The Art of Coaching is a new book on the principles that underline the Australian game of football. Based on David Wheadon’s extensive career as an assistant coach at many AFL clubs, and with a primary focus on AFL, it is also a comparative study of the other sports around the world and the great similarities in the principles inherent to those sports and Australian football. We are thrilled to share an excerpt below.
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When I started in football back in 1968, a raw teenager out of Colac in Victoria’s Western District, coaching was very much a one-man band. This was the era of Bob Rose, my coach at Collingwood, of Norm Smith, Tommy Hafey, John Coleman, John Kennedy and Ron Barassi—all strong men, all considered the dynamic leaders of not just their team, but their club.
On match day the coach would crouch on the bench, all but on the playing arena. He had an assistant on hand, and often a Football Record in hand, no doubt checking the numbers on the backs of the opposition. The assistant was usually the Reserves coach as well. Teams were chosen by the members of the match committee, none of whom were full-timers—more often than not they were former greats of the club whose analysis of the game was based on instinct and their on-field experiences.
These leaders had strategies that they believed in and coached even if they were not formally written down. Tactics were few and simple. Statistics were rudimentary—usually one or two people marking each player’s kicks, marks and handballs—and video analysis was left to the pundits on TV’s World of Sport. It was a time of personality leadership, of great men leading the pack through a mix of rhetoric, charisma and, more often than not, an aura of awe and power.
Coaching has changed so much since then, but the fundamental definition of the role of the coach has not. It remains, and always will remain, to improve individual and team performance.
Coaches are no longer dictatorial figures: now they run a department of all but equals, focusing on leadership, mentoring, teaching and managing, and analysis, inspiration and belief. The coach’s performance is not only dependent on their own performance but also on their capacity to choose the total football department (or enhance what they have inherited), to manage and encourage input from all who report to them, and to manage up (to their executive and board, and ultimately the fans) and down (to their assistants and the playing list).
Football knowledge—how the game is played, and how it can be played—is obviously a fundamental in any coach’s bag of tricks, but it has become clear to me that the coach’s total role has more to do with teaching and people management than debating the pros and cons of the long-kicking game versus possession footy. Much of the scientific part of footy—analysis of game trends and game plans, statistics, patterns, physiology, training routines, diet, and so on—can often be easily handed off to experts in these fields, single-focus analysts who can report to the coach without fear or favour.
As the game has become totally professional, and football departments have grown from hardly any staff to double figures, the teaching and management part of the coach’s role has become the most dominant and most effective: the coach must possess the capacity to find the right people who can teach, put them in the right positions, expect them to be accountable for their niche of knowledge, and listen to their findings, advice and ideas, keeping those that sit with the general philosophy of the coach and the football department and discarding those that don’t. Senior coaches do not have to accept all that is put before them, but must never put up a wall between themselves and their personal views, and never thwart the ideas and enthusiasm of the team they trust to help them grow the club’s win-loss ratio.
My firm view, developed after working with (and for) an array of senior coaches in six clubs—a period extending from 1985 to the time of writing—is that coaching is an art based on a science. The art is the same art that belongs to the best teachers, those who can engage and inspire their students while calling on their own great experience and learning of how things have worked, are working and can work into the future. The best coaches draw together the art of communication, the art of engagement, the art of motivating and, importantly, the art of bringing together a diverse group to perform to understood routines, game plans and processes instinctively, while never discounting flair and excellence beyond the norm.
The best coaches have an innate ability to build unyielding relations with players and staff, and know how to teach different individuals, read people and draw the best out of each person via listening and empathy. When I joined Kevin Sheedy’s coaching staff at the end of 1991, I soon realised how much importance he placed on human interaction—on reading his players and his staff, knowing what drove them and what made them tick.
It is this art of people management—these days given the label of “applying emotional intelligence”—that has always defined Kevin, and it is this art that makes the difference. Wayne Bennett, coach of seven NRL premierships, strongly argues this case. In an interview with Lee Wharton on Fox Sports Pulse some years ago, he said categorically, “You’ve got to realise that coaching is not a science—it’s an art!”
Unfortunately, despite clear evidence to the contrary, some coaches still believe that professional sporting clubs are little more than sports science laboratories. There’s a place for science, but it all depends on the balance, and the management of all the components that go into a winning formula. Much was made of the success of Major League Baseball (MLB) manager Billy Beane’s recruiting-to-a-budget policy, made clear in the best-selling book (and movie) Moneyball, in which data analysis changed the way the club chose its list. Such science might procure a strong list of players, but it needs to be balanced with people management—pushing that playing talent to its best potential.
