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Chapter 1: What are the key considerations in early season board meetings?
Good morning. Six games is a plentiful sample size to gauge your early season fortunes. It matters who you've played. It matters more how you've played. The changes that have successfully been made, the problems that need to be urgently solved. Sydney has aced the first exam of the semester.
Fremantle has passed with flying colours, Carlton keeps stumbling over the same answer, and Richmond barely have the tools to submit the assignments. There's a public line that needs to be held with more than a quarter of a team's games played, but what's happening privately is far more illuminating.
Chapter 2: How do early season performances influence coaching strategies?
In the first systems check that's being run, there tends to be a scheduled board meeting where the coach presents the true state of the team and its prospects. Sometimes that's reassuring, other times it's managing expectations, and occasionally it's edgy, bordering on hostile. Publicly and privately, now is the time for coaches to get a grasp on where the team is at.
Well, probably pretty good in a way. Like, well, we've had six games. We've lost two games by less than a goal. I won the other three and then Swans got us when we had quite a few injuries. So not too bad, not too badly, but still frustrated to be three and three. We could be a little bit better, I guess.
I would think we look okay. What are we, 2-4? From where we're at and where we're trying to get to, out of the bottom reaches or the middle or whatever you want to call it, I think five out of our first six opponents... They've all been finalists, prelim, back-to-back premiers and finalists, bar one. And we've been in all of those games. I would think if you take out win-loss, We've improved.
We're not playing our best footy now. We don't need to be. We need to be winning and we ticked off one of those today. But more important, we've got to make sure that our best side is firing towards the middle to back end of the year. We think we've got some players that are going to make us a very, very good side. It's not quite clicking at the moment, but we think we're not too far away.
Three and three, you could argue we could be a lot better on the ledge than that. And we're working through some things that we want to get better at. I'm just learning the guitar. We've got a couple of chords that are out of tune at the moment. We're just tuning them up, but it's round six, isn't it? So we're excited for the challenge of that.
Today's Art of Coaching is managing up the early season presentation to the board, and our guide through the Art of Coaching is Ken Hinckley. Hello to you, Kenny.
Good morning, Gerard.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do coaches face when presenting to the board?
That's an interesting topic for the week, isn't it? It's that time of the season where we're fulfilling our dreams or we're ā We're living our nightmares, and that's exactly what happens.
Is it a shiver down the spine when you contemplate presenting to the board?
Yeah, not so much a shiver, but the story you need to tell is what probably is really important. And you've got to be really clear in your own mind and know exactly what your story has been thus far based on the story you told in the pre-season. And I think that's where you've got to bring the two stories together.
You know, one of the key things when you asked me about this topic was one of the key things you've got to be is you've got to be a very good storyteller. Yes. That's what I thought.
I thought straight away, this is the storyteller moment that you've got to, as a coach, you're a storyteller to your players, you're a storyteller to your supporters, and importantly, you're a storyteller to the board at your football club. So, you know, and you've just got to be able to make sure that the
The story that you are reading is one, that you believe in, and two, that it's real and it's not fictional.
What would you arm yourself with going into a board meeting? Would you have a presentation to back up your thesis? How would you approach it?
Yeah.
Yeah, you would definitely have a small presentation. It wouldn't be too in-depth. It'd be, you know, if you think about a keynote presentation, you're probably talking about two or three slides maximum, I would have thought, around, you know, if you could almost picture it as the challenges, the successes, and the unknowns that are coming up for you. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How important is storytelling in a coach's presentation?
Results were, you know, they beat Hawks. They lost to St Kilda by a small margin. You know, lost to Collingwood. Richmond win. And Sydney, even on expected score, they were a much closer team, a much closer game. And he's doing this without all the players he's got. Their next four games, this is what he's telling the board. Let's have a look after our next four games.
We're starting to get Daniels back. We're starting to get Bedford back. And Cadman comes back this week. Hogan will be back in. We now play North, Essendon, Suns and Eagles. And I'm thinking about what we may be at the end of those times. You know, we may be close to five and six in results. And that will be an amazing performance given what we've had to deal with with injuries.
This is the facts that we are talking about. And the other thing he's got to talk around in these injuries are collision style injuries. One was brought about by state of origin performance that he didn't want the players to be involved in. So there's a lot of that that he's going to talk to.
And they're going to need, and he's going to have to start talking fact, we're going to need a bit of luck at the back end of this year with those players being available, getting Sam Taylor back for the second half of the year, having a bit better draw and then finishing really strong. And they can still finish anywhere from, you know, on a run six to 10. and make the most of that.
So he'll come out of his board meeting with his board really, really sure about what the problems have been and how well they've confronted those problems and are in a really positive position. So that's a board presentation that Adam Kingsley doesn't want to have to have, but he has to tell the truth.
And the truth is, like you said before, when we talk to the media as coaches, we fudge the truth a little because we have to, we can't be using excuses. But you're presenting to your board who's in control of your contract and you go, well, there is no excuse here, but this is the facts. It is very hard to survive collisions in our game.
