Hybrids excite him most about modern hockey: styles from several cultures are merging for the first time in a long while, Argentinian lifting skills alongside Australian counterattacking speed and German ball retention. Shane also names what he wanted more of in Belgium, the defensive discipline of the 2012 to 2016 German side that was happy to win 1-0, and Australia’s positioning and scoring mentality in the circle. Watch the full masterclass: Ask Me Anything with Shane McLeod.
Experiment with sports science, is Shane’s advice, but come out the other side simpler than you went in. With so much data on offer, he keeps only what he can operate with simply and get across to his players. Looking ahead, he picks out predictive video analysis, where AI could let you play the game before you play it, and physical preparation for a sport now built on repeated sprints rather than endurance. Watch the full masterclass: Ask Me Anything with Shane McLeod.
Culture starts with the environment, Shane says. Belgium built an Olympic Room lined with photos chosen to show their players dominating Holland, Germany and Australia, then ran simple trust exercises such as speed dating rounds of structured feedback. He also facilitated an open conversation between two players over a lingering Indian league grievance, arguing that issues discussed honestly deflate, while those swept under the carpet resurface in pressure moments. Watch the full masterclass: Ask Me Anything with Shane McLeod.
Shane takes the mental coach role on himself, partly because he enjoys observing how players react and partly because it removes any buffer between him and the group. A psychologist sitting between coach and players ends up relaying messages, which he finds ineffective. He prefers the specialist to work on him instead, as one did in New Zealand, so that he can do the job better with the players. Watch the full masterclass: Ask Me Anything with Shane McLeod.
The first ten months set the tone, Shane explains, with almost as much time spent in the classroom as on the pitch because the players could already play. Sessions focused on building trust, making honest feedback normal, and treating Belgium’s mix of French and Dutch speaking cultures as a strength rather than a divide. The result was a squad of genuinely close friends rather than teammates who merely knew each other. Watch the full masterclass: Ask Me Anything with Shane McLeod.
Joy rejected reward-and-punishment coaching, Pavlov’s classical conditioning, as too basic for her squad. Instead she works through the four I’s: an ideal vision, inspiration that gives amateur players who pay to play a reason to commit, intellectual stimulation that only works if failure is allowed, and individualised consideration, treating the man who just worked a twelve-hour Covid shift as a person before a yo-yo test score. Watch the full masterclass: Building a powerful team.
Values based coaching is not a replacement for tactics, Commens explains. You still run your press and your structures; what changes is how you deliver the message and influence behaviour. He warns against values that sit as words on a wall with nothing underneath, and shows how language shapes belief: a coach who answers a bold target by asking whether the team should be more realistic is signalling doubt. Watch the full masterclass: Values based coaching.
Are you autocratic, laissez faire or democratic? Result orientated or process orientated? Commens works through the questions he uses to help coaches figure out what they stand for, and shares his own fix from early in his career, when frustration kept spilling onto his players: a written reminder at the top of his notebook asking whether he was actually helping the situation. Watch the full masterclass: Values based coaching.
High expectations can backfire, Andreu argues here. Telling players anything is possible breeds frustration when it is not, so he treats expectations as agreements built through constant conversation across the season, not targets fixed on day one. Ric adds that in fourteen years with Australia’s national teams he never met a player who knew how good they could be, so the coach’s job is to keep lifting the bar. Watch the full masterclass: The Pygmalion effect.
For Graham Reid, defending starts with one-on-one tackling: coming in at a 45 degree angle, keeping the stick low, getting the distance right, and above all good footwork. His wider principle is that defence starts from the front. The strikers set the tone, because winning the ball back in the opposition’s half turns straight into attack. Watch the full masterclass: Field Hockey Tactics, Trust and Team Dynamics: Insights from Indian Men’s Coach Graham Reid.
Reid changed very little at first. He melded the Australian and Indian games instead, arguing the two countries share hockey history through the Anglo-Indian players who took the Indian game to Perth. Foreign coaches in India usually tighten the defence, and he accepts that is part of the job, but the attacking, aggressive instinct is something he wants to bring out rather than coach away. Watch the full masterclass: Field Hockey Tactics, Trust and Team Dynamics: Insights from Indian Men’s Coach Graham Reid.