Dr Anna Stodter is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Coaching at Leeds Beckett University, a rugby coach, and a researcher whose work sits right at the intersection of coach learning and applied coaching practice. Her research has explored how coaches filter and make sense of new ideas, how experimentation drives development, and more recently, how coaches can help players engage with contact in rugby more safely and confidently. She is one of those rare people who can take a complex academic idea and make it genuinely useful for coaches working at any level. This one was a real treat.

Key Messages

1. You are your own filter Anna's coffee filter analogy, published in the UK Coaching Applied Research Journal, is one of the most useful frameworks for understanding coach learning you'll come across. The idea is simple but profound. Your biography; the sum of your experiences, values, beliefs and knowledge, acts like a filter for every new idea you encounter. Some things get rejected because they clash with what you already believe. Some sail straight through because you already do them. And some land in the middle, they feel relevant, they might just work, but they need adapting for your context before you taste them properly. Understanding your own filter is the starting point for becoming a more intentional learner.

2. Coaching is a swampy lowland, embrace it Drawing on the work of Donald Schon, Anna describes coaching not as a precise science with predictable outcomes, but as a constantly shifting environment where the ground is always moving beneath your feet. That's not a problem to be solved, it's the nature of the work. And it means that experimentation isn't optional. Trying things out, tweaking, adapting, sometimes rejecting and starting again - that reflective cycle is how coaches grow. The coaches who thrive are the ones who get comfortable with not always knowing what's coming next.

3. Take a learning snack One of the most immediately stealable ideas in this conversation. You don't need to overhaul your entire coaching practice to keep developing. Anna introduces the idea of the learning snack. A small, intentional moment in a session where you try something new, notice what happens, and reflect on it. It could be a different type of question, filming yourself for the first time, or asking your athletes to rate their confidence at the start and end of a session. Small bites, consistently taken, add up to real development over time.

Some other things…

The coffee filter in full Anna's original research followed football coaches over the course of a year, tracking how they engaged with new ideas and what actually changed in their practice. The coffee filter metaphor emerged as a way of bringing that theory to life. You can find the full diagram and explanation in the UK Coaching Applied Research Journal, Volume 8. Well worth a read.

Film yourself coaching Anna's game plan contribution is a simple but important one. Film yourself coaching. It's confronting, there's nowhere to hide, and your voice never sounds like it does in your head. But the perspective it offers is like nothing else. Watch it back with a colleague, pick one thing to focus on, and just chat through what you see. Anna used it to count the types of questions she was asking - and what she found genuinely surprised her. You might be surprised too.

Contact Confident Anna has been working on a brilliant freely available resource for rugby coaches called Contact Confident, developed with colleague Dr Katrina MacDonald and in collaboration with World Rugby. It brings together principles from judo and other contact sports to help coaches build player confidence with contact. Gradually, safely, and without it feeling like a big scary event. Short, sharp one-minute videos that coaches can dip into and adapt for their context. Find it on the Leeds Beckett University website.

Get in Touch

Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/

Anna's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-anna-stodter-990a0855/

Welcome to the Game Plan Coaching Podcast

Dr Pete Olusoga is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University, a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society, and a sport psychology consultant. His award-winning PhD explored stress and coping in elite sports coaching, and his research has spent over a decade asking the questions that matter for coaches: what causes burnout, how do we recognise it, and what can we do about it? He also hosts his own brilliant podcast, Eighty Percent Mental.

Three Key Messages

1. Burnout isn't a you problem: One of the most important reframes in this conversation. Pete is clear, burnout is a perfectly normal and rational response to an environment that demands too much. It's not a sign of weakness or individual failure. Yes, there are things coaches can do for themselves, but there is also a real organisational responsibility to look after the people within it.

2. The superhero complex: Pete introduces this idea from his research - an unhealthy obsession with taking on too much, giving everything, and never stopping to recover. Coaching is a giving profession by nature, but if you keep giving without ever replenishing, the wheels will eventually come off.

3. Slow down to respond, not react: Pete's game-changing advice is deceptively simple. Slowing down - your breathing, your thinking, your responses - creates what he calls a choice point. Instead of reacting to stress, you get to respond to it. Those small pauses, the micro-breaks, the third spaces, the 30 seconds of silence before you walk through the front door, they add up. Rest and recovery aren't luxuries. They're a performance strategy.

Something else worth knowing

The stress that creeps Pete explains why burnout so often catches coaches off guard. Stress doesn't always arrive all at once. It inches up gradually, and we accommodate each small increase without really noticing. Until one day, one extra thing tips everything over. Understanding how you personally respond to stress -physically, mentally, behaviourally - is one of the most valuable things you can do.

Get in Touch

Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/

Pete's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peteolusoga/

Eighty Percent Mental Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/eighty-percent-mental/id1528861331

Russell Earnshaw, known to most as Rusty, is one of the most influential coach developers working in sport today. Starting out in rugby, he now works across multiple sports and environments, from Premier League football academies to New Zealand, Canada, the US and beyond. He's the kind of person who makes you think differently about coaching within about five minutes of talking to him.

1. The best coaches see the world through the eyes of the learner Rusty's game plan contribution is rooted in a simple but profound idea from Roger Neyburn's book Experts. As coaches develop, they move from being focused on themselves to being genuinely curious about the experience of every individual in front of them. His challenge to coaches is to pick one player, watch their experience for the duration of a session, and ask yourself honestly; was that good enough?

2. Expertise is about having more options A recurring theme throughout the conversation is that great coaches aren't working from a checklist. They're noticing more, seeing more, and responding with a wider range of options than less experienced coaches. Rusty's advice? Deliberately expose yourself to different environments, different sports, different ages and abilities. Every experience adds to your toolkit.

3. Make problems visible Rusty's game-changing advice is as practical as it gets. Use bibs, headbands, scoreboards, and simple constraints to make the key problems in your session impossible to ignore, for players and for yourself. When the challenge is visible, players engage with it, problem-solve around it, and coaches don't drift away from it. Simple, effective, and immediately stealable.

Pick one player. Watch their experience for an entire session, minute by minute. What did that look and feel like for them? Then ask yourself how you're going to make sure every player in your group is having an experience worth coming back for.

Get in touch

Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/

Rusty's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-earnshaw-66161020/

The Magic Academy Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-magic-academy/id1434710237

In this episode of the Game Plan Coaching Podcast I am joined by Professor Adam Kelly, Professor of Sport and Exercise at Birmingham City University.

Adam leads the Research for Athlete and Youth Sport Development Lab. With a background as Head of Academy Sports Science at Exeter City Football Club, Adam bridges the gap between academic research and applied coaching practice. His work spans collaborations with FIFA, the ECB, Olympic Lyonnais, and the South Asian Cricket Academy, focusing on talent identification and development processes in sport.

Three Key Messages

1. Understand the person before the player: One of the most important shifts coaches and pathway designers can make is to look beyond sporting attributes and first understand who the athlete is as a person. Factors like relative age, biological maturity, training age, family background, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity can all significantly shape how a player performs at any given moment. By understanding these individual characteristics first, coaches can better readjust their assessment of current performance and make more informed judgements about longer-term potential.

2. Widen the pool - different pathways for different players: Delaying selection matters, but so does broadening who gets considered. Adam shared two powerful examples: England Squash's birthday banding approach, which evaluates players as individuals rather than against age-group peers, and Denmark's Futures Team in football, a parallel pathway for younger or later-maturing players that has produced just as many senior international players as the traditional performance pathway. The message for clubs and pathway designers is clear - one route doesn't fit all, and widening the talent pool now pays dividends later.

3. Talent ID systems are designed for children: A simple but profound reframe: talent identification systems are built around children, yet they are rarely designed with children truly at the centre. Adam challenges coaches and organisations to ensure children's rights are actively lived and realised within their pathways, from child protection checks on scouts and recruiters, to consulting young athletes on the shape and experience of the pathway itself. The asset value placed on young players in some systems can all too easily overshadow the fact that they are children first.

Other Things Worth Knowing

The TIDE Society: Adam co-founded the Talent Identification and Development Environments for Sport Society (TIDE), a global network of over 150 researchers and practitioners across more than 20 countries. Their forthcoming position statement outlines 13 principles of talent identification, a practical and reflective framework for coaches, recruiters, and pathway designers. It will be published as an open-access paper in the Journal of Sport Sciences. Watch this space.

The South Asian Cricket Academy (SACA): A standout initiative born from research revealing that Asian cricketers were significantly underrepresented at professional level despite being overrepresented in the talent pathway, and despite showing no meaningful difference in bowling, batting, or physical metrics compared to white peers. SACA provides an intensive programme for 18–24 year olds, and in four years has seen 18 players sign professional contracts, nearly doubling Asian representation in first-class counties. Find out more here: https://www.saca-uk.com/

The coach's eye, valuable but not enough on its own: Experience genuinely matters in talent identification, but it also carries risk. Subjective judgement informed by personal experience can lead to unconscious bias. Even highly experienced scouts interpret players differently. Adam encourages coaches to pair their intuition with an evidence-informed, intersectional lens - one that considers who the athlete is, not just what they can currently do.

Adam’s Game Changing Advice: "Believe in every athlete — don't form a fixed mindset about potential too early."

Those selected gain confidence, opportunity, and development. Those not selected lose it. Keeping an open mind about who can develop, and over what timeframe might be the most important habit a talent identifier can build.

Get in touch:

Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/

Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlkelly/

In this episode of the Game Plan Coaching Podcast, I’m joined by Skye Eddy, founder of Soccer Parenting and The Sideline Project, a former player, All-American goalkeeper, and coach educator. Her work is helping clubs, coaches, and parents rethink the role adults play in youth sport.

Skye’s mission is simple: inspire players by empowering parents.

Rather than falling into the usual “parents are the problem” narrative, Skye offers something far more useful - a way to see parents as an essential part of a child’s sporting experience. More importantly, she shares practical ways coaches can build trust, set clear boundaries, and create a stronger sense of community around their team.

Three key themes

1) Parents are part of the picture: Parents aren’t on the outside of youth sport, they’re in it. When they’re better informed, better connected, and clear on their role, it improves the experience for everyone. Players benefit. Coaches benefit. The environment becomes more purposeful and less stressful.

2) Boundaries build trust: One of the biggest takeaways. Skye talks about “door open” and “door closed” moments between coaches and parents. Not everything is up for discussion. But when expectations are clear, relationships improve - and coaching becomes easier, not harder.

3) Sidelines and car journeys matter: Some of the most influential moments happen away from the pitch. We explore sideline behaviour, car ride conversations, and how adult stress can impact children. Skye’s framework of supportive, distracting, and hostile behaviours is simple and powerful.

This episode will help you if:

• you’ve ever felt stressed by parents
• you want to build a stronger team culture
• you know the coach-parent relationship matters, but you’re not sure how to improve it
• you want practical ways to make youth sport better for children

Skye’s work is grounded in experience, backed by research, and focused on real-world application. You’ll come away with ideas you can use straight away and probably a slightly different perspective on parents too.

Links

• Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
• Skye’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skye-eddy/
• Soccer Parenting: https://www.soccerparenting.com
• Feedback form: https://forms.gle/UwQad2r8xozcUKCW7

If this episode made you think differently about parents, sidelines, or the wider environment around young players, I’d love to hear from you. Use the feedback form to share your reflections or suggest future guests and topics.

