By John Harrington

Last Thursday, over 250 GAA Coaching and Games Development staff came together in Maynooth for a training and upskilling event.

As part of the day, world-renowned coaching professional, Wayne Goldsmith, gave a presentation and organised facilitative sessions designed to give the coaches an understanding of what motivates them, how they’d like to develop in the role, and the legacy they’d ultimately like to leave behind them.

Australian native Goldsmith is certainly qualified to help others along their coaching pathway having worked with many Olympic champions and successful teams in a variety of sports since the early 1990s.

What he has learned is that, regardless of the sport, there are a number of universal coaching truths that can help unlock the potential of an athlete while also making their sporting journey a more fulfilling one.

GAA.ie sat down with Goldsmith last week and over the course of an illuminating conversation he shared some solid advice that should give GAA parents, coaches, players, and clubs plenty of food for thought.

Q: Wayne, you do a lot of work in the area of ‘sport parenting’, where you help parents be part of an effective partnership with athletes and coaches. Because Gaelic games are amateur, community-driven sports there’s a lot of parent-coaches and other parental involvement. What tips would you have for parents and parent-coaches who want to support their children’s Gaelic games journey as best as they possibly can?

Wayne Goldsmith: The bottom line is to be a great parent first so that your kids are lying in bed at night, knowing with absolute certainty that they're loved for who they are rather than for what they do.

So, if they're the best player in the team and they get selected to representation level, or they don't, the way you feel about them and the way that you show love to them and the way you accept them and value them shouldn't change.

I often say to parents that whether your child wins or loses it shouldn’t matter. And you've got to be very sensitive because if a kid scores a great goal and you get really excited and you're pumped up and you're telling everybody they're an incredible player and you’re posting about it on social media, you better also do that when they don't score.

Because what kids crave more than anything, especially young kids, is the love and acceptance of their mom and dad. And if they sense I only get love and acceptance when I win or when I'm successful and I don't get it when I lose, that creates a whole bunch of very difficult mental and emotional issues for them.

For some of them it leads to perfectionism, which is not a good thing. It leads to a whole range of behaviours where they're doing whatever they can to get that sense of approval. And, if they fail, they think I'm not loved and not valued. So, I would say to parents, it's highly unlikely your kid is going to be on an All-Ireland winning team. But they're going to be your kids for the rest of your life. Your relationship with them is way more important than their scoring and their athletic ability. So be a good parent first.

The other thing is to step back and allow them to fall in love with the sport. It's their love. It's their passion. It's what they're interested in. It's their commitment. It's not yours. You have got to step back and give them responsibility and ownership over what they're doing.

And the final thing is for parents who also coach - you've got to have a line. And I usually say to parents the car is the line. As soon as you get in the car at the end of the game, the football is over. It's not about athletics, it's about being mum and dad. It's not about giving them feedback on their play or their performance or their attitude.

As soon as they get in the car, you're mom and dad. As soon as you get out of the car at the ground, that's where you can be Coach. You've got to have those lines.

Where parents have been successful playing both roles, they've got a very clear line. You don't talk about it at the dinner table or when you're watching movies.

You don't sit at the end of the bed and give them a debrief on their game for the day. If you pull it off as a parent who's coaching there's got to be a very clear line and you stick to it.

I play a game with parents when I do parent education. I say close your eyes and visualize you're getting in a Tardis, you’re travelling to the future 20 years from now, and your child is walking down the street. What do you want to see?

Every parent I do that with says something like 'Happy. Healthy. Fit. And maybe with a little boy and little girl walking either the side looking at Grandma and Grandad.’

No one says an Olympic gold medal around the neck. No one says an All-Ireland medal. Because in your heart you know what's more important than anything is the happiness, the joy and the love and wellbeing of your child, so you put that first. And then if they've got all the talent in the world to play, then all well and good. But be a good parent first.

Q: As a coach, is it also important to see the person first and focus on the human relationship rather than place too much of an emphasis on developing the athlete?

WG: It's an interesting question that I talked about with the GAA's Coach Developers, that, you know, in its essence what we do is we change lives, we can have such an incredible impact. And I often say to coaches, just close your eyes and think about a coach or a teacher in your life who believed in you. Because coaching is quite often about selling belief.

