Hi everyone, this is Dave Wright and welcome to the Play Developer Project podcast. Review listening, I hope you're having a great week working with your players. This week at PDP, as always there's fresh content on the website. We publish a top new blog by rugby coach David Sharkey on team dynamics and our latest Masterclass discussion with today's guest, Ken Lynch.
On top of this, we've just launched our PDP Mentors program, where you can book time for one-on-one consultations with our team and we'll be adding more mentors to this very soon. I've also been online working with PDP Technical Advisor Dan Wright as we look to build content for an exciting new feature coming to the site soon, so watch this space. So as mentioned, our guest this week is Ken Lynch. Originally from Ireland, Ken works for High Performance Sport New Zealand as an athlete development consultant, and he's a wealth of experience working with athletes across a variety of different sports.
Ken's got a great reputation using on, particularly in his areas of expertise, around athlete development and high performance strategy. In this wide-ranging conversation, we dive into a number of topics, including the role of High Performance Sport New Zealand within the local landscape, what makes New Zealand unique in this sporting sense, developing potential and we tackle the role of sports science in youth sporting environments and why context is so important. I hope you enjoyed the discussion and for the full version, as always you can head over to playdevelopmentproject.com and check out the Masterclass discussion section. Hi everyone, welcome to another Play Development Project Masterclass discussion.
Really pleased to be joined by Ken Lynch from High Performance Sport New Zealand. Ken, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Great to have you on board. Looking forward to this conversation. We're going to cover some really interesting topics, I'm sure. Ken, can you give us a bit of a background of your own coaching journey and your role at High Performance Sport New Zealand?
Sure, yeah, no problem. I've come the sort of long way round, I suppose, to High Performance. So I started as a PE specialist at primary level, which there wasn't too many around at the time. And then I drifted into secondary school, PE, and blended with coaching as tends to be the case.
I'm coaching football, not enough. And then I, from that, moved into the sort of ID development world, I'm in a little bit of service delivery in athlete life and team management at the London Olympics for Ireland. And then came back to New Zealand here to lead the High Performance Athlete Development team at HBS NZ. Excellent, what is that sort of department?
What does that team involve? So our role is to support sports in the effective transition of athletes into high performance in our target sports. We do have a little brief, so we can go a little bit wider, but not too much wider. But essentially looking at what's the athlete pool like?
How can we optimise him and then how can we transition effectively? OK, excellent. And when you talk about those target codes, are you talking about the sort of middle winning codes? We're talking Olympic sports, so are we talking across all sports?
Ours is a mix, so predominantly Olympic sports, but we've also got Nep all in there. So the vision for High Performance Sport is to inspire a nation through winning on the world stage. That's in World Championship, World Cup, Singapore, for example, or Olympic and Paralympic Games. So we've been lucky enough as a small country, with limited resource to have the political will on the mandate to focus.
So just to target a certain amount of sports that we believe are capable of winning medals at this stage. And then the investment I suppose doesn't get spread too thin, so that allows us to go a little bit deeper, maybe then other countries with similar resource. Excellent, seriously interesting. And obviously quite a unique approach.
New Zealand has some unique advantages and disadvantages, I'm sure which we can cover. In terms of the talent pool as such, how do you go and identify those, or are you working in conjunction with the various sports to say, which athletes are you looking to censor, or which athletes are you profiling as the high performers? And then do you work with them and their coaches in concurrence? Yeah, so we, part of our strategy was to generate capacity and capability in the sport, rather than have an external expert or guidance drop in and out.
So each of the sports that we work with has what we call a High Performance Athlete Development Leader. And we work in partnership with them and their sport to identify best practice and then look to create the type of models and frameworks that support good process in ID confirmation, and obviously that transition into high performance. So having someone in the sport that wakes up every day thinking about development and the development space in that sport has really been a really good way to go for us. And just those internal advocates makes a big difference for us then to be able to go around across, you know, that we have a team of two that works with third-gen sports, so for us to be able to consult into those sports and affect some change without those guys who wouldn't be able to do it.
Really interesting. And in terms of the New Zealand landscape, obviously New Zealand on an Olympic stage, an international sport, obviously high profile through rugby and other things like that, is generally overachieved in terms of the per capita kind of ratio when you look at that way. What are some of the challenges and some of those advantages that New Zealand presents? Yeah, so being a small country, you tend to, it's easier to see those that are already in the sport system.
