Books

Coaching

  • Every Moment Matters: How the World’s Best Coaches Inspire Their Athletes and Build Championship Teams: How do the world’s most successful coaches get the best from their athletes? How do top coaches design practices, inspire their players, and build teams that sustain their excellence season after season? How do they instill high-performing behaviors? Do they coach men and women differently? What about coaching their own children?

  • The Coach’s Guide to Teaching: The mark of a great coach is a constant desire to learn and grow. A hunger to use whatever can make them better. The best-selling author of Teach Like a Champion and Reading Reconsidered brings his considerable knowledge about the science of classroom teaching to the sports coaching world to create championship caliber coaches on the court and field. What great classroom teachers do is relevant to coaches in profound ways. After all, coaches are at their core teachers.

  • The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance: “The Inner Game” is the one played within the mind of the player, against the hurdles of self-doubt, nervousness, and lapses in concentration. Gallwey shows us how to overcome these obstacles by trusting the intuitive wisdom of our bodies and achieving a state of “relaxed concentration.” With chapters devoted to trusting the self and changing habits, it is no surprise then, that Gallwey’s method has had an impact far beyond the confines of the tennis court.

Ecological Dynamics & The Constraints-led Approach

The first two books that anyone interested in this aproach to skill acquisition should read are Rob Gray’s works on the subject. Gray does an excellent job of distilling the information into a form that is approachable for most people.

The books listed below are excellent resources, but are also much more academic. If you decide that you are serious about this approach they are worth considering, and are listed in what we consider order of importance.