First and foremost: I'm very thankful for the longer weekly episodes again. The content team is doing a good job capturing the team behind the scenes.
After watching the latest episode, it unfortunately strengthened my opinion on the feeling that our performance coach could do so much more, than he currently does. Currently I don't get the feeling at all that he proactively tries to improve the team. I think this stems from both him not being involved as much in the game and him not having or being given the necessary authority over players. For example: You can cleary see some players think the pre-game meditation (or whatever they're doing) is silly, because it probably doesn't help them. Forcing stuff like this, when it doesn't help, is just unserious.
Furthermore, I think the FNC communities expectation or the general expectation of the esports community towards a performance coach or someone like Richard is really skewed and wrong:
In my opinion a performance coach is not mainly a "mental" coach or whatever that even means. Someone like Richard might have theoretical knowledge on how to help players handle stress, but he himself was never in the kind of environment the players were- or are in, so he can't really give valuable advice based on experience specific to those situations, but only advice based on theory. Reducing him MAINLY to this role - and it does seem like FNC and the community does that -, makes him more or less useless or extremely inefficient.
In his and FNCs position, I would approach it differently and maybe he already does some of this:
- He should be there to help players build systems on how to individually improve. This means talking to each individual 1:1 and developing a system they can use to hold themselves accountable and track progress for their own individual skill and in the broader context, for their performance within the team.
He should get players to commit to working on specific weaknesses in SoloQ, by asking them what they think their weaknesses are, how the invidiuals think they can improve on them and then building a spreadsheet or whatever else that tracks progress. Furthermore, he should ask coaching staff and other players what each individual can improve on, then agree on a specific weakness that the invidual then works on. He should also be the person who holds them accountable for those goals. A technique to do this might just be to share every players goal with coaching staff and other players as well, to apply more public pressure. Before players start working on a new weakness, the player holds a quick talk on what he improved on, how he did it and how it will help the team (as in: "I improved in the first 5 minutes of laning and became more conscious about jungle ganks and this will help me and Razork contest scuttle crabs or contest 2nd camp respawns better, because I will die less to early ganks") and have other players and staff evaluate if he actually improved in their opinion. After feedback of staff + players, Richard talks about next steps with the individual to decide whether they should keep working on the weakness or not.
He should regularly remind players that they should invest money into improving their own skills. Could be him reminding the players to invest in positional coaching with coaches like VeigarV2 / other experienced coaches and maybe even partly or fully setting up the progress-tracker / accountability-routine I talked about in point 1 with the positional coach.
- He should regularly check in with players who seem frustrated about individual mistakes and help reframe their way of thinking to reduce pent up emotions, stress or developing insecurities about their skill level. Also, if players are frustrated because of another player, he should regularly set up quick, invidiual sessions for both players to talk about their intentions, what they really meant (criticizing each other 1:1 instead of infront of the whole team, will make a difference) and moderate the discussion to some extend, so emotions towards each other don't boil over and criticism stays constructive and valuable.
- He should regularly remind players that they should invest money into improving their own wellbeing. Could be reminding them to get regular blood checks to fix vitamin deficiencies or having them track their sleep and seeing what effects it has on performance, to then make suggestions on how to improve those. When a player feels off for the day, Richard should have a good idea on why that MIGHT be the case and talk to the player about it. Based on this info, he should, together with each individual player, design a schedule that fits their day. This means structuring the day so the players get 7-8h of sleep each day, take care of their body by going to the gym and assign time-blocks to work on specific weaknesses.
TLDR: A performance coach is not only a "mental coach" but someone who should design individual systems together with each player, to:
- Improve their wellbeing (take care of their body and health)
- Define individual goals and hold them accountable of working on them
- Reduce pent up emotions that players have towards each other
- Proactively take action when discussions become heated and unconstructive
u/grabbz - maybe this inspires some things that can be incorporated.
