The High Performance Sport Guild

The High Performance Sport Guild is an association for the craftspeople of elite sport - the coaches, the support staff, the administrators. The people whose knowledge, skills and experience - whose wisdom - facilitate the very best physical performances, time after time. Sharing the wisdom of these artisans provides invaluable insights and opportunities for learning.

The Guild emerged, in part, from the indisputable realisation that ten years studying sport science at university served as only the very beginning of my education in high performance sport. In addition to this was a largely unavoidable career break that came with following my husband to his track and field coaching job in Hong Kong. An advantage of this move were the complimentary introductions to, and friendships developed with, a host of elite sport personnel from all over the world. Relationships I could add to my already sizeable list of acquaintances and friendships with incredible people within high performance sport. Experts from whom I’ve already learned so much; who have provided that next stage of learning in my high performance sport education.

It was my interactions with two of these experts that provided the initial spark for this site. As I sat on a bus, from our home in the New Territories of Hong Kong, bound for a Rugby 7s tournament in the stadium at Happy Valley in 2015, I contemplated the wisdom that Anna Richards, one of the greatest rugby union players of all time, brought with her to coach the Hong Kong women’s sevens team. I wondered, too, what she, her former teammates and these current young players felt about the significance of the inaugural inclusion of their sport into the upcoming Olympic Games. A chain of thought led me to marvel at the quality of coaching and support staff I had met up to that point in Hong Kong; people from all over the world with a wealth of experience, knowledge, success and failure. I thought of our friend, Neil Harvey, Olympic swimming coach, on the verge of retirement. A guy whose coaching career spanned 40-odd years - surely he would have some stories to tell (and he did!). How fascinating it would be to sit and take the time to listen to these people. I took a detour to a stationery shop in Wan Chai to pick up a notebook and pen to scribble my ideas down while I watched the afternoon’s games.

Several years and a baby later, this baby is finally seeing the light of day. The conversations included on this site are edited only minimally, for ease of reading. They are long, but I have intentionally left them that way, rather than cutting out potentially significant ideas or thought trails. Please enjoy them. Read them as they are intended - conversations, with personal recollections, reflections, ideas and inspirations, remembering that knowledge, and indeed opinions, are fluid and liable to change.

Welcome to The High Performance Sport Guild.