Has Ross has grown up in his decision making ? He did give his word to Tony that he would commit to the system, then turned away one week later. Ross has the right to make this decision, however it doesn’t make it the morally the right thing to do. Emil and Tony have reason to feel underdone.
Personally I think it would be ideal to have a legal agreement between coach and the athlete after a trial period. Why should athletes have the right to jump in and out at free will?
So far as I understand from Aussie board members, Josh was asked to sign a contract through to the 2012 London Olympics. And if he broke the contract for any reason, he then had to (continue) paying Fairweather 10% of everything he earned from athletics sources until he retired. :rolleyes: And that would be 10% of everything Ross has coming in since he is apparently a fulltime athlete.
If that is true, then no wonder Ross hesitated once that indentured slavery clause was put to him. Maybe he should have put the boot on the other foot and insisted that if Fairweather failed to get him onto the Olympic podium in Beijing and London, then the coach should pay Ross 10% of everything he (Fairweather) earns until the day he (Tony) retires. Sound reasonable? :eek:
SHARMER WROTE: " Personally I think it would be ideal to have a legal agreement between coach and the athlete after a trial period. Why should athletes have the right to jump in and out at free will?"
No athlete leaves a coach because they have a desire to run slower!
Athletes have been coming and going for 100 years; that’s the nature of an individual sport. Look how many coaches, Lleyton Hewitt has gone through over the journey.
I have every right as a coach, to ‘move on an athlete’ as any athlete of mine has of leaving me tomorow. I’ve already said to a few that come Easter Tuesday I’m planning to cut my squad back. There will be athletes pissed off but I’m not here to run a halfway house or be a glorified child minder.
I promised myself (and my long suffering wife!) when I commenced coaching, never to worry about those who leave or don’t want to be part of the squad; only worry about those who want to be here.
An athlete has a very limited life span to make the most of his/her god given talent. No point staying with someone if you haven’t got 100% confidence in the program.
Sure there’s been athletes make disastrous decisions to move only to stuff themselves up, with poor performances; that’s the risk they take.
Josh learnt about short to long concept while in europe this summer, not realising what he was doing was similar to short to long ( not traditionally the same but …) already. Was advised to discuss this with Fairweather as aspects of it had worked for him ( including more plyos, less weights ) but the idea was rejected thus the move to Nancarrow. So its not like he has never employed this approach before its just he isn’t a real thinker.
I have a some experience with contract disputes. According to the NSW Department of Fair Trading, contracts cannot be harshly favourable or long serving for one side. I would say if Ross signed that contract, he would have very good grounds to dispute the conditions, as they are harshly favourable to one side. So the slavery clause you refer to, in effect doesn’t exist. Common law always takes precedence over contract agreements.
Regardless the idea of having athletes on contracts is not a bad one. However the terms of the contract should benefit both sides. I believe 12 month contracts would be more suitable in these circumstances.
Of course many of the top athletes are contracted. Marion Jones had a coaching contract with Dan Pfaff… didn’t quite work out as either of them had planned though, so off to court they went.
I think if the coach wants his athlete under contract, I’d like to see the coach guarantee something more than his time. Maybe s/he should pay the athlete a (training) wage like any other employer.
Seriously though, I also understand that the coach is a Service Provider so s/he is entitled to be reimbursed for their considerable coaching efforts. I suppose there will be some coaches you would be delighted to have a contract arrangement with because they have taken athletes to the top (eg: John Smith, Trevor Graham - oops, maybe not).
I know of a coach in Tassie who has her athletes sign a contract (or parent).
It is also an incentive for the athlete to commit. An athlete complained that I wasn’t watching her compete but I watched someone else in the squad compete. My reply was she has done the work through winter and has done everything I have asked of her, you haven’t.
I think a contract is a good idea, although the wording the like needs to be thought out well.
I pretty much agree word for word.
But, I don’t know what the deal was for Ross in Osaka! He seemed like a confused little boy just about to run his first school competition. Its as if he approached it with “I can’t wait for this to be over”, rather than a true competitor who would have thought “Man, I can’t wait for this to begin!” – even if he was “homesick”, or underprepared or tired or whatever the fuck.
Come showtime, you’ve gotta get going, no matter what. I know it can be hard, but that’s why us athletes train isn’t it? To perform (or AT LEAST try our best) when it counts.
He was trash-talking with Shawn Crawford at the start of the year, and then come Osaka: nothing.
Whatever…
his coach couldn’t even be with him in osaka as he was hospitalised not long after arriving in Japan.
Sounds like that would have been the final straw in the collapse of the performance delivery process.
What was the coach hospitalised for? Is he ok now? Hope so.
Because no matter what transpired between the coach and the athlete, as Charlie has stated, no coach deliberately stuffs up his own athlete.
In my experience, every coach tries her/his best, and even if it isn’t good enough s/he deserves respect for trying to do the best for the athlete.
I never had or wanted a contract with anybody because I never wanted to deal with people who’d need one (I’m no businessman as you can figure).
I also spent alot of time drumming up funding to avoid any reliance on money from athletes that could lead to trouble down the road- that was for agents to deal with.
That could well have been a result of him believing he wasn’t properly prepared, lacking confidence and feeling he wasn’t ready whatever the reasons.
You can feel if your strength is there or not and I’m pretty sure he had a good idea what was coming.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked that question… 
Good words though KK!
