He co-wrote a number of books on coaching including ‘Understanding sports coaching: The social, cultural and pedagogical foundations of coaching practice’ with Tania Cassidy and Robyn Jones, the third edition of which was published in 2015.

Potrac has coached in England and New Zealand and has worked with Richard Shuttleworth, the Professional Coach Development Manager for the RFU in England, featured yesterday in the second piece of this three-part series.

Potrac presented ‘The Key to Developing as a Coach – Knowledge, Experience and a Yearn to Learn’ at a Gaelic Games Development Conference at Croke Park previously too.

The professor is of the opinion that coaching has as much to do with social skills as it does with knowledge.

According to Potrac the social one-on-one interaction between the coach and his or her players will determine the success or failure rate of a team at any level and henceforth believes that coaching is the equivalent of ‘political activity’.

He says that like politics where people are canvassing for elections and trying to acquire an overall majority, coaching is extremely similar in that you have to ensure the majority buy into what you’re about.

All of the elite coaches in the worlds of sport and business are constantly striving to keep the majority of those around them on-side.

Not all players will buy into what you’re about as a coach. Those that don’t can be seen to feign injury or have an acute degree of absenteeism from training, team-bonding sessions or even matches.

“You’ve really got to win them over. It’s vital. If they don’t rate or respect you, then they can tend to go through the motions and you know you’re not getting their best efforts. Ultimately, that affects you, because you’re seen as responsible for the quality of their performances.”

That, the opinion of an English Football League manager speaking to Potrac on the vast importance of winning your players over.

Not alone do you have to keep the players on-side, it’s very much in your interest to keep the players’ parents, support staff, supporters, sponsors, administrators and media personnel on-side as well because all of those relationships are, obviously, interlinked.

To win players over you have been entrusted to coach, Potrac says it’s imperative you show them you have more to offer than your predecessor. It has to be witnessed by them almost immediately too.

As the player develops his or her game the trust and respect for the coach will also be harvested.

In terms of athlete learning, Potrac suggests we have to question what the short-term gains are for conducting certain exercises to the long-term consequences and how it will affect the future progression of the side.

The problem with coaching presently is that all formal styles are not critiqued constructively enough.

Potrac queries why operational methods are not questioned more regularly, even at the elite levels.

“Who’s to say they are the right way of doing things because there is risk of essentially cloning less competent coaches,” is his argument.

Research has shown that the top coaches think creatively for themselves about how they plan to deliver a coaching session.

Building up a certain degree of experience is seen as greatly beneficial to progressive coaching.

“Engaging in a life history of your experiences to date and charting them out in text will be of enormous benefit to you in the future,” Potrac stresses.

He also spoke of the Dialectic of Socialisation while examining feedback from players and illustrated the need to distinguish between the truly relevant and less applicable feedback.

This, he says, is vital because it directly impacts on your capacity as a coach to facilitate the collective progression of the group you’re presiding over.

Inevitably all of these factors will not always fall into place.

When this is the case, over a sustained period, players will, of course, become disillusioned.

Communication breaks down and invariably players rebel through below-par, or even abject performances that can lead to a coach or manager losing their job.

Everyone would be aware of coaches and managers ‘losing the dressing room’. Potrac reckons there are a number of reasons as to why this can happen.

“I think that is multi-faceted to begin with,” he mused. “I think it can relate to how you’re perceived when you come into the environment. So if I was, for example, to get the job at Chelsea and I was to walk into that environment of elite, international players and they ask ‘who is Paul Potrac? What is his background?’

“Even though I have coached elite kids in New Zealand, straight away is that enough to convince them that I could work at that level?

“Perhaps they may query whether I have enough experience or knowledge to coach at that level or ask should he really be here in the first place?

“After that it becomes all about what we do on the training ground, how we talk to players, what we ask them to do and if what we’re telling the players actually makes sense. That way they can make links between what we are telling them and how it impacts on their performances.

“Sometimes, for instance, in football you could go through a week or weeks of training that bear no relevance to the game.

“Then players go out, get beaten and say to themselves that the team isn’t very well-organised and that players don’t really understand their role within the team.

“One of the noticeable things about elite coaches is that all of their players have an understanding of what their roles and responsibilities are within the group dynamic, what they are accountable for.

“So it’s basically what people think of you when you walk into a dressing room and what that sub-culture expects,” he added.

This is the final in a three-part series on coaching. Read part one Read More: here and part two Read More: here.