Ciarán O'Sullivan on coaching: Sport thrives in turbulence, where problems solve themselves through movement

The experienced coach moves like water through sessions, reading what each moment demands,  when to strip away defenders to amplify technique, when to add pressure to forge character.

Coaching the kids: Sport thrives in turbulence, where problems solve themselves through movement/

New dawn fades

AUTUMN doesn’t so much arrive in Ireland as it settles in the streets. The grass is damp, the air promising rain. The first gold leaves scatter along footpaths, scraping like coins on stone before the wind lifts them across the waiting pitches.

The country shifts tempo as schools re-open — brake lights stutter, buses hiss, and swollen schoolbags thump against small backs. Children’s voices collide in hallways, a chorus of expectation and excitement. A cohort of teachers emerge from summer’s quiet into the autumn rush of volunteer coaching, dividing their evenings between school teams and the clubs that raised them.

In school corridors, something thrilling happens. Players from different clubs who might never share a pitch or a court elsewhere suddenly find themselves on the same team. School teams can be sanctuaries, places where participation matters more than performance, where the joy of just playing with friends isn’t crushed beneath county dreams or parental pressure.

Teachers hold something precious. In their hands lies one of sport’s greatest challenges and greatest responsibilities: Keeping children playing sport for as long and as often as possible.

Yet many begin with familiar structures, rows of desks become rows of cones, classroom lessons shape activities, and order replaces spontaneity. Raised hands become queues and waiting lines in drills.

Sport, however, thrives in turbulence, where problems solve themselves through movement. Give them the right framework, and these educators become coaching artists, their intellectual wisdom flowering into sessions where players discover what they’re truly capable of.

Light my fire

In a parish hall, a coaching clinic hums with restless energy. Instant coffee and middle-aged optimism fill the air, as notebooks lie open and pens are poised.

Teachers and coaches shift in their seats, lit by anticipation. Julia, an experienced coach educator, stands at the front, marker in hand.

“Think of the best players you’ve coached or seen — any sport,” she begins. “What makes them exceptional?”

Hands shoot up. “They turn games on their head,” a PE teacher offers.

“They inspire their team-mates,” another says.

“They shine under pressure, deliver on the big stage time and time again,” a voice calls from the back.

Julia scrawls three words across the whiteboard: Pressure, adaptability, impact.

She lets them hang there a moment as she strolls to the back of the room. A quiet recognition is settling beneath the nervous laughter. Julia’s seen these reactions before, coaches realising that their deliberately elaborate exercises were missing the point completely.

Their usual training — drills of passing, shooting, and movement without defenders or stakes — suddenly feels hollow. Children move, but they don’t decide. Skill without context is empty.

True sporting prowess thrives in turmoil, demands split-second choices, and hinges on consequence.

“On your way home this evening,” Julia continues, “imagine you’re on the motorway and the car in front of you slows down suddenly or swerves into the next lane — you wouldn’t consult a manual would you? Instinct takes over, gear changes, and braking on demand, built through years and years of driving. Our training should prepare our players to react like that.”

Julia turns back to the whiteboard. The room leans forward.

“There’s a framework that’s been transforming coaching across the UK and Ireland. England Hockey were the pioneers, but it’s gathering steam,” she says, drawing five interconnected circles. “The golden thread they call it. Five principles that, when woven together, create training that flows like water but cuts like steel.”

Five easy pieces

Julia has a guiding thought: This model isn’t about re-inventing sport’s coaching so much as re-finding what ignites sport’s passion, what will enhance both success and sustainability. Like the prodigal pianist in Jack Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces, sometimes the greatest artists are those that fight not to be contained. The golden thread model draws on research without getting lost in technical speak. Clear directions for the ambitious to pursue.

• Fun: The heartbeat that transforms training from obligation into obsession.

Not the manufactured joy of participation trophies, but the raw electricity when a pass threads through impossible space, when a tackle stops time, when possibility crackles through young limbs.

It’s the emotional architecture that allows players to dance at the margins of their abilities, unafraid to fall.

• Loads of touches: Creates intimacy between player and ball. A thousand small conversations unfold, spoken in leather and fingertips. Each touch builds a vocabulary that separates thinking from knowing. No cues. No bystanders. No wasted heartbeats.

Players need volume, yes, but volume with purpose. Touches that matter. Touches that carry weight. Touches that slowly build into fluency, where the ball feels less like an obstacle and more like an extension of the body.

