ago to 134 this year. That accords with what seems to be happening around the country – and with area championship entry, a more accurate measure as many serious athletes now bypass county championships due to their poor quality.

Many clubs now report not only huge difficulties in finding officials – a well documented issue that has remained fundamentally unaddressed – but also team managers, a problem that can decimate a club overnight.

I recently had occasion to chat to Bill Laws, longstanding team manager and mainstay of one, if not THE most successful athletics clubs ever – Belgrave Harriers. I was shocked to learn that even Bels has had to shrink back its teams due to problems finding team managers and that Bill himself has outstayed his own resignation rather than let its famously successful senior men’s team die.

The creation of the British Athletics Federation

But, reading John Lister’s recently published record of athletics administration in the 1980s and 90s (Athletics in the United Kingdom – The rise and fall of the British Athletics Federation; available from him on request), I am reminded how recent a phenomenon that decline may actually be. The book presents a detailed record of the extraordinarily complex , fraught, long-overdue process of amalgamating the many voluntary associations that contributed to the governance of the sport prior to 1991, (BAAB, AAA, WAAA, men’s and women’s area associations, X County men and women, etc, etc) into one governing body, The British Athletics Federation.

Even Andy Norman started as a Volunteer

The process had also to accommodate the transition from “shamateurism” to appearance money, trust funds and then full professional status for top athletes; the recruitment and subsequent resignation of the first two professional chief executives; several cliff-edge financial crises; the rapidly changing balance of power between volunteers and professionals; personality clashes –often in public – between key personnel; many very high profile drug, political and personal crises (Modhal, Zola Budd, among many others) which were also splashed, punch by punch, across the media; and on top of all that the day to day management of a coterie of assertive world class stars, who’s career needs didn’t always match what BAF needed from them to feed its TV commitments, as athletics became a top spectator sport via several enormously lucrative, hard won TV contracts.

The complexity of the whole operation was mind blowing; if you get a copy of the book you will have to concentrate hard to simply stay connected with all the many different strands of the story. Mistakes were made, that’s for sure, but Lister’s excellent record emphasises clearly the extraordinary management challenge that the sport of athletics presented then and still does, as illustrated by the list of chief executives that have limped home wounded after occupying their jobs for often quite short periods of time.

Central to all this was a large body of energetic, successful, experienced, motivated, passionate, frequently aggressive, often disagreeing, plotting volunteers, who had sprung up from all four corners of the UK. Between them they had made an incalculable contribution the sport, which at that time was vibrant, exciting, full of conflict and risk, and which enjoyed huge success in terms of medals, talent, public profile, media coverage and, on the surface at least, money.

The voluntary sector – the vast majority at that time, was densely populated, with people fighting each other for positions of influence, factions manipulating against others, new organisations (British Athletes Association for example) popping up all over, old ones hanging on to the vestiges of power like grim death, and the whole generating a level of energy, granted not always productive or easy to work with, that simply no longer exists.

Lacklustre regional councils

Contrast that 80s-90s scene with today’s sometimes lacklustre and vacancy peppered regional councils, the low profile, almost invisible national council and the pointless UKA members’ council, whilst most of the real business is conducted behind closed doors.

So what has happened? At guess I would say the people involved at that time were motivated by a mix of love of the sport and a wish to see it thrive, strong conviction regarding their own personal vision for the sport, innate competitiveness, and a drive for power, position and perceived personal opportunity amid the buzz and glamour of success. Not fundamentally different, in other words, from anyone in any organisation, then or now, business or sport, pro or am, rich or poor. But it seems to me that the equivalent group is not there now, in 2011, in spite of the London Games, the rationalised structure, regionalised England (a genuinely positive move), Lottery funding and all the rest of it.

So I have a serious research topic to offer Sport England; what is the extent of and reasons for the decline in volunteering in athletics and to what extent is it linked to the professionalization process?

I have to point out clearly at this juncture that I do not wish this website to be seen as aligning itself to the long standing band of traditionalists who have resisted change in general and professionalization in particular over several generations.

No indeed. Professionalisation will, if I can join in with the statements of the blindingly obvious for a moment, be seen by future historians as an appropriate and inevitable stage in the evolutionary process of embedding sport into society.

The problem as I see it is how the professional sector operates, not that it exists.

A bunker mentality?

I’d like to offer the following thoughts for consideration.

