Coachability

You have almost certainly met the player. Talented, keen, nods along at everything you say, and somehow never quite changes a thing. And right beside them sits the one who pushes back, asks the awkward questions, occasionally drives you a little mad, and grows faster than anyone else in the squad. So what is really going on there? Is one of them simply "coachable" and the other not?

Shea McAleese, who pulled on the New Zealand shirt more than 300 times and now coaches in the Black Sticks set-up, has a line that is worth sitting with.

Read that again, because it quietly lifts the whole thing off the table of "what kind of person are you" and drops it onto "who owns this". And that one move changes a surprising amount about how we approach coaching.

A quick word before we dig in. What follows is one coach's way of looking at it, shaped by twenty-odd years in high performance. Shea offers it as a lens he has found useful rather than a fixed blueprint, and how much of it fits will always depend on the group in front of you.

Shea's starting point is that the coachable athlete has decided their development is theirs to own. He talks about Hockey New Zealand moving to a decentralised model, where players might be living in Christchurch, Auckland or somewhere in Europe, and have to be the master of their own destiny between camps. The ones who take the bull by the horns turn up ready. The ones waiting to be spoon-fed turn up hoping someone else has done the thinking for them.

He puts it in a memorable way too. If a coach tells a player exactly how to do everything and wraps them in a bubble, the moment real pressure arrives in an international game that bubble pops, because the coach isn't out there to tell them what to do. The growth comes from the player learning to solve it themselves.

Here is where it is worth pausing, though. Is ownership purely the player's decision, or do coaches sometimes train dependence without meaning to? If your players are not taking ownership, how much of that is who they are, and how much is the environment they have been handed? Worth an honest think before we hand the whole thing to the athlete.

So how do you tell a truly coachable player from one who just nods along? Shea's answer is the art of questioning, and crucially, not accepting the first answer. Ask a player if they understand the press and "yep" tells you almost nothing. So you go deeper. "Tell me more." "What does that look like in real life? Show me." With a new player he might go two or three layers down. With a player he knows well, five or six.

He is honest about a trap a lot of coaches fall into, that habit of ending a team talk with "does everyone understand?" and getting a wall of yeses, because nobody wants to be the one who says no. Then the drill starts and it is chaos. His fix is to flip it. Instead of "do you understand", try "tell me what we just talked about" or "explain that back to me".

A nice question to sit with: how often do your "do you get it?" moments actually test understanding, and how often do they just invite a polite nod? And what would change if, a couple of times a week, you asked a player to coach the point back to the group instead?

Getting senior players to speak is easy. Getting a nervous junior to offer an opinion in front of the squad is the real craft. Shea shared a few moves worth stealing and adapting. Brief in small groups before the big meeting, and let the junior be the one who reports back, so they get reps at speaking up in a safer setting. Pre-warn a player that you are going to ask them something, so they are not ambushed, then over a few months dial that scaffolding back.