Jason Weber (00:13)
G'day and welcome to Two Coders and a Coffee, the Christmas special. Jason Weber with you and Darren Burgess, live from Italy. How are you, mate?
Darren (00:22)
happy Christmas or as we say in this side of the world, Buon Natale.
Jason Weber (00:27)
Yeah, bon Natale. Well, Christmas Eve right now in Australia, so I'm just gearing up for a little barbecue with the family before Christmas. So yeah, you know what it's like in Oz, nice and warm. We've just had a subtly wind kick in, so be cool where you are.
Darren (00:39)
Yeah, nice mate.
Yeah, bit cooler, mate. yeah, looking forward to having, β I'm enjoying the fact that it's a really sort of different Christmas experience over here. And you just got Christmas lights everywhere and went to Christmas markets the other night in middle of the city and just things like that, which is great. But that's not what people want to hear us talk about, One thing that I thought I would bring up, and this is completely unscripted. So, yeah.
Jason Weber (00:51)
Yeah.
It always is, mate. It's the beauty.
Darren (01:09)
I might have mentioned in previous podcast, doing a, I've just submitted my final thesis in a Masters of Sport Directorship and sort of took it up to, well, just over two years ago now and obviously I had no concept that I'd be over in this sort of role, but the reason why I bring it up is the thesis that I submitted was how to develop
a performance manual for a sporting organization. So by that I mean the guidelines and instructions that you might leave. So let's say you and I start working for, we're at Jarvis Bay FC and they're a professional rugby club.
in southern New South Wales with 50,000 members and worth, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and they bring us in and we want to develop standards and guidelines on how we operate so that when we get sacked and we inevitably will, there is, this is the way that Jarvis Baria FC does everything from rehabs, hamstring injuries to assesses strength to, so it's a complete,
guideline of how we do things. Now, reason why I bring that up is before I did the assignment, I thought, okay, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna produce a performance manual and it's gonna be unbelievable and I'm gonna be able to take it with me wherever I go, because this was sort of five months in the making. And I'm gonna go through the research and say, to rehab an ankle injury, I'm gonna use the Tabana and Allen Control Chaos Continuum.
To assess fitness, we are gonna use the Virgla's Submax heart rate. To assess run and gait, we're gonna use SpeedSig. And these are the protocols, yeah, these are the protocols. And this is the research that supports it. And I thought this was gonna be great. What it ended up being was 10,000 words of not one page was a practical
Jason Weber (02:56)
Good man.
Darren (03:11)
manual piece. Everything else was researched into the communication, effective communication strategies within a sporting organization, effective governance within a sporting organization, and then the procedures that would need to take place in order to implement the manual. And the supervisor, who was brilliant, said to me, Darren, if you can get to the manual, that's great.
but let's make sure that we get the right procedures in place. So, Jason, I spent 10,000 words and intermittently over, six months, producing a document that, and I don't know what mark I'm gonna get by the way, because I only submitted it this week, but that was around historical research and historical theories on
leadership, governance, communication, when I say historical, like global theories, not just performance related or sporting performance, before I even got to a manual. So my point in bringing this up is we go through this career saying I've read some great research on BFR training. We're just gonna do it. What an actual fact.
there are well established theories on appropriate pathways under high pressure environments. We wish to instigate VFR training, communicate why you're doing it to both players and staff and upper management and whatever else. But we probably don't do that well at Jarvis Bay FC.
Jason Weber (04:43)
Well, let's go through a couple of things. I'll ask you a few questions, but I'm going to start with just a quick observation for anyone listening who is early or mid-career. So this is Darren Burgess, who's had multiple jobs around the world, and he's doing a master's degree in a, yeah, yeah, but he's doing another master's degree in, you know, doesn't really matter what it's in. It's in a system that will enhance his career.
Darren (04:58)
Too many clubs.
Jason Weber (05:11)
If you're looking at what you're doing and you think that because you read two blogs a week, you're doing enough, probably have a look at yourself in the mirror because you're not. Anyway, that aside, get off my soapbox for a moment. So mate, can I conclude from this that the work that you've done, you actually have seen a different path forward that we need to do all of these other elements to get, let's say the practical manual ready to go. Is that what you've concluded?
