“Where are all the female coaches?”
“Why is the number of female coaches declining?”
“How can we get more women into coaching?”

The entire conversation is built around the idea of absence—that female coaches are missing, that something’s gone wrong, that the system is broken and in need of repair. And while yes, structural inequality still exists (in a big way!), and yes, representation matters, we’re missing something far more powerful by constantly framing the issue this way.

Because women who are out there coaching—on pitches, in gyms, at elite level and grassroots—don’t want platitudes. They don’t want hashtags. And they certainly don’t want to be forever introduced as “female coaches.” They want to be recognised, respected, and celebrated simply as coaches—leaders who bring expertise, vision, and results.

But we’ve been conditioned to only hear their names with a caveat: “the first,” “a trailblazer,” “one of the few.” And every time we repeat those labels, we subtly reinforce the idea that women in coaching are rare, temporary, or unexpected. We applaud their presence, but with an asterisk.

Let’s be clear: there’s a difference between acknowledging history and getting stuck in it. We can honour those who broke barriers without trapping the conversation in a permanent state of “not enough.”

When we always start with what’s missing—when the lead question is “Where are they?”—we erase the women who are already here. We silence the legacy of those who came before. We turn the spotlight away from the work being done, and back onto the hole in the wall.

That’s not progress. That’s just circular thinking.

We need a new approach—one that actively amplifies strength instead of scarcity. A narrative that says: women in coaching are not just emerging—they’ve been shaping sport for generations. A strategy that highlights tactical insight, leadership, innovation, and impact—not just gender. A culture that stops clutching its pearls every time a woman is named head coach and starts saying: “Of course she is.”

And while we’re at it, let’s ask some better questions:
Why aren’t more coaching books written by women?
Why do female coaches mostly speak at female-only conferences?
Why is the media still so fixated on a woman’s presence in the role, instead of her performance in it?

So if you’re writing a coaching policy, designing a development plan, building a media strategy, or organising an event—ask yourself: is your focus on what’s missing, or on what’s already powerful?

Because power has never been the issue. Visibility has. Recognition has. Narrative has.

The goal isn’t to ignore the barriers. It’s to stop making them the headline every single time.

Make female coaches so normal, so embedded, so expected, that it feels strange to bring up their gender at all.

The future isn’t waiting for women to step in. The future is simply catching up with the fact they’ve been here all along.

According to high performance running coach Steve Magness in his book Do Hard Things, the sporting world actually misunderstands resilience.  When we imagine someone who is a resilient athlete, "chances are that visions of individuals overcoming adversity and some sort of pain or suffering lead the way.  That's how we traditionally view toughness; perseverance, discipline and stoicism...and if we're honest, many of us picture a strong brute of a man."

This definition runs true across most sports, as the media portray resilient athletes as 'brave', 'mentally tough' and 'fighters', and those who perhaps didn't achieve what the world expected of them as 'failures', 'quitters', or 'soft'.

Magness believes that this misunderstanding of 'resilience' leads to abusive, very demanding and controlling coaching from coaches and perhaps even parents of young athletes. 

Using the example of controversial NCAA basketball coach Bobby Knight, Magness describes the methods Knight used to create 'tough athletes'; "his methods to achieve [toughness] were questionable at best and downright abusive at worst' which included; hanging tampons from lockers of players he thought were soft, screaming expletives, questioning his players manhoods and even choking out a player at practice.

Other examples include the case of 19 year old Jordan McNair, the football player at the University of Maryland who in 2018 tragically died after coaches ignored his extreme fatigue and screamed at him to "get the f**k up". Or the many cases in British Gymnastics in which some coaches were found to be emotionally and physically abusive, making gymnasts train on broken bones, punishments for needing the toilet, sat on and subjected to excessive weight management.

Whilst these are extreme (and hopefully) rare cases of abusive coaching, they do demonstrate that the misconception of 'resilience' is alive and well in sport.  So how should we be reframing 'resilience' and what do we need to be doing as coaches to ensure our athletes master this undervalued skill?

