Sports Team Culture

Articles and Videos

If you work with or in a team, this section is a must. We cover pre-season preparation, the development of teams, team selection, the secrets of great teams as well as all things related to building strong athlete engagement from team loyalty to building athlete responsibility. You may find our sections for our most recent articles, resources and materials, latest newsletters, or 5 Minutes with Bo Hanson video series valuable too.

Empowering your Team with Purposeful Recruitment

Melissa Phillips, Head Coach of the London City Lionesses on understanding yourself as a coach to provide the foundation for athlete self-awareness, and how she uses DISC to enhance team and individual performance through purposeful recruitment and positioning.

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The Head Coach’s How-To on Assistant Coach Recruitment

In any industry, recruiting the right person to join your team is a challenging task, but when done right can be extremely rewarding. We spoke to a panel of head coaches who are experts in recruiting assistant coaches for their own programs. Think of this as the how-to for recruiting the right assistant coach, the effects it has on team culture, and why it’s part of a head coach’s role to get it right.

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Learning About Leading

There’s no question that every individual has to be at their best in high-performance sport, but, if that is our only focus, we’re missing a critical ingredient essential for creating a successful team, and so the concept of being the best athlete for the team emerges.

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The Key to Unlocking your Coaching Philosophy

When we look at leaders in any endeavor, we often see their success critically defined by their leadership philosophy, and when it comes to sport coaches it is exactly the same. Having a defined coaching philosophy is key to effective coaching (and leadership), but the process of developing and understanding your own philosophy is often sidelined. When your team relies on your performance as a coach as much as they do on technical execution for achieving a winning outcome, this process is a priority.

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Conversation about Team Culture

Creating and maintaining an effective team culture is critical to sustained success. So, if we define culture simply as ‘the way we behave around here’, we need to determine what is acceptable and what is not? But then as a coach, how do you sustain a culture or how do you deal with an athlete who acts in a way that opposes the culture you want?

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Defining Team Roles: A Critical Component of Managing Conflict

Trust can be built through developing an understanding of one another and their position within the team. When we talk about team roles, we look at both technical and non-technical roles as being equally critical to a team’s success. While technical roles are the position an athlete plays on the field, non-technical roles refer to how the athletes make (or don’t make) a contribution to the team beyond their technical position.

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Accelerating Athlete Decision Making

The skill of decision making is closely linked to problem solving. For some athletes, making the right decisions at the right time is a well-developed skill, whilst other athletes find this process more challenging. Like any critical skill, the key to developing an individual’s decision making is to practice. So, where should an athlete practice their decision making? The answer is in training.

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Team Day 2 - May 2021

Hanging Upside Down for Team Day #2!

Going beyond what’s expected of you, is a part of what we value at Athlete Assessments. So, when it was suggested we do an aerial yoga class as our team building activity, we all jumped at the idea of getting out of our comfort zones (no pun intended…).

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An Early and Important Impact on Athlete Performance

Darren’s contribution to Western Australia’s basketball program reflects his approach to developing and supporting athletes as they ‘form’. He explains that essentially his role is “to help athletes understand themselves, their teammates, coaches, and managers, so they can be more effective with their communications and be able to better adapt to situations.”

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New Book About How to Win in Business and Sport

Here’s a positive to come out of Covid-19! Our client, Head Coach of the Utah Utes Volleyball team, Beth Launiere, took on a different challenge last year and collaborated with Leo Hopf to co-author the book, ‘Stop Competing And Start Winning: The Business Of Coaching’.

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We are in the AITD 2020 Excellence Awards Finals

We are incredibly proud and excited with the news we recently received from the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD). Each year they preside over the national Excellence Awards and Athlete Assessments have just been announced as one of eight finalists in the Best Leadership Development Program Award. Prior winners range from large corporations and Australian household brands such as Coles, Blackmores Institute, Volkswagen Group, Government departments and top Universities, so it is truly an honor to be named a Finalist now and we have our fingers crossed for the winner announcement later this year.

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Athlete Assessments’ Team Day #1 2020 – Re-establishing & Symbolizing Values

How did we get to a point where the CEO has confidence in the people she relies on? How did a group of people become a team with shared goals and a sense of excitement about navigating the challenges that the journey might bring? The answer lies in the process and so you can see how the specialists in the people side of sport connect their people to the organization’s goals – I will take you inside our latest Team Day at Athlete Assessments.

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Debunking The Myth of Leadership

Leadership is not anchored to a nominal position or the domain of the select few within a team, according to Sarah Leberman, Professor of Leadership at Massey University, New Zealand. Also a Fulbright Scholar and the author of highly significant research on leadership, Leberman specialises in applying the knowledge surrounding leadership to the sport space and in particular women and girls.

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The How, What and Why of Athlete Leadership – Tips for Coaches

So, you’ve just decided on the leadership role or roles within your team. Now the journey begins! What do you want your leaders to do? How do you expect them to carry out the role? You might have your own ideas and that’s fantastic. Maybe you’ve coached a team with effective leadership, and you know what works. Or perhaps you’d like your athletes to role model someone around them. But, if you’re wondering what effective leadership looks like in sport, I’ll give you a short method that I know works well. It’s crucial to know what’s important, what impacts performance.

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Embracing Values from Inside the Sports Team

There are some non-negotiable principles teams need to have in place if they are to achieve success. Firstly, every unique team must have a set of values they agree to live by. Secondly, they have rules to co-operate within a framework. What’s interesting is how many of these teams fail to live their values, or only live them to some degree. The special few, live them to the degree required to achieve success.

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Learn how to master the people side of sport using DISC Profiling...

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We specialize in helping our clients create and sustain winning results...

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See who we work with and read what they say about us...

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Bo Hanson

Senior Consultant & Director

Bo Hanson’s career within the sport and the business sector spans over 25 years, delivering leadership, management, and coach development. In addition to his own athletic career comprising of four Olympic appearances and including three Olympic medals, Bo has worked for many years with coaches and athletes from over 40 different sports across the globe. Bo was also the winner of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) 2023 Award for L&D Professional of the Year, for his dedication to L&D and transformational work across various industries.

After a successful career in sport including four Olympics and three Olympic Medals, Bo co-founded and developed Athlete Assessments in 2007. Bo now focuses on working with clients to achieve their own success on and off ‘the field’, and has attained an unmatched track-record in doing exactly this.

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Now, watch us interrupt him for a round of quick fire questions.