Game Changers: How a Team of Underdogs and Scientists Discovered What it Takes to Win by João Medeiros

Author:João Medeiros [Medeiros, João]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408708477
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2018-08-30T05:00:00+00:00

14

WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF GOLD

According to his players, Danny Kerry was ‘miserable’, ‘grumpy’ and ‘unapproachable’.

Kerry was thirty-four, lean and bald, with a circumspect and courteous demeanour. He was also a naive, inexperienced hockey coach who believed he could defeat any team through ‘knowledge and process’. Most of the time, he was glued to his computer, analysing video, devising strategies, planning and reviewing. He was obsessed with his players’ performance, but he didn’t show much concern for them otherwise. He wouldn’t socialise with his players, or engage in any light-hearted banter, or comfort them after demoralising defeats. He wasn’t aware of how they were feeling, and whether they were coping with the pressure, because he seldom asked them.

Kerry’s philosophy of ‘knowledge and process’ was not only alienating his team, it was also making them predictable on the pitch. ‘We were more prescribed to and told what to do, rather than expected to learn as a group and rely on each other,’ defender Crista Cullen says of that time. ‘As a result we became easy to read. The opposition knew what we were going to do.’

Going into the Beijing Games, the British women’s hockey team was ranked eleventh in the world, and had modest expectations. In their first match, on 10 August 2008 against Olympic champions Germany, Great Britain were demolished, losing 5–1. They finished the Games in sixth position after losing the playoff against Australia.

By then they were a broken, fractious group. ‘We fell into a blame culture,’ Cullen says. ‘We weren’t connecting as a squad, we were sporadic. We didn’t have unity. We were just made up of little groups without a common goal.’

After Beijing, UK Sport asked the players to complete a survey. When he received the feedback, Kerry was stunned to see some of the epithets that his own squad had chosen to describe him.

At first, he felt hurt by their brutal appraisal. He asked his wife if the man it portrayed really sounded like her husband. UK Sport had already confirmed that Kerry would continue as coach: after all, he had delivered a sixth place at Beijing, which was above their world ranking and a marked improvement on previous tournaments. Nevertheless, he thought of quitting. ‘Personally, it was a trying time,’ Kerry says. ‘The feedback was harrowing.’

Instead, Kerry began to make a conscious effort to change, to have a relationship with his athletes that wasn’t limited to coaching them on tactics and technique. Being more human: asking about their relationships, asking about their weekends. ‘He made himself vulnerable, and that was a brave thing to do,’ Kate Walsh, the then captain, says. ‘I imagine it was quite tempting for him to say no and say that it was going to be his way. But he knew he couldn’t do that. He knew he needed to get buy-in, and he needed the players to go with him. That was empowering.’

After the Beijing Games, the players decided to commit to training full time at their base at Bisham Abbey.

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