Firstly, we need to understand that resilience is far more than a fear driven concept.  Having true resilience is about maintaining a clear head when the pressure hits, being self-aware, learning to sit with the pain instead of pushing through it, learning to respond not react, and understanding the notion of having a greater purpose

This concept of resilience is exactly the example super athlete Simone Biles taught us all during the Tokyo Olympic Games.  After admitting to getting the 'twisties' she shocked the world by pulling out of the women's gymnastics team final saying:

"I have to focus on my mental health.  We have to protect our minds and our bodies and not just go out and do what the world wants us to do. I didn't want to go out and do something stupid and get hurt."

This takes a lot of self awareness, maturity and experience for an athlete with so much pressure on her shoulders to reach and then make that decision. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Simone has even gone as far as saying “If I don't make it to Paris, it won't absolutely crush me.”

Traditional coach education neglects the critical importance of resilience, undermining its significance not only for athletes but also for coaches. While the majority of education emphasises the ‘what to coach’ skills, it leaves the 'how to coach' to the coaches, leading to a reliance on their own experiences and potentially perpetuating the behaviours, whether positive or negative, learned from their past coaches.

Coach Paul Bryant, the well known college football coach from the 1950s who spent his pre-seasons trying to harden his teams through the infamous “10 days of hell” in later years actually apologised to his former athletes saying:

“I don’t know if I was doing it right or not, but it was the only way I knew how to do it.”

Coaching resilience involves working with a coach who supports and guides individuals in developing the skills and mindset necessary to face life's uncertainties and challenges.  It's about supporting the athlete to adapt and be flexible to the challenges thrown their way, and understanding that how we respond to is our own responsibility.

Check out our interview with Olympic Diving Coach Jane Figueirdo who explains in detail how to care for and create resilience in high performing athletes.

One of the best places to find formal resilience coach education is through Gazing Performance, an organisation who aim to equip people to develop their capabilities and manage their way through high pressured situations.  They do this through their Red2Blue framework, which supports attendees in developing emotional self-control when they need it the most.  Tactics taught on Red2Blue courses include; recognising where attention is in the moment, understanding what can be controlled, what can be influenced and what can't be controlled and whether they are lost in the RED brain, or thinking clearly in the BLUE brain.

This Red2Blue training is so effective in building resilience in high performing athletes that the world famous All Blacks rugby team but their incredible streak of World Cup wins down to it, as former Captain Richie McCaw explains:

“Over time we changed the way we dealt with pressure. In 2011, the match was touch and go, I felt I was going into the red like 2007 but I didn’t.”

Find out more information on Gazing Performance here: https://gazing.com/

So with a true understanding of what resilience is, and a toolkit full of tactics to embed these skills into athletes, could resilience training be the way forward for a more efficient, effective and safer high performance arena?

That’s what systems thinking and framework thinking do. They help us see the invisible patterns behind visible problems. For coaches, these are superpowers — yet they’re almost never taught in traditional coach education.

🧐 What Is Systems Thinking?

At its simplest, systems thinking is the ability to see the whole — not just the parts.

Instead of focusing on isolated events, a systems thinker looks at how things connect, influence, and feed into each other. It’s an approach built on curiosity: asking why does this keep happening?, instead of just how do I fix it?

Think of a sports team as a living system. Every outcome — a win, a mistake, an injury, a drop in motivation — is rarely the result of a single cause. It’s the product of relationships between people, environments, incentives, and culture.

Here’s how most coaching systems view performance:

Now, here’s how a systems thinker views it:

In the second view, the “mistake” isn’t a singular event — it’s a symptom of the system.

Fixing it means understanding and adjusting the web of connections that created it.

In practical coaching, that might mean asking:

• Does this athlete feel psychologically safe enough to take risks?

• Does our training design encourage learning or punish failure?