This conversation will help you:

• think differently about how you design practices
• reflect on the questions you ask
• become more aware of how athletes experience your coaching

Links

• Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
• Richard’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsbarbour/
• Feedback form (share feedback, suggest guests, propose episode ideas): https://forms.gle/QJYropsa4grmFLCT9

In this episode of the Game Plan Coaching Podcast, I’m joined by Sally Needham - a football coach, coach developer, and human development specialist whose work brings together football, neuroscience, and performance.

Sally has worked across football for many years, including roles within The FA Skills Programme, academy football, and international environments such as Wales Women. Through her consultancy 4Growth, she now works with coaches and athletes to better understand the connection between brain, body, behaviour, and performance. She has also recently completed a Professional Doctorate focused on elite performance and neuroscience.

I’ve always found Sally’s perspective fascinating. She has a brilliant way of helping coaches see what sits beneath behaviour and performance, and how understanding the nervous system can change the way we coach.

Key Themes

Coaching the soil not just the grass

Sally explains how neuroscience helps coaches understand what sits beneath behaviour - the brain, nervous system, and emotions that shape learning and performance.

Regulation and safety in coaching

We explore why coaches need to regulate themselves first - because “a disregulated adult cannot regulate a disregulated child.”

Small behaviours that shape learning

Simple coaching habits like how we greet players, the language we use, and how we structure sessions can have a powerful impact on development.

Links

• Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
• Sally’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-sally-needham-264918b5/
• Feedback form (share feedback, suggest guests, propose episode ideas): https://forms.gle/LNH76ce2ahwesSvj6

If this episode made you think differently about behaviour, learning, or performance in coaching, I’d love to hear your reflections. Use the feedback form to share your thoughts or suggest future guests for the podcast.

In this episode, I’m joined by Dr Alex Lascu - a coach, researcher, and learning designer whose work sits at the intersection of skill acquisition, coach development, and practice design. Alex has worked across community and performance sport, has researched talent development and skill acquisition in cricket, and is currently connected with the Queensland Academy of Sport and the University of Canberra. Across her work, she focuses on bridging the gap between research and real-world coaching.

I love spending time with Alex, and this was a really fun conversation, but also one with plenty of depth. We explored what coaches can learn from thinking like gardeners, why the environment matters so much in practice, and how laughter, challenge, and co-design can all tell us something meaningful about learning.

In this episode we cover…

Coaches create conditions, they do not control learning

Alex opens with a brilliant analogy: the coach as a gardener. The point is simple, but powerful - coaches do not “make” learning happen on command. Instead, they shape environments where learning is more likely to emerge.

We explore:

• why practice design is really about the conditions we create
• how behaviour is always a response to something in the environment
• why coaches need to think beyond what players are doing and pay closer attention to what is shaping it

Better practice starts with better design

A huge part of the conversation centres on constraints, representative practice, and the relationship between the person, task, and environment.

We talk about:

• why space is one of the first constraints coaches should think about
• how training environments can accidentally teach the wrong things
• why starting with a game first can be a far better diagnostic tool than jumping straight into drills
• how co-designing challenge with players can help practices land more effectively

Laughter, challenge, and waiting longer

We also get into:

• why laughter and learning are not opposites
• what coaches can notice when they listen, not just watch
• why sometimes the best intervention is to wait 10 more seconds
• how not rushing in can leave space for players to solve problems for themselves

There’s a real thread here about trust: trust in players, trust in the process, and trust that learning does not always need rescuing.

A few standout ideas from the episode

• Start with the game and see what falls out
• Ask more questions instead of assuming you already know
• Design with players, not just for them

Links

• Tom’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
• Alex’s podcast — The Deep End: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-deep-end/id1686774407
• Feedback form (share feedback, suggest guests, propose episode ideas): https://forms.gle/SDCdYhS799nxgfrG9

If this episode gave you something to reflect on, whether that’s practice design, player voice, or simply the reminder to hold back for 10 more seconds I’d love to hear from you.

Use the feedback form to share your thoughts, suggest future guests, or tell me what topics you’d like us to explore next on the podcast.