ICOACHKIDS with Sergio Lara-Bercial

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Welcome back to the podcast. Delighted to be joined by Sergio Lara-Berciel. Sergio is someone I got to know this year through London Lions and some of the work we did together earlier in the season. And Sergio does an incredible job with his company, iCoachKids.

And I think it's really transforming the sports landscape. And we've got the added bonus because Sergio's specialty is basketball. So it makes it even more relevant, of course, to the podcast. So Sergio, such a pleasure to have you on.

Thanks, Alex. I'm delighted to be on the podcast. I listen to your podcast all the time, so it's great to be on it.

Oh, greatly appreciated. Sergio, I want to start with the mission statement for iCoachKids. And I think it's one of the best mission statements I've seen just for a company in general. And I think going on your website, it's so evident what values underpin everything you do.

So I'm just going to read it out. And I'd love it, Soheir, if you could just kind of unpack this mission statement for our listeners. So iCoachKids is a nonprofit global movement. Our mission is to help kids get the most out of sport by helping coaches create the best environments and motivation to stay in sport longer.

Kids who move can move the world. That's incredible. Could you just build on that a little bit?

Yeah. So I think our intention really, and I can give you a little bit of background as to where the movement came from. is just to put children first, to put kids first. One of the— a short version of that mission statement is putting kids first in sport.

Because the reality of youth sport at the moment is evolving really towards something that is a little bit utilitarian in the sense of commoditizing kids a little bit. And it's become too similar, too close to adult sport. And I think there is a clear difference between the two, right?

And reasons why children do sport. Compared to why professionals do sport. So that was always the main motivation, that we want to put children first, and that we want to support coaches and organizations, really, because at the end of the day, coaches work within organizations.

And without the support of the full organization, it's difficult for a coach to change much. So we want to provide coaches and organizations with the up-to-date evidence-based information and resources about best approaches to work with children, and really to try and move the needle towards a different conceptualization of youth sport as fulfilling the needs of children, rather than fulfilling the needs of the adults.

And then we can get into what we mean by the needs of children, but that's in a nutshell where we come from.

I love that, Sergio. So on that note, obviously we've got a lot of American coaches, and I think it's really interesting when you look at basketball in North America, because you spoke about how a lot of youth sports is really It's very adult-like and kids, you know, in these ultra-competitive environments, this AAU stuff, all of this.

So maybe if there are coaches or even parents listening to this, are there any practical steps they could take to try and think, you know, put the children first, as you said?

And perhaps even the first thing that I wanted to clarify is that putting children first is not incompatible with developing elite athletes. Okay. There's a time and a place for everything. And This is developing an elite basketball player takes time. It's a process.

We don't have to go all out when they're 9 or 10 years of age. So that's the first thing, because I think sometimes what we get thrown back at us is, yeah, but that doesn't work with elite athletes. No, it does. It does.

And there's plenty of evidence to suggest, to show that, that it does, right? That we don't have to be training them as if they were elite athletes already at 10, because they're not. No matter how good they are, they're elite athletes at that point.

So that's the first starting point, really. Key steps. Over the years, we've developed a number of catchphrases that we use all the time to communicate our message. The first one is that we need to look at ball through the eyes of the child.

We need to really get down. When I'm teaching students at the university or doing workshops, I literally get on my knees to see the world from a child's perspective, because it looks very different. And we have to understand, seeing the world through a child's eyes means understanding why they are there and why they want to be there or why they may not want to be there.

Okay. And understanding that in the main, really, the first thing we need to understand is that children go to sport, what they want to get from sport is 3 things. They want to have fun. They want to be with friends or make new friends, and they want to learn something.

Okay. Again, there's plenty of research that shows that winning, becoming a professional, that is not very important to a lot of children. And especially early on. As they progress, some of them will develop those motivations. But even, you know, I'm working now with a bunch of under-18 premier players, if you want.

A few of them have aspirations of becoming professional players. Some of them play for Great Britain. And I still, when I'm planning my sessions, my first 3 things are fun, friends, and learning. That's where I start. And then we can do all the other things and still be trying to develop elite players.

But for me, they need to be there, want to be there. Once they want to be there and they trust me as a coach because I'm really focusing on them, then you can do everything else. But otherwise, you're just climbing an uphill battle all the time.