Darren (05:37)
It opened
my eyes massively because I honestly thought when I dreamed this up, when they said, you know, you've got to an applied assignment, I've always wanted to do a manual that documented the injury prevention we're going to do is this based on, you know, this research and, you know, it's just going to be handed to the L.A. Crows at the end of my tenure and say, this is how, this is the Crows way of doing things or, you know, Arsenal or wherever. And,
Jason Weber (06:03)
no.
Darren (06:04)
what it ended up being was if you're gonna do this, these are the effective governance that you need. This is the effective communication strategies that you need. And these have been well established theories since, you know, early 1900s and then developed into this is what's been researched on pilots, on surgeons, on elite sporting pathways, on a whole bunch of research on the Syria art and some of the governance issues that the Italian football has had.
and how to navigate that successfully. There would be the same, whether you're talking about the French league or the Southern New South Wales rugby competition, how you can adapt it to different environments. And before I even got to the nuts and bolts of it, we should do strength training on match day minus three. There was all of this research and appropriate documentation to prepare.
for the implementation of a manual in a sporting organization. So it really was, it really did open my eyes up about how sometimes β naive we are and when we think, we're working in this high performance, high pressure, fast decisions, big consequences environment. There are theories that we should have been, that we should be listening to that help us with this.
Jason Weber (07:22)
Yeah, so no longer no.
Darren (07:22)
and help us navigate
through this. And these are well established theories in other industries that β were probably, you're right, on your soapbox. You won't find on a blog or a podcast, and I certainly didn't, and I've been doing it for a long time, and I certainly didn't. So it was just a really, you know, when I texted you yesterday and said we need to do a podcast, this was on my mind, because I'd submitted it the day before. β
Jason Weber (07:31)
Night-night.
Well, here's an interesting
parallel, right? So as in my role as lead S &C coach at the West Australian Institute of Sport, I have recently done a similar thing. So created a operations manual for our S &C department. Now, I did a very similar thing is I went through and looked at all that because it's a government institute, looking at all the procedures and all the...
Darren (08:01)
Yes.
Jason Weber (08:11)
are policies that fed into us. But I didn't get, like, there's no question, like, I've got a lot of that in my manual, which I haven't even counted the words, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't in the 10 grand market. But what I did get to was the practical, but only at a, like you, only at a shallow depth, got to the main things we were looking at were,
β primarily around the implement implementation of technology and the fact that it's been done so cavalier that we have no process by which, we adhere to between particularly an institute of sport where there's different sports. It's like everyone goes off on their own tangent. And it's like, no, no, like a prone ISO 30 hamstring is the same in cycling as it is in running. It's the same test. shouldn't be.
Darren (08:43)
Yes.
Yeah.
Jason Weber (09:02)
varying that. Not to say that we shouldn't be looking for specific tests in those sports. In that particular example, they're the same thing. So I'm with you, mate. I'm at the point now where I'm going, well, why do we need to keep reinventing the wheel? And one thing I would say of some of my younger staff at the moment is I get this, I get, hey, have you seen this new thing? You know, it's called kettlebells. I'm like, hang on.
Darren (09:25)
I'm
Jason Weber (09:26)
We were doing kettlebells in the 90s and we pinched them off people who were doing them back in the 40s and 50s. They're not new. And I'm being a bit facetious with the kettlebell thing, but there are many instances like isometrics would be an example. There's lots of great work being done on isos at the moment, but they have been around for millennium. Like Milo of Croton back in the day was probably pushing brick walls around. So
Darren (09:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason Weber (09:51)
So what I would say if we were to give something to, there's two takeaways here I reckon. There's the young practitioners which are, have a look at history. And in fact, I'm just writing a course at the moment that I'm delivering for a football organization soon. And one of the first, the very first lecture, and it's a lot about, it's called Data to Decisions. But the very first,
webinar I do in it is about the progression of all the things we've from back in the early 1900s. Like, what's the issue? What have we done? Which is your thing exactly? What have we done? And we've done it okay, but how do we make it better? We've got to take these, we can't keep reinventing the wheel. And I think then for your more senior people listening to this, I think you've got to have a listen to what Darren's saying. Like this is a guy who's been around for
Darren (10:30)
for sure.
Jason Weber (10:42)
20, 30 years and still learning, but learning in a new space.
Darren (10:47)
It's
bit about safeguarding as well and even protecting yourself if you want to take a selfish angle on it and career protection and it's not in any way shape or form that's how the assignment started but and my wife jokes that I'm going backwards I built up to a PhD and now I'm going backwards through the degrees β on the way back down but
Jason Weber (10:50)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bet you're not, like, I mean...
Darren (11:13)
But it's about, not necessarily to do with the masters itself, but about the document. You go into a club and you say, want to, let's use your example, I want to use iso holds or β isometric contraction as part of our injury prevention strategy. And the existing staff there say, well hang on, we do...
We do some power stuff on match day minus one and we do some strength stuff on match day minus three. What do we need to do any isometrics? And before you even deliver that this is what I wanna do because it worked really well and I heard John Smith talk about it on a podcast, what's your communication strategy? What's your implementation? Okay, we're not gonna, if you go into a club that have existing staff and say,
We do ISOs three times a week because that's know, whoever the isometric guru is these days, suggests you should do. That's never going to work. There's so many things in that space, so many layers in that space about looking after the existing staff, respecting the existing way in which they do things. yeah, no, no, I catered to that because I asked them, what do you currently do? Okay, we're gonna do ISOs. No, that's not.
what we're talking about here. We're talking about well established communication strategies. And so then when you document what you did, we did these ISOs because of the following reasons, and this is how I implemented it. We had weekly meetings, had document and those, well whatever it might be. So it's more about making sure that there is due process associated rather than, I think it's really.
And I've been so guilty this, by the way, and we're on a podcast now, so I'm aware of the irony of it. When people say, how are you self-educating? Well, I'm listening to podcasts like I'm a voracious podcast listener. Just remember what podcast, we do this because you and I are doing this anyway, and we're talking about it anyway, and thought, let's just talk about it on a podcast. There is no... β
Jason Weber (13:11)
see what happens.
Darren (13:13)
Yeah, there's no, we're not getting paid a cent for it, but of all the educational podcasts that most of the performance world listen to, almost all of them have ads in the middle of it and are getting paid, so it's not a true education platform. I'm not saying it's bad, but just don't be reliant on that by itself and say that you're educated. Don't forget the real sort of forms of, of.
Jason Weber (13:32)
Yeah.
Darren (13:39)
β education and the historical forms of sort of people way better than what podcasts have. That's my side box.
Jason Weber (13:44)
Can I a quick,
can I throw a bit in there, mate? I had a really interesting, I don't know, nearly two hours yesterday with Stu McMillan. And we chatted through a lot of stuff. And he is, whether you like him or not, whatever, I think he's a great thinker. He's a great thinker. For a guy who's like us, a specialist in sport, he has a great breadth of knowledge around things because he reads.
Darren (13:58)
But, you know.
Jason Weber (14:09)
And we were talking about deep learning yesterday. And his question to me was, do you think you've got better? I said, well, yes, I have. I've got better at deep learning on a subject now than let's say when I was at high school, way better. Like I mean, I can sit quietly and go in and I really can exclude what's going around me. And you can hear my wife who hates it because she tries to speak to me and I can't hear a thing. But.
Darren (14:35)
You
Jason Weber (14:37)
Point of that is what you've just described about going deeper on matters of communication, structuring of staff, et cetera, et cetera, all that, deep learning, what I fail to see and I've seen, because I actively work with younger staff at the moment. When I say younger, in their 30s, early 30s, remembering that I'm in my mid to late 50s, they're learning, they tell me, and they've described this quite clearly.
their learning platforms are podcasts, blogs, and that's about it. I'm actually forcing them to read books. Yeah, yeah, summaries. Like you've got to go deep. when I think people miss that fact of diving into a subject and really going deep. And I, with all due respect, man, disagree with your wife saying you're going backwards. A PhD is like a microscope.
Darren (15:09)
So chat GPT as well.
Hmm.
Jason Weber (15:29)
down on one subject, going up to a master's gives you that broader width. And I think doing a master's in another subject is really, particularly with what you've now done, really healthy from just a thinking perspective. So you've now got a different perspective on the world we work in than you might have previously. But if I could say anything to young and middle career practitioners, don't be afraid to say, hey, for this month,
I'm just going to work on one thing. I'm like, I get the podcasting and all that, but mostly people are driving when they're listening to podcasts or they're doing something else. It's very hard to remember, to take notes, to draw mind maps, all of those things. Right. So when you're listening to someone intently and you're trying to learn from them, I don't know that that's the most effective way. It's not for me. So I can't put that to everybody, but
Darren (16:05)
Yeah.
