Managing Athletes and Service Providers

Supporting performance at the highest level will cost you time and money. Coach Joe Friel shares a balanced approach to the high-stakes game of working with pro athletes.

The degree to which you cultivate a positive coach-athlete relationship will enhance your athletes’ race performances—and help you retain them as clients.

Everyone wins when an athlete feels supported. In Module 5 from The Craft of Coaching, Joe Friel and his hand-picked experts share how to best manage athletes and add service providers to extend your coaching capabilities.

No one wants to “fire” an athlete. But there are times when the coach-athlete relationship is clearly not working. Coaches need to reflect on these difficult situations and athletes so they can identify problems before things get personal.

For the coach-athlete relationship to be successful, it must be rooted in trust, and trust is earned or compromised from Day 1. Begin any new client relationship with the end in mind.

Ryan Bolton was coached by Joe Friel for the duration of his career as a pro triathlete. He reflects on what made that relationship work and the lessons he took from it in establishing his own coaching business.

Coach Grant Holicky describes how athletes are impacted by the additional experts and services that coaches make available to them.