Working with Parents in Sport - a conversation with Gordon MacLelland

It's Parents in Sport week!! A week dedicated to providing parents with support and guidance about how to have a positive sporting experience for parents and children.

So it is only fitting that I had a conversation with Gordon MacLelland of Working with Parents in Sport

In this conversation I am actually being a sport parent and recording the podcast on my phone while watching my son play his first game of 'proper football' (this gets me into trouble so stay listening until the end to hear me try and make amends with my son for not paying enough attention to his first game....Bad Dad!!!)

Gordon and I explore the challenges of being a sports parent, we also look into how parents can navigate the increasingly competitive and ruthless world of talent identification as well as looking into some practical ideas around how coaches can build better relationships with parents.

If you can cope with the sounds of enthusiastic parents in the background and my occasion outburst as my son does something good in the game then I am sure that you will get a lot from this.

Enjoy!

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Don't forget to buy yourself an early Christmas present and book your place on the upcoming learning event on 4th January where I will be exploring the next evolution of coaching with John O'Sullivan from Changing the Game Project and Mark Bennett from Performance Development Systems. Click here for more details

I am also running another event in Scotland called 'Talent Equation Live' with the kind support of Stuart Melville's College in Edinburgh on 29th March. Details can be found here.

"I want to make myself unnecessary" - a conversation with Peter Prickett

Peter Prickett is a coach that is passionate about the role that games can play in the child's sports experience. So much so that he has written a book that is dedicated to playing games. But not just any games...specifically 3 v 3 games as he believes that they offer the most representative football experience and provide the richest opportunities for learning.

In this super interesting conversation we cover...

• How 40 different 3 v 3 games could become 140

• His views on the development of creativity in players

• How his club has turned the tables and ask the coaches to do trials and get the kids to select them if they are suitable

• Why paying coaches is the model that they have adopted

There is a lot of interesting stuff in here. I hope you enjoy.

Peter's book can be pre ordered at a discounted price by clicking here

Book tickets for the 'Future of Coaching' event I will be hosting with John O'Sullivan and Mark Bennett here

'Carving nature at her joints' - A conversation with Andrew Wilson

Andrew Wilson is a researcher from Leeds Beckett University in the UK who co writes about ecological psychology in a fascinating blog 'Notes from two scientific psychologists'

In this fascinating and insightful conversation Andrew and I explore various aspects of Ecological Psychology and try to apply them to real world problems in coaching. We explore the following:

• The difference between affordances and information

• Why "context isn't noise...it is signal"

• How information is the key to effective transfer

• Why motor control researchers are to blame for the lack of understanding of the ecological approach

This conversation has a lot of theoretical heavy lifting in it but stick with it as it will be worth it.

Enjoy