AI: It's Your New Assistant Coach!

By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * AI is a tool. We have done tools before and we survived every one of them. * The brief you give AI determines the quality of the information you get back. * It will never replace coaches - but it can hand coaches their time back and that’s the real prize. It’s the question I get more than any other now. Every week, in every country, in every sport. New Zealand. Canada. Ireland. The UK. Doesn’t matter where I’m standing. A coach puts their hand up and asks me about AI. So here’s what I’ve learned - from using it heavily in my own work, from working with professional teams and from talking to people who understand this stuff far better than I do. Tools: we have been here before, my friends: The stopwatch was a tool. Just a tool. The handheld video camera was a tool. Just a tool. The laptop, the tablet, the GPS unit. Just tools. All of them were going to change coaching forever…yet here we still are. AI is just another tool. Assistant Coach: the brief determines the session: Here’s the way I want coaches to think about it. Imagine you’re the head coach of a rugby team and a new assistant coach walks in. If I say “go over there and coach those kids” - that coach will go and do whatever they think is right. Based on their experience. Their training. Their understanding of the game. Might be great. Might also be nothing like what I needed. If I say “go over there and work on defence, work on tackling technique, work on how they apply tackling forces, work on how they arrive at the tackle” - now that coach can run a training session that is of far greater value to me, the players and the team. And if I sat down with that coach the day before and gave them the background on every player, their strengths and weaknesses, where we sit in the competition and where we’re heading.... Now the coaching they deliver is more precise, more accurate and more relevant to that group of players. AI is exactly the same. Ask AI to “Write me a strength training session” and it will go into the vast pile of everything ever written about strength training and give you something genuinely interesting, but it may also be completely irrelevant to you. That’s the equivalent of “go and coach those kids over there.” Now try this instead: I’m a high school coach. I work in the gym. I have football players coming in aged 13 - 15. I’m looking for a strength program, particularly focused on core strength, leg strength, balance and coordination. We’re pre-season. Same tool. Better brief. Better output. Better session. Clarity: know the problem before you open the laptop: Your first step in using AI is not going to AI. Your first step is working out what is the problem you’re actually trying to solve. Too many coaches are turning to AI with no idea what they’re looking for and just hoping that some sort of miracle solution is going to arrive. It’s like walking into a library and going “I don’t know what book I want, what genre, what author. I’ll just wander around and hope something decent falls off a shelf”. You can do it that way - Or you can walk in knowing you’re interested in history, and specifically the history of art, and more specifically Leonardo da Vinci. Have a philosophy. Have an approach. Have a method. Then give AI what it needs to give you something back worth having. Mistakes: it will get things wrong: I do a lot of data management and data analysis for the organisations I work with. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve looked at an AI built analysis and thought - something doesn’t look right to me. So I go back to the AI and say “can you have another look at that, I think that’s wrong, that reference isn’t right” or similar follow up questions. And AI often comes straight back with “yeah, you’re right, Wayne. I should have looked at that”. Don’t assume that every AI answer is accurate. Ever. Coaching Yourself: ask it how to work with it better: Here’s a great AI tip few people use but that everybody should. A few weeks ago a job I was working on took me far longer than it should have. Lots of questions, lots of back and forth, lots of dead ends. So when I finished the report, I went back in and asked the AI - “is there a better way I could have worked with you to get that same answer faster or a smarter way to get an even better answer?” And it told me. “If you’d asked that question that way at that point, we’d have got there quicker and it would have stopped me going down those two rabbit holes”. Use AI to coach you on how to use AI. Summary: The question I always get is - “will AI replace coaches?” No. Coaching is the art of inspiring change through emotional connection. It’s the relationships. It’s the connection that lets us help athletes do amazing things, believe in themselves and believe in us. A machine cannot do that. Yet! But here’s what it can do. Coaches are crazy busy. Coaches are often stressed. Coaches have no time for the parts of the job they actually love. Analysing data. Ordering data. Reviewing sessions. All the admin that quietly eats your evenings, your family time and your own recovery. AI can take a lot of that off you. And - best of all - AI can give you your time back to coach and to inspire kids to believe that anything truly is possible. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Write your next AI request as if you were briefing an assistant coach the night before. Who the athletes are, their ages, their performance level, what you’re working on, where you sit in the season etc. If you wouldn’t send an assistant in with that little information, don’t send AI in with it either. * Name the problem before you open the app. One sentence. If you can’t write the sentence, you’re wandering around the library - and no tool fixes that. * Debrief the tool the way you debrief a session. When something takes too long or comes back wrong, go back and ask how you could have asked better. That five-minute habit compounds faster than anything else you’ll do with it. Let me know about your own AI journey. Where has it helped? Where has it fallen flat? Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne If you want the toolkit for the rest of it - the coaching AI can’t do - it’s in The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now. Seven modules, built for real coaches with real time pressures.https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow And if you’re a parent watching your kid navigate all of this - Raising Athletes (includes The Talent Myth book).https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe