Rugby Coach Weekly

Send us a textDan 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 matthew.gold@abingdon.org.uk.The link for his podcast is: Goldy's Rugby podcastsTo find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly To find out more about our Partner Club offer, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textHost 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 FerrisCoaching Athletes to Be Their Best: Motivational Interviewing in Sports – Stephen RollnickCynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World – Dave SnowdenSUGGESTED CONTENT/WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSEDThe Tim Ferris Show – Dr. Jim Loehr on Mental Toughness, Energy Management, the Power of Journaling, and Olympic Gold Medals – Tim FerrisHow to Organise a Children's Party – Cognitive EdgeHegarty on Creativity: There are No Rules – John HegartyDoug Lemov - The Coach’s Guide to Teaching – The Sports Psych Show hosted by Dan AbrahamsThe 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 PodcastLet’s Talk Coaching: Shaun Edwards - The Loose Head PodcastTo find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly To find out more about our Partner Club offer, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textBird 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, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textJamie 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 sessionsWhy a coach needs to be much more than an environmental designerThe role of cognition in learning How coaches can use professional judgement and decision making to decide which principles and methods to use and whenWhat factors does it depend on when we say "it depends"RESOURCES/REFERENCESRobert Bjork Desirable Difficulties:https://bit.ly/DesirableDifficultyPam Richards Research on Shared Mental Models:https://bit.ly/NetballCaseStudyhttps://bit.ly/HolisticSMMFrameworkImplementing the Five-A Model of Technical Refinement: Key Roles of the Sport Psychologist:https://bit.ly/5AModelProfessional Judgement and Decision Making in SportCoaching: To Jump Or Not To Jump:https://bit.ly/PJDMPaperVisit Jamie at:https://twitter.com/jattaylor Jamie@greymattersuk.comTo find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly To find out more about our Partner Club offer, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textDan 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 analysisHow analysis creates new thoughtsHow do we make analysis easy to use for coaches to make sense of itWhat is the most essential information availableWinning the battle of the metricsWhat does "opportunities taken and missed" mean for a coachHow do you have positive conversations with players with the dataWhat is a perfect pass?How can we analyse decision makingWhat sort of analysis can you do when you are simply watching the gameFor more on Pass Analysis visit www.passanalysis.co.ukTo find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly To find out more about our Partner Club offer, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textHost 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 LancashireThe 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, 2011What 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, 2020SUGGESTED CONTENT/WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSEDImproving "impoverished practice environments" - a conversation Ian Renshaw, Peter Arnott and Graeme McDowell – The Talent Equation hosted by Stu ArmstrongCoach Developer Conversations: Bob Muir – Navigating The Terrain of Coach Learning – hosted by Andy BradshawCurious Coaching Podcast: Elaine Rice, Tandy Haughey & Lucy Moore – Sport Northern IrelandRugby Coach Weekly: Reviewing research into what keeps good young players in the game with Jonny McMurtry from Coachingthecoaches.net – hosted by Dan CottrellTo find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly To find out more about our Partner Club offer, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textLiza 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, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textHost Phil Llewellyn with guests review some of the many great podcasts, books, articles and webinars from the last week. This week's guests:Sandro Fiorino, Rugby Canada Women's head coach and 7s academy head coach, Jack Hanratty, Rugby Canada academy coach and Canada Women U20s head coach and Graeme Moffat, Director of Rugby for Rugby Alberta and Wolf PackThe 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:Building your inner coach with Brett Ledbetter - TEDxGatewayArcHow to stop comparing and start competing with Brett Ledbetter – TEDxGatewayArchThe Sport Psych Show podcast with Dan Clements – Hosted by Dan Abrahams The Test - AmazonSUGGESTED CONTENT/WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSEDStrategising effective questioning within the TGfU model – Ryan White (Blog)How England Select Cricket Teams – Matt Roller (ESPN CricInfo) (Article)Game Feedback: What happens in the AFL coaches box? - Rob Mason (Blog Part 1)When given feedback isn't feedback received – Rob Mason (Blog Part 2)The Magic Academy Podcast with Alex Lascu and Courtney Winfield – Russell EarnshawLet's Talk Coaching Part 2 with Fiona Hayes – The Loose Head PodcastTo find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly To find out more about our Partner Club offer, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textAndy Stevens sits down to chat with Richard Cheetham and James Clark about coaching, coach development and skills of being a coach.The main topics were:A picture of ideal coach development.How transferable coaching skills can be, and does a coach need an in-depth knowledge of their sport.The importance of reflection and who to include in the process.Key reading and resource recommendations.Richard Cheetham MBE, a Senior Fellow in Sports Coaching at the University of Winchester, with a holistic approach to coaching and experience across a wide range of sports.Twitter: @twowheelprofJames Clark, a highly respected rugby coach and passionate coach developer. A proud member of The Front Row Club.Twitter: @JSClarky3To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly To find out more about our Partner Club offer, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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 a textDan Cottrell invites Dave Sharkey, Ged Hall and Edd Conway to say how they would use Doug Lemov's latest book, The Coach's Guide to Teaching in their own environments.Bestselling author and teaching guru Doug has drawn on his vast practical classroom experience to see he can help coaches produce better players. The panel discusses their main takeaways from the book in the context of their own coaching.The main areas covered are:Decision makingPractice designFeedbackThe book is enormously rich in stories, practical examples, sourced from people like Wayne Smith, Nick Winkleman, Dave Hadfield, Johan Cruyff, Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll.Click here to buy a copy of the book.Here's the book blurb.The mark of a great coach is a constant desire to learn and grow. A hunger to use whatever can make them better. The best-selling author of Teach Like a Champion and Reading Reconsidered brings his considerable knowledge about the science of classroom teaching to the sports coaching world to create championship caliber coaches on the court and field. What great classroom teachers do is relevant to coaches in profound ways. After all, coaches are at their core teachers. Lemov knows that coaches face many of the same challenges found in the classroom, so the science of learning applies equally to them. Unfortunately, coaches and organizations have a mixed level of understanding of the research and study of the science of learning. Sometimes coaches and organizations build their teaching on myths and platitudes more than science. Sometimes there isn't any science applied at all. While there are thousands of books and websites a coach can consult to better understand technical and tactical aspects of the game, there is nothing for a coach to consult that explicitly examines the teaching problems on the field, the court, the rink, and the diamond. Until now. Intended to offer lessons and guidance that are applicable to coaches of any sporting endeavor including everyone from parent volunteers to professional coaches and private trainers, Lemov brings the powerful science of learning to the arena of sports coaching to create the next generation of championship caliber coaches.To find out more about this podcast and many others, go to Rugby Coach Weekly To find out more about our Partner Club offer, there's a great webinar coming up: FIND OUT MORE HEREAlso, 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!