Coaches Corner

I recently met Paddy Fay for a catch up. We met in Raheny GAA Club bar and the breadth of his sporting background was on show. All the GAA lads seemed to know Paddy and he explained that he used to be the Director of Underage Football in the club. It was something I never knew about Paddy. His athletics coaching career included the athletics team in Lusk National School, where he was a teacher, and their success was exceptional particularly at sprints and relays. But primary school athletics was far from the pinnacle of his coaching career and when he finally retired he had amassed 59 National Senior medals, including 22 golds, 20 Irish Internationals and 4 Olympians. It was Paddy’s move into relays in the mid 90 that defined his legacy.  He recalled being handed the reigns of the National Sprint and Relay programme in late 1995, more of a toss and ‘there you go’ than a handoff. Morale was at an all-time low with the relays. Paddy wrote to all national sprint squ...

Picture at last weekend's Ton Le Gaoithe Wind Sprint Meet (Brian Corcoran, Paul McKee, Paddy Fay, Shane McCormack) According to Wikipedia, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. The graph below was presented by Athletigen, a sports genetics and performance company, to represent the Coach's brain. The profile of a large percentage of our elite (sprints) coaches in Ireland is very young, i.e. coaching only 5-10 years. All probably early in their coaching careers, all enjoying relative success and all thinking they are somewhat the bees knees. Confidence is high. As we progress and go through generations of athletes, achieve more success but also failure and generally become more experienced, per the Dunning-Kruger effect we will likely hit a crisis of confidence.  It's at this stage in our coaching lifecycle when...

The following article by Drew and Hayley Harrison was first published by the UL Communications and Marketing Department in May 2017. It is several months since Thomas Barr stunned the nation with his performances in Rio, coming 4 th in the Olympic 400mH final and breaking 48 seconds for the first time. Six months on and we are back to our normal routine working by day and coaching athletes on evenings and weekends as we have done for the last 22 years at the University of Limerick. In sport, the challenge to set the bar ever higher is always a priority. We believe that the key to success lies in optimising the total training environment for the athlete; this includes ensuring good facilities, equipment, proximity and quality of accommodation, quality of the training squad and the quality of the support structures around the athletes. A key element of the high performance environment is coaching. Coaches play a pivotal role in setting and monitoring all aspects of the training e...

This is Part II of the Shane McCormack presentation on Sprint Development including case studies on three athletes including Phil Healy.

Irish badminton player, Scott Evans, tweeted this article about the Danish way of creating champions. Denmark is the mecca of Badminton in Europe and Scott moved there in his teens to immerse himself with the best coaches and players in Europe.   The article is by Nicklas Pyrdol and he introduces the Danish model of not just producing great athletes but also great people. He says  "let’s face it, medals are for the very few, so the rest still has to be able to get a good life.". He lays out the 6 simple aspects of how they do it. The part of becoming better together reminds me of points made on the recent discussion on coaching here  on the Jumping The Gun site. Irish athletes David Campbell and Ciaran O'Lionaird talked about their experiences and how athletes working together will yield greater results. However, the relentless pursuit of success mentioned by both on the same podcast would seem at odds with the Danish model of being more rounded and h...