Definitely. Sergio, it's difficult. I have so many questions I want to ask you. I'm going to come back to the basketball piece and I'm going to save the questions there because obviously you've had enormous success in youth basketball coaching. Before we get to that, could you talk a little bit about your role at Leeds Beckett?

Because you're actually, for the listeners, you're doing a lot of this evidence-based work and using that to underpin everything. I coach kids, so maybe, maybe you could talk a little bit about that. And I think practically what you do so well is practically apply that research, and you're really bridging that gap well between research and practice.

Yeah, I'm very fortunate. There's no two ways about it, right? I've been very lucky to make my original passion my job twice. So as a coach, but also as a researcher. My day-to-day job, really my 9 to 5 if you want, I'm a professor of sports coaching and youth sport at Leeds Beckett University.

I've been there now for 13 years. I have a master's in sports psychology and a PhD in sports psychology, always around youth sport, really. Sports psychology applied to youth sport and specifically to psychosocial development of young people through sport. But for the last 28 years now, I've also been a coach.

I was a player. I came to the UK from Spain as a player. Landed in Manchester and I've been there ever since, working for Manchester Magic and Manchester Mystics, one of the clubs in Manchester. And I'm there pretty much every night of the week, or at least 3 to 4 nights every week, plus the weekend.

And I've been doing that for the last 25 years since I came over, really. And yeah, what I try to do really, so my job at Leeds Beckett is really based around doing research into coaching and youth sport. A lot of that through the iCoachKids avenue, really, where we look at from the motivations of children to reasons for dropping out, to the way coaches learn, to everything in between, really.

I'm very fortunate as well that we have a great, great team at Leeds Beckett. You know, we have so many people there that do great work. So it's not like I'm doing this by myself, but also I get an opportunity to learn from a lot of great colleagues, really, that we have there.

And then what I try is to do 2 things with that knowledge, really. Very selfishly, I try to apply that to my own coaching. And I've always said that I'm a very, very, very selfish researcher because I'm always thinking about me in terms of how can this make me a better coach.

But then I also really, over the last 10 years, we've tried to make an effort to make all this knowledge and all these ideas available to other coaches really. Because I think a lot of the times really coaches have a lot of knowledge accessible to them relates to the sport.

So like this, you know, people like yourself.

Yeah.

Or the podcast, or they do a great job with the ins and outs of the sport, or the X's and O's, all of these things, right? But I always say that when you're coaching children, in my case, if I'm coaching basketball to children, I need to know a little bit about basketball, but I need to know a lot more about coaching and a lot more about children.

And if I do a good job in the coaching side and the children's side, the basketball can take care of itself in a way. So that's what we do. We created iCoachKids. 7 or 8 years ago, really as a platform where people could access that kind of knowledge.

Really, we just translate scientific knowledge, if you want, into applicable bits for, for coaches, really. And that's day-to-day job. So like I say, it's a great job.

Fantastic. So I guess this is a good segment, Sergio, into the work you've done in Manchester with the club. And I'd love to know practically, like, just from my perspective, I think looking at the research more so on the SkillAct side, it really changed how I coach.

And I think the fact you are like such a prolific practitioner and a researcher. It's rare to have both those hats. And would you say the research has really given you a different lens and focus when you're actually coaching? And maybe are there any practical examples of things you've introduced at the Magic or things you do in your practices which has been inspired by some of the work you've been doing at the university?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think I'm very lucky because again, I take my work home, if you will, right? Constantly when I'm coaching, I feel like I'm experimenting. Sometimes the experiments go catastrophically wrong. And I always joke when I'm doing a coaching clinic that I'm here to tell you in an hour the things that have worked for me.

If I have to tell you all the things that I've tried and didn't work, we could be here for 3 days because that's what I try to do really. I try not to copy drills or anything. I try to constantly design new things and some of them—

I've seen them on Twitter. They're so good.

And some of them completely fall flat on their face because they don't work. But then every now and again, you strike gold, and then you've got something that works really well. So that's been one thing I've been very keen to experiment. Now, things that at a more practical level or methodological level, really, a really big change for me around 10 years ago, because coming from the Spanish school, really, I grew up as a player being very

drill-oriented.

Sure.

I mean, a lot of time spent on understanding The game.

Yeah.