And the collisions, I mean, are the injuries that are caused by the damage that gets done to your team results.
So stay in New South Wales and do the other Sydney team. So the Swans, Dean Cox has them flying. So whatever he presented around the changes that we were going to make when you go back in, you go, we made them.
Oh, Coxie walks in and he's a big, strong man at the best of times. And he walks in and says, I told you so. That's what he walks in. His first line is... I told her we were going to make a change and we've made that change, you know, and it's a really significant change. You know, we had game style adjustments that I wanted to implement in the pre-season.
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Chapter 5: What data should coaches present to justify team performance?
It's all working for him at the moment. He's enjoying his time.
Now, back to Waitley. Ken Hinckley for Alex Scott and staff to sell your livestock or sell your home. The art of coaching, the art of managing up the early season board presentation. Kenny, so we've had one of each in New South Wales. These are a little bit trickier. Let's start with Michael Voss, the Carlton early season presentation.
You did start with a tricky one, didn't you? It's a really interesting one, this one, for Michael. And without pretending to know exactly what's going on at the club, there's some things that Michael needs to have answers to in this board presentation. I don't think there's any doubt at all that this is not the easiest presentation, but we need to set some...
For Michael, he needs to get as many answers himself, I would have thought, as do the board. So I don't think this is just a one-way conversation. I think this is a grown-up conversation at round six, which sounds pretty early, but that's the facts. You know, Michael can point to, and he'll walk in and point to, the performance of the team, and they have led...
They've led by the, for the longest part of the games, but the third best team in the competition, which sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? One and two are Sydney and Fremantle and then Carlton who have led for 62% of their games, you know, and he's going to walk into that board meeting and say, listen, our best is good enough, but it tends to run out at three quarter time.
And his job is to try and solve the fourth quarter challenge for them and for the board. They're clearly struggling in fourth quarters. He can't go in there and not talk about that. Again, when you're telling a story, you've got to use enough truth. You've got to use enough courage to back in your forecasting. And then you've just got to be strong in your beliefs of what your team can do.
So he's walked in and says, look, we're struggling in fourth quarters, but we are playing good enough footy. that we are leading a lot of games for a long period of time, but we are not winning. So no matter what he says other than that, the board is sitting there going, but we're not winning. The members are sitting there going, but we're not winning.
So that's a little bit of fact that he can lean into a little bit to promote his game style, to promote the situation they're in. But they'll use that on the opposite. They'll use that as a, well, yes, we are playing well enough. And yes, we are good enough to lead for large periods of games. Why haven't we finished? That's when Michael's left the room. That'll be their conversation.
So he'll talk around struggling around fourth quarters. He'll talk around how good they've been in early parts of games. He's then going to move into, I would, I would move into some, what's the goal here? What's the goal for us as a football club from this part of the season onwards? So he needs some clarity around what he's trying to achieve. Sorry, if he's trying to achieve something.
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Chapter 6: How do coaches manage expectations in difficult seasons?
Brad Scott, when he goes and talks to the Essendon board, and this is a bit different two weeks on than it might have been after the first four games, how do we see this scenario?
Yeah, this is a really interesting one now. And it's a really, you know, for Brad, timing's a wonderful thing, isn't it? Timing. It's all about the timing and it's all about when you have to do these presentations and what you have to talk about. Now, timing for Brad, it couldn't be better. even though their win-loss record is not great by any means.
But the performance of the team over the last three weeks has been much, much more consistent with what they would be expecting and what they talked about. But remember, when he walks in, the first thing he talks about, remember, we are in a development phase. We are in a rebuild stage. We've made this commitment. So his first job is to reset the board.
and get them to acknowledge where we are at. He's had that support, I think, from his president. You know, through the media, his president's gone out and said, you know, Brad's our next premiership coach, we hope, based on KPIs. First thing Brad needs to go is let's just really check those KPIs.
Let's have an audit of our KPIs together and make sure that we all know what those KPIs are because he doesn't want an invented KPI that comes from nowhere. Yes. So there's a chance that there's some KPIs that are sitting in the background that Brad might not know about. So his first job is to understand what the KPIs are. And that would be, to me, would be simple.
That's what we said at this point in time. Put that back up in front and say, that's where we're at. Does everyone still agree? Yes, we all agree. Let's move into our reflections of the first six rounds of the season. But the really crucial part is to get those things nailed away because that footy club is a development footy club currently. They're a rebuilding football club.
They've made some decisions to go to the draft and they're starting to bring some of those players. And he's just fortunate enough that some of those players have really started to come through in the last couple of weeks.
Now, even Caddy and Kako from a couple of years back, starting to look like we knew they were going to be good, but now we're actually getting more glimpses of how good they can be. Roby, who came in and played with the energy that he played on the weekend and There's lots of things that they were doing. Essendon is a week-by-week scenario. And then he talks about game style.
And for some of the questions, Brad, what was going on early? We could not defend. We couldn't defend any marks. We were giving up 150 marks. Now we've actually changed that around. So he talks about the... The connection between his offense and defensive models, I would have thought. That's the very first thing he'd be talking about.
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