Part 3

Lunch…very nice thank you; thanks to the BE staff for organising it.

Refreshed and fed our afternoon session was a presentation from the EIS (English Institute of Sport) team, a Q&A with some of the players, a presentation on the BE Pathways and an observation of the squad both on curt and in the gym.

EIS provide all of the services you'd expect for an elite sports team – psychology, physiotherapy, lifestyle, dietician etc. They spend a lot of time with the players monitoring all aspects of their performance and developing routines and plans to ensure that they all perform at their optimum. One of the interesting things was an approach called Wellness. Broadly speaking this looks at a wide range of factors to determine whether an athlete is in the right place to undertake the training schedule. Probably obvious stuff but good to see that allowances are made rather than just training the athletes until they break! Wellness looks at things like sleep patterns, general health and something called RSI – reactive strength index – that looks at explosive strength through a simple jump exercise. Bottom line on all of this is that that maintain a “norm” for each player and monitor regularly.

As you'd expect, the right mental attitude (and body language!!) play a key part in their performance…enter the shrink! Actually he was a nice guy (they all were). So it was good to know that all aspects of their health were catered for.

During the presentation we were given some Post-its to write down questions for the EIS team, the coaches and the players. These were collated and we had the Q&A session. For the players we had Toby Penty, Peter Mills, Lauren Smith and Heather Olver (all from the GB Programme Squad) – they answered all of the questions put to them (too many to list here). They were all a credit to BE; polite, open, honest and amusing too. A really nice group of people.

We had a presentation of the pathway structure – effectively how to get to the GB squad. I won't go into to it all here but just to say I now understand the sacrifice the players make to achieve their position; seems you have more chance of winning the lottery than becoming a senior England player! Jens Grill was fascinating to listen to. Money plays a big part in making things happen; more would be good but BE are under pressure to make every penny count – this can mean that not all of the best talent in the country gets the opportunity to take part – I guess that is the nature of the beast.

Jakob Hoi (Head GB doubles coach) gave a short presentation before rushing off to the hall to put the squad through some more torture!!

That was the chalk and talk sessions done. Next up was more training in the hall and the gym – more on that in part 4.

Regards

John

Paul,

Absolutely! I only gave a brief overview of the EIS team – but you are spot on the performance review stuff is vital. Interestingly enough, we were chatting to Chris Adcock – he said that because of the tournaments, they get to play the same pairs frequently. Each time they play they keep detailed notes of what worked, what didn't and what they could do next time.

It is this constant attention to detail, this desire to improve 1% here and there and the need (and desire) to train, refine and improve overall that sets the players apart from the usual club/league player.

Now imagine what could be achieved if club/league players spent a little more time practicing rather than just playing games.

Regards

John