Mark Thompson, who reinvented himself as a coach and reinvented the way his Geelong team approached the game after some disappointing seasons through the early 2000s, explained in a 2009 interview how he had changed the way he prepared himself and his players: “I was a facts and figures man and I’ve grown away from that because I see them as less important than some of the other stuff … the relationships and the communication and just appreciating what people can do and try to help them.” Mark had replaced Gary Ayres after the 1999 season, and went through tough times (7th, 12th, 9th, 12th, 4th, 5th, 10th), including a knife’s-edge decision to reappoint him in 2007, before leading the club into its greatest era, with a phenomenal win-loss record and flags in 2007 and 2009.
I was close at hand through this successful period, and watched as things changed. Mark had employed as assistant coaches excellent teachers in Ken Hinkley, Brenton Sanderson and Brendan McCartney (all to become AFL senior coaches), and he allowed all of us the freedom to coach in our own preferred manner. The same theme was applied to the players, who were encouraged to express their flair and creativity within the new discipline of an exciting run-and-carry-based game plan backed up by a very strong, tough and disciplined defence. These two features summed up what Mark had loved about football when he was an Essendon champion. It was not a closed shop: he would have players in his office for chats and would walk around discussing different issues informally with his players and staff.
Fundamental characteristics of successful coaches
Many different characters succeed at coaching—at all levels of leadership, in fact—but to be a great coach, no matter what the individual’s personality, they must have the following in their DNA.
1. The coach must understand the game they are coaching.
This is as fundamental as a chef in a great restaurant understanding not just how to cook, but flavours, textures, historical treatments, and also that a successful restaurant depends on much more than such knowledge. In the AFL, as Geelong showed with its appointment of Chris Scott, football knowledge is a must but it cannot be the only component in a coach’s repertoire. It is a first among equals.
2. The coach must be a people manager.
This is very broad, and its application can differ from person to person. However, some basics include listening, absorbing, communicating (to and from), recognising talent and how to grow that talent, engaging, and respecting individuals no matter what their background, education or past history. As the game has evolved so too have the skill sets and personalities in the football department: a list manager has different needs from a high-performance manager. The coach must empathetically understand how each works, and nurture their strengths while reducing their weaknesses.
3. The coach must understand the club’s culture and assist its development.
It is important for a coach not only to try to develop a team culture but to ensure that this culture is policed by the performance department and the players. That is why leadership groups are developed at AFL clubs—to discover and embrace and evangelise this magical culture. The greatest influence on culture at a club is almost always the oldest and highest-profile players. Standards of behaviour off the field, attitude to training and competitiveness on game day affect everybody around a club. A powerful culture that is well understood and completely embraced by all is probably more important than a complex game plan. A great culture—encompassing work ethic, “team first”, respect, enjoyment, good humour and a constant search for what’s best for all—is the undefined magic that makes some teams more successful than others, and not just for flashes but through multiple generations.
4. The coach must be constantly curious.
The game changes almost by the week, and the best coaches are always alert to trends as they develop, and capable of pushing key staff to evaluate change and its impact, aware of the potential for roles to change within the team list, and ready for structures and game plans to be varied as quickly as the game evolves; or, better, ahead of the general trend. A coach must never wonder and never be a believer in that old line “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, as the game is always changing; at the same time, managing momentum can be just as important as managing change. In reality football teams are never standing still—they are either going forwards or backwards.
5. The coach must be able to bring all the above together, as a teacher and mentor.
The art of coaching is bringing it all together—as former Australian prime minister Paul Keating said of one of his budgets, of “bringing home the bacon”. The best teachers know the best way to teach each player and how each player learns; they gather all the knowledge given to them and apply it to all the players in their class. The coach has more than that to consider—his or her “class” can range from crusty 50-year-old list managers to recently retired, highly ambitious assistants, to 300-gamers to wide-eyed teenagers having their first look at a new world, a professional sporting world that will always be unreal to most of us. The ability to calmly apply the total philosophy to this group is what marks out the best coaches.
The Art of Coaching by David Wheadon, RRP $29.95, Slattery Media Group, is out now.
