Building Coach/Athlete Relationships Helps Build Sports Performance

Relationships and communication between athlete and coach are a primary driver in delivering athlete performance in sport, a leading international coach told the second annual Rowers Conference, ‘R2: Rowing and Technology’, at Dorney Lake, UK in late January 2018.

Talking about the coaching tools that help athletes and coaches build relationships and improve athlete performance, Robin Williams said that such relationships “are really at the centre of performance”.

Williams – who coached Cambridge University Boat Club (to seven Boat Race wins) and several Great Britain crews (including the gold medal women’s pair at the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympic Games), and who works currently as a coaching advisor – said that, alongside knowing what it is that an athlete must do in a boat to make it go well, it is important to know how and why this happens.

Coaching Technique

Across the international coaching community, Williams said, today there is a large degree of agreement about what good rowing technique is. However, noting that some rowing programmes are clearly more successful than others, he argued that “performance relationships are a big part of how you get that message across.”

“Every successful crew, every successful team has got a good coach behind it,” Williams added. “All clubs have these phases where they’re doing well, and there’s a coach – there’s a person – driving that programme,” he said. “These people are obviously doing something more than just telling people to ‘put [the blade] in, take it through, and take it out at the other end of the stroke’. There’s something else at work there.”

Williams said this was true of other sports, and also in the industry and business worlds. There are “Leaders who somehow manage to get across not just the nuts and bolts of what to do,” he said, “but [also] the philosophy, and getting people to show the best in themselves to deliver whatever it is, whether it’s profits or gold medals.”

Drawing on late Harvard University rowing coach Harry Parker’s argument that a coach’s role is to provide the environment within which an athlete can find and bring out the personal desire to succeed, Williams said that – in setting up this coaching environment, and emphasising the cultures and values therein – a coach’s job “is to display the qualities that you want from your athletes”.

Coach Behaviours

“If you have vision, passion, and determination; if you’re reliable and you’re on time; you can be relentless and ruthless and tough, but you can also show compassion, communication, and understanding.” For “all of these things,” he said, “athletes look to coaches … to produce these qualities in themselves.”

As regards the athletes, Williams said “rowing is littered with examples of people who have been successful despite not being the biggest, or perhaps despite not even fulfilling the written criteria that whatever system says you need to fulfil.”

Williams said there are other factors at work for an athlete “beyond just the numbers that come out of the machines and what you can measure”. “It’s easy to turn up and it’s easy to do the work,” he argued. “The hard thing is to be honest with yourself and find out what your inner drivers are.”

While Williams acknowledged that individual personalities can be hard to change as a whole, “I think what you can do [as an athlete],” he said, is “look at bits and pieces of your personality and find the ones which are most useful to you in a rowing context.”