That someone who believed in you, someone who made you feel that you're extraordinary and you can do great things or somebody who took time to listen to you. Think about them. And what an impact that had on your life.

Because now you're that person. You are now in a position of great power and responsibility to impact on the lives of every athlete that you work with. And it's a very important one to take.

So be thinking about not just how do I help this kid go faster or stronger or score more goals or be more skilful, but how can we impact on this human being? How can I help them with their own sense of self-love and confidence and sense of belief in themselves as people? How do I help that evolve and to put relationships above talent?

One of the biggest mistakes that coaches and parents make all over the world is they worship talent. Because they think that the physical talent of the athlete is all that really matters. And yet the data and the research and anecdotally and even intuitively around the world, we know that those kids who were absolute stars at eight, nine and 10 rarely, if ever, make it to the highest level in an Olympic sport or professional sport. I'm sure it's exactly the same in any sport in Ireland, those early rising superstars who are accelerated in their growth and development rarely make it to the top.

And yet because parents and coaches generally worship physical talent, they start having high expectations of what can happen to the athlete and they put the talent above anything else.

I've been in sport for a long time and when I think of all the Olympic gold medallists and successful rugby league players, AFL players, international rugby players, all the players that I've met over the years....when you start thinking what is it about them that you see consistently, you see things like they're good people, they're selfless, they are really committed, they are passionate about the sport, they love what they do.

Talent isn't the first thing that comes to my mind because it's just not as important as people think. The things that drive success are character, loving what you do so you do what you love, all those things are generally the driving factors for most great athletes. You've got to have some talent to be at an elite level of course, but it's nowhere near as important as people think.

Now, the beauty of that is that as a coach and as a parent I can influence those things. I can't influence genetic talent, but I can influence attitude. I can teach values, I can teach virtues. I can teach them all those things that will underpin their success. The key for coaches is keep that in mind. But also that like any like anything that works, it's relationship-based.

A wonderful line that that a lot of people use around the world is that kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And when you think about the best coaches that I've seen at any level, the players will say, 'we love the guy', or, 'she's a great coach. She'd do anything for us.'

They talk about them almost as family and they talk about their relationship and they talk about their connection and how much they really care about them as human beings. I think with young coaches the trap that they make is they become overly obsessed with the physiology. It's all about drills and sets and heart rate and lactate testing. They get overly obsessed with the physiology and don't spend enough time on understanding what coaching is really about and how important the relationship side is.

So our message always to young coaches is don't worship your talent. Don't be overly focused on the things that easily can be easily measured and seen and counted. Spend as much time as you can understanding human behaviour and how to work with human beings.

Q: As in all team-sports, there’s a high drop-out rate in Gaelic games once players hit their mid-teens. Is there anything from a coaching perspective we can do to address this?

WG: What we're seeing in sport is there's high competition for kids in a lot of sports around the world and the number of kids who are playing organized competitive sports is falling. The number of kids who play rugby in New Zealand has fallen dramatically and it was happening before COVID. The number of kids who play soccer in England has fallen. The number of kids who swim in Australia competitively is half what it was in the nineties.

So, there's a global trend towards kids walking away from organized, competitive sport and you've got to ask yourself, ‘why?’ Why would that be happening in so many countries?

I think so much of it is due to an overemphasis on too high competition at too young age. That's one of the big reasons.

Another reason is how that then flows through into the coaching and the way we develop athletes, which has become too obsessed with physical development and not enough on holistic development of athletes. But we see these patterns around the world. When you talk to kids about why they leave sport, there's a big dropout rate in three areas in most sports.

Entry to high school because their life's expanded and they get exposed to other things, mid high-school because the ‘fumes’ gets them, the car fumes and the perfumes, they just grow up and they want to experience the world and earn a living and get a job and explore the world a little bit more. And then exit from high school into university.

And when you look at the data about why kids drop out of sport, particularly in mid-teens, most of them will say the sport just didn't adapt to my evolution and my growth and didn't give me enough flexibility or understanding of what I need as a 15 or 16 year old. My coaches were still coaching me as if I was a 10 or 12 year old. Going back to the clubs, you know that's happening, you know that there's dropout rates and you know that that's going to happen. You've got to have strategies around it. You’ve got to say we can't coach the 14, 15, 16 year olds the way we coach the eight, nine, 10-year-olds.

