Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 3, Epsiode 4

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 3 • Episode 4

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A thought-provoking discussion unfolds around the critical relationship between sports science and coaching, addressing the fine line between data interpretation and practical application in conditioning athletes. We explore the disconnect between coaches and performance scientists, their communication hurdles, and the importance of collaboration in optimizing player readiness.

• Critique of sports science by prominent football figures 
• Conditioning's role in preparing athletes for competitive play 
• Importance of trust between coaches and sports scientists 
• Need for a shared language to facilitate better communication 
• Real-life examples of managing player workloads and performance metrics 
• Discussion on injury risks among categorically fit and healthy players 
• Emphasis on the importance of collaboration in sports performance

Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com

Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee Birchow and Jase Webber. Here we're back on opposite sides of the country. How are you travelling, mate?

Darren Burgess:

I'm all right. I'm in the office, as you can see at the hospital-like background.

Jason Weber:

I'm in the library. I'm in the library, I'm in the world of knowledge. I've seen your library.

Darren Burgess:

That ain't what it looks like, but if some players come in, we'll either get them involved in the conversation or I'll be momentarily distracted. But let's go.

Jason Weber:

No, it's all right, mate. I've been sworn to privacy. My family walked past the glass door behind me and I'm not allowed to have anything showing, so that's why we've got the false bookcase.

Jason Weber:

Righto mate In our little preamble mate. I saw this interview yesterday published on LinkedIn. It was part of an interview which you might be able to elaborate on what it was, but there was Roy Keane, amongst a number of other people who appeared to be coaches of some description. I didn't really I didn't recognize them, nor know any of them, but they were slagging on sports science pretty hard and I I've got a position on and I want to discuss, but who? Who were these? Who was this?

Darren Burgess:

so do you know who it was? Who were they? Our english followers will be swallowing their cup of tea at the moment. They were Gary Neville, roy Keane and Wayne Rooney. They have a podcast.

Jason Weber:

Oh, is that Wayne Rooney? Jeez, Wayne Rooney's put on some weight, hasn't he?

Darren Burgess:

I got sent the link a few times. I think it was maybe a week or two weeks ago. And essentially they were talking about injury crisis in Tottenham and how, you know, managers are blaming injuries and you know, and there was a bit of debate about it's quite right that your manager can blame injury when you've got eight first-team players out.

Jason Weber:

No, no, no.

Darren Burgess:

So. But what they were saying was sports scientists have got too much of a say. Sports scientists are telling people they can and can't train. And Gary Neville who's obviously a very good footballer in his time but now he's probably the premier football pundit in the UK he said quite rightly your body has to build up a resilience to what you're asking it to do on game day. So if, for whatever reason, the manager, the sports scientist, the high-performance director, is not training the team hard enough, come game time your body will go hey, what the hell is this? Couldn't agree more, yeah.

Jason Weber:

Could not agree more.

Darren Burgess:

Probably the point that he made, which I think a lot of people in my experience anyway get undone by, is, he said you've got to harden your body to play Wednesday, Saturday, wednesday, saturday or Thursday, sunday, thursday, sunday, if you're playing two games a week, and so that's where, if you do play Saturday to Saturday to Saturday to Saturday and you have coming up after that, so four weeks of one game a week, and then you have coming up Saturday, wednesday, saturday, wednesday, saturday, Wednesday for four weeks after that, if you don't prepare the body for that, then that's a massive spike in load and you're asking for trouble. Now we can say, as sports scientists and high performance managers, whatever our profession is, yeah, but the coach should rotate and all those sorts of things, but the fact is, prepare for the worst case scenario, which is Saturday, wednesday, saturday Wednesday. So, although they were criticizing our profession which I get, I did like some of the points they were making You've been just chomping at the bit, so go ahead.

Jason Weber:

No, mate, look, I saw a snippet right so it was fine and it wasn't that I disagreed. I think you said Gary Neville's point. Absolutely agree, If we're not conditioning for, as you say, the worst case scenario, but straight up, what do they have to do? When do they have to do it? How frequently do they have to do it? It's pretty straight forward stuff. So on that front I couldn't agree with him more.

Jason Weber:

The idea of hardening them up, that's a very ethereal types like output, when we're starting to talk like even AFL is nowhere near the financial system that EPL or anything else is. But even with players of that value and their careers, we should be a bit more accurate than hey, we've just got to harden the body up. My argument is with, like, I think there are sports science guys and we talked about this last week with your experience with the Indigenous camp there were some guys coming in saying you know, they've got to play 23 minutes and this and that it's just too cute to use the phrase of a coach I used to work with. Far too cute, but so phrase of a coach I used to work with, far too cute, but so acknowledging that there are some dudes who have gone way too far and they are radically overstating their capabilities from a sports science perspective. But my note, my thing, was the notion that because you're a head coach, which means you're exceptional at understanding the tactics of the game, the nature of the game, all that sort of stuff is that you know is absolutely flawed, Absolutely flawed.

