Rugby Coach Weekly

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Host Phil Llewellyn with guests review some of the many great podcasts, books, articles and webinars from the last week. 

This week's guests:
Ross Ensor, Lecturer at Worcester University, UEFA B Football coach for Wolves FC and Tim Jones, PhD Researcher at Stirling University, Technical Director of Syngenta Juvs FC and host of The Developer Tribe Podcast.

The team pick out the key takeaways from each piece of great content and say how to use it on the pitch, at all the levels of the game.

This week's content:

Questioning for learning in game-based approaches to teaching and coaching – Harvey, & Light, (2015)

Skillful Neglect – Beverley Labbett

SUGGESTED CONTENT/WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

The Sports Psych Show - Fergus Connolly and Cody Royle on High Performance Coaching – with Dan Abrahams

The Coaching Discourse Podcast - Decision Making with Ceriann Davies & Mike Ashford – The Coaching Discourse

Discussing Boundaries in Coaching – UK Coaching

Coach Conversation – Managing Transition  with Nick Levett and Jenny Coady

Game Spirituality: How Games Tell Us More than We Might Think – Carlson, (2017)

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Si Nainby deep dives with Sam Portland.

Sam is a strength and conditioning coach and performance consultant who has worked for Wasps and Ealing Trailfinders. He's consulted with Kenya 7's and many individual pro-players from NFL to bobsleigh.

Here's what they covered:

• Sam's background and why he is so passionate about speed development
• Why rugby coaches should approach speed as a skill to be developed in the same way as passing or tackling
• The basics that underpin speed and sprinting
• The difference between speed development and speed expression
• Heuristics and cues for coaching acceleration and maximum speed 
• The benefits of Extensive Plyometrics for developing a base of tolerance and teaching speed
• Programming speed training into weekly and monthly cycles of rugby training
• The importance of consistency in programming drills and exercises
• How to blend multi-directional speed with basic acceleration training
• Why you should avoid too much competition and racing in speed development
• How Sam developed Speed Golf and how it teaches players to understand "Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast"
• Common mistakes in speed development
• How Sam programs gym training to support speed development and the Rollover Principle for weekly planning
• Moving from working for a pro team to becoming a freelance coach
• Developing streams of income within a freelance business
• How Sam is using the lessons from his time in coaching to develop other coaches through his mentorship

To find out more and contact Sam:
(w) www.coachsportland.co.uk
(e) [email protected]
(i) instagram.com/Coach_Sportland 

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Dan talks to Abingdon School's director of rugby Matt Gold.

We discuss his own experiences of speaking to a stellar cast of coaches in his own lockdown podcast series, Goldy's Rugby Podcast. We reflect on the lessons he learned from speaking to coaches like Ben Ryan and Sir Gordon Tietjens, especially on resilience and dealing with pressure.

We then explore how he developed an all-embracing season plan at Abingdon. Matt tells how he and his team of staff introduced the plan, the importance of a team approach and how he sold it to the players and the rest of the staff.

We delve into the detail of a session. I challenge Matt on how his team of coaches allow for a differentiated environment and what a typical session might look like.

One of the main lessons from the podcast must be that while the sessions might look rigid on paper, the coaching group is actually adjusting it all the time to suit the players.

We also discuss when and how you empower your players. His story about a particular crucial half time team talk brings into shark relief the power of this approach.

Matt is always delighted to chat with other coaches. Catch him on @gold_matthew or email him at [email protected].

The link for his podcast is: Goldy's Rugby podcasts

To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly

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Also, tap into the library of 4,000 pages of activities, advice, tactics and tips to help you become the best rugby coach you can be!

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Host Phil Llewellyn with guests review some of the many great podcasts, books, articles and webinars from the last week. 

This week's guests:
Tom Hartley, Senior Coach Developer at UK Coaching, Doug MacDonald, Coach Developer and Mentor for Scottish Canoe and Andrew Bradshaw, Senior Coach Developer at UK Coaching. 

The team pick out the key takeaways from each piece of great content and say how to use it on the pitch, at all the levels of the game.

