Coaching Culture

As a coach it is your role and responsibility to get the most out of each individual athlete that passes through your doors into your programme. You are required to enable your athletes to reach their potential by improving a variety of their physical skills including strength, aerobic capacity, and anaerobic threshold. Alongside these measures, mental resilience is key to help the athletes reach their goals in day-to-day training and when it comes to race day. Creating a culture within the club is key to building mental resilience in individuals and within the squad. Culture is an environment that is developed over time and is shown through the actions of yourself and your athletes.

Different factors are involved when building your culture which include the club you are working at, the goals that you want to achieve and the goals you believe the athletes can achieve. If you are coaching novices, then you want to create an environment that they enjoy learning in to enhance their ability to pick up the basic skills of rowing. Whereas if you are coaching more experienced athletes who have results-based motivation such as winning at Henley then you want to create an environment which allows them to push themselves as hard as they can to get the most out of each training session to help them reach their goal.

I am going into coaching my third year at an Oxford University College Boat Club where I have been trying to build a culture to enable the athletes to reach their goals while working around a busy academic schedule. To best achieve this, hard work is rewarded so as soon as the athlete’s step into the gym or push off from that landing stage they are ready to the get the most out of the session. This allows them to focus solely on the aim of the session and to take their mind away from their studies for a short period. Moreover, by enforcing the ethic of giving your all each session it ensures that they will get the key and targeted physiological benefits from the session. I have coached both novices and more experienced athletes and this has meant that I have been able to develop different training environments depending on the type of athlete I am coaching to allow each individual to thrive and reach their potential.

The key to creating a sustainable culture for your club, athletes and team is to reflect the goals of the individuals and the team within the training environment. This means that the goals are aligned with the process that the club is going through which will improve the chances of team and individual goals and results being reached, without this sentiment there runs the risk of losing motivation and burning out early in the season. A particular factor commonly limited by external factors, such as education and mental health, which can be pertinent to younger athletes as their bodies and minds are still developing. Importantly, a flexible coaching culture which can be adapted on a squad or one-to-one level is key to getting the maximum output over a session.

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Sam Sheppard

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