"It's easy to sit here and talk about, but I've got 30 years of experience getting it wrong and right." Simon Cox is the most critical person for esports to listen to that I've ever come across, and yet I'm fairly certain this conversation will get very few views. Not only does he have 30 years of experience at the very pinnacle of human performance, it's in a role that many people (including many within the scene) don't even know should exist. After winning a gold medal in the 1994 World Championship, Simon transitioned to coaching and then became a Performance Director. That means he is in charge of the long-term strategy and approach of the overall structure. It's not coaches (especially those with 1-year contracts) who should decide the direction of teams; yet, in esports, that's often what happens. Coaches should be brought in to do a job. At the moment, organisations often don't even know what that job is, so the coaches we choose are doomed to fail from the start. We talked about: 02:21 - What is coaching? 07:41 - How do you go about setting up a structure from scratch? 13:00 - What mistakes do organisations make around having their end goal? 19:31 - Having an ambitious goal 27:00 - How do you find someone’s why? 31:24 - How do you find out the steps you should take? 41:13 - How do you schedule training plans? 54:37 - Should you be open with players with the goal, if it’s not to win? 57:11 - What are the positives and negatives to coming into a pre-existing structure? 1:01:30 - How do you work out what to keep and what to drop? 1:08:07 - Does every assistant coach want to be a head coach? 1:12:10 - The problem with role clarity 1:13:38 - Quickfire questions Let me know your thoughts. Do you agree that this is the area in which esports is woefully behind?
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If you want to see Simon's talk at the summit for free you can find it here - youtu.be/lK8cs2yfBpM?si…. If you want to buy the rest of the talks from the 2023 Esports Performance Summit you can do so here - ifoec.com/summit2023.