This week's content:

• The Tim Ferris Show – A Past Year Review – Tim Ferris
• Coaching Athletes to Be Their Best: Motivational Interviewing in Sports – Stephen Rollnick
• Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World – Dave Snowden

SUGGESTED CONTENT/WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

The Tim Ferris Show – Dr. Jim Loehr on Mental Toughness, Energy Management, the Power of Journaling, and Olympic Gold Medals – Tim Ferris

How to Organise a Children's Party – Cognitive Edge

Hegarty on Creativity: There are No Rules – John Hegarty

Doug Lemov - The Coach’s Guide to Teaching – The Sports Psych Show hosted by Dan Abrahams

The Magic Academy with Aiden McNulty – hosted by John Fletcher and Russell Earnshaw 

The Magic Academy with Scott Sneddon – hosted by John Fletcher and Russell Earnshaw 

The Magic Academy with Rob Mason – hosted by John Fletcher and Russell Earnshaw 

Let’s Talk Coaching: Bernard Jackman - The Loose Head Podcast

Let’s Talk Coaching: Shaun Edwards - The Loose Head Podcast

To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly

To find out more about our Partner Club offer

CLICK HERE

Also, tap into the library of 4,000 pages of activities, advice, tactics and tips to help you become the best rugby coach you can be!

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Bird and LJ welcome Katie Sadleir, general manager Women's Rugby with World Rugby since 2016 and was recognised as one of the top 10 rugby influencers (Rugby World Magazine 2020).

Here are the questions they asked Katie:

• What has been your driving force to keep working at a strategic level? 
• What does a typical day look like in your role as World Rugby’s General Manager? 
• What has been your greatest moment of change/influence? 
• How and why did you become involved in rugby? 
• Did your educational journey help you in your passion for sport or was it outside influences that shaped you? 
• What have you learnt/taken from your personal participation and experience at a strategic level in other sports?
• What advice could you give to any female’s wanting to hold a position of influence/change within sporting organisations? 
• What are your aspirations for women’s rugby over the next five years?
• What has been your greatest challenge in your involvement with women’s rugby? 
• Does the development of women in rugby include female coaches as well as players? What plans are there to grow the number of female coaches across the game and how can we support at grassroots level (as local recruitment is normally a players’ mum)?

Katie is a Commonwealth Games medal winner and in 2016 was awarded Sport NZ Life Time Achievement Award for contribution to sport and recreation sector in NZ. Her impressive CV included general manager roles with NZ Academy of Sport and the NZ Sports Foundation.

To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly

To find out more about our Partner Club offer

CLICK HERE

Also, tap into the library of 4,000 pages of activities, advice, tactics and tips to help you become the best rugby coach you can be!

Send us Fan Mail

Jamie Taylor PhD is the former head of Academy at Leicester Tigers and now working with Grey Matters as a Senior Coach Developer and the English Institute of Sport as the coaching and curriculum lead. He is a coach, coach developer and researcher in coaching science with a particular focus on talent development.

In this podcast, we follow up with Jamie to take an even deeper dive into teaching, learning and decision making. 

We discuss:

• Is coaching teaching?
• Can classroom research transfer to sports coaching?
• Which pedagogical principles can help coaches plan and deliver sessions
• Why a coach needs to be much more than an environmental designer
• The role of cognition in learning 
• How coaches can use professional judgement and decision making to decide which principles and methods to use and when
• What factors does it depend on when we say "it depends"

RESOURCES/REFERENCES

Robert Bjork Desirable Difficulties:
https://bit.ly/DesirableDifficulty

Pam Richards Research on Shared Mental Models:
https://bit.ly/NetballCaseStudy
https://bit.ly/HolisticSMMFramework

Implementing the Five-A Model of Technical Refinement: Key Roles of the Sport Psychologist:
https://bit.ly/5AModel

Professional Judgement and Decision Making in Sport
Coaching: To Jump Or Not To Jump:
https://bit.ly/PJDMPaper

Visit Jamie at:
https://twitter.com/jattaylor
[email protected]

To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly

To find out more about our Partner Club offer

CLICK HERE

Also, tap into the library of 4,000 pages of activities, advice, tactics and tips to help you become the best rugby coach you can be!

