Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 3, Epsiode 3

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 3 • Episode 3

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The episode delves into the intertwining themes of culture, performance, and leadership within the context of the Indigenous All-Stars game. It explores the challenges athletes face regarding performance metrics, cultural significance, and job interview processes, emphasizing the importance of preparation, connection, and personal growth in these contexts.

• Discussion of the Indigenous All-Stars game and its significance 
• The cultural immersion of Indigenous players in sports 
• Challenges of balancing physical demands with cultural respect 
• Insights on player resilience and genetic durability 
• Importance of GPS metrics in monitoring performance 
• Reflections on personal growth through job interviews 
• Strategies for effective preparation and connection 
• The role of scenario planning in professional development 
• Closing thoughts on the value of cultural significance in athletics

SpeedSig Intro

Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com

Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to a very special episode of Two Coaches and a Coffee. Today, you actually have your two coaches and your coffee all in one spot. So, Darren, how are you doing, mate? Welcome to Perth.

Darren Burgess:

Doing all right, mate, Good to be here. It's a little bit odd in that I can look over there and see you and yet we're on here. But this is the modern technology that we're working with here.

Jason Weber:

We're using a bit of new tech, yes, but it's good to have you in one spot, mate.

Darren Burgess:

No, it's good to be here for the Indigenous All-Stars game later this afternoon, which will be an incredible game. Really genuinely privileged to ask to be part of the All-Stars staff. So yeah, we've got 31 of the best Indigenous players in the AFL playing against Fremantle, so it should be. If nothing else, it'll be an extremely entertaining game.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, mate, they're going to bring some passion to it, because you watch on the news through the week, there's quite a lot of lads that are genuinely behind the concept and represent family and culture and all that. So I think they're going to have a big crack. Yeah, and we've had a fair few cultural events concept and represent family and culture and all that.

Darren Burgess:

So I think they're going to have a big crack. Yeah, now we've had a fair few cultural not education, but immersion sessions and the boys have got a few surprises when they kick goals at the start of the games. It's exciting to be here, mate, good to see you.

Jason Weber:

Just as an aside, mate, the All Blacks do that really well With their haka and and they have what you'd say cultural immersion around that. So, yeah, it's awesome. I will say the Wallabies now do it because we have so many Polynesian descendants playing. They actually have Polynesian culture, dave and things. So, interesting aside, mate, so back to the world that we live in and communicating to our brethren two things we're going to go through today, probably briefly, but one might drag out a bit. We were just discussing survivability of players because, in the role you're in for this game, you've just been asked. You get so from all the teams around the country who supply players. They give recommendations. So your call to me the other day was the old bulls have just said, yep, play him, play him. The young ones are saying, oh, it's got to be. You know, 5.2 kilometers and 33 and a half minutes are really very minutiae orientated numbers.

Darren Burgess:

It's interesting because there's a cultural aspect to this and there's a physical aspect to this. So, 31 players from 17 clubs, and these are, by and large, their star assets.

Jason Weber:

Yes.

Darren Burgess:

And that's what they are, their assets.

Jason Weber:

In a business?

Darren Burgess:

yes, exactly, and so the staff have said to me, or some of the staff have said you know, can this player get this many kilometres and can this player, if this player doesn't get this many kilometres, can you do some extra work with them afterwards? And so there's been some quite specific and some quite generic, and so the cultural aspect is for, and that's not what we're here to talk about, but I feel like I should mention it.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, absolutely.

Darren Burgess:

This is as big a game as any for these players. Some of them will never get to play in a grand final and so playing with their brothers on a big stage. There's 37,000 tickets being sold, so it's probably 45,000 crowd for a trial game is enormous and some of the vision that I've watched in the last 24 hours and talking to the players. This is so big for them. So I feel a responsibility to A give the players enough game time so that they can show themselves. But the physical aspect is we've got to respect the requests of each of the clubs, because tomorrow morning at am they're all going back to their clubs and there's two weeks till the season, so to get an injury now would be an absolute disaster. So, yeah, there's some of the players, but certainly the older players are. Just no, I'm playing. You know you rotate me on and off. So in a normal game you've got four on the bench, we've got 11 on the bench to try and get them on. So it's going to be organized chaos.

