The Winning Difference The European Athletics Coaches Association annual conference is being hosted by the Athletic Association of Ireland in Dublin this year. The theme of the conference is The Winning Difference. The conference will explore the pursuit of the winning difference through 3D Coaching. The 3 D’s being Design – Development – Delivery. There will be 5 keynote presentations:

• The Coach as Team Leader and Team Player
• Professional Attitude to Coaching
• Customer Focused Coaching
• Managing the Coaching Process
• The Coachable Coach

The keynote speakers are:

• Alan McNish GBR
• Frank Dick GBR
• Peter Keen GBR
• Vadim Zelichenok RUS
• Pat Duffy IRE

Alan McNish is a Le Mans Grand Prix winner, formula 1 driver and this season had led the Audi team to winning the USA Sports Car Championships. He provides a challenging perspective of how the effective coach in the international arena must adopt a different style of leadership and relationship management, to meet the athlete’s development and performance needs. Frank Dick CBE follows up on the IAAF NSA article. “It is time for coaches to take care of business” – written more than 10 years ago. The presentation looks at both the professional and commercial aspects of coaching in athletics changing world and reflecting experience of sport and business. Peter Keen is without a doubt one of the world’s finest practitioners and thinkers in elite sport performance direction. From harnessing modern technology and science in producing Olympic cycling gold through to being mastermind of strategy and quality control in leading and supporting the process of achieving performance excellence across sports, he is truly a global role model. Vadim Zelichenok both as a chief coach for USR and Russia: and as Director of the IAAF European Regional Development Centre (RDC) brings vast experience to support his undoubted experience in the area of managing the process of selection, development and the maximising of potential of athletes through the growing years and into the peak performance years. Pat Duffy is one of very few authorities in the world who understands the development and education needs of coaches to make them more effective in their role delivery. Pat has designed and constantly reviews design of coach certification programs and brings deeply respected authority to various discussions on this topic. There will be a number of workshops built around the theme also. The workshop leaders are:

• Sprints/Hurdles: Loren Seagrave USA assisted by Dr Tom Comyns
• Endurance: Peter Thompson GBR assisted by Prof. Niall Moyna
• Jumps: Wolfgang Ritzdorf GER assisted by Dr. Drew Harrison
• Throws: Ekkart Arbeit GER assisted by Stephen Maguire
• Combined events: Jitka Vinduskova CZE assisted by Dr. Maeve Kyle