Eight, nine, ten-year-olds still think that being a superhero is a potential career choice and they're playing Pokemon. 15/16 year-olds are saying, ‘how do I get money? How do I get a girlfriend boyfriend? How do I get a driver's license?’

They're different human beings, they're different in their psychological and emotional development. You can't coach in the same way. So the clubs who succeed understand that evolution and they adapt to it, and they've got a pathway and a model which facilitates that working. The ones who don't get it just have a do whatever they can and hope for the best approach. Wishing and hoping and luck are not strategies for success.

Q: In Gaelic games, quite often the same cohort of coaches will coach a team from U-8 to U-18 because their children are part of the group. To be a good coach, is it important to have a growth mindset so you adapt to the needs of the players as they get older?

WG: Yes, you have to. I say to coaches that your own learning and development has to be equal to or greater than that of your athletes because otherwise you'll lose relevance, that's a really important concept. And the reason why it's more important now than ever is that because of your phone, anyone can get anything anywhere anytime for free.

Kids and their families now have access to the same information that coaches do. There's no secrets. Everybody knows what everybody knows, because of the access to the information on the net. And therefore as a coach I'm going, 'well how do I become or stay relevant?' Because they know all the drills and they know the routines and they know what the All-Ireland players are doing because it's all on there. So, what have I really got to offer?

The thing you've got to offer is relationships with athletes. Listening to them, understanding what their needs are, inspiring them, giving them what I call the power of choice instead of telling them what to do all the time.

Presenting them choices, taking them through what the advantages are of doing things in a certain way and allowing them to choose and take responsibility and ownership for their own destiny. That's what modern coaching looks like. The old way of coaching which was standing there and telling and yelling at the athletes, it's gone.

And the coaches who were doing that are seeing the numbers decline. They're reluctant to change because when it really comes down to it they believe the only thing we know for absolute certain that gets kids better is consistent hard training. So a lot of coaches still will not move from that. Just do more, do it more often and do it harder. But the statistics and the data around the world are saying really clearly that kids don't want that. It's not that they don't want to work hard. That's a big myth in sport that kids are lazy but that's not true.

The thing that hasn't changed quickly enough are coaches and coaching. We've been too slow to adapt to the different way they want to learn, the different way they want to be communicated with, the different way that they want to feel like they're part of the process rather than just being dictated to.

And you've only to spend time with High School teachers and ask them how have kids changed in the last 10 years? They'll tell you, 'we no longer do Power Point presentations at them, we give them a problem and they solve the problem and do PowerPoints back to us.'

It's a partnership in learning. We create an environment where learning is inevitable rather than standing there and saying, 'do it, do it, do it, do it.'

Coaches in general have been too slow to pick it up. But it's time that we jump on that and understood that that's the way the world has changed.

Q: Should GAA clubs encourage greater communication and exchange of ideas between the coaches and managers of teams at the different age-groups right up to senior level? Would that approach help foster a more consistent club culture and playing style?

WG: It's a good idea. And particularly having the influence of the senior coaches down through the club. Because the senior coaches are the custodians of the style of play that defines the club. And their influence then down on the development-level coaches and the emerging coaches can be huge. I'm a big believer that when a young player knocks on the door of the senior team, they should be ready to go.

It's not the job of the senior coach to teach them how to be a senior player. The job of the senior coach is to help them be a remarkable senior player. But by the time they get there the coaches along the way have developed in them the capabilities they need. The understanding of nutrition, hydration, injury management, skills of the game, tactics, strategies. They should have all that in place so that when they knock on the senior team door, they're ready to go.

And the senior coach takes them up to another level. That starts with the senior coaches having influence all the way through the system. And one of the smartest things clubs can do is to say to the senior coach, look, I know you're busy, and I know you've got a lot of commitments. But we want you to have influence on the developing coaches so we've got that consistency and philosophy and culture flowing throughout the club.

