Mark Blundell: Coaching Bodyguard

This is the final episode of series two, and it's a fitting way to close things out. Rather than a single coaching idea or a piece of research, this conversation zooms out to look at the systems and structures that sit behind coach learning and development. Tom Causer is National Coach Education Manager at Badminton Ireland, originally from High Wycombe and now based in Moira in Northern Ireland. He works across an all-island governing body covering everyone from volunteer grassroots coaches through to coaches working with Olympic players. He is currently leading a number of ambitious projects to transform how coaches in badminton learn, grow and feel supported, and the thinking behind it is well worth borrowing whatever sport you work in.

Stephen Maxwell is a man who wears a lot of hats, and wears them well. Coach and Match Official Education Manager at Cricket Ireland, director of coaching across four Gaelic Games codes, founder of No Other Game Around Performance Consultants, and a researcher whose MSc thesis at the University of Limerick was titled Do Coaches Fill Their Own Cups. He completed that degree with first-class honours, and his research on self-care in coaching is something he now shares with coaches and organisations across sport and business. He started coaching at 14, has worked across multiple sports and multiple countries, and brings a warmth and practicality to this topic that makes it feel useful rather than abstract.

Rob Gray is a Professor of Human Systems Engineering at Arizona State University and host of the brilliant Perception and Action Podcast. With over 25 years of experience he has worked with elite sports teams including MLB and NBA franchises, and is the author of How We Learn to Move, How to Be an Ecological Coach, and Learning to Optimize Movement. He's one of the biggest names going in ecological dynamics and the constraints-led approach, and has this rare gift of taking genuinely dense science and making it sound like the most obvious thing in the world. His main applied sport is baseball, though his work spans golf, tennis, driving, cycling and even martial arts.

I came across Adam Nicholls on LinkedIn and his posts kept stopping me. Short clips of Klopp, Popovich, Steve Kerr - with Adam quietly unpacking the psychology of what they're actually doing. Not tactics, not systems. The human stuff. Care, compassion, what it looks like to genuinely back the people you coach. So I reached out and invited him on to the podcast. Professor of Sport and Exercise Psychology at the University of Hull, over 85 published papers, three books including Psychology in Sports Coaching. And outside of all that, a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu who competes at the British Open and uses his own experiences of standing in a competitive bullpen waiting to be called to the mat to test the psychology he researches.

Mark Cairns and Andy Muir are the co-founders of Coach Logic, calling in from their bothy in Edinburgh - which, for anyone not from Scotland, is a shelter in the mountains. They haven't climbed a literal mountain to get there, but the metaphor isn't a bad one for what they're trying to do. Both rugby. Mark is a coach educator for World Rugby across Europe and comes from a PE teaching background. Andy has lectured in sports science at Edinburgh College. They built Coach Logic because coaches have no consistent way of knowing what they actually do when they coach. This conversation is about finding a solution to that - and it's a really good one.