Jason Weber:

And I bet they want to go too. They'll want to get in there.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, imagine. You know, trying to get players off when you know you're on the bench is pretty tough. So anyway, it was an interesting sort of experience getting the limitations placed on players. I don't know their history, but some of the high-performance managers just said no, just play them. Whatever. We trust you, we'll back you in to look after our guys. We've got live GPS, so some of them have given us metrics to hit. Trying to get them to run after the game is going to be challenging, jason, as you know. No.

Jason Weber:

Not in a cultural game like this, no way. I mean I think it was like. I mean it's an amazing thing. I will make one quick comment. Which I think I didn't get as a younger guy when I was in some of the roles, is the enormity of the culture in some of these events. And I think when you're looking at what you, as you said, you're privileged to do, a guy I worked with for a long time and will work with again soon, michael Dobbin. He ran this Indigenous program for many years. It's awesome, but you've got to respect it and you've got to, as you're doing, try and make it happen for the guys, because it is such a big thing and I think when it comes to this will sound silly. But broader things, like other stakeholders in your job, you know the importance of what the marketing people do and the sales and all those things that you know you've got to, really got to support that because ultimately it's the business. But anyway, let's not talk about that stuff too much. What I will say was it was interesting when we sat down with a chat and, just about this, we're estimating we need this many kilometers or that, and the level of accuracy or the merit in some of those things. I'm not saying they're right or wrong, I don't know, but it's been interesting.

Jason Weber:

And I pulled up a point about your journey through EPL. I'm doing a lot more now on the periphery of EPL with SpeedSig and looking at the guys who can and those who can't. And is it just truly attritional Because we discussed a player which I'm not going to name? And is it just truly attritional Because we discussed a player which I'm not going to name but we both work with, who just had this litany, this list of reasons why he couldn't go Central tender miss da-da-da-da-da-da-da. But he's a great footballer, so we'll try and keep him going. But, mate, I think sometimes there's no question and SpeedSig contributes to this too is it just starts to rack up evidence as to why this guy can't go and he's never going to go.

Jason Weber:

He's just attritional at some point.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I think I was listening to a podcast from Ender King talking about rehabbing and Aspartame.

Darren Burgess:

Aspartame, yeah, talking about and he's one of the best around talking about how he likes to put together the puzzle and why this player ultimately. I believe that some players are not genetically equipped to perform at the highest level and we both work with players like that, correct? I can listen to a thousand podcasts on how to piece together the rehab puzzle for somebody with chronic hamstring tendon, chronic calf. Just genetically, they were gifted with many things, but one of them was not the durability to play at the elite level. Oh yeah, so we could spend all day going, yeah, but if we just improved the stiffness of the tendon. But it's just not going to happen. But on the flip side and I'll say this till the cows come home and very few people will listen to me, jason, Look, I will mate GPS.

Darren Burgess:

I did my parents, steve, I don't know I've said this a few times, probably on this podcast, but GPS is a guide. If I took the 32 players that are going to take the field this afternoon and I put them through whatever model you want to use, whether it's Acute, chronic or whatever it is and I added 40% every week, which is unhealthy, and people will go, what the you're ruining it. I guarantee you there would be um 28 red flags by any system that you and I could set up, and I'm going to guess 26 of them would get through. If I did five weeks of continuous add 40 percent of load, 26 of them would get through and three or four of them wouldn't make it. Yet every sports scientist in the world, being a journalist here, would be saying oh you can't.

Darren Burgess:

Red flag, red flag, red flag. You can't do it, you can't do it. So it's a guide. Some players can handle it, some can't. For as many red flags and we do this analysis every year for as many red flags that have got injured versus red flags that have got through is ridiculous.

Darren Burgess:

The amount that get through compared to those who get injured yeah, so overwhelming if, if a coach wants to do a certain amount of training, we do ourselves a disservice as an industry to continually saying no, no, no, no, there's a red flag there, there's a red flag there. No, he can't. The difference between 60-metre sprint and 80-metre sprint might be 33% and that might be too high, but it's 20 metres.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is where we get down to really starting to understand what's true and what's not. You say GPS. Right, it's a guide. Gps is what, what reps, what distances?

Jason Weber:

I think when you get into the enderking level, and what they're doing and certainly what I aspire to do in the field with Speedsink is how. How are they doing it? Because if how changes, that's a big deal. So my view would be, let's say, asymmetry, and there's a hole in running. The asymmetry thing is much more complex than force plates. But if you've got an asymptomatic asymmetry, that's got no history, but that's just the way they run. Who cares? Move on.