A lot of coaches will ask me questions all the time about developing a values-based club or an organization. Culture is really easy to describe. Culture is what you do. So I can walk into a sport pretty much anywhere in the world and within 10/15 minutes you get a feel for what the culture is like because you there's an energy, there's a presence, there's a there's a feel about what they do. There's behaviours and there's things you pick up on really quickly.

The most successful teams that I've had anything to do with like Canterbury Crusaders in rugby, a couple of AFL teams, a couple of rugby league teams…the ones that have been so consistently good for a long period of time…when you talk to them and ask them how have you been so successful for so long, they say very consistent things.

They say, because we know who we are. We know what it means to be us. We know what it looks like to play like someone from Tipperary or Cork or Antrim, we know who we are. Then we recruit and develop players who will sustain our culture and will sustain our values. And then we work harder than anyone else who's prepared to. Those messages are so consistent.

What I see in clubs that don't succeed is they don't have a real sense of who they are. And every time they bring in a new head coach, the head coach says we're gonna go that way and everybody goes that way and the next head coach comes in and they change the values and change the systems.

The ones that have got it right, they've got this clear sense of identity. And the people they bring in make it better. They don't change everything. I'm a big believer in the motto that you’ve got to play like your place. I think there's a unique culture in this country in every county or in every club. And you've got to understand that and embrace it and become part of that connection with the community, connection with geography, and really understand what it is you stand for, who you are. Once you've got that established then that sense of culture and those values flow through the club.

If you don't know who you are, if you don't know what you stand for....it's like Alice in Wonderland talking to the Cheshire Cat. She asks the cat which way should she go. The cat ask her where she wants to get to and she doesn't know and he says well then it doesn't matter what direction you go in, does it?

The club that have got a clear vision, and the ones who've got a clear sense of culture and clear values are able to sustain a level of success where they're always competitive. The ones who don't have that have massive variations based on personalities, and relying on the luck of the talent that comes in. So a wonderful exercise for clubs to do is ask themselves, 'Who are we? What's our identity? What are our values? What do we stand for? What does it look like to be a player from this club?'

Once you know that, the rest is not as difficult as people think. But they just they don't spend enough time understanding who they are. And once you know who you are you also start to develop what we call 'The Power of Why'.

Once you understand who you are and then understand why am I doing this, what's motivating me, what's in my heart, why am I doing what I'm doing...they're the exercises you’ve got to do with clubs early on to help them know understand those things. And then building around that once you've built those foundations is not as difficult as you think.

Q: Quite often parents are reluctant to coach their children’s teams because they didn’t play the game to a high level and so don’t believe they have the technical knowledge. How do we encourage them to get involved and what would you say are the benefits of getting involved in sports coaching?

WG: Where I'm seeing the best organisations evolve with coaching is their understanding of the actual needs of the coaches that are out there doing the job.

So what does a parent-coach who has no experience need to know? They need to know do I make this fun, how do I put smiles on their faces so they come back next week, how do I keep them safe, how do I help them learn. They don’t need to know overly-complicated sports science or how to write a training session.

The one thing we all failed at, including myself for a long time, was that we didn't coach coaches to coach. We coached them to understand sports science, periodisation, and writing training sessions. We didn't coach them how to inspire the hearts, minds, and spirt of a young child.

Coaching isn’t for everybody, and the first thing I do when I talk to coaching groups is to help them discover their ‘why?’

I tell people that being a coach gives you the opportunity to change the lives of human beings in a way that most other people can never comprehend, that you can make a positive impact and make people realise their potential.

Coaches don't just help a player get better, they can change their lives. There's a lot of people in the world that need help and we can't do it quite often in ways that we would like to. But go to a football field or go to a sporting field and connect with them, listen to them, respect them, help them understand that what they want out of their life is quite often within their own control. Teach them that they can make choices on the football field or hurling or swimming or anything.

I say to coaches that you can teach children how you can respond to a loss, you can teach them how to respond to a set-back or adversity or disappointment. And then, through their life, when those things happen, and it's all going to happen, what you've taught them is a life-changing skill on how do I respond when bad things happen, how do I respond to disappointment and failure. This is a really powerful tool to give to a teenager.

So that's the reason why. The easy, joyful, relaxed environment of sport gives you an opportunity to teach lessons that then impact positively on the rest of their lives.