What Frank Dick doesn’t know about masterminding individual success and international achievement can be written on the back of a particularly small postage stamp.
So, with the Olympics rapidly approaching, who better to turn to for advice on how to turn high-performing athletes into ‘super-elites’ than the man who helped guide Daley Thompson to two Olympic decathlon titles and who, as the British Athletics Federation’s Director of Coaching, played an instrumental role in the success-laden careers of other much-loved 80s icons like Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett.
He has gone on to work closely with sporting greats including Boris Becker, Justin Rose and Katarina Witt and, more recently, worked as a consultant alongside England coach Eddie Jones, lending his strategic planning expertise in the build-up to the 2019 Rugby World Cup, where England finished runners-up to South Africa.
As you would expect, Frank is often asked for his ‘golden nuggets’ of advice by coaches – “They come in all the time, from every direction”, he says.
Of course, there is no silver bullet for sporting success and neither, it would seem, are there any secrets just waiting to be told.
Shooting down my initial idea for a headline – ‘Unlocking the Secrets to a Golden Games’ – in his opening sentence, Frank says: “If there is a secret, it’s that there isn’t one”.
There is, however, a mountain of essential lessons coaches can learn from Frank’s own career experiences, beginning today with his tips on shrewd and methodical planning.
This is the base layer that sits on top of the foundations of athletic excellence: plain unadulterated hard work and a willingness to acknowledge and learn from failure. We will reveal other layers coaches must master through the course of the series if they are to create a recipe for success.
Be forward thinking but coach backwards
Frank’s opening gambit to those coaches who ask for his advice is usually a quick reminder of what he terms the most important relationship in sport:
That athletes make excellence happen; coaches make excellence possible.
“That’s your role as a coach; you are creating the possibility. Once the athlete is out there in the arena, then that’s their job.
So, everything you do in your planning and preparation is about that: equipping them to make those decisions themselves when it matters.”
And just like there are no secret short-cuts to success, so there is a lot more to effective planning than meets the eye.
If you want to achieve greatness, then your brain must always be thinking one step ahead of your fellow coaches.
And that is certainly the case with planning. It is standard practice for coaches to plan forwards, but better practice to flip things 180 degrees and plan backwards.
That back to front, upside down way of thinking may be contrary to convention, but Eureka moments happen by looking at things through a different lens and shifting your perspective.
Always plan backwards from a big competition to determine exactly what is needed to achieve performance success on that day,” says Frank.
“Whether it be next week, next month or in four years’ time, work backwards from that point to the present day.
If you intend to achieve greatness in the biggest arenas in life, you must not look at what excellence is like today and say ‘how can I be better than that tomorrow’, you must look at what excellence is going to be like tomorrow, and ask yourself how you can be better than that.”
Anticipating change and what greatness will be
By definition, a visionary is someone who plans the future with imagination or wisdom.
Frank is a firm believer that pre-empting change is far better than having to wait to adapt after change occurs.
He quotes Air Marshall Giulio Douhet, an Italian World War One military theorist, to emphasise this point:
Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur.”
In military terms, survival is dependent on demonstrating prescient insight. In sporting terms, success can depend on anticipating what greatness is going to be.
So, what exactly does it look like when a coach, showing foresight and thinking ahead of the curve, and who is striving to make excellence possible, executes a plan to perfection in a relationship with an athlete who is striving to make excellence happen?
Well, in its most dynamic form, it looks like the Novak Djokovic return of serve!
As Frank explains: “Why is Djokovic’s return of serve so brilliant? What makes him great is that when he’s providing the solution to the problem that you’ve set him, he’s setting you a problem with his solution.” Djokovic and his coaching team, in other words, are always one step ahead of the opposition in their obsessive planning.
Okay, so you have devised a meticulous periodisation plan. You know your athlete is running the 100 metres final at 8pm in Paris on August 4 in the biggest competition of the year. You are planning backwards and have a detailed picture in your head of where you need to be six weeks before that, and six weeks before that, right back to the present.
What’s next?
“Well,” says Frank, “now you have to be mustard at your preparation!
“Remember, an athlete doesn’t have control over the result, only their own performance, so that’s what you’re preparing for, for them to give the performance of their life, at that moment in time. And every moment of your preparation is about that.”
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