Wider base, taller peaks: How motivation can impact participation AND performance

/ Nudgee College/

I was fortunate to present as part of Day 1 of Nudgee Coaching Forum on Friday evening with the theme of the weekend being COOPETITION, the concept of sharing ideas with your direct competitors and focusing on the importance and impact of coaches for youth development. Along with Brad Thorn and James O’Connor being present, Dr Jonathon Weakley and familiar face of Ryan Schultz talked about coopetition in sport and leadership in age grade rugby respectively. Tying together my presentation, which looked at and discussed ideas of motivation for our youth players, there was a real subtheme around the importance of connection with your athletes and understanding your players as people and not solely as athletes, combing ideas and opinions from shared research by Weakley and Schultz plus answers and opinions from Thorn and O’Connor.

For me, it was an interesting evening; seeing many familiar faces in the room having coached with, around or across the field of many in years gone past yet having stepped away from week to week coaching to focus on research and writing for the past 3 or so years. I reflected on and shared how my journey started; having my eldest son drop out of rugby at 14 from a misalignment of goals or understanding between him, the youth player and the coach. On years of questioning, reading and research, I found this was not uncommon amongst other sports, finding a massive drop out in the “transition age” of athlete; sports players or participants exiting their school environment and entering HP sports environments or the big world of club or senior organised sport. Why I hear you ask…what did my research or other similar research find that youth athletes are chasing that possibly we as coaches or sports organisations not offering? What factors are causing drop out in adolescent or young adult sports and could burnout research give us some flags to be aware of? What do we need to change as coaches or organisations to “widen our base to heighten our peak” as wonderfully described by Dr Weakley? Let’s have a review of some of the ideas discussed on Friday evening….

I wanted to discuss what can motivate and demotivate our young players to our state’s best coaches. Being a rugby forum, I shared some of my findings from the sport specific side of the research. On questioning the personal strivings of selected age grade players representing the Super Franchises of Australian Rugby, I outlined that I found a high level of intrapersonal, achievement focused goals. Most of the players involved and questioned showed a strong drive and desire to make themselves a better player and even person from being involved in rugby union, focusing on and working towards achieving goals important to them as individuals with “improve” being the most used term for player’s sport specific goals or motivations at both stages of the season. These findings and ideas were beautifully supported by James O’Connor during their Q&A session; he wonderfully described how throughout his playing career, he has had a continual desire to question, develop and grow as an individual, even if sometimes losing his way and focus throughout his 12+ year professional career. I go on to talk about how there was very little mention of winning games, flags or championships as example and more challengingly, pretty much all of goals found using terms such as “fun” or “enjoyment” was found away from the rugby fields!! This made me question the coaches present; do we know what fun looks like to our age grade players? Are we offering them a “fun environment” based on their measures as opposed to ours?

I reflected on the work of Amanda Visek and her team at George Washington University. Her and her team’s work around developing a theoretical framework of fun using a novel mixed-method assessment of participants in sport (FUN MAPS) via concept mapping offered a great snapshot of what main determinants for fun were for sports participants aged between 9-19. I shared some of the top five areas which included:

  • ’trying hard’ (setting and achieving goals, being strong and confident, working hard and competing)

  • positive coaching’ (when a coach encourages the team or treats players with respect, allows mistakes while staying positive, communicates clearly and takes players perspective into consideration)

  • ‘learning and improving’ (being challenged to improve and get better at your sport, learning from mistakes and/or new skills)

I discussed and described with the coaches present how this was a bit of light bulb moment; reflecting on my work and research, I could see how the achievement focused goals of the Super franchise players tied into the ‘trying hard’ section of the mapping while their most common term of “improve” obviously ties in strongly with the third mentioned section. However, I discussed the importance of how ‘positive coaching’ can actually impact fun and enjoyment at an age grade level. Ideas included clear communication, taking players perspective into account and treating players with respect, ideas supported from other rugby specific research I shared.