So if you think of an example of somewhere like the US, how do you get to look at all the under 18s in a particular sport? So you're relying on regional networks, you're relying on state networks, you're relying on then local providers to feed that through. Whereas a smaller network in a place like New Zealand better enables that sort of identification and then the communication of current status where people are at what they need to do. That's a big advantage.
You know, the targeting around the investment is a big advantage. And then a small country being able to bring best on best together and have connection with quality coaching more often. It's easier to do here than it is to do in a bigger country. I have a friend of mine who works in the States.
I know when he got that job as a coach there, as a national coach, was wondering how he's going to get his eyes on everybody. So he's come from Ireland and you just say, well, look at how many people, many medals did you get in London? How many people are there in Ireland? Just pick a state.
Yeah, pick one state. Yeah. Start there. Yeah.
So ultimately you can't and practically couple these down a lot. But that's the advantage of being 4.5 million, 4.8 million people in a landmass the size of Great Britain. So you can get places and see people pretty easy, which helps keep you kind of grounded as well. No telling an idea, just to touch on that as a fairly hotly debated topic, especially in the world of football and in a lot of sports, where the hunt for talent is going younger and younger and at times is getting quite disturbing as to what programs are being labelled elite at what age.
Is there anything around the idea of good practice? And I know there's probably not a generic answer across sports for this, but is there any advice you would give coaches or organisations around what good practice and talent I do looks like? Yeah, look, there's a lot to consider, as you mentioned, and there isn't as close as you can get to a generic answer, I suppose, you know, but you've got a relative age effect and you've got things going on around by a bending and that's just one element of it. So we are very aware that those things are floating around, but I think if you were to identify some key principles around, well, first of all, how about we look at people over a window of time, rather than a snapshot is really important?
Can we stay a little bit wider, a little bit later? Because we know we have late matures, you know, we can use some tools to identify where they are in terms of their physical maturity, but then you've got mental maturity, then you've got where they are in their game sense, and we talk about holistic development, so you really have to run the rule over all those areas to be able to have a really good snapshot, or a really good understanding of their current status. So I think to do that, you need more time. Can you keep it a little bit wider for longer so that you've got more time with more people?
And then there has to be some kind of strategy around retention. So, you know, it's kind of in some spaces, it's applied pressure, and those, you know, people will deselect, and of course, and the assumption is that they're the ones that you don't want. And that's not always the case, right? So we put people under pressure, maybe we haven't them, you know, when we challenge people, we should support.
So, you know, even in the product of support, have we given them the tools to cope with the pressure we're about to apply? And I'm not sure if we have, what if we do, you know, I think we get a little bit lazy with ID sometimes too, and you know, we've had cases of team sports maybe suggesting that we're really good, we're okay, we don't need to help, we've got 85% conversion from this level to this level. And when you test it, you know, what's really happening is just a confirmation bias around the people they know. So, you know, they don't look at a new player, it's harder to gate than it needs to get in.
You know, the 15% of people that are in are only because people deselected, self- deselected or were injured. And that's not healthy either. So, it's a balance between you and you got to open and close the gate every so often. Yep.
And it's a gate to a program that's longer and wider than maybe traditionally is the case at the moment. So, I think more people are thinking that way. I don't think it's foreign to people. Probably people are constrained by resources at the time.
So, well, if I had another 10 in, that's going to cost whatever, I've got to bring another coach on. But yeah, it will depend on the age, right? So, you know, would you do that at 17, depending on the sport? But it doesn't seem to make sense to do it at 13.
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, obviously very relative to the sport. Gymnastics, for example, might be very different to football.
So, that could be in terms of where the athletes are at different stages, I imagine. Yeah. And different for different genders, right? Yeah.
So, we really have to consider how we do that. But sometimes, how we structure things are important for how we structure our competitions as an example. So, a lot of times, we might structure a competition like in a week like we get for tournaments, where what we're actually doing is for taking players and increasing the risk of injury, or likelihood of injury, which isn't any good for anybody. And then you're only seeing them over that week.
So, what happens if Bob's confidence was low? What happens if Richard had an injury? What happens if Anne has been sick and didn't tell anybody? So, looking at these, looking at people, and I think we've been in a reasonable position in New Zealand to do because we are a bit smaller over a longer period of time, and with access to quality coaching, challenging and supporting on the way through.
And there's a lot of things coming in now about behaviours. So, and characteristics, but is that person a learner? Some of our best potential men out of Lien to Lien, yeah. So, we've got to give them that opportunity first to test their learner, and we can't do that in a weekend when we're watching two games at once, trying to get an 85 percent conversion rate.