• Does the sheer difficulty of managing athletics and the wide range of knowledge required due to the nature of the sport, its complex history and culture, the intellectual and other challenges of coaching it, its quirks, the complex funding issues and resulting conflicting objectives, produce a kind of bunker mentality at strategic level? With that might come an instinct to cut off from the main, tangled mass of the sport and what was excellent about its past, to over simplify the strategic and operational tasks and to defend that stance by exerting heavy handed power and control? If that was the case, dissenters might be dismissed as having an axe to grind, being negative, the lunatic fringe or just plain wrong, rather than having a contribution to make.
• As has already been pointed out, there is now a lack of any meaningful voluntary input within UKA and a gulf between athletes who make it to elite level and the rest of the sport. An unforeseen consequence of that could be that the voluntary sector is almost completely cut off from one of its most potent objectives – high performance, resulting in plunging motivation and apathy. The excitement of success might be felt to be simply no longer available.
• The above and the previous destruction of the old national coaching scheme (coaching coaches, teaching teachers and supported coach/athlete partnerships) has fractured the cohesive link between the top of the sport and development. The National Coaches previously directly injected high quality technical knowledge deep into the coaching “workforce”, made elite performance and the top athletes that the N. C’s often coached appear accessible, firing ambition and creating a culture of aspiration. Are the N.C.s remembered with nostalgia now because nothing since has come near in matching their impact?
• Have changes in coach education and all of the above, produced a “dumbing down” in coaching which has sidelined, de-motivated or simply infuriated talented and experienced voluntary coaches, including ex national coaches, and failed to thoroughly equip younger coaches for the task of “developing the next generation of champions”?
• Strategy has appeared to have focussed on structure, projects and maintaining a united front. But have other vital requirements for success been ignored? The objective and transparent measuring of outcomes and methods – what works and what does not, seems to be missing. Three massive cheers for the National Union of Track Statisticians, by the way, – another group who’s contribution to the sport is incalculable. But possibly the most destructive of all is the apparent lack of attention to the human dimension – how relationships, feelings and behaviour impact on an organisation’s bottom line, no matter how good the strategy looks on paper.

If the above were the case, or even partly the case, then decline is systemic within the sport and can only accelerate. I plan to be talking to some real experts on management and organisational development before the next posting. Meantime, your views would be welcome.

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Sunday, May 15th, 2011 in Track Chat
7 Comments »

Frank Dick’s Vision for Coaching

There’s no doubt in my mind that the most profound and urgent of all the changes required in our sport after 2012 relate to coaching.

Our professional governing bodies still rely on a band of dedicated volunteers to attract, enthuse, talent spot, educate, guide, develop and mentor the athletic talent that is the sport’s bread and butter. There are clearly problems – by general observation. Disaffection and de-motivation in the ranks is reported; few clubs can offer quality coaching in all events; field events are poorly served numerically; the average age of coaches is increasing and women suffer barriers to advancement. So, in the light of falling participation and performance trends, what is the sport’s vision for coaching – more of the same?

As UK Director of Coaching from 1979 to 1994, Dr Frank Dick OBE oversaw the planning and athlete management for 4 Olympic Games. He has remained immersed in coaching, in voluntary positions, ever since. Master-minding the annual International Festival of Athletics Coaching, he is also chair of Scottish Athletics, the president of the European Association of Athletics Coaches, and has recently received the first professorship ever to be awarded in sport coaching, from the Bulgarian National Sports Academy.

Here, Frank Dick selects the crunch issues for coaching which he sees as priorities for change if the sport is ever to recover and thrive.

Eager to talk and oozing passion for his subject, I first asked Frank Dick why, after 45 achievement packed years in coaching, and given his successful career in business and sport consultancy, he still cares.

“That’s an easy question to answer” Dick responds. “No-one goes into coaching to make money. It’s a passion – some people have that leaning as an athlete, and some acquire it later – but the point is that the passion does not leave you. Coaching has not been my remunerated career since 1994, but my passion and commitment remains the same. And clearly, much remains to be done, in the sport generally and in coaching. That fires the blood.”

Relationships

So, what are the major issues that give him concern? “Well,” Says Dick, “the first thing is that the culture of athletics coaching demands harmony between unpaid voluntary coaches and paid coaches. It is my perception that such harmony is not quite there for athletics coaching in the UK.” Given that this very issues has been picked up by many, including John Lister in our last posting, I comment that “not quite there” might be an understatement.

“Well,” he continues “it rests with the leadership skills of the national federation’s salaried coaches to create and preserve that harmony. It is unfortunate that the nature of the paid/volunteer relationship remains undefined. In general there is no model for an appropriate relationship, either organisationally or for individual personnel and we see these stress points across the whole sport, not just in coaching. Harmony may not be easy to achieve, but it is essential not only for the best interests of current athletes, but also for creating a greater coaching future.”

Coaching coaches and teaching teachers

“Under the old salaried national coaches’ scheme,” Dick explains, “harmony was achieved by the salaried national staff (then national coaches) having primary responsibility for coaching coaches, teaching teachers and supporting coach-athlete partnerships. This generated a mutual trust and respect, and also ensured that the influence of the professional coach extended across the coaching community. In that model, the federation’s salaried coaches do any personal coaching in their own time, just like the volunteers, creating yet more common ground.

“It was a system that worked both for effective partnership between sectors and for national performance.” Dick continues. “The record over almost two decades from 1980 demonstrates that clearly. The model was also very low budget, which is something that should be uppermost in our minds in the present climate.

“Now, salaried performance staff are focussed on coaching elite and elite potential athletes exclusively,” expounds Dick. “To be fair, there are some exceptionally talented coaches in that staff and Charles (van Commenee, UKA Head Coach) is an outstanding leader. That model can and does work in terms of effectively controlling the performance management process and environment.

“However, it is also entirely dependent on the federation having very deep pockets. Current UKA high performance budget is around £11 million per annum. It also requires the highest quality technical staff which UKA has price conditioned at a very high figure; it requires a most sophisticated, world class support infrastructure which, by definition, must keep pace with accelerating change in technology.

Disrupting coach-athlete partnerships

“But, most significantly, there is very strong perception in the voluntary coaching sector, that the voluntary coaches who have taken their athletes into the elite performance radar are out of the game at that point. Instead of supporting the coach-athlete partnership, the federation is replacing or disrupting it.”

I ask, given the high cost and the de-motivating effect on volunteers, if the current model is sustainable. Dick is categorical, “I honestly cannot see how it can last beyond 2013. A changing economic profile for sport in general and athletics in particular necessitates immediate consideration of alternative operational strategies. That is clear. The damage that the present model has done to the relationship between paid and voluntary sectors is a huge issue and too many volunteer coaches voice a sense of disenchantment. I do not for one moment believe that the sport intended this, but fewer volunteer coaches are coming into the sport and staying, while more volunteer coaches are leaving the sport. This has to be addressed as a priority for the long term health of the sport.”

Economic pressure

Dick’s next priority is some sort of accommodation regarding the current economic realities of volunteering, which, in Dick’s view, is and will increasingly be an obstacle for volunteers.

“What wonderful people we have in the sport,” Dick exclaims, “as technical officials, club officials, and coaches. They are the sport. No matter how good the 100 plus salaried staff at UKA are at their jobs, at a cost of nearly £6 million, by the way, and not including the staff costs of the home country associations, they cannot replace the voluntary sector. Without the volunteer we have nothing.

“When I first took up the post of Chair of the Scottish Athletics Federation (SAF) in 09, two things profoundly shocked me. The first was the amount of money that a voluntary coach has to spend financing the first 3 levels of qualification and the second is the fact that in Scotland it was taken for granted that there is a 30% loss in participation as you proceed up the age groups. For example for the u20 age group you can only expect 70% of the number you had at u17, and at senior level only 70% of the u20 number. Those negative assumptions have to be challenged. The paucity of good quality coaches obviously has an impact, among other issues, on that level of drop-out and we should be doing everything possible to ease the passage of coaches into the profession.

British coaches spend 5 to 22% of income on coaching

“I have conducted enquiries that show that British coaches variously spend 5 to 22% of their personal income to carry out their vital service for athletics. In at least these next 24 months they will feel a lot of pain due to economic pressures. Some are already suggesting they will have to cut back on their input. We must wake up to their needs and indeed the needs of all our volunteers. We must, in my personal opinion, ensure that all salaried staff remuneration has 0% increase this year and next. We must also help reduce the burden of costs for volunteers, if nothing else.

“It may be that UKA is already looking into this, but it is simply not acceptable that the cost to coaches for the first two levels of coach education/award hits them for a minimum of £455, excluding travel and accommodation costs, which could easily double that figure. This might be OK in a sport where there is probability of a commercial future career, but in athletics? In effect, volunteer coaches are funding the federation’s recruitment programme.”

Coach education; reinventing the wheel

The coach education process is currently undergoing yet another rewrite. “Is this really necessary,” I enquire? “Well, firstly, is very regrettable that it is taking so long to put the Coach Certification programme beyond Level 2,” he responds with a sigh. “Naturally the team doing so will want a very professional job done on it. But it has created a bottle neck. This hurts the committed coach, and surely must also hurt the athletes they coach. Presumably they need their coaches to benefit from the content of Level 3 and beyond.”

“But, in response to your question, it does seem a little odd to me. In Scotland we are looking into pursuing the IAAF CECS programme from Level1 to IAAF Academy. This will be an alternative to the UK programme. We simply cannot deny coaches their right to progression, and the IAAF programme is actually the model used by the European Council for Coaches (ECC) for all sport. So it fits perfectly to the European coaching framework recognized by the European Union, and this is likely to be increasingly significant.

