Sport Coaching in Practice

Articles and Videos

Here is a collection of articles focused on the practical application of coaching. Covering a varied topic mix, they all relate to useful and relevant coaching issues, coaches face day in, day out. You may find our sections for our most recent articles, resources and materials, latest newsletters, or 5 Minutes with Bo Hanson video series valuable too.

Elite Sports Camps – Include the Skills that Really Need Work

Camp can be a pivotal time for young athletes, they are exposed to new ideas, techniques, facilities, coaches and competition strategies. Equally, sports camps present the best coaches with an outstanding opportunity to work on an athlete’s people skills and strengthen their performance potential, alongside the usual physical and technical focus.

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Evolution Equates to Success in Sport Coaching!

A Coach’s role is always evolving. Something Tom Kyle, Coach Development Manager for Basketball Queensland understands and loves about his job.

His role with Basketball Queensland means he’s responsible for developing some 2,000 Coaches at a club, association and school level throughout Queensland, Australia.

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Elise Ray – Phenomenal First Year as Head Coach

It’s a big deal to turn a team around as a first year Head Coach. It’s an even bigger deal to do this and get your team to the National Championships. And when it’s the first time that team has reached the NCAA Nationals since 1998, well you don’t get much better than that.

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Coach Roland Thornqvist: Winning Coaches Never Stop Learning

Have you ever wondered what successful Coaches do differently? How they manage to amass title after title and build a team culture athletes want to be part of?

The first thing we noticed with winning Coaches is that they never sit back and become complacent. Instead, the fact that they don’t is what sets them apart from the rest. Winning Coaches are always learning, always striving for the 0.1% and this set them up for success game after game, year after year.

And that’s exactly what University of Florida’s Head Women’s Tennis Coach Roland Thornqvist has done.

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Winning Back-to-Back Championships

Winning a National Championship is not only an incredibly special feat; it is also very hard to do. So when you win a National Championship twice, you know that it is even better and even harder.

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Superelites: What makes the best, the best?

Throughout August the world’s top athletes battled it out in Rio as part of the 2016 Olympic Games. But some far outshone others to take home the medals. According to Scientific American, researchers have a special term for these best of the best: superelites.

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Wrapping up Rio Olympics

Rio was always going to be an unfamiliar environment for many athletes. As such, it was going to be uncomfortable.

And perhaps one of the biggest lessons to be learnt from the performances at Rio was that those athletes with the ability to best adapt to new situations and unexpected circumstances, achieved better results.

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Solving a TOUGH Problem in Sport

The book GRIT made it onto many coaches reading lists over the summer (including ours) and there has been significant media coverage on the topic too. The interest is well founded as more than ever before, Coaches are unanimous in saying that their athletes are lacking resilience, they aren’t as ‘tough’ as their teams in previous times have been. And not just physically tough, mentally tough. But is ‘grit’ really the solution needed? Has the word ‘grit’ become too interchangeable that the real definition has been lost?

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Conscious Competence Learning Matrix

As athletes we all start at the very beginning and over time, develop the skills and techniques needed to be successful in our chosen sport. This process can be defined by the Conscious Competence Learning Matrix, or a 4 stage model outlining the various stages of learning an athlete goes through in order to acquire new skills.

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A Generation Gap: Coaching Millennials

By Lahnee Pavlovich, Head of Research and Writing, Athlete Assessments Athlete Assessments’ Bo Hanson spoke at the recent National Rugby League Coaching Seminar about Coaching Millennial athletes. We have captured his presentation on Coaching Millennials and

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Values and Behavior in Sport

One of the challenges we face as Coaches or as leaders at some stage of our career is when we feel like our values have been compromised. So what are our values, what defines them and what is the difference between our values and behavior?

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How to Break a Losing Streak

As a coach, nothing is more demoralizing than a losing streak that just won’t break. While we do our absolute best to avoid losing streaks, performance slumps, or even the prospect of our team underachieving it doesn’t mean we can avoid the topic, it’s too important.

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Getting Athletes to Change

One of the most satisfying moments as a coach is when an athlete successfully makes a change you’ve been working on. Sometimes the time to achieve this change is a mere moment, other times you can feel like you’ve been striving all season to help them to take it on.

On occasion, it is a tiny change that has a massive impact, other times is big change to achieve a small but crucial improvement. When you think about it, coaching is really a series of changes and the best coaches are those who have mastered how to help their athletes take these steps of continuous improvement.

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Stanford’s Best Year – Insights from Head Coach Tara Danielson

In 2014, Head Coach Tara Danielson led Stanford’s Women’s Field Hockey team to its most successful season in program history including their first ever NCAA Tournament victory. The season saw the Cardinal shatter previous program records and resulted in a host of individual honors for both players and Coach Danielson. So how does Tara set herself and her team apart? We caught up with her to find out.

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ONE Element

With Athlete Assessments we have now worked with over 22,000 individuals from over 40 different sports. This work has given me a unique vantage point to see the recurring patterns or themes that create success. When I see these patterns consistently creating success, year after year, the evidence certainly mounts. With this in mind, here is one of those concepts I have seen create consistent success. I believe it is critical for any coach and all teams to clearly understand and apply this concept to improve performance.

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5 Minutes With Bo Hanson The Circle of Safety in Sport

The Circle of Safety in Sport

At Athlete Assessments when we work with clients one of the really critical models we refer to is the Circle of Safety. The Circle of Safety is not a concept we developed ourselves, it is taken from models such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and it is also taken from a lot of the work Simon Sinek has been doing, and the book that he wrote Leaders Eat Last.

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WHAT WINNING TEAMS GET RIGHT PLAYBOOK

The Game Plan for Winning

One of the benefits of working with many different sporting teams each year is the insight we gain in what really makes the difference for sustained success.

We share our fundamental performance philosophies and some of the key models we use to achieve success – think of it as the how-to on performance.

Bo Hanson

Senior Consultant & Director

Bo Hanson’s career within the sport and the business sector spans over 25 years, delivering leadership, management, and coach development. In addition to his own athletic career comprising of four Olympic appearances and including three Olympic medals, Bo has worked for many years with coaches and athletes from over 40 different sports across the globe. Bo was also the winner of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) 2023 Award for L&D Professional of the Year, for his dedication to L&D and transformational work across various industries.

After a successful career in sport including four Olympics and three Olympic Medals, Bo co-founded and developed Athlete Assessments in 2007. Bo now focuses on working with clients to achieve their own success on and off ‘the field’, and has attained an unmatched track-record in doing exactly this.

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Now, watch us interrupt him for a round of quick fire questions.

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