I discussed some rugby specific papers released in the past couple of years; Sam McKenzie from Auckland Uni Tech and Jeremy McLean from Uni of Waikato. I used these papers as reflective ideas on what positive and negative impact coaching interventions can have to players motivations. Starting with Mckenzie’s research, looking at a group of 1st XV school players in Auckland, it discussed how coaches wanted to offer autonomy supportive behaviours, which include providing choice for athletes, providing a rationale for tasks and limits, providing non-controlling competence feedback, acknowledging the athlete’s feelings and perspectives and providing opportunity for athletes to show initiative and act independently. However, as the competition started and the season rolls along, controlling behaviours such as criticisms, controlling statements, dictating how they were to play on-field and whom played when crept back into their coaching environment. These coaching behaviours prevented players from being able to express themselves during games & led to examples of player dissatisfaction, lack of understanding and reduced enjoyment of their sporting experience. How did the players respond?? Unsurprisingly, the playing participants sometimes resisted this control through covert and overt displays of power. The 1st XV players found the expectation on performance often led to a fear of failure, while the expectation of commitment was too much when taking into account their rugby and school workloads. From this paper, we can already see the negative impact controlling coaching behaviours has on motivation and engagement for our age grade players.

As a contrast, McLean’s research which looked at the benefits of introducing a games based approach to 16-18 year old male and female players, found that player motivation is increased as practice situations are more active and player autonomy is elevated, where players feel they can move in to a position of decision-making within the team (Evans & Light, 2008). Contrasting the controlling behaviours offered to the Auckland based 1st XV players, introducing a more games based and collaborative style of coaching, coaches are seen as more of a facilitator and learning is socially constructed between the coach and players, built on ‘equal’ relationships which in turn increases motivation and engagement for players. I described how the coach’s role is to design and modify the practice environment through games, game scenarios, activities and problem setting, which encourages the players to problem-solve by modifying the practice environment and design or through questioning, facilitating group discussion, problem-solving and collaboration scenarios. The players are then afforded the opportunity to test and reflect on their strategies, tactics and skills back into the practice context, all in an attempt to develop their understanding of the sport. Again, these ideas tie in well with the findings from my research and the mapping displayed from Visek’s investigations around fun.

Flicking back to the “transition player”, I reminded the group of coaches for signed of burnout in sport, many of which can lead to drop out for the late adolescent athletes. Not only should we as coaches be watching the physical elements of exhaustion, we need to know and recognise burnout can be as a result of emotional exhaustion, which can come from multiple factors including reduced sense of accomplishment and devaluation of sport. Fransen’s research seen how we can reduce burnout symptoms by fostering a sense of shared identification and making people feel and behave as members of the same team. I emphasised to coaches that understanding, cooperation and responsiveness in coach athlete relationships shall prevent burnout, which echoes findings from McLean’s research and ideas around leadership styles described by Ryan Schultz earlier in the evening.

Schultz talked about his leadership modelling work and the importance of a transformational leadership style; this is defined as where a leader works with teams or followers beyond their immediate self-interests to identify needed change, creating a vision to guide the change through influence, inspiration, and executing the change in tandem with committed members of a group. Brad Thorn echoed these ideas, reiterating the importance of developing connection with his Super Rugby players so he has the ability to offer short, sharp feedback which they know is coming from a good, empathetic space. He even commented how the greatest pre game speech he had from one of the NRL’s greatest coaches, Wayne Bennett was three words; “Be Brad Thorn”. He led on to describe that Bennett knew exactly what Thorn needed to hear to get him out of his slump and make him perform based on the connection and empathy Wayne had showed to him in many years prior.

So, how important is creating an engaging atmosphere and motivating our youth athletes? Like mentioned during the evening, the actions of our grassroots coaches has an long term impact on our HP coaches such as Brad Thorn and Dave Rennie. As described, controlling coaching behaviours can led to lack of enjoyment, decreased sense of achievement and ultimately dropout…in turn narrowing our base and lowering our peak! We need to remember to focus on who we’re coaching and how we’re communicating as opposed to what we’re coaching; context is key…understanding whom is standing in front of you and what motivates them to be involved (and stay involved) in the game is critical to your practice design and coaching methodologies. We as coaches need to focus on connection before direction; as the research suggests, we as coaches should be focused on our positive behaviours and setting the right environment for athletes to test themselves in goals that are meaningful for them as opposed to offering too much technical or tactical feedback. I reminded the coaches present that “athletes don’t care what you know until they know that you care”; we should reflect and build our interpersonal skills to allow us to take time to better know and understand our athletes to gain a holistic view of involved players. The art of coaching is knowing how and when to communicate, and how this varies from individual. Work on empathetic relationships and having a better understanding of your athletes or players as this will allow you to modify your environment or approaches for greater impact and understanding. Know your players, know their story, know their context and then put it into practice.