“IAAF has had access to the finest coaching and coach education minds in creating the Coach Education and Certification System (CECS). Levels 1 to 5 have been in place since before the Athens Olympics. It is reviewed and revised annually to improve currency and quality of content and presentation, etc. It is recommended to member federations by European Athletics. It is a fraction of the cost to coaches. So, why, very expensively, re-invent the wheel? The materials are fantastic and are all there waiting. Why not adopt it then adapt it to the development needs of our coaches? Simple!”

I ask if he has perceived an issue with the delivery of programmes in Britain, remembering occasions when coaches have said that course tutors did not always have an athletics background.

“Formerly, only experienced coaches were involved in delivering coach education,” he responds. “This was important to me and to Carl Johnson, who was architect of that programme. It is crucial that whoever is presenting the content understands how that material fits in practice.

“The tutor must understand the material, its application, and the world in which the coach is operating. That’s why, as often as possible, courses, clinics, workshops, etc were conducted where the coaches were actively doing their coaching.”

Coach education versus coach development

“I think you’ve come to the view that the on-going process self-managed, continuous personal learning and development should be facilitated by coaches themselves, have you not?” I ask.

“Absolutely! Giving coaches access to education and certification is the responsibility of the national federation. The latter may also provide access to workshops, clinics etc – but that is probably not the right way. Coaches associations should do this.”

That seems like a radical departure, but Dick doesn’t agree. “In actual fact, the European Athletics Coaches Association was founded in 1960 by Geoff Dyson (UK), Gavril Korobkov (USSR), Toni Nett (FRG) and other head coaches in Europe because national federations were not providing coaches with help in their development,” he expounds.

“Sir Arthur Gold as European Athletics President, gave EACA official status by ‘recognizing’ it. Paradoxically, he would not countenance a coaches association in UK. UKA and England Athletics continue to oppose the formation of a coaches’ association. Germany is similar in this respect, so in that sense, I suppose it could appear radical.”

“But in fact every IAAF area has a coaches association, the presidents of which sit on the IAAF Coaching Commission. The chair of the commission sits on the IAAF Council and so has input to decision making at the highest level of the sport. Ideally, all national federations should have a coaches’ association. Area coaches’ associations should be alliances of national coaches’ associations. We are working towards that in Europe, where countries such as Italy and France have very powerful coaches’ associations.

Qualifications alone do not make the coach

“The fundamental principle to remember is that development of the practicing coach is not the same as the coach education progression diagram. Mere qualifications alone do not mean you are a good coach. Just as there is an athlete pathway building to the peak performance years, so also for the coach. The latter pathway is, however, a much longer process, stretching over many years. It includes coach education qualification, of course, if for no other reason, this ensures personal liability insurance!

But the coach pathway also includes a personal commitment to self-directed, continuous learning through reading, study, conferences, symposiums, practical workshops and clinics, access to coaches of experience and expertise, and so on. The knowledge gathering never ends. Learning through experience never ends. The pursuit of personal coaching excellence and effectiveness never ends.

“So,” I say, “you’re saying that the very act of coaching well is synonymous with high personal motivation to learn more, and that drive must be intrinsic to shaping the direction of coaching?”

“Exactly. Coaches need to be moving in the same direction as a body, identifying issues from practice, guiding and shaping the practical application of their art.

“Furthermore, sport development requires coaching to be a properly regulated profession, and coaches must be free to regulate it themselves, as in medicine, teaching, social work and other professions. 3 years ago I produced The Coach’s Charter which identifies both the rights and responsibilities of coaches. Responsibilities have been identified frequently, but as with all other groups of professionals, rights must also be recognised and that can hardly be done without the input and agreement of coaches themselves.

“In Scotland, before being invited to take the chair of Scottish Athletics in 09, I chaired the working group to form the Scottish Athletics Coach Association (Athletics Coach Scotland – ACS) which is now an official body. ACS leads
the coach development programme of practical coaching clinics for all regions of Scotland, staffed by experience coaches.

“Scottish Athletics membership fees for coaches are diverted to ACS. The coach’s fee must cover the portion required by Scottish Athletics for insurance, etc but it also contributes to the ACS programme.

A properly regulated coaching profession

“I feel strongly that our coaches associations must lead the move towards a properly regulated coaching profession not just in athletics, but in all sport. Sport is not a profession like law, medicine or engineering, because of its
need to embrace the paid and the voluntary. For us, professionalism is about attitude and codes, not economics.

“On the other hand there is, to my mind, a clear similarity. By completing a university course, a graduate is not a lawyer, doctor or engineer. It is the professional body who gives license to practice. And the body is the profession’s leadership – not the university faculty. In sport, the federations provide the qualification at completion of the course of education. But it should not be the federation who issues the license to practice. That should be the properly regulated coaching body and it should be governed by coaches. This is the only way to harness both the energy of coaches themselves and the findings from practice.

