Tour life of an S&C
Take home message
touring is a great way to learn more about the people you work with. Embrace the experience and opportunity.
For Coaches
Look for ways to help. Logistics can be stressful. If you help, you’re likely to get help.
For Athletes
You are all in this together. Pitch in and learn from the experiences of senior athletes.
As we leave for a quick three week tour to Europe, I thought I’d piece a few thoughts on the role of S&C on the road. A fortunate aspect of being an S&C coach with an international team is touring. Even a state role might involve some travel from time to time and getting away and living with players and coaches is one of the best ways to get to know them as people.
Personally, I love travelling, seeing new places and being immersed around the coaches and athletes. I hate being away from my family, but we understand that this is the role and it can bring some unique experiences for all of us from time to time.
Living with team mates, eating together, plane trips and bus rides are great opportunities to know more about the person than just the athlete or coach. It is also a great opportunity to expand the S&C skill set and experience into a repertoire of useful and unique skills
Hotel room - office, kitchen, meeting room and occasionally sleeping. .
As an S&C coach on tour, there is also more to the role than S&C. It is certainly a role that has that “and other duties as required” feel. There are definitely tasks that you cannot learn from a book. You can have some help from a mentor on how to plan and some of the things to expect, but until you live it, you don’t really understand it – and that’s ok. It’s why we value experience. Somethings you have to live to learn. But here are a few things you can know before you go.
From an S&C perspective, there are training sessions, warm-ups, gym sessions and maybe rehab, recovery sessions and assisting with nutrition – tasks we know how to do. However, even these “simple” tasks can be entirely different in foreign countries. First, you probably have a bus ride to training, which means you need to take everything to every session – it is not already there. That means warm-up/exercise kit, recovery gear, hydration, GPS, laptop. The first trip to the new city/venue should have a “recky” (reconnaissance) first to help prepare – but this does not always happen, so you have to think on your feet. How do you do this? Calmly and drawing on previous experiences.
Gym sessions, which are an S&C coaches bread and butter can be somewhat stressful (again, a recky can help, but does not always happen). You have to have a program that is flexible and can be adapted by you and your athletes on the spot. A way to improve this is to have sessions throughout the year in your home environment where you can educate the athletes about exercise alternatives. In this foreign environment senior athletes will be able to adjust rather quickly, especially as they assess very quickly how to adapt the environment to their own needs (whilst you are trying to think of the whole squad) which will allow you to cater for the lesser experienced athletes.
However, it is also the less obvious tasks that take a lot of your attention, tasks that would not normally comprise much of your day in the home training environment. A significant task is scheduling. I think it is because there are many aspects of physical preparation that are considered by an S&C coach that we become natural day planners on tour and interact with the manager a lot. And in doing so, it has many significant benefits.
First, it means that the head coach does not have to stress about planning detail and can focus on tactical and technical preparation. Head coaches want to know the detail, but they don’t always have to know the three or four drafts and communications that went into the final product. Managers too appreciate that someone is there to help them. There are a lot of logistics, formal requests and duties that this often thankless role has to focus on. Knowing that someone else is assisting also helps them.
Finally, players enjoy knowing that there is someone else assisting the manager. (I used to manage the men’s team from 2015 to the Rio Olympics). I find that although I no longer manage, the players will still ask for details about their day and the manager appreciates my previous experiences. It is critical that there is a good relationship between manager and S&C – a collaborative pair helping each other allow the team function seamlessly. I have found myself assisting with everything from transport, meal times, packing gear, shopping, tournament managerial duties, tickets / check-in at the airport, the hotel arrival check-in and room allocation / the team room set-up and laundry.
Match day is all hands-on deck and it doesn’t matter who does what – get it done. On match day, coaches need to focus on coaching and players on playing and everyone else on making sure coaches and players don’t get distracted. There are tasks allocated as you do not want to create confusion with many people assigned to a task. But when there is a change of plan, S&C coaches need to get stuff done.
There are so many tasks that require no talent or training. If a bottle needs filling, a bag needs to be picked up, plane tickets need to be distributed or a hotel room needs sorting, put your clipboard down and get it done.
I would encourage you to strive for a tour, but don’t do it for the tracksuit (I will say that again - don’t do it for the tracksuit. Those who do, get worked out quickly). Do it for the experience and skills you will develop. You will also make some tremendous memories and relationships.