Because we, I think in Spain, we've done a good job with that, but it's still relatively drill-oriented and always coming from skills first rather than the game. And really over the last 10 years, I really took a detour really. And with the influence of one of my colleagues at the university, Dr.

David Peacock, also a basketball coach.

Yeah.

We set out to develop a model of the game, right? An understanding of basketball from a wider perspective, really from the perspective of the principles of the game. Okay, the phases of the game and the principles that apply to those different phases, depending on, based on what the, of that phase is.

So for example, if you're talking about the offense, the goal, the, if you want, what we call the performance problem that we're trying to solve is that we want to generate a good scoring opportunity. So what do we need to do to generate the scoring opportunity?

So it might be that then we have some certain principles, right? So we need to be able to move the ball. We need to be able to space well. We need to be able to do a number of things. And we've got, I think in total now, we've got across the 4 phases of the game, there's probably about 27 principles.

And for every principle, then there are some tools that you can use. Some of them might be technical, some of them might be other things.

Cool.

So it's kind of really taking a step back and trying to see the game as a whole, to then coach the game, as opposed to coaching skills. And if we ever coach skills, they have to serve a purpose within the game.

Yeah.

And also that when I'm designing drills or designing session plans, I always refer back to the model, you know, which, what are we working on here? And that's something that my students hate me for this, because every time we do a practical exam, they know really well that if they can really explain why they're doing an activity, what the objective is, and we really drill down into specifics about the objective.

Like we also ask them to build game models for their own sports. Okay. To really understand what it is that they're working on. They know that if they don't do that well, it's not going to go well for them on that particular day.

And I'm very demanding with myself in that sense as well. And if you look at my practice plans, I constantly refer to my game model to make sure that, just to really double-check that I'm really working on what I want to work on.

And also that allows us to then plan mid and long-term as well, because we don't have to teach the whole game in one year, because that's impossible. Which is one of the other mistakes that we tend to make a lot, that we want to cover way too much.

Have you enrolled in our free skill acquisition workshop? This is a game-changing resource for you to apply the ideas discussed within the podcast. The workshop features some of the best snippets from previous podcast guests, in addition to illustrations and free small-sided games for you to use in your practice.

Click the link in the footnotes of this podcast episode to enroll in the workshop today and receive lots of instant ideas for your next practice. That's so good because it's those principles of play, like you said, Silvio, it shapes everything. And then it's like you said, for a club, we spoke about it when you were in London, you could easily then design, okay, these are the age groups, these are the principles of play, and you just get one club vision.

Like you've done in Manchester, where it's just, it creates that language as well.

Yeah.

And that's really important.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you did that, you talk about that, about a shared language, a shared mental model. It really enhances everything, both from conversations that we can have between coaches, because we are speaking the same language and we don't need a paragraph to understand what we're saying, to conversations with players.

In timeouts, you can be super efficient if the language is really clear. if everybody understands what you mean by the language. Okay. But, but it's really, it's really helped us have really meaningful conversations. And I think that's a key element of coaching really, but also coach development and coach learning.

Meaningful, like, like hopefully today we're having a meaningful conversation between us and, and we'll both go away with something.

So, Sergio, on that note, I'd describe you as a prolific coach and people developer. And we had the pleasure, unfortunately I missed it 'cause I was traveling, but you did an amazing workshop for Alliance coaches and The feedback was, it's one of the best workshops we've had all year.

Could you speak a little bit just about how you go about that process, Sergio, of helping develop coaches? Because a lot of the coaches listen, they always ask, how can I actually develop my assistant coaches or colleagues and explain evidence-based ideas to them?

And we were speaking about it offline. I think I'm a little bit too hammer-like sometimes. I'm a bit of an eco-warrior. And I think I've learned a lot just observing you. And how you interact and run coach development. So maybe you could talk about that.

Yeah.

So we were talking off air, if you want, before about whether we want to— I was going to say convince, but we're trying to help people explore an area of knowledge. Okay. We can be, we can use a hammer and just hammer it into them, or we can be more, I don't know, just more organic a little bit.

And what I, again, in my own personal development, I used to be quite, I used to love the hammer. But I've realized that that's not the way to go. And for me, what I try to do is, I think we have to meet people where they are.

The first thing to do is understand where they are and why they are there.