“In the current absence of a licence awarding body, in Scotland we are working towards ACS awarding the Scottish Athletics Coach License and we are taking advice on this.”

Given that discussion on the professionalization of coaching has been around for decades, I ask if this is any nearer reality. I comment that, in many locations, especially away from the large conurbations, I find it impossible to envisage how the lack of level 3 plus quality coaching is ever going to be satisfactorily addressed, other than by creating local employment opportunities for suitably qualified and experienced coaches. In that scenario an active Coaches Association giving input in terms of ethical, safe, achievement focussed practice would fit perfectly.

“Yes” Dick replies. “I too envisage a mixed economy in coaching; volunteers, employed by various organisations – or even self-employed, operating within and without club settings and in performance centres. ” Dick explains. “Sport development also requires parity of esteem for coaches, paid, unpaid, working with high performance, developing or beginner, able bodied or disabled athletes, and this needs to be championed by a professional body and the associations.

“The International Council of Coaches Education (ICCE) and the European Coaching Council (ECC) are both committed to establishing a professional coaching body. Actually, Pat Duffy (Ire), Miguel Crespo (Sp) and I have been requested to begin work on this.

“A starting point has been the drawing up of a ‘Coaches Charter’, setting out the rights and responsibilities of coaches, as I said before. I prepared and proposed this three years ago and it is now recognized by ICCE and IAAF. The next step is to do something with it. Making a decision to do something is not even close to actually doing it! But it affords a strong platform to setting a strategy.”

Are coaches willing to shape their future?

“The European Union has made big steps forward in acknowledging sport’s value. At a meeting in Madrid in March, organized by the ICCE and ECC, for several sports’ European Federation coaches associations, it was made clear that sport is firmly on the EU agenda and that coaching is central to this.

“Coaches associations are seen by ICCE and ECC as critical to any strategy in moving things forward in Europe. I understand that there are funding streams available for projects related to coaching and sport development via EU initiatives.”

It strikes me that, exciting though these ideas are, there is something of a disconnect with the realities of day to day coaching activity in Britain, 2011.

“True,” agrees Dick. “In all of this, coaches must be more willing to get involved in the collective purpose of shaping their future.

“They may have to sidestep current structures to do this, though. My perception is that the voluntary sector now has very little influence in where the sport is headed. My understanding of the roles and responsibilities of UK Members Council, for example, as suggested by Foster (The Foster Review: Moving On: A review of the need for change in athletics in the UK 04) is clearly erroneous. I had thought it would represent the voluntary sector hand on the sport’s strategy and operational rudder. That does not appear to be the case and in my opinion our sport will suffer as a consequence through the next decade unless this changes, and soon.”

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 in Track Chat
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John Lister Reflects…

Collecting his MBE, November 2010

The major transition points in life often cause us to scan either the past or the future with a width of lens we would not otherwise employ. As athletics faces yet another potentially transformative hurdle – post 2012 cuts to funding – I ask two people who have had highly influential roles in the sport over the last 30 years, John Lister, (AAA and then BAF honorary treasurer ’86 to 96), and Frank Dick (UK director of Coaching 79 to 94), to reflect on their careers, the changes they have seen and influenced, the foreseen and unforeseen outcomes, and where we go from here.

In this posting I talk to John Lister about the pros and cons of structural change, and his continuing love affair with athletics after 40 years of post competitive, voluntary involvement which has taken him from club to national and international level, and now back to club level again as webmaster of Cardiff AAC’s excellent website.

In the 60s and early 70s Lister was a prolific Welsh International athlete, competing in high and long jumps and 110m hurdles on many occasions over several years. Nearly 50 years later he is still, with his wife Mary, attending club nights 2 or 3 times a week at the Leckwith Stadium in Cardiff – a continuity of involvement that is becoming increasingly rare in our sport.

But, although his immediate focus is now on the local, he is still reflecting on the wider implications of the past. He is about to publish, for the purpose of historical record, “The Rise and Fall of the British Athletics Federation”, a document likely to contain some significant messages for those who are currently charged with the responsibility of negotiating the white water of change and contending, as was ever the case in athletics, with an environment full of conflicting and difficult drives and conditions.

The Birth of Cardiff AAC

Lister first came to national attention in 1968 after writing the “Birchgrove Report” on the future of athletics in Cardiff. As a result of his study, two clubs, Roath Harriers and Birchgrove AC, amalgamated to form Cardiff AAC. The new club was immediately successful and has maintained a first class record both in development and in producing top athletes – Lynn Davies, Colin Jackson, Kay Morley, Venissa Head, Tanni Grey-Thompson, Jamie Baulch, Christian Malcolm, Tim Benjamin, Rhys Williams and many more – ever since. Unlike many clubs, Cardiff maintains a comprehensive coaching team and although, like any unit, the club has had its ups and downs, its history is a strong indication of the importance of rational planning as the basis for long term success.