• Constant decision-making: Refuses to reduce sport to choreography.

Every possession with pulp and fiction tells a story with multiple endings.

Every touch of the ball is a pivotal moment. Players read the silent language of sport, the spaces between defenders, the flow of an attack, the exact force behind a pass. In those brief, intense instants, with full commitment, they shape their own path. Champions emerge quietly from these micro- decisions. Not through perfect technique, but through the courage to choose, and the wisdom to choose well.

• Stretch: It lives in the Goldilocks zone where growth happens. Too much breaks spirits; too little breeds complacency. As Omar Little from The Wire observed: “How you expect to run with the wolves come at night when you spend all day sparring with puppies?”

Players are pushed just beyond their current abilities, into scenarios that demand solutions they haven’t yet mastered. Players must feel their limits. They should attempt to produce the goods at the edge of possibility.

• Looks like the game: Insists training honours competition’s wildness.

Drills without defenders are conversations without context, movements without meaning. Real play breathes with uncertainty — time pressing, space collapsing, choices multiplying. Practice must preserve these elements. It must teach players to find clarity in confusion, to craft art from the storm.

In the back row, Sarah, a fourth class teacher for the last 12 years, nodded.

The framework resonated with her teaching instincts. It wasn’t revolutionary. Good teachers had always known learning comes from engagement, from wrestling with problems, from failing and trying again. What was different here was the application. Sport could be learned in the way one learns great literature, not by rote or through repetition of endless exercises, but by living it and by allowing it to inhabit you.

IRISH sport has always been different. It’s about community. About belonging. About finding your place in a story that stretches back generations. Somewhere along the way, that sense of belonging had started to fade, lost in early specialisation and a winning at all costs mentality. Julia’s framework offered a way back to something authentic.

Children learned best when they were having fun. When challenges stretched them just enough. When they were trusted to make decisions, and to live with the outcomes.

Teenage kicks

Aoife, 15, lives very near the parish hall where the coaching clinic is taking place.

She sits, staring out the kitchen window, watching the weather worsen. Camogie used to set her soul alight. The crack of the hurley, the rush of air as she burst past defenders. It was freedom, wild and untamed, like her heart had grown wings. Now it feels different. Heavier.

Two years ago, she had carried her hurley everywhere. What had once been autonomy now felt like assignment.

The problem wasn’t lack of ability, it was that camogie had stopped being about her and started being about them: The coaches who saw her as a project, her parents who saw her as vindication, the selectors who saw her as a means to an end.

That night, she even Googled “how to quit camogie without upsetting my dad” — but quickly deleted the search. A week later, she walked to training with her hurley held like a question mark. She saw her friend Michelle across the pitch. A flicker of connection.

When training started, she found Sarah energised by new ideas from the clinic, determined to try something different. “Right, straight into a game,” Sarah announced. “Six versus Six, small pitch.”

Aoife’s eyes widened, no boring warm-up drills, no speeches about commitment. Within seconds, she was in possession, defender closing in. The unpredictability felt natural, even fun. In 10 minutes, she touched the ball 20 times, each contact stitching back a little confidence. As dusk settled, Aoife meandered through a narrow gap, the grass wet beneath her boots. She struck the ball clean to Michelle, who found herself with a rare pocket of time and space before slotting it over the bar.

Aoife wasn’t considering who might be observing or what they might be saying for the first time in months. She wasn’t even thinking. She was smiling, moving, playing, caught up in the moment. A month later, her father noticed something he hadn’t seen in what felt like forever. Aoife, hurley in hand, slipping out the door without a word. No sighs. No coaxing. Just a quiet spark of anticipation lighting her step.

Court and spark

But how do coaches navigate between the sanctuary of skill-building and the uncontrolled complexity that defines the game itself?

This is where understanding what leading coaching educator Danny Newcombe and his colleagues in UK Coaching call the practice continuum. Essential to understand, not as a rigid hierarchy, but as a palette of possibilities, each tool serving its moment.

• Blocked practice (1-on-0): The monk’s cell of sport. Alone with the ball, alone with oneself, stripped of all distraction. This is where broken confidence heals, where complex movements become simple conversations between body and ball.

But beware the seduction of perfection, players who live in this sterile peace struggle when the game’s heart starts racing.

