MAKE YOURSELF REDUNDANT

Many coaches think their job is to be needed. The best coaches are working toward the opposite — developing athletes who don't look to the coach to solve every problem. That means knowing exactly when to instruct, when to question, and when to step back.

Most coaches never say this out loud, but a lot of coaching behaviour is built around being needed. You show up, you run the session, you talk through the drills, you call the adjustments in the game. It feels like coaching. It looks like coaching. And it's quietly training your athletes to wait for you.

The alternative isn't stepping back and hoping for the best. It's a different kind of discipline — one where every intervention is a deliberate choice, not a reflex.

The goal is redundancy, not indispensability

There's a well-known line in performance circles: your job is to make yourself redundant. Not immediately, not completely, but as the standard you're working towards every session. You're building the knowledge, skills, and confidence in your athletes to make good decisions under pressure — without needing you standing there to make them.

"My job is to make myself redundant as a coach — to impart the knowledge, skills, understanding and confidence to make decisions live, under any type of pressure, without the need for me."

That's not a passive goal. It's arguably the hardest thing to coach towards, because everything about the role pulls you the other way — results pressure, watching eyes, the instinct to fix what you can see going wrong in real time.

Redundant doesn't mean passive

It's a common misreading of this idea: that developing decision-makers means stepping out of the way entirely and letting athletes do whatever they want. It doesn't.

It's a myth that applying this approach means you're not coaching — that you're just letting players do whatever they want. That's not it at all. You can still intervene if you see something you want to change.

The skill isn't picking one mode — instruct, question, or step back — and sticking to it all season. It's reading which mode a specific moment needs, and having the discipline to use the lightest one that will actually work.

• Instruct when an athlete genuinely doesn't know what to do and standing back would just waste the moment
• Question when they have the answer in them but need help finding it
• Step back when the group is already working it out, even if it's messy

What it looks like when it's working

The clearest sign your athletes are developing this way isn't a quiet session — it's a session where problems get solved before they ever reach you.

When athletes are effective at solving things themselves, and effective as a peer group at solving things together, the coach can breathe. The coach can watch, listen, and think about where an intervention would actually add value — instead of being the only person doing any of the thinking.

That's the practical payoff. Fewer things landing on your desk isn't a sign you've disengaged. It's a sign the system you've built is working without you having to run every part of it.

The three layers that get you there

Building this kind of athlete doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen through the coach alone. It happens in three layers, each one built on the last:

The framework is a scaffolding: first, understanding your role and purpose at the individual level — the decisions you make on your own. Second, your role and impact within your peer group — how you help each other be effective. And third, understanding the coach's role — when they step in, and just as importantly, when they don't.

Skip the first two layers and the third one collapses under its own weight — you end up as the only person in the room doing any problem-solving, because nobody around the athlete has been built up to share the load.

What to actually do next session

• Before you speak, ask yourself: does this athlete or group genuinely not know, or are they just waiting for you to fill the silence?
• Notice when you're instructing out of habit rather than necessity — and try stepping back one level instead
• When something's off, intervene deliberately rather than not at all — redundant doesn't mean silent
• Build the habit in your athletes of solving things at the individual and peer level first, so what reaches you is genuinely worth your input

None of this means doing less as a coach. It means being deliberate about every intervention, so the moments you do step in land with far more weight — and the moments you don't are building something that outlasts the season.