Jason Weber:

My perspective with that is model it, understand it and keep an eye on it. Yeah Right, but that's when we get to the loading parameters is we don't actually model players and understand how they recover. What we're doing is just saying, globally, you can't add more than, let's say, whatever, it is 10% per week. We put caps and we're doing population-level evaluations. So, as you said, you give everybody a smacking. Well, 4% or 5% are going to go unbelievably. Four or 5% will fall off the edge of the earth and the rest will survive. So yeah, man, I think, for the level of. I think there's just got to be a reality check to what we know and what we don't know. That's the one.

Jason Weber:

The one that gets me is the young coach, the young sports scientists who go. This is the law, this is the thing it's like, dude, you don't know that You're making as big an inference call as anybody in the world, like the one of mate. God forbid, you know, I jump on a force plate or a Nord board. We'll predict whether you can run or not. Like, give me a break. Like it's totally different.

Darren Burgess:

I was speaking to Matthew Inew innes recently, one of the great high performance managers and and the great humans going around, and he said a lot of people said um to him when he when he started at various jobs in the past. We're overfilling this bucket with. You know, the bucket's just getting too full, and his reply was we make the bucket bigger and then see if we can't fill it up. So, you know, make improve their capacity and the only way you can do that is by adding load. Now I understand you don't want to add load on dysfunction and all those wonderful gray with the gray terms, and it was the american guy that did the. I'm looking over to get the answer. It was the american guy that that did the?

Darren Burgess:

sorry, who was the American guy that did the? I'm looking over to get the answer. Who was the American guy that did the?

Jason Weber:

Sorry, who was he? We're getting all the reverb now.

Darren Burgess:

I can't remember, can't remember his name, but load on dysfunction. Yeah yeah, you can't do that, I understand that, but it's amazing how much the body will adapt within reason. And then you find out, like we said and we'll get on to another topic shortly but like we started talking about the Premier League, those guys and girls playing 60 games a season, and now up to 80 games a season, some of them this year. So the human body can handle it. There just are some that might not be able to.

Jason Weber:

But there's also mate. There's also some really simple metrics. Like the kid who played through his age groups and just survived, got through, mate awesome. The guy who's had injuries for five, ten years before he even comes to the pros probably gonna have an issue. I had I think I've talked about this before, mate, back in in 2005 in the Wallabies we had these three rugby league recruits come in, three great guys, but, mate, they come from a nutritional system where you just get belted and they survive. They came into rugby. They never got injured. They always performed. They got on the drink a hell of a lot, but they were just resilient humans because they'd probably to some extent gifted, like mum and dad, good breeding. They were excellent, but they had problems. They had one of them in particular super powerful but super tight, so range of motion was horrible.

Darren Burgess:

The dude could go.

Darren Burgess:

We'll finish this topic by. There was a I don't even know where I saw this, but I promise you it's objective. It's not just in the back of my head somewhere but there was about five different AI tested models of injury prediction, and the common theme of all of them was previous history. That's what they all used to lean on more than anything else. So as much as we can talk about this injury prediction and go, oh, Sam Robertson said it'll never happen, and I agree with him. We're in the risk mitigation business and the biggest risk is previous history.

Jason Weber:

Have you.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, yeah 100%, 100%, which is why I think, when we're picking players and I preached this for a long time in AFL and for a long time no one listened Number one if you want speed, buy it. Yes, Because again the same thing. I can make people a little bit quicker or a little bit more efficient, but I can't take slow and make them into super quick. You want quick, go and buy it, right, Go and buy it and we'll keep it healthy and all the rest of it. But buy speed and, I think, buy resilience. Buy the kid who has shown ability to back up games and he's played. Oh, she same thing. Same thing, I think, particularly in Australia with the AFLW very, very difficult because you've got girls coming out of other sports so you don't really know. But again, that's another hole.

Jason Weber:

Matt had his basket full of crazy, very tough and demanding metrics there.

Darren Burgess:

We can chat about that another time. But what I want to talk to you about is something you've experienced recently, Jason. I know hair loss. That was an awesome um is the job interview process. Talk to me about that well the job interview process.

Jason Weber:

So I mean to be blunt and fair. I've been through two job interview processes in uh inside the last six months, one in the AFL and one just recently. Both have been successful One I knocked back and one I've accepted for the purposes of making my life simpler. But I do think what was really interesting is you know when you talk to people about how do you do it. And so one job interview was, as I said, afl level, so it was three or four meetings. It was then a presentation, it was the whole piece. The other job was really just one meeting. It was not as quite a high level, so it was a little bit more simple.