Jason Weber:

I've had two massive examples in my career of coaches going I know what to do, we're going to do it my way, and it breaks 100% and that we end up with. In both cases we end up with a raft of injuries that crushed the entire team. So while I disagree with the notion that coaches should know everything, I also think sports science doesn't know anything. So maybe somewhere in the middle there has got to be a point where coach and that senior whatever it is high-performance manager, they've got to come together and say this is what we do, this is our plan. What do you think, mate?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I think in the best-case scenario the coach and the director of performance, high performance manager, general manager, whatever your title, vice president of player health, as is the case in the US need to be on the same page, as this. So often what happens is either the coach brings their fitness person in in the case of soccer or global football and they just rely on that, or, in the US, the coach comes into a system whereby the general manager has employed the director of performance vice president and the coach comes in and fits into that system. So either way, it's not always the case, but there is a disconnect between coach and club staff and that's where the problem lies, because the coach has to trust that the club staff doctor, physio, performance person has the best interests at heart and obviously the performance people need to leave the coach to do the coaching. Where they start to intersect and a performance person says oh, I don't think they can do this drill, but that drill, but this drill, because that drill has too many left foot touches and not enough right foot, and you know that's where we get into some problems.

Darren Burgess:

Generally, keep it pretty loose and say this person can do 70% of a session. Which session? Which drills? Is it absolutely essential for this striker to do. Well, we're doing some defensive clearances from um set plays, okay. Well, maybe he doesn't have to do that, maybe she can go and work on some finishing, or maybe she you know that that's the sort of conversations broadly, rather than, as I said to you last week, I reckon um, this person can only do 50% of their game load of sprints and they sprint 200 metres in a game. Therefore, at 100 metres, we are taking this person off training. I just don't think that that works and the margin for error is too great and the precise nature of your diagnosis is just flawed on so many levels.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think something you said to me years ago resonated right when I was going with the coach. I don't know if you still do it, but you put a piece of paper on the wall and go right when the shit hits the fan. That's what we're going to refer to, I think the biggest issue I'm going to go with. I think it's our responsibility to go to the coach. We have to take the information to the coach. They're the boss, right? They're the gaffer.

Jason Weber:

I think we have to get our language right. I think we have to get our language right. I think we have to get our communication. I think we need to be clear from day one what we can do and what we really can't do. So, coach, when I come in and tell you that, hey, they can do 50-meter sprint, but they can't do 75, you probably deserve a swat over the head with a heavy object. Right? You should be able to say to Coach hey, this is the concepts we're going to work with, this is what we're working with. But what I would say is establish a language. Don't be a smart mouth. Don't be a smart mouth and think that because you got a PhD when you were 23 in some ridiculous loading study that you can enforce that and throw that around on people. I think it's our job to communicate what we do in the most understandable and digestible language for the coach.

Jason Weber:

And I think establishing that language early, Like don't like Something as simple as they talk in metres per second, you talk in kilometres per hour, like whatever. Something as nomenclature, simple as that, I think, will break those relationships and if you can get them squared away early. I must admit I worked years ago, like I'm happy to say. I worked with Ross Lyons for a long time.

Jason Weber:

Ross is a tough coach but we had some not hiccups but hurdles early. But I remember that as soon as we got our language right and he understood what I was talking about, his ability to plan training was unbelievable. Like so fast but so accurate. Like we had some like projected metrics, so like, if this is what you're doing in training, we could predict within reasonable accuracy what each player would do, which is not brain surgery but his ability to. When I came in and said, hey, these are some of the parameters we're after, he would be able to go bang, bang, bang, bang bang, Because we had that common language and I always think that was a massive thing for me and I think that if anyone listening to this is in the sports science game, it's your responsibility to communicate well to the coach. Don't force them, and I can only imagine it's worse when they're Spanish and English is not their first language. It must be incredibly tough, right.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I think keeping, like you said, keeping it generic or generic is not quite the right word, but Consumable, yeah, and also Usable Makes sense, enabling yourself to say to your sports scientist or your physio or your whoever listen, we don't want this guy to go above, we don't want this girl to go above 100-metre sprint, if we can help it, like that might be a language you use in your morning meeting, but then when you go to the coach, it's OK, we're going to restrict this player to 50% of the session. Then if they go to 120 metres, as I said last week, it's 20 metres of sprint.

Darren Burgess:

It's okay, everybody has targets, of course, we all have targets.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Darren Burgess:

But don't be obsessed by the targets, because, as we know and I got a message from our man, dave Carillon, during the week and he said great pod this week, mate, so much resonated.