So that's just asking questions is how you do that, right?

Exactly. Questions from, tell me about your work. Like, what do you do? What's your day-to-day like? Because I think sometimes I was very quick and I still am sometimes, right? I'm not perfect, but very quick to judge people very quickly and always based on our own standards and our own situation.

And I've learned to really take time to ask people, well, tell me about your work. Where do you work? What do you do? What are the— a little bit of the CLA, what are the constraints you have in your work? Because people don't do things for no reason.

So explore that, explore the context first. I always start with the idea, explore yourself and explore the context. Because that also allows me to then think more about how, why people are doing certain things. Sometimes that exploration leads me to think, It's okay.

I don't need to do anything here, right? It's what it is. And they're doing the best possible job within their circumstances, okay? But also then that, I think once you've given people time to talk and to explain who they are and what they do, they're a lot more receptive to then you asking questions.

And why are you doing that like that? And have you tried other things, other ways of doing it? What would you like if you could change something in your club, in your coaching, in yourself? What would that be and why? And really have exploratory conversations really around, from the things that they're really proud of and that they think they do really well, to the things that they don't.

And then when you're working with a group, normally if you do that and you kind of collate all that information from different people, you end up finding themes. And typically the themes are the same in most groups. And that's the way in then to try and help them explore other ideas.

Okay. So you give me all these things, now put out there some We call them thinking tools. We don't call them theories or frameworks or anything, just thinking tools, things for you to think about. Does any of this resonate with you? Okay. And in the main, really, when you give people the time to first talk about themselves, to explore their practice, and then give them more tools to continue to explore their practice, you end up in a good place.

And also, I think the other realization as a coach developer is that Rome wasn't built in a day. You're not going to change someone's life in 3 hours. Hopefully you'll make a start. And some people have real epiphanies in those moments. I've had some real epiphanies listening to other people, but it's just laying the foundation to start thinking about things perhaps in a different way, because we are all stuck in our own routes really, because they're there for a reason really.

The routines that we built are there because they help us navigate our current landscape. So they make life easy. And change is not easy. So just starting with that. Yeah.

I love that. So I think, would you say, Sergio, practically it's less about, and this obviously very aligns with the CLA, it's less about going in with a presentation where you have loads of slides and you're just instructing and you're telling people how to coach and more like you said, minimum, where you're asking a lot of questions.

Maybe you give them a topic of discussion, you put them in groups, they talk about it, you debrief. And you're basically doing that for most of the workshop, would you say?

Yeah, it always depends a little bit on— there isn't a single way of doing this, right? It depends on how long you've got, whether you're going to be seeing them regularly or as a one-off, how much do you know about them. I try to find out as much as possible about a coach or a group before I go in.

But yeah, I try to be very collaborative. Again, still sometimes you just have to go and, like, for example, you're doing a coaching clinic and you've got 60 minutes to get a few points across. And in that case, you're just doing that, right?

Whether that's through slides or through activities or whatever. I think what I always say, and again, I've changed this really in the last few years, is when I present something, even if I'm presenting a set of slides with some clear principles and recommendations, I always say, look, you all have to put this through the filter of your own practice and context.

There is no copy-paste. Also, I warn people, look, I might be giving you 10 Like, for example, with the iCoachKids pledge, which is 10 golden points of coaching children, 10 golden rules, if you want, or principles. I said to them, look, I'm not great at all 10 of them.

Sometimes I forget about some of them because practice takes over and the constraints of your environment take over, and then you forget that you have to communicate with parents, for example. But it's just thinking through, every now and again, I'll go back to the 10 points and go, well, I'm doing all right with this, but I could do a lot better in this.

So let's just spend the next couple of weeks focusing on that particular area. I think I've learned to be really humble about just saying, look, some of this works for me. I hope it works for you, but it has to work for you in your context.

Don't copy paste, make it your own, really make it your own. That's always the message. Definitely.

I love that. Silvio, I wanted to touch upon something you said actually early on in this podcast about how you can develop elite players while having fun. And I think this is very much something that with your Manchester Magic U18s team, you know, you're one of the best teams in the country.

But you're still having a lot of fun. And it was the same when I was coaching in Italy or even like a professional team, like when I was with Paris. These things aren't incompatible with each other, like you said. For coaches to achieve this, I think a lot of the times we see coaches on TV where it's very serious and drill-based instruction, instruction.

