Gold Medal Coaches and Olympic champions share lessons at the Coach Academy
Published Thu 16 Sep 2021
Two years after its inception, Snow Australia Coach Academy continues to offer Australian coaches engaging opportunities to grow as professionals and individuals.
COVID-19 posed significant challenges to a program originally designed around ‘live labs’ sessions and in-person gatherings, but Snow Australia Lead Facilitator Chip Richards and the rest of the Coach Academy team including Ben Wordsworth and Peter Topalovic did not let the disruptions affect the roll-out of the program.
The group seized the opportunity instead, and built momentum using technology to facilitate remote connections. Over the last 12 months, they organised regular virtual sessions to bring together coaches across different disciplines in a virtual environment.
“Of course these arrangements have their pros and cons,” Richards said.
“Remote sessions cannot replace the intimacy of meeting together as a group for three of four days, but they allowed for more frequent touch points and enabled us to bring together people that otherwise would have not had an opportunity to meet and share experiences.
“This has been true not only for the Coach Academy cohort, but also for guest speakers, experts and other people with unique perspectives that it would have been difficult to bring to a live lab in Jindabyne,” he said.
The ‘Gold Medal Coaches’ series offered the 45 emerging coaches from all snow sports disciplines participating in the Coach Academy program an opportunity to interact with snow sports Olympic champions like Alisa Camplin and Lydia Lassila and other performance specialists, athletes and coaches from summer sports like Australian BMX technical director Wade Bootes, or canoe slalom Olympic Champion Jess Fox and her coach/mother (and Atlanta 1996 Olympic bronze medalist) Myriam Fox.
“What’s really unique about Jess and Myriam is that they are a coach/athlete combo, and they’re also family members,” Richards said.
“That presented a great opportunity to get a different perspective on what it takes to create a breakthrough or sustained performance at the level that they do, together.”
Jess and Myriam Fox first participated in one of the Coach Academy sessions in mid-2020, when they were still navigating the postponement of the Tokyo Games. They connected again after the Olympics, where Jess Fox won a gold and a bronze medal, cementing her status as the greatest canoe slalom paddler of all time.
“We stayed in contact with them while they were in Tokyo and afterwards it just fell like a perfect full-circle moment,” Richards explained.
“I think Jess and Myriam’s ability to embrace any obstacle along the way, lean into it and use it as fuel to move forward was really inspiring for our coaches.
“Jess’ ability to reframe obstacles and setbacks, identifying opportunities to grow, was a real eye-opener. She has a mantra that says - if it’s difficult, if it’s challenging, that’s good for me.
“Listening to her talking about change and challenge, in particular after watching what she achieved in Tokyo, was very powerful for the group.”
The Gold Medal Coaches sessions fit into the overarching Coach Academy objective to develop coaches holistically, addressing multiple dimensions of their growth including human performance, management and leadership.
“Coaches have to wear all these hats at different times, but they don’t always realise it and they don’t often take time to develop these skills,” Richards said.
“So when we started pulling together the curriculum for Coach Academy, we realised that there are so many strong subject matter experts within the Snow Australia family, or closely connected to it, and one of my great joys is to bring in guest speakers and facilitators from different backgrounds because it’s really stimulating for the coaches.
“Coaches recognise that there are common threads that go through all high-performance endeavours, so they can take those learnings and apply them specifically to the technical challenges of their sport,” Richards said.