Yeah,
it's easy to say that because trying to learn a language and people say, just put Italian podcasts on while you're driving. just like, no, I cannot do that. But anyway, so I agree with you. So I'm gonna go to two points quickly on that because we've got one more topic to talk about. One is, Stu McNeil, he doesn't realize it because he's a humble, humble guy, but.
Jason Weber (16:27)
Yeah,
Darren (16:45)
I reckon there's a handful of people that we could name on this podcast that in my opinion, my opinion only, completely changed the industry and left a genuine sort of legacy behind. And Stu's one of them. He's one of the smartest, most humble people that I've come across in any walk of life. So whenever you get a chance to have...
10 minutes, let alone two hours with Stuart in whatever capacity, whether it's through his unbelievable record at training speed to talking about life in general, he's an absolute star, so I'm very jealous that you had β two hours with him. Secondly, β
Jason Weber (17:22)
And I tell you what,
here, just, all right, go to your second point, but I want to reflect on that conversation and what, I was just going to say what happened after it. So we talked some highly technical stuff without, like we went deep on a few subjects. Man, we finished the chat and I went off and was doing some other stuff. I get a message a couple of hours later, hey man, I was just thinking about what we spoke about. What about this point and this point? And gave me a couple of questions and mate, they were awesome questions. I loved them.
Darren (17:25)
No, no, no, you go.
Jason Weber (17:49)
engage that process. here's again, this is an example of a guy who has thought about nothing else but that conversation. So he's gone deep and focused right on that. He wasn't speaking to me while he was driving or walking or doing anything else. And then he's obviously thought enough about our conversation to go, hey, man, I like that bit, but can you explain it a bit more? Or why is this that way or whatever it was? And I think again, that's just that example that's a little bit
Darren (17:58)
Yeah.
Jason Weber (18:18)
different from what I see in the market with younger practitioners. Go deep on a subject.
Darren (18:24)
The other thing is, while we're on that topic, you can choose to... I've got no dramas with people who would have that sort of conversation and then tune out because they wanna then go and lift themselves or they wanna go and go for a walk or watch TV or watch Netflix or whatever and choose to not...
be as challenging as someone who might then go and reflect on that conversation and start taking notes about it and say how can I apply this? That's no problem at all. It's just go through at a surface level and that's absolutely fine. But Stu genuinely takes it to another level and that's his way of doing things and I've got nothing but admiration because he will sort of.
reflect on that and the great thing about that is if there's something that he can take away from that conversation, it'll be implemented at Altus for sure because he has that ability to both reflect, whereas there are some people that just reflect us and just reflect us and reflect us and don't actually step onto where the rubber meets the road. But yeah, he's a bit different on that. Before we finish up.
You mentioned to me that you were looking, one of your staff got a great job at an AFL organization and you said it was a great process and it made you think about something, so I don't know the details.
Jason Weber (19:43)
I won't.
I think the process, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, so let's roll with that. And it's not dissimilar from what we're talking about, but this is a mid-career practitioner who's been chasing a job further up the chain and in different sports and all the like. And the person made an application and came back to me with some questions, said, hey, Josh, could you help me with a few things? Which I did. I was very, very happy to support and...
if you like, mentor that process through. But what it made me reflect on was how much, and I'm going to speak to this person later, like how much had you actually thought about the job you were aiming for before you got it? Like had you actually envisaged yourself in that job and asked some questions? What would I do if I had this budget or you had these people or was this sport versus, you know, it's AFL versus global football?
what would I do? What if they say you can't have two physios, you can only have one. Actually gone through the process of thinking it through. So again, we talk quite a lot. We talked a lot about that idea of trying on ideas, of doing hypotheticals. And I really think having seen this one go through and the person was successful. So that's a great outcome, great outcome for that person. However, I would
Darren (20:58)
Yeah, well done.
Jason Weber (20:59)
If I was to what I'll be feeding back then at the right time is you've got to stand. did mention to the person, you've got to start thinking like a leader. You can't just think I turn up to work and someone will tell me what to do. Like you've got to start now you've got to do your job, which is maybe working with a certain portion of the athletes in this role, but you'd now got to look at the bigger picture because now you have five or six other staff reporting to you.
