okansas.blogspot.com

okansas.blogspot.com
Occassional thoughts about orienteering

Monday, November 29, 2004

New contracts for Swedish coaches

The Swedish O' Federation extended the contracts (or maybe entered into new contracts) with Goran Andersson and Marita Skogum. Andersson and Skogum have been national team coaches for three years. The reports I've read about the new contracts note how successful the Swedish teams have been at this year's WOC.

I started thinking -- how would you know if you've got a good national team coach? Is looking at results the best way to judge them? How much worse could Sweden's results have been last summer for the Swedish Federation not to want to keep Andersson and Skogum?

I don't know anything about the contracts for Andersson and Skogum, so I don't presume to be able to say anything about how they've done or how the Swedish Federation decided to extend their contracts. That's not what I'm interested in. But I am interested in the idea of how you measure coaching success.

It seems to me that holding coaches accountable for results alone is dumb. How coaches get results -- the process -- matters, too. My sense is that process matters more than results.

I'm convinced a coach can have a good process and the team can get bad results. A coach can also have a bad process and get good results. But over the long run, the good process will tend to get good results and the bad process will tend to get bad results. If that's true, a federation would want to "buy" the process not the results.

The same would be true for an owner of an NFL team or the athletic director of a university or the owner of a NASCAR team.

Getting back to orienteering...how do you know if you've got a good process? The first step would be to figure out how to measure the process. How do you describe the different approaches to leading a national team? What are the key decisions a national team leader makes?

I could probably go on like this for pages, writing questions I'd like to answer but can't. But, it is almost time for the Jayhawks basketball game to come on TV, so I'll stop.

posted by Michael | 7:24 PM

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