Jason Weber:

But the importance of getting yourself organised and being structured I mean, as an older guy obviously you know it's, you're a bit more confident, but I think the the ability or the necessity to get everything organized and to get your mind really clear as to what you're presenting, so that when you're in conversation not just presentation, but you're in a conversation you can convey very comfortably where you're at. So massive experience, very interesting experience. I think there's a bit of humility to it. Like you're going back to the job interviews, I'm 55,. I'm not a spring chicken as much as I look like a spring chicken with bags under my eyes. But yeah, I think you've got to. I think there's an element for younger coaches of preparing for this stuff before it comes.

Darren Burgess:

How would one prepare for it, though? Like how can you know the um proliferation of people and culture, um infiltration into interviews, where I'm gonna say to people so recently we, we hired a physio and we gave them, uh, an hour before the interview, we gave them a scenario, and so they were emailed a scenario and they had to prepare for it An hour before Holy cow An hour before yeah, so how can you prepare for that?

Jason Weber:

So you know what we do in this podcast a lot Hypotheticals.

Darren Burgess:

Yep.

Jason Weber:

I'm a big believer in hypotheticals, in that you can test things out, you can walk a mile in someone else's shoes, so to speak. In that I think you can prepare for different ideas. I think it's something that I don't I would do. I did, certainly in the lead up to the job interview, the big job interview, particularly the AFL, because it's the same thing. I was going into an interview and I was wondering, like what might they ask me? If they ask me this, which direction would I take the discussion? If they ask me, if they ask me this, which direction would I take the discussion? It's like preparing for um, a debate. I don't know if you remember that back in school, uh, yeah, or anything like that. Like you've got to prepare for arguments, you've got to understand the, the landscape. Where could people go, man? I think that's really like getting the scenario an hour before. That's really interesting, but it's gonna be. It's not going to be something that ideally, it's something you should know and understand. So what are they going to give me? So let's do this.

Jason Weber:

Let's say righto, if you're going to prepare for a reasonably solid level job, let's say senior S&C coach, physio, like you did, solid level. So you should be looking at scenarios around that and I'm going to give you something else. So there's two ways this could go. You could interview with Virgil and he could give you an hour before prep. You can interview with me, and my interview process is quite different. Once we go through that, oh, we've met and this is okay. I'm going to take you into the practice and into the gym and I'm not going to give you an hour. I'm going to say, right, let's do this. I'm not that aggressive like, but I'll make it conversational because I want to know what you know. I'm not interested in, um, what you make up, I want you on the spot so then again.

Jason Weber:

So, so they're different scenarios like what.

Darren Burgess:

It's hard to prepare for that other than um know your shit.

Jason Weber:

It's pretty hard to prepare for that yeah, but what you can do I, I would argue then it's pretty hard to prepare for that. Yeah, but what you can do. I would argue then that the way you get really good at that stuff is sharing your shit with other people. So take what we're doing, for instance. Right, we're doing a podcast where we're speaking about the things we believe and know and well, things we believe, not certainly we know, but we understand and we put out into the world. You've got to practice it and you practice that, in my opinion, by working with your peers. Yes, you're going to do the job. I think there's no question of that, but there's nothing to say that if you're in an industry where, let's say, I've got a job, I'm mid-tier in an AFL team or at any club and I'm trying to move on, I think there's something to be said for getting in front of your mates and your peers and saying, hey, man, just drop me a couple of questions, let's interview me. I think you said before sorry you go.

Jason Weber:

No, I can hear you over there. He's doing that at me behind the camera.

Darren Burgess:

I'm just saying let me get a word in I think you've made the point more than me in this podcast A scenario planning where you say to your staff, your peers, can you tell me what happened in that meeting so I can prepare for when it is that I'm going to be in that meeting? Can you and we might sit down and as a group and say, right, we've got a pretty fortunate so far the Adelaide pros, for instance, we've had a pretty fortunate off season in terms of a pre-season, in terms of injuries. But now's the time where if you get a little hamstring or a calf or a quad or something like that, you've got three weeks to get it right for for the season. It becomes pretty crucial. So you could scenario plan that situation and say, right, let's do this. Um, we had a hamstring pre-christmas that took probably eight weeks to to get back because we had eight weeks in fact we had 16 weeks, so we used it.