Asked to stand for election as AAA Hon treasurer in 1986, Lister succeeded in gaining the post and, as a chartered accountant with significant business experience, he brought an unprecedented level of financial expertise to the national level of the sport. Indeed, he arrived at most a fortuitous moment for the AAA and BAAB, who were struggling to manage the huge increase in funds that flowed in from the new contracts with ITV and APA (Alan Pascoe Associates – later FastTrack, the sport’s sponsorship agents) in 1985.

The level of income generated by these “breakthrough” contracts created the financial foundation for a golden period of success during which British athletes – Coe, Cram, Ovett, Christie, Jackson, Thompson, Gunnell, Whitbread, Sanderson, Regis and many others, became household names. For a while, athletics enjoyed the level of media profile unknown in the sport previously or since.

AAA/BAAB Financial Rescue

But, in spite of these funds, AAA/BAAB were overspending and heading for disaster. The improvements in financial management introduced by Lister transformed losses into profits and this dramatic turnaround remains, he says, his proudest achievement during his time as treasurer.

Moving on to become the inaugural British Athletics Federation (BAF) honorary treasurer, when it was formed in 1991, Lister stayed in the role until stepping down in 1996.

As we all know, BAF proved to be a short lived entity, succumbing to bankruptcy in 1997, the causes of which Lister details in his soon to be available book. But nevertheless its existence facilitated an historically significant period of change, marking the beginning of the much needed transition away from the Victorian legacy of amateurism, towards a modernised response to the needs of athletic talent and ambition in Britain.

As a result of his successful profile at national level, Lister also served with the European Athletics Association for 12 years, succeeding Andy Norman as the GB nominee on the EAA Council. Ending up in the “inner sanctum”, in charge of EAA marketing and two European Championships (Munich 2002 and Gothenburg 2006), he came to see GB athletics differently from both a personal and an international perspective.

“On a personal level, I enjoyed my time with EAA in a way I found impossible domestically,” Says Lister. “EAA is a stable organisation with the primary role of running a very credible championship programme. Working relationships were friendly and supportive, which enabled difficult decisions to be made. In contrast, annual elections domestically meant people were always looking over their shoulder. There was also a perception around that the televised events were artificial, and the whole relationship with television was unhealthy for the “real” sport. Overall I found that animosity was the hallmark of the sport at that time. I did not find it enjoyable.”

“The international view I came to understand” Lister continues, “is that, although GB’s athletes have always been highly regarded, the demise of the BAF in 97 led to an understandable period of administrative introspection. UKA was not seen, and is still not seen, as a fully committed member of the European athletic family.”

Surprised at this, I ask him to explain. “The AAA, then BAF, had a very
positive attitude towards its international role and consciously tried to maintain the historical influence of GB, by seeking positions within the IAAF and EAA and regularly hosted IAAF and EAA events.

“BAF had a vibrant international group” Lister continues, “composed of all its international representatives. This was continued under UKA but the attitude towards it changed almost immediately to a distinct lack of interest. I’m not sure if it even exists now. GB’s willingness to host events also dwindled, whereas comparable countries are keen to do so and see it as building national prestige and underlining the importance of athletics within their countries. This did not go unnoticed. At a more subtle level, the EAA has organised many seminars and workshops for member federations. It was often noted that GB was not represented.”

Historical change

Lister’s time with BAF was marked by two historical and much needed changes.

“Firstly,” Lister elaborates, “the amalgamation of track and field associations, road and cross country, including the merging of men’s and women’s associations into one organisation, with the introduction of combined male and female championships for the first time. Secondly, there was the start of the professionalization process, enabling athletes to be treated as professional sportsmen and women, an essential change if British athletes were to stand any chance of competing successful on the world stage.”

“Combined male and female championships were a great step forward and taken for granted now,” he continues. “It’s hard to understand now why this was so difficult to achieve.”

“Professionalization resulted in a totally different approach to the management of top athletes, introducing the concept of year round guidance and access to sport science services. Previously BAAB provided only selection for international teams, team management and some medical help.”

Lister firmly stands by the structural change that occurred when UKA set up after BAF’s bankruptcy in 97. “A much needed opportunity to get rid of the dysfunctional “democracy” which in reality merely amounted to individuals scrapping over positions – without any debate on their vision for strategic direction.”

“However in spite of continuing improvements in the management of top athletes, engineered by the combined talents of Andy Norman, Frank Dick and Malcolm Jones when he was Director of Finance,” Lister observes, “this much needed rationalization of structure, and the further changes made since, have not halted a long, slow decline of the sport in terms of participation and performance trends.”