And the time sheet, like when do they turn up? When do they not turn up? All that logistical, I don't know, job process orientated stuff, which links into what you said earlier. So I would just say to the young practitioners, start studying the people you're working with who are in charge and evaluate them critically. Like what are they doing that you would like or you would keep doing? What are they doing that you would stop?
blah, blah, blah, blah. And, but going through that process and really having a look in detail, it's just something that occurred to me in the last week, but does fit with, in a way, with what you've seen Darren, that you've discovered that, we're not really doing it the way we should. Which means hopefully some of the young ones will find that as well.
Darren (22:08)
Yeah, interesting, interesting process. And did you offer the practitioner like, okay, in your first three months, this is what you need to be doing, β like in explicit detail?
Jason Weber (22:19)
Yeah, yeah.
What the question, the key question was, these are the constraints. There are a couple here, particularly around staffing. What does your first 90 days look like? And so my thoughts were around creating the structure. What does the structure look like within the constraints that we have? Because when I'm looking at those things, the first thing I'll always go to is opportunity. Opportunity is time.
Darren (22:31)
Yeah, okay.
Jason Weber (22:45)
All right, so what time do we have to train? What time do we have? What time do we need to do medicals? What time do we need to do recovery, to do rehab, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you start to flesh it out. And it just has to, it has to work progressively out. You know, it's like, I was playing chess with one of my kids yesterday and saying, like, it all looks very complicated, but it's actually simple if you go through the process of what we're trying to do. We're trying to control the middle of the board.
then we're trying to weed out some pieces, et cetera, et cetera. So that first 90 days, you've got to think about it systematically. And that's just what I just saw was someone who's very, very smart, but clearly had not practiced that. And that's kind of what I'm saying to young practitioners out there. If you're looking to take the step up, start trying it on. What does it look like? How would you do it? If you were given and practice. I mean, I think
Like I always say that about job interviews, don't go to a job interview without having interviewed yourself in your room 10 times quietly and like speak aloud, practice saying it. I think you have to practice what would I do? What's my priority? Which falls back to your manual, doesn't it? If I can only do, if I got a list of five things and I can only do two of them, which are the two I do?
Darren (23:48)
Yeah.
Yes, exactly. And I can only add to that, well there's nothing I can add other than a story of when I got to the Swans a long time ago, and so I was 23, 24 years old and I was playing basketball in far, far away and Paul Ruse who just retired as a player wanted to play basketball and I'm...
Jason Weber (24:06)
B.
in a galaxy far, far away.
Darren (24:25)
in the local league and I had a game and he said, yep, as in I was shit, but I was playing in a game. he said, yeah, could I come and join you? Yep, no worries. And we got to know each other reasonably well in that year. And he was saying that when in his last couple of years as a player, he would just write down all the things that annoyed him about a coach. All the things and all the things that he wouldn't do if he got the chance to be coach. Lo and behold, you know.
Jason Weber (24:44)
Yeah.
Darren (24:49)
A year later he's the senior coach of the Swans and they win their first title in however many years, a few years after that. So whether he was a genius or not, I love the practice of this is, like you said, this is what Darren Burgess does that I don't like or that I wouldn't do if I was working in his shoes or this is what Jason Webber does that I do like if you're working for or with either one of us. β
Jason Weber (24:57)
And he's a goat, he's a goat. β
Darren (25:16)
I like that practice for sure because then when you get to that position you have objective, not objective, but these are my notes that I took rather than I didn't like it from a year ago.
Jason Weber (25:25)
Exactly.
Yeah, here we go. Let's start. think it's that's why don't reinvent the wheel when you don't have to. So anyway, that's our Christmas present to you guys. I hope you enjoy it. Darren's on a plane and I've got a barbecue I've got to go to, mate. it's as always. Yeah, yeah, man. Well, we're only doing them. We're only we're only doing them once a month now, so.
Darren (25:42)
It's a bumper edition. It's a long one. A bumper Christmas bonus edition. So we don't know when the next one's coming, but we'll work on it.
Jason Weber (25:51)
Mate, listen, you have a great Christmas to you and your family and β be safe and we'll see you in the probably in the new year, All right, folks, best.
Darren (25:59)
You too, mate.
Yeah, we'll look forward to anybody
got any any topics that you want us to cover down to show.
Jason Weber (26:07)
Send them through and yeah, everyone listening, thank you for your support and your continuing to listen to us even though we're becoming infrequent, but we appreciate you all and hope you get something out of us. So farewell and enjoy your Christmas.