Conference Booking The conference will take place in the new Park Plaza Hotel and Conference Centre which is 15 minutes from Dublin Airport. All conference delegates will be transported to and from the airport. The conference fee is €160. (€140. for EACA members). The fee includes a buffet dinner Friday night, buffet lunch Saturday and the Conference dinner on Saturday. There will be a special fee for Saturday & Sunday only of €100. Accommodation is available at a special conference rate in the hotel. Bed and Breakfast is €55 per night based on two sharing or €100 per night for a single room. Bookings can be made by emailing: bookings@athleticsireland.ie Timetable Friday 10 Nov 16.00 Registration (Onwards) 19.30 Keynote 1 – Alan McNish - The Coach as Team Leader and Team Player 20.30 Breakout to workshop groups for discussion/orientation etc 21.30 Close Sat 11 Nov 09.00 Workshop A 10.00 Keynote 2- Frank Dick - Professional Attitude to Coaching 11.00 Coffee 11.30 Workshop B 12.30 Lunch 13.30 Keynote 3– Peter Keen - Customer Focused Coaching 14.30 Workshop C 15.30 Coffee 16.0 Keynote 4 – Vadim Zelichenok - Managing the Coaching Process 17.0 Close Sun 12 Nov 09.00 Workshop D 10.00 Keynote 5 – Pat Duffy - The Coachable Coach 11.00 Coffee 11.30 Workshop E 12.30 Closing Ceremony 13.00 Lunch & Disperse There will be a conference dinner on Saturday at 20.00. The post dinner entertainment will have an Irish flavour. To find out more about the hotel and conference visit www.plazatyrrelstown.com Keynote PresentationsThe Coach as Team Leader and Team Player The past perception of the coach was one of an entrepreneurial, maverick person uncomfortable with belonging to the established order of things. They did not enjoy association with administration, functionaries and management but did enjoy association with free spirits and the unconventional. The Coach for today and tomorrow must shift this picture to one of being a leader, not only of their athlete’s or team’s performance development process, but of those support persons and agencies which must be built around the athlete or team to effectively meet their needs in pursuit of performance excellence. The Coach must also shift that picture to one of being a player within high performance teams committed to effecting those changes necessary to achieving performance excellence, be that for athlete, team, coaching itself, or support. Today’s coach must, then, have leadership and teamship skills if they are to design, develop and deliver in owning the future. Professional Attitude to Coaching Although some coaches enter coaching with a career in mind, most coaches start coaching quite simply because they want to be involved in helping athletes or teams perform better. The latter coaches may, once energised by the rich experience of that involvement, join those who would seek a coaching career. In the majority of sports, however, there is no clear path way nor is there a culture to establish and support a profession of coaching. It is time to move things forward in this respect and to seek advice from sports which have such a pathway and culture and have experience in its design, development and delivery. We should consider careers as coaching leaders – chief/head coaches from club to national level; as elite practitioner coaches in specialisms ranging from disciplines through to level of athlete development; as professional development coaches variously responsible for a coach accreditation program and/or for creating career pathways and a culture supportive of coach development and of a coaching profession. Customer Focused Coaching As coaches, if we think of ourselves as a “business”, our customer or client is the athlete. Even if our function is in professional development, “coaching coaches” and the coach is the immediate customer, the customer’s customer is the athlete! This is a fundamental concept, which enshrines the values and vision of coaching and affords professional integrity to the relationships we enjoy with employers such as clubs, institutions, IAAF Member Federations etc. Customer focussed coaching has us involved in the design, development and delivery of a process, which is athlete centred, coach led and performance services supported. Within such a process model the coach must have the skills to synthesise the diverse inputs of expertise in performance services and to afford team leadership to that expertise. The concept of performance direction must be considered within this process. The coach, both from a career perspective and in the interest of ensuring that this process model is effective, must consider developing the competencies required of a performance director, or build performance direction into their performance services team as the essential function of one of the performance support team members. Managing the Coaching Process Coaches must have 20:20 double vision. They must be able to focus on hitting today’s goals, whilst being perfectly focussed on hitting tomorrow’s. This means that short term and medium term objectives and programs are viewed as components which build towards the long term objectives and process which is to achieve career best performances and results in the athlete’s or team’s peak performance years. It is a fundamental role of coaches to design, develop and deliver the overall process and to hit the various milestones of achievement in the course of that process. This starts with a “fourth D” – the Discipline of setting the goals; planning the program to prepare for the performance required to achieve it; executing that plan; and constantly reviewing the programs to learn faster, in making the process effective. It is brought to fruition by careful management of the process which will span the years from early teens to late twenties or even the thirties. Such management demands those competencies which meet everything from the changing relationship between athlete/team and coach as the athlete/team grows from teenage years to mature adulthood; to co-ordinating the input of those who influence the athlete/team as they grow through school, club, high performance program and so on. The Coachable Coach Coaches must aspire to being world class not only in their technical skills but in their people skills. They are both scientist and artist. Or, as Leonardo da Vinci put it “those who are enamoured of art without science, are like a pilot who goes into a boat without rudder and compass. There will be movement without direction”. The fact is that there is no end to our learning in this. What we do must be constantly reviewed in light of an accelerating rate of change in our understanding of human potential; in the performance sciences; and in technology. How we do it must also be constantly reviewed in being creative and adaptable in applying the changes to what we do and what we learn through our experiences as coaches sharing best practice – and problems. Responsibility for our learning is not something we can delegate to someone else. Clearly that learning goes beyond our various coach certification programs. It is enhanced by the opportunity afforded by the IAAF Academy and its Coach 2 Coach program; by the World Academy for Coaches; or similar concepts. But essentially it is each coach who is responsible for his or her own continuous learning program. That program must be designed, developed and delivered by the coach. We must each own our self managed learning program. The coach must be continuously coachable. The Workshops The workshops will take a 3D view on each of the following topics: A. The Foundation- From Beginner to Early Teens This workshop will focus on the practical aspect of coaching this level of athlete development. It bridges junior and senior school years. It involves setting down the physical, intellectual and emotional foundation upon which long term development will be built. B. Developing Years – The Mid Teens to Junior Years This workshop addresses the practical aspects of working with young people who are committing themselves to long-term achievement in the senior arena. They are preparing for national & international levels of competition in their peak performance years. This covers secondary school and early university/college or working years and the tempest of change, which accompanies the teenage years. They build on the foundation years but are preparation for even tougher years to follow. They are the final preparation years for elite competition specialisation. C. Elite Performers – Post Junior to the Peak Performance Years This workshop focuses on those athletes who are national or international high performers through to full time professional athletes who are international medal contenders. They include athletes in their early twenties – some even juniors - through to the late twenties to mid thirties. Their programs are extremely varied. Some will have enjoyed the benefits of a co-ordinated foundation and development process as a basis; others will be compensating for the fact that they did not. It requires big judgement calls on when to raise the stakes in training and when to stabilise and regenerate. It is about producing the goods on the day! D. Monitoring Coaching Effectiveness This workshop focuses on review of personal coaching performance and learning from such review how to perform even better. This is an essential component in the process of continuous learning for the coach. Too often, the picture is one of a learning process, which is measured by coach certification criteria. But being effective as a coach is another matter altogether. Coach certification programs are normally designed with the purpose of equipping the coach with knowledge relevant to coaching. Beyond this is monitoring how effective the coach is in applying that knowledge and being mentored in being even more effective. It is very difficult to find such a system in any sport- -yet it would seem critical to ensuring the credibility of coaches and coach certification programs. This workshop looks at how to build such a system. E. One Europe in Addressing Performance Trends In the competitive arena, it is athlete against athlete, coach against coach, Federation against Federation. But it is also Europe against the rest of the world. The success of the IAAF Development program has changed the shape of the athletics world map in terms of medal distribution. Yet this does not fully explain why Europe has lost its competitive advantage or even its ability to challenge in certain disciplines; nor does it explain why we have improved in other disciplines. If we accept the truism that our only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than the opposition, we must also accept that we can learn faster together rather than alone. So when we are not in the arena, we must use our time when we are not competing to learn and work together to address the challenges of performance trends for Europe in a world context. We must be one Europe in doing so. Workshop Matrix

Workshop	Sprints & Hurdles	Endurance	Jumps	Throws	Combined events
A	1	2	3	4	5
B	2	3	4	5	1
C	3	4	5	1	2
D	4	5	1	2	3
E	5	1	2	3	4

Conference Booklet The Athletic Association of Ireland extends a warm welcome to all participants coming to the EACA Conference. We will endeavour to make your visit to Ireland informative, inspiring and above all memorable. If you would like more information or help please contact us: Athletics Ireland Sport HQ 13 Joyce Way Parkwest Business Park Dublin 12 Ireland Email: admin@athleticsireland.ie Phone: +353 1 6251101 Fax: +353 1 6251102