"You are your athletes greatest source of competitive advantage." The Story of Coach Linda Nicholson.
PRO - Performance
📸 Track & Field Coach Linda Nicholson (UK / Scotland)
This week, as part of our new series of articles supporting coaches and organisations to take a more holistic approach to addressing the persistent lack of female coaches across sport, we turn our attention back to the P of PRO - PERFORMANCE.
FCN | PRO Framework
To borrow a quote from Cody Royle, author of Second Set of Eyes and former Head Coach of the Canadian AFL team;
“you are your athletes greatest source of competitive advantage.”
It’s a quote Cody has repeated many times across his presentations and podcasts over the years. Through his work supporting elite head coaches, he sharpens this message further, helping coaches become their team’s greatest source of competitive advantage through his Four Crafts of Coaching model: organisational craft, personal craft, locker room craft and game craft. The model recognises that coaches are required to perform across every area of their role, not just on the pitch on game day.
Cody is a global leader in advancing the idea that coaches are performers too. He challenges head coaches to recognise that performance is not something reserved for athletes alone. Coaches are required to operate under pressure, make high-stakes decisions in real time, regulate emotion, and influence outcomes when it matters most. His work with coaches around the world centres on a simple but confronting truth: great coaching is not just about what you know, but about how you show up.
📸 Cody Royle, Presenting at the LMA Conference 2025
This same philosophy underpins the concept of the FCN | Coach as a Performer Framework — a framework designed to help coaches build self-awareness, the tools to perform under pressure and the ability to have a sustained coaching career without burnout.
Before coaches can help others perform at their best, they must understand and manage themselves. The quality of coaching is inseparable from the quality of the coach’s presence. Great performances happen when individuals improve not only what they do, but who they are.
The moment can strike at any time — the moment when a coach must step up and perform for their athletes. When the stakes are high, uncertainty creeps in, and the athlete or team turns to the coach for answers. But will the coach be ready to perform?
Will they have slept well the night before? Fuelled themselves properly? Regulated their nerves and brought themselves into a calm, focused state? Because in sport, there is often only one opportunity to step up and deliver.
Few moments capture this more clearly than the moment Coach Linda Nicholson stepped forward to become her athlete’s greatest source of competitive advantage at the British Athletics Indoor Championships in 2025.