We discuss possible reasons for this. “Despite a more professional approach at the top, this seems to be focused on the elite athletes, and there is an unhealthy obsession with global medals. ” says Lister. “The base of the sport has, by general observation, dwindled – despite the huge amounts of money (UKA turnover is £24 million per annum; the Welsh figure £1 million) invested. Along with that, public interest has also probably dwindled. It is interesting to reflect that, pre UKA, AA of Wales had a modest turnover and was run entirely by honorary officers, 2 part time secretaries and one national coach paid for by the BAF. It now has a turnover of £1m, with a CEO, head coach and a full time office staff. However, few would claim that much more is being achieved.” A view, I suggest, echoed by observers in all home countries.

Floundering on the basics

“Why do you think that professionalization and bigger budgets have not resulted in a bigger, stronger sport?” I ask. “Everything seems to be geared to medals, Olympic medals for GB and Commonwealth medals for Wales.” Lister responds. “The fostering and development of the sport through its clubs receives lip service only.”

I invite John to elaborate. “Although I am no longer close enough to comment personally on their attitudes, from what I do see and hear there is an apparent absence of vision in UKA beyond the elite – little feel for the sport as a whole.

“When it comes down to basics – the club system, the domestic competition structure, the very nature and appeal (or otherwise) of the sport to children and teenagers – we seem to be floundering. As the governing body for the UK, UKA has a responsibility to set strategic direction (home countries’ remit is to deliver), and I see it absolutely as their responsibility to face up to these truths. But there is poor communication with the whole sport and no apparent concern or emotional attachment to it. As a result, I am concerned that clubs still feel isolated from “the top” – that UKA is so powerful, large and far away as to be of no consequence to them.”

Lister continues, “This causes either resentment or apathy and, although there are various forums for feedback, such as members’ council, UKA conference etc, these are underused and, especially given the power imbalance between the professionalized organisations and the voluntary sector, do not in any way provide the required check on the effectiveness of the organisation.” The outcome of that of course, is that athletics governing bodies appear to be judge and jury in their own case, leading to the accusations of unaccountability, and anger that the obvious decline remains unacknowledged and unaddressed.

Investigation into volunteer – employee relationships

“The relationship between professional staff and the voluntary sector also needs attention.” Lister explains. “In Wales the lack of respect and confidence between paid staff and volunteers has meant that relationships have deteriorated to the point where the board of Welsh Athletics has commissioned an investigation into the gulf that has arisen. I anticipate that the outcome will be very critical of the management.”

“I also think” Lister continues, “that the current structure makes the relationship between staff and volunteers more difficult. It is over complicated and the overlapping responsibilities results in confusion and frustration all round.”

In Lister’s view, the neglect of club coaching is also a significant factor in the decline and believes that David Moorcroft probably made a profound error when reorganising in the early years of UKA, in sweeping away the (admittedly imperfect) National coaches system, thereby removed the link between the “technical directors” and the club coaches. I attempt to develop this theme, but Lister calls a halt. “This is not an area I feel competent to comment on,” He says, and later adds, “Please give my best regards to Frank when you speak to him.”

I promise to do so, and reflect that therein lies an essential element of Lister’s success and longevity – his passion for the sport is firmly controlled and expressed through his particular, very hard-edged knowledge and expertise. He does not stray over his own boundaries, does not live through his own ego, and is therefore able to continually reflect and adapt objectively. This trait has gained him a reputation for a certain coolness in the past, and if this has sometimes ruffled feathers…well that has hardly been avoidable given the tumultuous times the sport has had to negotiate.

I ask two final questions. First, what does he think is his major contribution to the sport? Answer: playing a part in the transition of the sport in GB from the outdated AAA/BAAB model to what is now UKA; Second,
what is the sports biggest challenge now? Answer: Fixing the basics after 2012. Quite. But will the next layer of change be moulded by these lessons from the past?

NEXT TIME: Frank Dick’s vision for coaching.

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Saturday, April 2nd, 2011 in Track Chat
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Power and accountability

Having made a commitment to continue The Inside Track, I’ve continually ruminated on my decision. It’s both a burden and a luxury. Tony felt strongly that an alternative voice should be heard, because he saw the sport as in decline – a decline masked by spin, superficiality and waste. He observed the continual structural change that drew attention away from the needs of athletes and coaches, and, as he loved to write – he blogged.

So now I find myself the inheritor of these pages – as I said – both a burden as a hard act to follow, and a luxury in the sense of an opportunity to have one’s say with a small measure of power. But even a small measure of such power can be heady, especially in a context where power is at a premium.

The most fundamental and important of the changes that Tony observed in his long career in athletics is that from purely voluntary governing bodies to the largely organisations we have now; and the way things have turned out, power or influence is in short supply for most of us now.