Absolutely. Well, we're going to touch on the idea of frameworks and structures within organisations and within teams and how coaches or clubs can work on that. So, you've obviously talked a little bit about the talent ID side. What are your views when it comes to developing potential and people around some of the frameworks that coaches could implement within either a team culture or within a club culture?
Yeah, so there's a, the sort of framework concept might be seen as a bit, either old hat or taboo, or you know, there's a, when you see people when I say the word pathway or framework, and I understand why they do. And so, you either change the word or you educate the people. So, you know, for me, well, there's only so many words we can have, so I've already changed it to us. It's a fair point.
So, we know that we know development is nonlinear, right? So, we know that it takes different people different lengths of time, so individualisation is important. So, to a pathway or framework has to be flexible, it has to be tolerant of exceptions, and it has to account for and understand that process, good process has to run alongside it. So, how do we exit a player?
How do we re-enter a player? What about a late entry player? You know, when we consider the framework, so we generally tend to have the skill set or the sport-specific or physical dimensions required as the price of entry, the gates wider lower down, and that's understandable in fear. It's also understandable at fear that later on it narrows, and you actually have to be better to stay in the system.
So, for us, you know, our role here is high performance athlete development. So, we do get to a point where we have to turn the heat on and go against world standards, how we're tracking that's the price of entry, and then within that, what is good process and best practice look like to develop players or people, right? So, I think for a person with a team or a club, if they're developing a framework, I think it's really important to have solid guiding principles around how they operate to keep things in frame. You know, how you speak to a high performance athlete versus an emerging development athlete is quite different.
And how do you reframe yourself before you have that conversation, can a framework do that for you? So, rather than you have to run this fast over this distance, those physical markers are there, but I think for it to be holistic and have strands around nutrition, psychology, performance, lifestyle, you know, and those pieces woven into the message aligned is really, really important in a smaller stage like a club or a coach with a team. I think you can still have a lot of those things than just the coach might be responsible for bringing them in when they see fit or when it's appropriate. So, it can be as big or small as you want, but ultimately, I think having a guiding framework enables you to be aligned to what you identified at the beginning is best practice.
And there's a temptation at the moment to chop and change things all the time. And with that, you might lose some continuity anyway on the way through. Yeah, that flexibility or adaptability certainly stands out to me. And obviously, how you understand the level at which the athletes are operating is obviously pretty critical.
You know, a group of under nine players versus a group of elite players at the age of 20 or 22 is going to be a very different kind of approach in terms of your coaching practice. There's often just moving on a little bit in terms of technology and sports and you've touched on physical measurements and sports science a little bit. There's a bit of an obsession in modern sports with marginal games and sports science is becoming more and more prevalent, which in an elite performance environment, it could be argued as very advantageous when you're talking about those small games. But how can we ensure that coaches and abroad are seeing so coaches working in that developmental space can take that holistic approach that you're kind of advocating?
I don't believe it really. People are looking for marginal games. Yeah, the machine is in full flight. I've never come across that before.
There's always a temptation to try and replicate what's happening at our performance lower down. And we see it when potentially novice coaches go into an environment that's high performance and instead of asking the question that might be, look, how did these athletes transition into this program and what did you notice? It's what session did you do on Tuesday with an intention of replicating it when they get back to their home club or wherever that is. So that piece certainly isn't new.
The technology piece is a little bit newer. People have always been looking for it, but it's more readily available now. But there just isn't any point in having the icing if you haven't got the cake. There's just too many people running around with bowls of icing.
And look, there's a lot of people trying to sell it too, which makes life difficult for, let's say, the purest development people, because what we do isn't exciting. You know, working in a gym with an athlete to get the fundamental movements right before we add load. It's not exciting, but it's really necessary. Yeah.
And there's always someone down the road that's willing to sell or come down to my gym. You can lift on Tuesday, start on Tuesday. We'll have you lifting X amount of weight within six weeks, and athletes, parents and some coaches might be joined with that because proud of it is, is that everybody thinks that their athlete, their player, their kid is the exceptional one. And for us, we remind groups of athletes when they're together, you guys are all exceptional because they're high performance.
So you're already exceptional. To be the exceptional exceptional, you have to be really exceptional. So we're trying to say, well, you know, remember that the main thing remains the main thing, which is your development is important. It's your future success that we're looking at, not your success now.