With this talk of a contract between athlete and coach, it is interesting that the man of the moment, Nanny, raised this issue back in 2003 with the following post.
[i]Coach / Athlete agreements
Hello forum wanting to hear from any career coaches or basically any coach who has agreements set in place with high profile athletes they coach on the following.
1 - % of income/prizemonies/sponsorships paid to the coach
2 - monthly payment prices for coaching for say 4 days per week.
3 - and has anyone had experiences in approaching this matter say 3-4 years into coaching an athlete.
the reason i have a triathlete who will next season take part in the very lucrative aust circuit and want to know how to approach this matter.[/i]
Hi Youngy
i remember posting that all those years ago but lost my password for my first id on cf.com, so rejoined again as nanny69, anyway.
i never started or acted on a contract at the time with that athlete, the reason i posted it back then was because i told by another coach to do so, common sense prevailed and i never went there then nor will i now.
I’m with you Nanny,
I will never go down the path of contracts as I’m not interested in an athlete whose word is not their bond.
I’m a traditionalist in respect to pro running;my athletes understand that if they run with me, they must run on the pro circuit and if they win more than $100, I get the standard 20%.
If I wasn’t coaching in pro running, and only had amateurs, I guess I would probably just ask for a standard nominal monthly fee.
However in respect to the pro’s, some athletes due to lack of natural talent, may not win more than $100 until their 3rd year, so they get coached for nothing for 2 years. That’s a risk I’m prepared to take and so far I haven’t had anyone renege on the arrangement in 9 years of coaching.
Mind you god help the first person that does…it won’t be me that will sort them out, it will be my wife! 
With regards to contracts and athletes paying coaches, I guess it’s all relative.
If paying the coach means the athlete has to go without in other vital areas such as massage, chiro, weights-gym fees, etc and s/he is thereby prevented from reaching world class, then I would rather the coach did not take that money from an aspiring and potential elite athlete. Afterall, if the athlete succeeds, that glow will shine on the coach as well.
I would be hoping the coach might get support from a club, federation or sponsor. Taking from the athlete, unless they are making stupid big bucks, seems to me to be putting another hurdle in front of the aspirational athlete.
Perhaps I am naive about all this and I’m certainly not a businessman . Not being critical of those who do charge a fee, especially if the name of the game is winning prizemoney as on the pro circuits in Scotland and Oz. But I had this dream of getting athletes into Olympic finals and it’s so hard to do that, so if you get lucky enough to have such a gifted athlete knock on your door, you better clear a path rather than strew it further with obstacles.
Look at it another way. Here in Toronto, our old club had the same budget as the Univ of Toronto Club. We spent 100% of the money on the athletes and they spent almost 100% of the money on coaches. We had results- they didn’t.
A contract paying you money from a limited pool compromises results.
You have to put your “money where your mouth is”. If you DON’T produce, you get nothing out of it, putting you pretty much in the same boat as the athlete(s).
If you build in pay based on earnings after, almost any athlete would sign up front ("Hey! You get me a million dollars and I’ll be glad to give you 100,000!) BUT, when push comes to shove, it’s usually a different story and you risk destroying the relationship. Look how often athletes left John Smith regardless of the results he got them.
BUT, if you do get the results, you have a personna all your own and you can make it pay via seminars, endorsements, coaching jobs in this or other sports, etc. You are limited mostly by your own creativity.
In some way I agree with you KK.
If you have an athlete at the elite level, vying for Olympic Games selection, then I gather the coach woud be compensated in some way, from the sports institute. It should not be the elite athlete’s responsibility.
I would never seek anything from the athlete’s government or AA funding or endorsements.
From a pro level, there’s prizemoney at every meeting and the athlete might win a Gift worth $3000 or a 400m worth $600. A coach gets a percentage of that which compensates them for the training regime, program, time, massages, etc. In that respect it’s alligned to horse racing where the jockey and trainer get a % of the prizemoney. The major difference is there is not the ongoing training fees that horse trainers need to charge when the horse is in the paddock.
As Charlie says: “You have to put your “money where your mouth is”. If you DON’T produce, you get nothing out of it, putting you pretty much in the same boat as the athlete(s).”
Being on a percentage of prizemoney only, If I dont produce (improve the athlete), they don’t win and I get jack schitt.
Because I have the ‘luxury’ of pro running earnings to compensate for the costs of being invovled, I don’t need to charge ongoing training fees, but I certainly understand those in the amateur domain that do.
As long as those fees are reasonable and affordable and the coach can guarantee the athlete will improve.
I had an athlete who ran with me for 3 years, he didn’t win much so I didn’t win much either, but he was studious, did the work and turned out a reasonable runner. I probably earned less than $150 in the three years he was with me from prizemoney %.
He actually left me to move interstate and within 4 weeks (of moving) won over $3000, which he got to keep because officially he was no longer running with me. That’s the luck of the draw and good luck to him.
But anyway, he moved to a much larger city in another state that doesn’t have a pro running focus, and sought out one of the few available coaches in the area where he lives. That coach (aatached to an amateur based club) charges $70 per month. As a young bloke just out of Uni, he couldn’t afford it and ended up giving athletics away. Some time later he told me how fortunate he was to train and compete in my squad where he wasn’t be asked to fork out over $800 per year just for coaching costs.