Send us Fan Mail

Dan talks to Barry Frost of Pass Analysis about how you can get more all the analysis that might be available for your team. This is a very practical insight into getting more from the data, at all levels.

Here are some of the main topics we touched on:

• What is analysis
• How analysis creates new thoughts
• How do we make analysis easy to use for coaches to make sense of it
• What is the most essential information available
• Winning the battle of the metrics
• What does "opportunities taken and missed" mean for a coach
• How do you have positive conversations with players with the data
• What is a perfect pass?
• How can we analyse decision making
• What sort of analysis can you do when you are simply watching the game

For more on Pass Analysis visit www.passanalysis.co.uk

To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly

To find out more about our Partner Club offer

CLICK HERE

Also, tap into the library of 4,000 pages of activities, advice, tactics and tips to help you become the best rugby coach you can be!

Send us Fan Mail

Host Phil Llewellyn with guests review some of the many great podcasts, books, articles and webinars from the last week. 

This week's guests:
Dave Collins, Director of GreyMatters Performance Ltd and Professor at Edinburgh University, Jamie Taylor, senior coach developer with GreyMatters Performance Ltd and coach with Loughborough University and Andrew Cruickshank, sport and performance psychologist and lecturer at University of Central Lancashire

The team pick out the key takeaways from each piece of great content and say how to use it on the pitch, at all the levels of the game.

This week's content:

Tacit Knowledge in Expert Coaching: Science or Art? - Nash and Collins, 2012 

Effective Skill Development: How Should Athletes' Skills Be Developed? - Abraham and Collins, 2011

What You Think – What You Do – What You Get? Exploring the link between Epistemology and PJDM in Cricket coaches – Crowther, Collin and Holder, 2017 

Developing Coaches professional judgement and decision making: Using the 'Big 5' – Collins and Collins, 2020

SUGGESTED CONTENT/WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

Improving "impoverished practice environments" - a conversation Ian Renshaw, Peter Arnott and Graeme McDowell – The Talent Equation hosted by Stu Armstrong

Coach Developer Conversations: Bob Muir – Navigating The Terrain of Coach Learning – hosted by Andy Bradshaw

Curious Coaching Podcast: Elaine Rice, Tandy Haughey & Lucy Moore – Sport Northern Ireland

Rugby Coach Weekly: Reviewing research into what keeps good young players in the game with Jonny McMurtry from Coachingthecoaches.net – hosted by Dan Cottrell

To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly

To find out more about our Partner Club offer

CLICK HERE

Also, tap into the library of 4,000 pages of activities, advice, tactics and tips to help you become the best rugby coach you can be!

Send us Fan Mail

Liza Bird Burgess and LJ Adams catch up with former England international flanker Maggie Alphonsi MBE.

Maggie, who is now a regular TV pundit and writes in The Daily Telegraph, was one of the world's best players, with 74 caps for England and 28 tries. She helped England win a World Cup and seven consecutive Six Nations crowns.

In the pod, Bird and LJ ask Maggie (who Bird used to teach!) the following questions:

• What did you want to be growing up?
• You played a lot of different sports when you were growing up in school, what was it that attracted you to rugby and what kept you playing it?
• When you look back at your rugby playing career, is there any particular advice you would have given to your younger self and to young players now aspiring to be international players?
• What is your favourite rugby memory?
• Talk us through your transition from a player to media professional; what support did you have? Were there any barriers and what advice would you give anyone wanting to pursue a role such as this? 
• What other aspirations do you have?
• Where do you see women’s rugby going in the next five years?
• What is the hardest lesson/ biggest disappointment when playing rugby and how did you overcome this?

To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly

To find out more about our Partner Club offer

CLICK HERE

Also, tap into the library of 4,000 pages of activities, advice, tactics and tips to help you become the best rugby coach you can be!