Start Here — Coaches

What this is

An extra set of hands on the one part of this sport nobody ever handed you a framework for.

I am a mental performance coach. For the last decade I have worked with athletes, parents and coaches — hundreds of teams, thousands of people, across a lot of sports and a lot of bad days. What I teach is not motivation and it is not something I invented. It comes out of performance psychology: an actual field, with research behind it, applied to sport.

Utah Swimming brought me in so that every club in the state has access to it. Everything in the partnership is free — the workshops, the masterclasses, the monthly tools, all of it.

I will also be straight with you about the other half, because you will hear about it eventually and I would rather you hear it from me: I run a private one-to-one program that families can choose to buy directly from me. That sits outside this partnership. It is never pitched at a workshop, your athletes will not be sold to on your deck, and it is not the reason I am here.

What this is not

It is not an audit. Nobody is evaluating how you coach, and no report on your club goes to anybody.

It is not a program you have to run. There is no curriculum for you to deliver and no parent night. The workshops do go on your calendar — but they are mine to run. You pick the timing and the groups; I deliver the session.

And it is not me replacing your philosophy with mine.

That last one matters most, so let me be direct. If you already have a way you talk to your athletes about pressure, about failure, about focus — good. Most of the best coaches I have worked with do, and they built it the hard way, over years, out of their own competing and their own mistakes. I am not here to step on that.

What I am here for is narrower and more useful: solutions to problems you have hit before and not fully solved, and perspective on what tends to work. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. That is not modesty — it is the only way this works on a real deck.

Use me as much or as little as you want

Some coaches will book both workshops, come to every masterclass, and send me a situation most months. Some will read one tool in November and never contact me again.

Both are a completely legitimate way to use this. Your club’s access does not change either way. There is no minimum, nothing is tracked, and you are not behind if you do nothing.

What we are actually after

Faster swimmers, yes. This work shows up in races, and that is the language the sport speaks.

But the thing underneath it is bigger, and I suspect you already know it, because it is probably close to why you started coaching.

Athletes who are happier, healthier, more determined and more capable. Specifically:

• Kids who can take a bad swim and rebound quickly for the next one.
• Kids who can face nasty, hard challenges and stay stable — emotionally and mentally.
• Kids who find more fulfilment in executing what they can actually control than in chasing social approval.

To get there, what we teach your athletes is:

• Emotional response control
• Focus and attention capabilities
• Self-talk, visualisation and imagery
• Pre-performance routines

So that they master what ready means for them, and how to get themselves there before every single race. On the block, ready and knowing they are ready — rather than hoping.

They learn all of it through the challenges the sport hands them. But in the end their mentality is their own responsibility, and it reaches a long way past swimming, into every performance domain of their life.

Where to start

Book your first workshop when it suits your calendar. You can set it up at any time — but book early. The earlier you schedule, the more slots there are to choose from across the season.

Once it is booked, we will sort out by email what topics you want brought to your groups. And every workshop comes with a half-hour decompression afterwards, just you and me: what I saw and discussed with your athletes, and what you can do from your role and your influence to keep it going once I am gone.

The other thing I would genuinely use is Ask Coach Last. It is on this page. Send me the situation — the kid who trains at the front and races scared, the group that went flat in February, the parent conversation you did not want to have — and I will send back what I would try.

Coach to coach. Whatever you send me stays between you and me.