Darren Burgess:

Got me thinking. When you spoke about the red flag review, did you ever review the orange or the green status guys that get injured? And it was remiss of us not to talk about that last week. We certainly did and it was extraordinary. The um, the green people got injured almost as much as the unadjusted red flags. The problem is the red flags were acted on so you could never tell the accuracy of your flagging system, which is how it should be. That's exactly how it should be. But yeah, even though you've given these people the green lights by your wonderful, by my wonderful monitoring, they still get injured, dr Andy.

Jason Weber:

Roark. But let's take a step back and a little bit of humility. What does it tell us about our monitoring metrics? We don't know everything. The purpose of science is to understand the variability in a system.

Jason Weber:

If we can't describe the variability accurately with the metrics we have, then, just because we have metrics, we can't say that's 100% right because we don't know. That's the thing that bugs me is that we try to imply so much from so little information that it's ridiculous, mate, look what I've done for the last 10 years with SpeedSig. I've done nothing but try to figure out the gap where we have no information, and the difference is like remarkable. I had a conversation this morning with a university in the US like entirely about just trying to. If we had this information, what would it help us do? That's like it changes the landscape. I'm not saying it's just basic, but back when I started in the late 90s, stop watching a pen and paper. That was it. All you could do was use your eye, and your eye was not always great.

Darren Burgess:

No.

Jason Weber:

You had a biro. You were more advanced than me.

Darren Burgess:

To finish the conversation and move on to the next topic, because I am under a bit of time pressure today. Neil Craig, one of the premier sports scientists in the country for some period and then he went and was a very successful senior coach and now he's a coach advisor with many different successful organisations. I went and doing my hon honors using a thing called Track Performance, which was a pen on a scaled field of.

Darren Burgess:

AFL and I remember sitting up in a cherry picker almost like a crane Got a crane Yep Running my pen over a miniature field and tracking players during training for him. And I came and said what did you want out of training? And he said I want about 10K. What do we get? And I said, oh well, this player got nine. Do you need to do extra? And he goes is it going to change your decision on that player? Only give me metrics. If it's going to change my decision on the player, I can't argue with that.

Jason Weber:

No, 100%, 100%. It's all about decision-making. But that's why you were up there doing that and I was working with the Wallabies then and that's when Neil Craig introduced that to Eddie Jones and the Wallabies. So, yeah, it was interesting, but same thing we went from having no information to having what you'd call canary in the coal mine, because you could only track one or two players, but straight away that gave you this new body of information For sure.

Jason Weber:

Mate I'm going to throw. I've got one other quick one which I think just stays close to this. This is for the S&C and sports sciences out there. But I reckon stay close is something that I did well for Tom sometimes with coaches, but I think you've got to keep a tight relationship with them, in that you need to be constantly having conversations, because when you just deliver information and then skip because you're doing something else, I think that relationship is so critical and I think I would be critical of myself for not facilitating that relationship in some parts, or sometimes because I was in gigs for a long time taking it for granted and letting it slip. I think keeping tight in that relationship with the boss is really important so that you can have conversations that don't go from zero to all our mma in fucking one second.

Darren Burgess:

Um, you know, and that does happen periodically yeah it does I think, yeah, you've got to navigate that and it's a balancing act. You've got to navigate the? Um pissing off the coach versus having the uncomfortable conversation early so you don't have to have it later, versus, um, keeping your job, which is a realistic um. Uh, worry for people versus doing what's right for the player versus doing what's right for the club, and all of those things can be.

Darren Burgess:

We could simulate maybe we'll do this next week. We could simulate a conversation between a high-performance director be that a doctor, physio, fitness, whatever and a manager, with me saying okay, I'm going to do what's best for the club here. How would the conversation go? Me saying I'm going to do what's best for the club here? How would the conversation go? Me saying I'm going to do what's best for the player? How would the conversation go? Me saying I'm going to do what's best to protect my job? How would the conversation go? And they would all go differently. Oh, yeah, yeah, it depends on your motivation and how you can sleep at night, depending on which angle you're going down.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, but I think the closer it's like anything right, Like, I think, any relationship you've got to keep them closer so those conversations are more easily facilitated, right. Hey boss, I've got something we need to discuss. It's shit, it's shit, but we need to just go through it. Okay, you know. So I think, yeah, staying close to your gaff is important. What else? You got any on the agenda, mate? Or you got to fly because you're under the pump? Something for us.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, we've got a first game against opposition this week in trial game against Port Adelaide. We've got two games in two weeks and then it's the season starting, so we can keep talking about that as we go through that process. But yeah, it's 1.30 in the middle of a training day and I need to get off, but I'm glad we could squeeze this in, mate. Love your work mate, yeah, start going through that library behind you and see what you can get from it.

Jason Weber:

I don't know. We'll cast an eye over it and see what happens. But thanks, mate, appreciate you and stay in contact, mate, I don't know, we'll cast an eye over it and see what happens but thanks, mate, appreciate you and uh, let's stay in contact. Thanks, mate.