And success now is that performance at an event, performance at a tournament, performance at a competition, or is it being able to get through 10 weeks in the gym with whatever progression and whatever loading without getting injured? Yeah, sure. Because that lays the platform for a technical piece that you weren't able to deliver because you weren't strong enough. So it's a hard sell.
It's a really hard sell, but there's so much icing around. Yeah, absolutely. Go on, sorry. No, I just think it will be great.
We're doing a little bit of work at the moment on tracking people on the way through and sort of what do quality interventions look like. And then what's the longevity of that athlete that experienced quality interventions? We just don't have that at the moment to be able to go back and say the sale to parents, coaches, athletes, look, this is what good looks like in the sense we've got a theory in concept and we've got pockets of evidence. But in a New Zealand context, we haven't quite got that yet, so we're not fair away.
Yeah, I think it's really interesting because that gets way to become exceptional or create a super strength in a player or an athlete. It could come across anything in terms of technically, physically, psychologically. Those sort of gains could come across any of those areas, it's not just about the physical work as you've cited as an example, but it could be strategies in place for resilience or coping mechanisms or how they deal with pressure or some kind of technical attribute which needs more work. So I guess it's about understanding the individual as you touched on earlier.
Yeah, that's a really important one. And if people don't have context, context is king right, so you work with a triathlete and you go like, well, I'm mechanically, we've got an issue. So what we're going to do is we're going to break the rundown, we're going to address the biomechanical issue in the run. Why will we do that?
So we're going to do that so we're going to depower the run. We'll pair up the swim and we'll pair up the bike shortly. But ultimately, they're racing triathlon, right? So they're going to go swim well, bike well, and then they're going to hit the road and they're not going to run well because they're not going to run well at the moment.
So overall performance at the very best probably plateaus or might dip. Without that context, if you were just running the rule over as a selector, you could just, that person could be gone, oh, they've plateaued, they've got to go. The context is when we pair the run up next year and they're not getting injured and they can do 12, 16 week locks at whatever we need them to do, we're going to have a different athlete on it. And so it's really important to consider it and really important to rationalize what you're doing with the athletes, coaches and parents of that age and stage because they're also impatient.
Yeah, sure. They're impatient. Absolutely. And just continuing on the individual thread, obviously within team sports and with athletes having mixed experiences, mixed abilities, particularly in development settings or club settings, it's really important to sort of integrate and understand how those different individuals work.
So what advice do you have around how coaches can make sure every individual within a team set up is getting what they need? Yeah. So the plan that we mentioned, that kind of framework, so what are you looking to achieve and how does everybody fit in it? It's really important at the beginning.
And then when you've got that kind of string line of best practice, you can align the stages of the season and the individuals to different parts of that. So again, yeah, understanding the individual, understanding where they are in relation to each of the strands, say, of that framework, to go, okay, yeah, well, look, you may have a really, really top performer. So it delivers, executes on the day, but actually, you know, physically isn't robust mentally, is still in the simple phase. They haven't gone through the complex phase yet to reduce it to simple again.
Psych-wise, well, it's never been an issue yet. And so you can have players and athletes that go really well for a period of time, one, two, three years. And then they hit a complex stage, and it all becomes really difficult. So understanding where each person is in relation to what you've identified as a key for their development, so key strands for their development, and identify the next steps on those.
So what's the logical next step? Like I mentioned with the strength piece, well, they can deliver this technical element in canoe racing, because they're not strong enough. So if you just go down the technical line, well, the next step is they've got to do this technical piece. What the logical step is, do the strength piece first, then you can deliver the technical piece.
So it takes time to think and plan your way around there. And then you know, so you know your audience, you know the individuals, you know what each of them are working on. And then your session design has to, you can't differentiate for those things run, not all the time, but at least some of the time. And it might come into frame and competition.
So a really good player who's high in confidence, what you say to them before they take the field versus potentially good player, whose confidence is low, might be two different messages. One could be in a phase where they're learning to win. One could be in a phase where they're learning to perform certain elements of the game consistently under pressure. So yeah, process outcomes, someone's ready for the outcome, because they've got the processes to be able to, they've got tools and somebody hasn't.
And both players could be in the same game easily. Thanks for joining us on the Play Development Project podcast. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram, have Play at DB or find us on Facebook. Don't forget to head over to playdevelopmentproject.com, where you can sign up for our progress in coach community and gain access to our wide variety of resources to help you in your coaching.