What would you say are some ways that coaches can still hold their team accountable to high standards, but maybe giving the players more autonomy? Or is it like as simple as just your tone and your language, or maybe creating opportunities for the players to lead parts of the practice?

What would you say?

Yeah, there's a few things really. For me, I always start with, like, I try to build a relationship with all of them. Okay. And I try to spend time getting to know them a little bit, to know their families, to know, like, in my environment in Manchester, it's a very multicultural environment.

This year in the under-18s, I think we have 9 different backgrounds. So the kids may have been born in the UK, but their families have come from all over Africa, Europe, America as well. And so just trying to really show a little bit of appreciation for who they are, and that I'm more interested in them as human beings than basketball players.

Okay? I think that's the first step. And that goes a long way, because I can also be quite demanding. I have certain standards that I want to maintain. What I do as well in terms of those standards is we try to agree those with them.

We have always at the beginning of the year a couple of meetings where we talk about, all right, what are we trying to achieve here? What are the kind of behaviors or attitudes that we feel we need to achieve those goals? And I think that goes a long way because in the end we end up with the same list that I would've created myself on my own in this office, but it's come from them.

And then we can always review that list through the year or when someone is not living up to some of those standards, then we can hold them accountable really. Never hold them accountable. We don't punish or anything like that. It's just like, look, we say that we want to do this.

I don't think you're doing this at the moment. And sometimes there is a reason for it. And that goes back to the relationship, okay? We've had these instances really where, I don't know, there was a problem in the family. The parents were separating in the middle of the season.

And obviously that affected the child. And unless you sit down and have that conversation with the child, with the young person, and they trust you enough that they're happy to say that to you, like, I'm going through a really tough time. You could be shouting at them until the cows come home, but they're not going to change their behavior because they're not in a good place mentally.

So that's, you know, getting to understand them is important. Setting some common ground rules together is important. But for me, the biggest thing is that they want to be there. What do I do for them to want to come back every day for training?

And you know what this is like, right? In the middle of the winter in Manchester, it's -3, it's raining. Raining sideways, and a lot of these kids have to take 2 or 3 buses to come to training because they come from all over Manchester.

What's going to motivate them to be there? And I think, for me, I've realized that there's 2 things really. One is that they want to be there with their friends, that they really— I have to find ways to give them the space to become a band of brothers between them without my interference.

I'm just facilitating. They just love each other. I'm very proud of— I think I do a good job at They love each other. They want to be there. They want to support each other. And they really become every year a band of brothers.

They would do anything for each other. And then for me, the other thing is the element of fun, right? And for me, there's nothing more fun than playing the game. And they want to play the game. And that doesn't mean that we do a lot of 5-on-5 all the time, but games, everything is through the game, from 1-on-1 to 5v5 to 1v2, 2v3, multiple variations of all of those.

I try not to repeat drills from one practice to the next, okay? For multiple reasons. One, for the element of fun, but also for the element of variability and forcing them to do the same thing in different ways. But I think that to me, that's the 2 key things, really, that they feel that they belong there, that there is a family there for them, and that they come and play.

They want to play. They don't want to be going around cones or doing a lot of on-air stuff. And we do some, but at the end of the day, it's the game.

Exactly. Sergio, I want to say thanks so much. This was a masterclass on a lot of topics— coaching, transformational leadership. What, what's the best way for coaches to explore more about the work you do, iCoachKids, etc.?

Yeah, so the best way is to go to our website. It's icoachkids.org. Everything there is free. That's one of the principles of our, of our program. We've been very lucky to have some great support from the European Commission and the likes of Nike to be able to give away our resources for free.

So icoachkids.org. I'm active on Twitter at Dr. Sergio Lara underscore ICK for iCoachKids, ICK. And I'm trying to become more active on Instagram because my children tell me that Twitter is for old people.

Okay. I'm going to follow you right now on Instagram.

But I don't do that. I need to do better on Instagram. But yeah, if you go through icoachkids.org, you can contact us through that. But even if you just Google Sergio Lara-Bercial. My email address will come up from the university. I'm always happy to chat to anyone.

Fantastic. Sergio, thank you so much.

Thank you, Alex. Thanks for the opportunity.

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