A bit of vision of me trying to execute a ramp shot for the first time! 🏏
In advance of the upcoming Swiss Premier League season, our cricket club (Cossonay CC) was lucky enough to have a coach by the name of Steve Atkins come in to work with some of us for a few days. Steve is one of a small number of Level 3 High Performance qualified coaches from Australia. He just happened to be passing through Lausanne and offered his services!
Like a lot of people from my generation, particularly when it came to sport, I was very reliant on being self-taught as a youngster and carried that approach through to adulthood - including for sports that I picked up later in life like downhill and cross-country skiing. Even professionally, I had discounted the value or benefit of any form of formal coaching or support. In fact, I almost wore this self-reliance as a badge of honour.
I have completely flipped on this in recent years though.
From the business and leadership side of things, I’ve been fortunate to spend a lot of 1-2-1 time with Cameron Schwab as part of his DesignCEO programme. His unique philosophies on leadership and organisational culture along with incisive reflections on my own experiences, have been so important in helping me chart a course both individually and as a team over the last few years.
It is coaching I wish I had started sooner. Nonetheless, it has been an incredibly timely relationship and one that I suspect has made me infinitely better at some of the most important aspects of my job with FIBA Media. Not to mention that having a respected and trusted sounding board has been tremendous for me personally.
As for Steve, he is 71 years old now. You have to seriously love what you are doing to give up part of your European holiday to spend a lot of hours coaching club players in a small part of the cricketing world. He is a phenomenal example though that as you get older, you have to keep learning and challenge yourself - the techniques and approaches he teaches could not be more progressive, with him often railing against established orthodoxies.
Consistent with that, he challenged me to learn to “ramp” properly and thought I’d be much more complete with that shot in my toolbox. A shot that was considered ludicrous 15 years ago is now accepted as part of the risk/reward calculation at different stages of the game.
It will get better as I practise it more. But it reminded me how enjoyable it is to learn a new skill… and it certainly reinforced to me just how much quicker the pick-up is if you have a guru guiding you through it (along with firing a few 115 kph balls at your head!).
Shout out also to Vivek Jayaram and the guys from Fulltrack AI (by Maiden) whose amazing ball tracking product allows us to track and review our training sessions. A great example of some of the brilliant new tech that is helping develop the next generation of players (and provide some older ones a bit of alternative LinkedIn video content!).