merry go rounds

I want off this ride, but I can't leave

I've been thinking a lot about the state of play in sport coaching lately. I know I haven't been in the game as long as most, but it's been on my mind for the last 14 years, so I think I have some skin in the game. The overwhelming sentiment of where we are today is summarised perfectly in the video below, generated by a friend after a lengthy conversation (read: rant) about what's happening in our worlds lately.

In big, bold, purple highlighter letters across the top of a page in my journal reads this phrase: this is just one big merry go round. Why? Because we think we’re going somewhere, but actually, at best, we’re going around in circles, and maybe moving up and down in the process. But if you watch this video closely, you’ll see that some of the characters don’t even move vertically! They’re just along for the ride.

I mentioned the merry go round analogy in at least 8 different catch ups during January, and every time it was mentioned, I was met with a solemn nod. It's not something we want to admit, but I think it is undeniably staring us in the face right now and, in the words of one of my favourite bands: "we've got a mirror in between us, we've got to stop looking 'round".

My biggest dilemma, like many others who have ever tried to change the behaviour of others, is where do we go from here? For now, there is an odd, transformational moment when someone goes from "parent" to "coach", like a whistle and a clipboard turns you into a Power Ranger and you suddenly have everything you could possibly need to support the (skill) development of young people. I don't know where this comes from, the notion that two weeks ago you didn't want to do something, and now, all of a sudden, because your name is on the virtual team sheet you are now worthy.

Oh, but when you realise you're not worthy, the excuses come in waves. "I'm just trying my best" - aren't we all. "I've still got my training wheels on" - and yet you keep running people over (I'll write a whole newsletter on that one someday). My personal favourite, the one that makes my blood boil is, "I'm an armchair expert... I've watched enough cricket to know what I'm doing". Is that even possible?

To me, no. It is not possible to watch enough of a sport on the television to magically know how to develop others, and the connection between those ideas baffles me. Where does it come from? How did we get here? On what planet does watching something that everyone else is doing become something you can help others with?

Oh, wait.

When you put it like that, it kinda feels like watching your maths teacher solve a problem and then staring at the problems on your homework sheet and having absolutely no idea how they just did what they did. "Follow my process" they might say, and you do, but even when the numbers are almost identical, it doesn't quite work.. and that pure rage, that frustration from an inability to do something when someone else says "it's easy" or expects you to have done already, is something we will unfortunately know for lifetimes.

"They just don't get it." This line has been breaking me as of late, to the point beyond where kintsugi can work. There is no gold and glue that can keep this fragile teacup together anymore. It baffles me that we can so casually blame 9 year olds for their lack of exposure to the world.

I think I mention it in a podcast with Talking Performance around the tension between the 10,000 hours rule being comically false and scarily accurate in a way, we have just been thinking about it all wrong (and I am not the first to say this of course - check out Myths of Sport Coaching, Chapter 1 by Ed Coughlan).

We. Need. Time. Absolutely, there is no denying that. There is no version of learning and development that is (ironically) acquired, like a health pack in Fortnite so you can continue playing. It's not just floating in the ether, hiding in the back room of a digitally rendered house within the safe zone. It's not a blip on the map telling you where to go. I hate to break it to you, but the world doesn't work like that and of course people love video games, because in that world, it does.

But even in those spaces, you need to directly experience it for yourself. You need to get it wrong before you can get it right. You need to make your way through the landscape and complete appropriately-scaled challenges along the way not just so you can do one thing, but so you understand the process of learning how to do the thing and apply it to anything!

We are not collecting solutions, we are learning the process of creating them. Of trying and failing and eventually succeeding with them. And yes, we can waste time heading in a direction that may not help us solve the problem or achieve our goals, but that's why we constrain environments, to help us head in a useful, functional direction.

To me, when someone doesn't "get it", I immediately blame myself (as the coach). I haven't adequately prepared them for the journey ahead, for the landscape we find ourselves in, and we probably haven't spent enough time in the moments that matter.

That's on me.

My familiarity with the game may mean that I can see/hear/think/feel the moments that matter, and I can maybe recreate them, but it's not about what I see, hear, think or feel. It never was.

And that's the critical point.

No version of this is actually about me, but it is my responsibility. My "experience" therefore only contributes to my ability to slice the game up in a way that maintains the information we need to use to problem-solve. I’ve written about this before in terms of “what needs to be real”.

But we've been here before. We know all this. This 'knowledge' has been around for centuries in some way shape or form and yet, we are going around in circles. Sure, you could say we are moving, but where? Does it really count if it's just up and down, around and around?

Photo by Eleanor Brooke on Unsplash

Lying to ourselves that we're making a difference while the people who think, for a second, that they are worthy of the space and time of others because they occupy an armchair in front of the TV are responsible for the formative learning experiences that make/break young people's relationships with moving their body for a lifetime?

I tried that once, appealing to the ego of it all. We've even tried the angle around higher transfer of skill in more representative learning environments with grassroots coaches who believe "there is not enough time so we will make 11 year olds train for 4 hours a week in the nets" (I wish that wasn't a real example).

It. Didn't. Work.

The tightrope of raising someone's self-awareness while not threatening their identity, an identity that literally didn't exist a few weeks ago but now is burrowed into a part of their psyche that they've genuinely never considered before, and I am expected to connect at that depth with the 1000+ coaches in our systems, without actually going to their training sessions because why on earth would that help.

Just force them to sit through a course at my office, just make them compliant, just turn around after the course and say "they just don't get it" and wipe your hands of it because "you tried your best", right? (Again, a real conversation I’ve had lately)

Yeah. Pots and kettles and the colour black. What can we do to get off this damn ride? I have no idea, but surely, we have to try. As the book Songlines paraphrases Victor Hugo:

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Our time will come.

Someday.

I hope.