Too many coaching podcasts waffle. We don’t.<br /><br />This is The Game Plan Coaching Podcast – short, sharp, and full of real coaching stories. Each episode is about the length of a car journey, or lunchtime walk, full of tangible ideas and coaching advice.<br /><br />In every episode, our guest adds something new to the 'Game Plan'. A shared playbook of ideas, stories, and moments that have shaped their coaching journey, and may rub off on you.<br /><br />Each episode ends with a piece of 'Game Changing' advice from our guest. Something that you might want to apply, adapt, or reflect on.<br /><br />Follow the podcast, share it with your coaching friends, and be part of a community that’s about being better at what we do.<br /><br />Real stories, practical tools, and coaching that makes a difference.<br /><br />You can follow me on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
Game Plan Coaching Podcast
Claim This Podcastby Tom Hartley
Podcast Overview
Too many coaching podcasts waffle. We don’t.<br /><br />This is The Game Plan Coaching Podcast – short, sharp, and full of real coaching stories. Each episode is about the length of a car journey, or lunchtime walk, full of tangible ideas and coaching advice.<br /><br />In every episode, our guest adds something new to the 'Game Plan'. A shared playbook of ideas, stories, and moments that have shaped their coaching journey, and may rub off on you.<br /><br />Each episode ends with a piece of 'Game Changing' advice from our guest. Something that you might want to apply, adapt, or reflect on.<br /><br />Follow the podcast, share it with your coaching friends, and be part of a community that’s about being better at what we do.<br /><br />Real stories, practical tools, and coaching that makes a difference.<br /><br />You can follow me on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
10/7/2025
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Recent Episodes
June 21, 2026
Rob Gray: Problems not solutions
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. Three Key Messages 1. The environment should do most of the talking Picture watching a really skilful coach at work, what you'd notice is how little they actually say. Time spent designing the practice. Constraints that create problems for athletes to solve. The coach stepping in occasionally to guide rather than constantly instruct. It's a shift from coach as the holder of all the answers to coach as designer and guide, someone who sets problems rather than prescribes solutions. 2. Repetition without repetition One of the standout ideas in this episode, borrowed from neuroscientist Nicolai Bernstein. We don't get better by repeating the same movement over and over. We get better by repeating outcomes while constantly adapting the movement that produces them. 3. Make the mistake loud Mistakes aren't something to rescue athletes from, they're information. At the right level of challenge, a mistake tells an athlete almost everything they need to know to fix it next time. The coach's job is to understand why a mistake happened and design the next problem accordingly. Find Rob's Work The Perception & Action Podcast: http://perceptionaction.com Rob's books: How We Learn to Move, How to Be an Ecological Coach, Learning to Optimize Movement Get in Touch Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/ Rob’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-gray-8232b417/
June 10, 2026
Professor Adam Nicholls: The cost of closeness
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. Three Key Messages 1. Tough and compassionate aren't opposites This came up early and kept coming back. Adam posts a lot about coaches like Popovich, Saban and Ferguson - coaches with reputations for being hard, demanding, sometimes brutal. And what sits underneath that, consistently, is genuine love for the people they coach. Adam's point is simple. You don't get to choose between creating a tough environment and creating a caring one. The best coaches do both at the same time. A coach who doesn't care enough to challenge their athletes isn't being kind - they're just being easy. 2. The closeness finding In a study of over 200 athletes, he and his colleagues found that the closer the coach-athlete relationship, the more pressure an athlete can feel not to let their coach down. The relationship itself becomes an added stressor. Think about it like this - having your best friend watch you parallel park is harder than doing it in front of a stranger. The care makes the stakes feel higher. Adam's answer isn't to back off and keep your distance. It's to name it. Tell your athletes explicitly - your relationship with me has nothing to do with how you perform today. I'm in your corner regardless. 3. Coping is a skill Adam's research on what effective coping actually looks like is full of useful ideas. Ineffective coping - speeding up your routine to escape the moment, withdrawing from the game, just stopping trying - is more common than you'd think even at the highest level. Effective coping looks like slowing down, logically working through what's happening, using visualisation, breathing properly. None of this is complicated. But most athletes don't do it deliberately, and that's exactly the gap a good coach can close. Coach Logic Really pleased to share that the podcast is developing a partnership with Coach Logic. From future episodes onwards the partnership means real coaching challenges to try out between episodes, and conversations with coaches who've been paying attention to how they coach and what they've noticed when they do. More details coming very soon. Find out more about Coach Logic here: https://www.coach-logic.com Get in Touch Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/ Coach Logic: https://www.coach-logic.com Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/professor-adam-nicholls-77453b20b/
May 29, 2026
Mark Cairns & Andy Muir: It's how, not what
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. Three Key Messages 1. How you coach matters more than what you coach Content is everywhere. YouTube, social media, coaching courses - finding out what to do in a session has never been easier. What's harder, and what makes the bigger difference, is the delivery. The question you asked and then immediately answered yourself. The huddle you called with nothing planned to say. That's the stuff that shapes how players experience their coach - and coaches need help seeing what is happening with clarity. 2. You coach from perception - and perception can be wrong Andy watched himself back and discovered that the high-tempo sessions he'd designed were wiping out everything else he thought he was doing. The open questions, the space, the relationships. None of it intentional. None of it clearly visible until he looked. This isn't unusual - it's can be what happens when you're coaching 18 players in 90 minutes. But you can do something about it when you see it. 3. Film yourself coaching A £10 microphone. A chest harness from Amazon. That's the starting point. Film a session, find two or three moments that stand out – and make a plan to be intentional for next time. Other Things Worth Knowing What SAM does SAM - the Session Analysis Model - is Coach Logic's latest development. Upload coaching footage from your phone and SAM automatically analyses your coaching behaviours. Types of questions asked, feedback given, key interactions. No grades, no judgment, no tick boxes. Just a clear breakdown of what happened, which you can use on your own or with a coach developer to find the moments worth looking at and talking about. The data isn't the point - the conversation it makes possible is. Sort your audio first Before anything else. A wide pitch shot tells you about body language and positioning. It tells you almost nothing about what the coach actually said or how they said it. A chest harness with your phone captures your audio and your point of view. A second camera at the side of the pitch gives you the wider context. Both together is the ideal setup and neither costs much. Mark's advice - buy a microphone and a tripod long before you think about GPS units. The infrastructure point For the next generation of coaches, filming themselves and reflecting on what they see won't feel like a new idea - it'll just be what coaches do. Like having a session plan or using a whiteboard. The question is whether you wait for that to become normal or get ahead of it now. As Andy puts it, the return on improving yourself as a coach will outstrip almost anything else you can spend your money on. Find Out More Coach Logic: https://www.coach-logic.com Get in Touch Tom's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhartleycoaching/ Andy’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/muirandrew/ Mark’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maccairns/
34 total episodes available
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