Hi Michael

Welcome.

How many people do you coach? Any particular age/ability levels you prefer to work with?

It’s really good to have a fellow coach around. We know how much hard work goes into coaching, and how much satisfaction we get when the players get the technique or skill and we see it integrated in their game.

Hopefully, you’ll have plenty of ideas for topics to cover in this forum or for my video, so feel free to join in and have your ideas.

Personally, I really love chatting to other coaches and hearing about different methods, different thoughts on the game and how it should be played or coached. I hope we get the chance to to get know one another through this forum.

Paul

Michael

I can only echo your comments. When I used to be Head Coach at Greater Manchester Badminton Association (before they were disbanded by Badminton England to fall in line with senior counties), I worked with every squad, except under 10’s although I occasionally visited to see what they were up to and spy on the up-and-coming talent.

One thing I found with my private juniors is that no matter what I coached, they all adapted it to their style and I didn’t mess with it. After all, coaching is about developing talent, not clones.

I’m sure we’ve got lots to share Michael and I’m really looking forward to your contribution. I always love meeting other coaches to share ideas and thoughts on approaches to specific player problems.

The mental side of the game is huge. Like most sports, it’s becoming the next big thing. It’s been in athletics for many years. The great 400 metre hurdler, David Emery, was a pioneer in this research. Not sure what he’s doing now, but certainly he was one of the principle leaders of the mental side to sport from 1970’s when most top athletes hadn’t heard of it.

Over the last 10 years, when I wasn’t involved in badminton, I studied a huge amount. I dived into the business world and met so many great people including business coaches and life coaches. I also qualified as a Master Practitioner in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) which is a major force in changing peoples views to solve issues. One of my many teachers was Paul McKenna, who most people think of as a TV personality who helps people with phobias. Paul actually uses NLP in most of his work and all of his techniques for phobias are NLP techniques.

I’ve used NLP many times in different situations and use it in coaching frequently. It’s great when a child is getting upset over not being able to do a particular technique and then a change of their thinking creates the change required to do the technique correctly. Great stuff and so satisfying to see the result.

Hopefully we’ll get into some good discussions over this forum or email etc in the future.

Good luck with your studies.

Paul