Darren Burgess:

So what? What are the risks that we could take in that process? So I understand that you can scenario plan but you do you.

Jason Weber:

You're falling now to a leadership thing which is dead right, mate, like. So I'm very big on like. In hospitals, when you have an incident where someone passes, they have an after action. Same in military after you finish. You finish an operation or even in training you finish training, you have an aar after action report, so you review everything. I think there's a massive learning experience in that for everyone.

Jason Weber:

Now I do that now with meetings. So, as a businessman, if I have a big meeting with a prospective client, I'll review the meeting. Like how did I go? Did I present well, what did I do? What would I do differently? And that's the same thing. So we used to do it with a couple of my guys who are now running AFL Jump themselves. If I went to a meeting that I knew was going to be heavy with coaches but I couldn't bring them in, I would say this is what it's about. Go and do the meeting, come back and go right. This is what happened. How would you do it? How would you handle it? This how would you do it? How would you handle?

Darren Burgess:

it. This is what they posed to me. I think it makes sense.

Jason Weber:

That's a leadership piece from us, but I think that the ability, like there's some things you can't learn- unless you do the job.

Darren Burgess:

Do you agree?

Jason Weber:

Yeah, and so when you're interviewing for a position, generally it's up, so you probably haven't done that job. Practicing the elements man, I'm a big believer. I read the Google book years ago about how Google was built, but part of it is having time every week to work on projects. But there's also time every week If you're in the business of going up a tier, of preparing yourself, of practicing. Getting those, of testing and I still think that's part of just getting better at your job is all right, I work with you. I saw Darren make this decision. Would I have done it differently? And if I did, what's the point for and against?

Darren Burgess:

And then, in some regards, hopefully being in a position to discuss that with someone then, in some regards, hopefully being in a position to discuss that with someone, I think, when a lot of people say, how do you improve your leadership and how do you and there was, look, I'm doing a master's in leadership, so you hope that's helping Nothing is helping more than on the job and having to make those decisions. I remember and I know we're running out of time here, but when I was at Arsenal, we changed managers from Arsene Wenger been there 23 years, built the club to Emery Spanish, brought in his own Spanish analysts, and I went up to the analysts who were under my remit in that role and they were really frustrated because they were using the Spanish system and we had this advanced system and they thought it was you know.

Jason Weber:

So I looked at them and thought we're not doing much.

Darren Burgess:

And I said well, I'll tell you what you're gonna do. You're going to review every game. Well, the manager doesn't need it, yeah, but it's good practice. What happens if the manager goes to Real Madrid in six months time and another manager comes in? This is good practice to review every game. So let's just pretend that the manager wants it because at some point he's going to.

Darren Burgess:

It's like the story that I told a hundred times when I started with Pim Verbeek and the Socceroos, who had no interest in GPS, no interest in heart rate. It was just me downloading one cradle after another cradle after another cradle, and I'd slide the report under his bedroom door in hotels and write a little handwritten note on it. I reckon six months it took him to actually ask me a question about it, and so I imagined him playing basketball with the crumpled up bit of paper in the in the in the bin in the hotel room and just laughing at this stupid Aussie. But after six months he asked me a couple of questions and and then we, we established it's good practice to do it. So you do it. It's scenario planning um it's forward planning.

Jason Weber:

For sure, man I'm going to throw one last thing before we go, mate. I'm I'm doing some mentoring stuff at, so you do it, it's scenario planning, it's forward planning, for sure, man, I'm going to throw one last thing before we go, mate. I'm doing some mentoring stuff at the moment with a good young coach out of Queensland, and one of the things we've talked about which is what you just talked about then is connection. One of the biggest things in this gig is the connections, connections you have with all your up down sideways, but how you manage that and that's ultimately when you're doing job interviews, what you're trying to establish really quickly is a connection with the person interviewing you. So figuring out how you can cut down time and space to create connections with people is awesome.

Jason Weber:

Righto mate, we've done our dash. We think Coles is going to be finishing the gym by now, so we need to pull this thing up. Mate, it's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure having you here sitting a couple of meters away from me and listening to the reverb, but my awesome made all the very best tonight. I hope it goes really well for you and the boys thanks, mate cheers.

Darren Burgess:

Thanks, mate Cheers, mate Cheers.