Unopposed practice (2 v 0, 3 v 0): The first whisper of possibility. Team-mates drift into familiar patterns, defenders exist only in imagination. Patterns take root, but this is shadow boxing with ghosts — precise, clean, yet far from the storm of competition.

1 v 1 opposed: The first true test. Two bodies locked in conversation, each movement answered, each intention challenged. Coaches become puppet masters, 1 v 2 to teach escape artistry under siege, 2 v 1 to build the confidence that comes from having options.

• Small-sided games: The world contracts, time accelerates, choices multiply. A 6 v 6 camogie game on a shrunken pitch creates a laboratory of constant decision-making. Coaches paint with numbers: 3 v 2 to teach attacking courage, 2 v 3 to sharpen defensive desperation.
• Full game: The complete symphony. Every note practiced in solitude now weaves into the greater composition.

Under lights, hierarchies emerge: Some players claim the spotlight while others drift to touch, every possession a treasure fought for and won. But this authentic mirror of competition carries a cost — when touches become scarce, even the most game-like environment can leave players hungry for the ball and very often the peripheral players hiding in plain sight.

The revelation?

Coaching is no staircase — it’s a tide, the levels flow back depending on what players need in the moment. Each stage breathes with its own purpose, its own powers and pitfalls.

The experienced coach moves like water through these possibilities, reading what each moment demands, when to strip away defenders to amplify technique, when to add pressure to forge character, when to build in variability or create representative scenarios that echo the game itself. Everything leading back to the intention of the training session.

Aoife feels this shift in training.

Small-sided games stretch her, demanding decisions. She learns to read gaps, to act without overthinking.

Sarah watches, seeing her classroom wisdom — engagement, challenge, choice — come alive on the pitch.

Gimme shelter...

And yet, routine tempts even the best.

Martin Scorsese has used The Rolling Stones to soundtrack at least five of his classic films, the familiar comfort of what works. 

But when he chose Derek and the Dominoes’ haunting second half of the piano-driven Layla for that famous Goodfellas montage, bypassing the iconic opening riff for something unexpected, that was genius. Finding beauty in the overlooked, the part most people skip.

Coaches face the same temptation. They cling to weathered notebooks of drills, repeating what feels safe.

Repetition without imagination suffocates curiosity. Kids know when they’re just performing for adults; coaches feel it when the pitch becomes a checklist rather than a canvas.

The framework demands presence and creativity. For teachers, balancing classrooms, parent-teacher meetings, and family, it’s a reminder that coaching was never about perfect linear drills. It’s about creating moments where players surprise themselves.

The weight

Three months later, Aoife’s team face their rivals in the county final. The stands are packed. In the old system, this would be the moment where training ground heroes became match-day ghosts — but something different unfolds.

Players who’ve spent months making decisions under pressure now embrace the storm. They’ve learned to read the game’s rhythm, to find space that doesn’t exist on a tactics board.

The golden thread and practice continuum have done their quiet work through thousands of small moments where choice mattered.

Before the throw-in, Aoife walks along the sideline, her cold hands tracing the worn grip of her hurley. She remembers the day she almost quit, but she’s here now, ready to perform.

Sarah consults her fellow coaches from the sideline as her team warms up, no longer the reluctant group that sleepwalked through endless drills a few months ago. Throughout the game they move with intent and purpose, seeking out the ball and using it efficiently. 

Aoife’s on the front-foot, forceful and in command, speeding past two defenders, and striking the sliotar cleanly between the posts. The sound — leather on ash, perfect and true — carries across the field like a bell.

The crowd erupts, but Aoife’s smile comes from something deeper — the pure joy of a decision made well under pressure. Aoife doesn’t look to the side-line for approval. Doesn’t search the stands for her father’s reaction. Instead, she turns to Michelle, grins wildly, and sprints back into position.

Pure joy, uncompromised by expectation.

Her father, watching from the side-line, sees something he’d almost forgotten in all his talk of potential and development pathways: His daughter is having fun again.

Fever dream

September and October start us off again, mist hugs fields, and shoes squeak on courts as a new season begins. Children arrive, nerves and laughter tangled together like laces.

This isn’t about drills versus games, it’s about creating moments where players surprise even themselves.

The golden thread isn’t theory anymore. It’s this: 15-year-old hearts beating in time with ancient games, discovering that sport at its best isn’t about becoming someone else’s idea of perfect. It’s about becoming fully, unapologetically yourself.