The Deep End

Everyday people doing extraordinary things in sports coaching.

Sports coaching is not easy, especially at the community level. This podcast is a collection of interviews and stories of everyday coaches, the people in the deep end of their own coaching journey, wayfinding their way through practice and pedagogy.

False dichotomies and verbing your nouns

Join me in this wonderfully open, curious and pondering adventure through expertise, learning, thinking, knowledging and science as inquiry. I am joined by Martin Camiré and Carl Woods for this correspondence, something I never thought I’d say!

Science my way out of this

In this episode, I meet hockey coach Helen Weston who was kind enough to reach out and send a message of support after hearing one of our earlier episodes. Despite adamantly suggesting that she didn’t have much to say, this episode was an absolute joy to record (as you will no doubt hear in our voices!).

Go fast alone or slow together

Here, two of my favourite Kiwis in coach education and development join me to ponder some of the questions we face in our daily work: how do we co-design with community coaches, who gets to decide what’s worth knowing, and how do we balance “what they need to know” with “what they want to know”.

Reviews

“Alex, you have a voice that needs to be heard… just the parents on the side lines need to understand how important sport can be and they shouldn’t suck the fun out of it for their kids. Honestly… I think I was a bit full on in the early days, I hope to be able to share your podcast with as many people as possible, so they better understand what it’s really about.”

“It was a joy and a pleasure to listen to your insights and experiences on the podcasts mentioned. I had to keep stopping to make notes. I just really wanted to add to the sentiment that yours is a perspective that needs to be heard and to say a huge thank you for all the work you do in sharing it.”

Paper by Paper: A Sports Research Playbook

Turning journal articles into fun conversations.

I know, two podcasts is a bit unnecessary but it’s my excuse to catch up with the effervescent Yleia Mariano monthly and unpack the research papers that sports coaches would love, but can’t read, because they’re not written for every day people.

Offroad Cycling

A personal favourite of mine, wandering through the concept of expertise after being inspired by watching a road cyclist go seamlessly “off-road” with his bike after sliding out of a corner! So much to unpack here.

The Gorilla in the Room

The classical experiment about counting basketball passes while nobody noticed the gorilla suit strolling through the video is a great vehicle to discuss “inattention blindness” – yes that’s as hard to say as it is to read…

Tongue Twisters

Exploring the Etymology of Existing Terminology was a bit of a play on words (hehe) given how convoluted scientific language and papers can be. We discuss a paper on ‘blurry terminology’ in talent.

Still curious to hear more? Let me know if something resonates with you!

research threads

blog

services

^^ This is where you’ll find my guest appearances on podcasts :)