Not that he, or I, was a great advocate for the old AAA or WAAA. He used to come home from AAA General Committee meetings with gritted teeth. But that does not make the almost complete annihilation of volunteer input into strategy and delivery healthy, for herein lies the root of the ludicrous collision between Rob Whittingham’s participation figures (1847 senior athletes competing) and England Athletics and UKA’s claim to have 10,000 coaches (as pointed out by Jim Cowan). Neither set of figures is universally agreed because neither set is co-owned. Accept one and you must surely disbelieve the other – a truly farcical situation underlining profound lack of trust between the governing bodies and the rest of the sport. This also raises fundamental questions of governance, accountability and democracy. The divide is not, I think, purely between the paid and the unpaid, but between those who exert power behind closed doors, who mostly are paid, to the exclusion of wider “stakeholder” involvement who are not.

It amazed both Tony and I that “democracy” disappeared from the sport almost overnight and apparently without formal protest. I put the word in quotes because some would argue that in fact we’ve never had it. If you define representative democracy as voters choosing representatives to act in their interests, they would be right. We’ve never had one person-one vote.

Clubs used to elect representatives to attend county associations, which in turn sent reps to area associations, who in turn elected reps to attend national ones. So we do not have a tradition whereby coaches and athletes have an individual vote, as some sports do via their (lucrative) registration schemes.

There has been an assumption that the interests of clubs are the same as those of athletes and coaches – which is obviously not the case. However, it was a system of mandates, and although geared to maintenance of the status quo rather than to growth and development – its major flaw, it at least gave open dissent a place at the top table and decision making was visible.

Since then we’ve had an increasingly rapid change to professionalism. Tony in fact was the first professional administrator – for the Southern Counties AA in the late 60s/early 70s.

As professionalism has increased, decision-making has increasingly taken place behind closed doors. The last stage in this was when the England regional budgets, managers and offices disappeared a couple of years ago, rendering the voluntary, elected regional councils toothless. This was a decision with huge implications, made without consulting clubs, councils or other volunteers, on the basis that “employees have to be informed first”. Had no-one thought through the implications for stakeholder accountability in the change from England Athletics, Association to England Athletics, Company?

Although the councils still exist on paper, as does UKA’s members council, in reality none of these bodies exerts much power, although the London Regional Council could be seen as an exception, owing to funds brought in off the back of the Olympics. A quick glance at most minutes, including those of the UKA Members’ Council, confirms that challenge and strong debate are not usually a feature and reports tend to see every activity as an unqualified success.

Due to a mixture of obscurity, tokenism and grassroots apathy, neither regional councils nor UKA members’ council generate the kind of accountability they were set up to provide.

Here is a quote from the Sport England Strategy 2008-11. “NGBs themselves will also be expected to deliver and operate at high standards of internal organisation and democracy, ensuring that the voices of all levels and participant groups are heard.”

What we actually have is a top down model where real accountability is to government funders, not to the sport, and where diversity is an unconsidered issue. Henning Eichberg of the University of Southern Denmark wrote a paper “Pyramid or democracy in sports? Alternative ways in European sports policies” (2007). He points out that a difficulty for top down, hierarchical governing bodies is the separation of regulatory and commercial functions. That has certainly been an issue in the past; UKA gained the first major sponsorship for the development of women’s athletics from Aqua Pura 10 years ago; Aqua Pura may have gained from its association with women’s athletics, but it is very hard find any lasting benefit to the sport. There are many other examples.

Eichberg states that democracy in sport is characterised by frameworks for the expression of diversity and opposition. I get the strong feeling that opposition is firmly discouraged in our governing bodies. In some ways I can sympathise with this because there is certainly a lot of negativity about and that can be unhelpful to athletes, coaches and front-line employees trying to do their job.

However, to blank out all criticisms is often to throw the baby out with the bath water – forcing meaningful debate underground, encouraging turf wars and general defensiveness, destroying creativity and trust and risking arrogance and dismissive attitudes by those who find themselves in positions of power ……and, you might say, encouraging angry blogs.

I wonder when and how Sport England will attempt to assess whether or not high standards of internal organisation and democracy, ensuring that the voices of all levels and participant groups are heard is real or just a token gesture in athletics.

IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN

How wonderful and heart warming to see Helen Clitheroe’s success at the European Indoor Championships. Persistence, talent, maturity and application at last bring golden reward and give the 37 year old everything to play for leading up to 2012. Like her 29 year old team mate Jenny Meadows, Helen has overcome being “de-funded” to come back strongly and prove her ability. Both are excellent role models for younger female athletes – persistent faith in your ability is the name of the game.

Posted by Gwenda Ward on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 in Track Chat
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