• What language or cues might be reinforcing hesitation rather than confidence?

When we see through this lens, we stop reacting to outcomes and start redesigning systems.

🧐 What Is Framework Thinking?

If systems thinking is the map, framework thinking is how we navigate it.

Frameworks are structured ways of thinking — simple mental models that help us understand complexity without getting lost in it. They’re not rigid checklists; they’re scaffolds for better judgment.

For example, imagine you’re a head coach noticing inconsistency across your team. A simple framework for analysis might look like this:

• Inputs: What’s entering the system? (Players’ energy, preparation, clarity, motivation)

• Processes: How are we interacting? (Communication, training design, leadership style)

• Outputs: What are we seeing? (Performance, cohesion, retention, trust)

Instead of asking what’s wrong with the team, the coach asks where in the system are things breaking down?

Framework thinking gives structure to that inquiry. It turns abstract ideas into tangible steps, helping us make decisions faster and more intentionally — the way an architect uses blueprints, not guesswork, to build.

Here’s a simple visual comparison:

Traditional Coaching Thinking:

Framework Thinking:

Frameworks don’t limit creativity — they focus it. They help coaches act strategically rather than instinctively.

🧢 Why This Matters for Coaching?

Now that we understand what these ways of thinking are, here’s why they matter.

Traditional coach education teaches us to look down, not out.
We’re taught to control variables, fix technical issues, and plan sessions with precision. That might make sense in a textbook, but sport doesn’t behave like a textbook. It’s messy, adaptive, unpredictable.

Every session is shaped by dozens of interconnected factors: the team dynamic, organisational culture, athlete mindset, even the weather.

Systems thinking begins when we stop seeing those factors as noise and start recognising them as the system itself. It’s a shift from seeing sport as a set of parts to seeing it as a network of relationships.

When we take this wider view, our focus changes. Instead of asking how do I correct this player’s technique? we start asking what conditions are shaping that behaviour?Instead of what’s wrong with this athlete’s mindset? we ask how does our team environment reward or punish risk-taking?

That’s not just better coaching — that’s smarter thinking.

📝 Why Traditional Coach Education Fails Us…

Most coach education programmes were built for a world that valued certainty. They were designed to produce reliable implementers, not adaptive thinkers.

The emphasis is still on curriculum, compliance, and standardisation — what to do, how to do it, and how to measure it. But real coaching doesn’t live in the predictable. It lives in the margins, where human emotion, social connection, and context collide.

Our education systems rarely teach us how to navigate that complexity. They teach us to follow structure, not to think in systems.

The result? Coaches who know their content but not their context. Experts in drills but novices in culture. We’ve been producing competent practitioners in an age that demands creative leaders.

🧬 Coaching as a Living System

If we want to change coaching — not just what happens in the session, but how the whole system functions — we have to start thinking in systems. Real transformation doesn’t come from isolated workshops or policy reforms; it comes from shifting how we see the system itself.

When we think systemically, we recognise that every part of sport — coach education, hiring, governance, funding, athlete pathways — is connected. Adjusting one part without understanding its relationship to the others only creates friction. Sustainable change requires alignment and feedback loops, not quick fixes.

This mindset invites a more generous form of leadership. It moves us from blaming individuals to examining patterns. It reminds us that culture isn’t created by mission statements but by the everyday interactions that reinforce what’s normal and what’s possible.

Sport needs coaches who can zoom out, see patterns, and understand that a team’s behaviours are products of the system they live in.

Framework and systems thinking give us the tools to hold complexity, to see beyond the obvious, and to act intentionally. They remind us that our job isn’t to control every variable — it’s to create the conditions for growth, learning, and adaptability.

If we can teach coaches to think this way — not just in terms of drills and tactics, but systems and patterns — we can begin to transform the game from the inside out.

Because coaching has never really been about control. It’s about connection. And once we start coaching the system, not just the session, everything changes.