Last week we explored athlete-team fit and the idea that success is often about more than talent alone through a recent University of Florida study led by Yulsoo Ji and supervised by my good friend, Dr Chris McLeod. But after reading the paper I found myself moving beyond a simple question of whether fit matters.

The more pressing question is - what should coaches and organisations actually do with that information?

Should they recruit athletes who fit their environment? Should they adapt their environment to fit their athletes? Or is the answer somewhere in between?

To help me explore this I reached out to Chris to get his thoughts. What follows is our conversation with some reflections from me sprinkled in (SM is me, while CM is Chris)

SM: After completing the research, what do you feel are the big implications for coaches and teams?

CM: Well, obviously that fit is important and that initiatives to enhance fit can improve athlete well-being, retention, and most likely performance. We don’t have any research on how to improve fit. But the concept has some good clues. Fit is about the individual + the environment. So there is work to do on both of those areas. I also suspect that there is some untapped existing fit in most teams. Specifically, I think you can find some fit just by having a good democratic discussion about goals and values. We can find some fit where it might not be obvious. But then there is also some athlete + team or athlete + coach matches that are just never going to have the max potential for fit. We should be okay with that and see it more as a problem about matching the right people rather than trying to make everyone fit every situation. As a scientist I mostly focus on the lack of research for guiding implications, but those are some reasonable speculations based on the theory.

As we discussed the importance of understanding the individual within athlete-team fit, I was reminded of Liverpool Academy Director Alex Inglethorpe describing the players who make it through to the Premier League. He suggested that many of the very best possess an element of maverick. They have their own way of doing things and, while they use coaches to support them, they are also "coach-proof" to a degree because they can do things that others simply can't. They are on their own journey. Sometimes, the best thing a coach can do is get out of their way and give them the space to explore.

If many of the best athletes possess that maverick quality, it raises an interesting challenge for organisations. When trying to match athletes with environments, there needs to be enough flexibility for those athletes to thrive. If an environment can't accommodate people who think, learn or operate differently, it risks overlooking exceptional talent—or burning it out before it has the chance to reach its potential.

SM: Often in elite sport (and, to be honest, most sporting environments), the coach or organisation sets the environment and athletes are expected to adapt to it. One of the ideas I've been reflecting on since reading your paper and what you allude to is whether we've got that balance wrong. Should organisations spend less time asking, "Can this athlete fit our environment?" and more time asking, "how can our environment help this athlete thrive?" How do you think about that balance?

CM: I think there are a couple of questions to think about here:

Most research and organisational theory suggests that environments, especially organisations, are often slower to change than the people moving through them. As a result, many teams may not have the flexibility to continually reshape the environment around individual athletes.

On the other hand the key to fit is really “perceived fit” so I don’t see any reason why coaches can’t create an environment that enables multiple different people to perceive high fit. Additionally when we say “environment” in a team, it’s probably true that there are multiple niches in that environment. Different people might succeed in the same environment if they find their right niche. So I think that coaches could get a huge amount of value in imagining their role as creating environments for each athlete to flourish. Even if, in reality, there are many serious constraints on what can be changed or modified.

If you look at really successful environments you’ll see elements of this shine through.

Take John Wooden’s UCLA teams. A 10x NCAA champion who had a very clear definition of success for his groups. And he was stickler for fairness. But in his eyes fairness looked different for each player, because he believed “the most unfair thing to do is treat all of them [players] the same.” He was explicit about this, each year starting the season by explaining to his players “I am not going to treat you players all the same. Giving you the same treatment does not make sense because you’re all different.”

It’s a wonderful example of designing your environment so that everyone can flourish. Wooden wasn't creating a different team for every player. He was creating the conditions for different players to find their own fit within the same team.

SM: I think it's worth digging further into your point that perceived fit is the key to fit. If we extend that idea, then how people experience a team comes down to their perception of it. The values, beliefs and culture of an organisation aren't necessarily fixed, tangible things that are experienced in exactly the same way by everyone. Two athletes can walk into the same environment and come away with very different experiences of it. And if both of those experiences are valid, it really challenges the idea that there is a single environment experienced uniformly by everyone. That changes how we might think about great cultures. When we talk about great team environments, we often speak about the overarching culture, as though it is something experienced identically by every athlete. But perhaps great environments are less about creating one shared experience and more about creating the conditions for enough athletes to perceive a strong fit and, as a result, thrive within it.

It also shifts the way we think about building environments. Rather than starting with a single culture and expecting everyone to adapt to it in the same way, we might begin by understanding the individuals within it and what helps them flourish. As you put it, the role of the coach becomes less about creating one environment and more about "creating environments for each athlete to flourish" within the broader team setting.

CM: I agree with that. I will caution that I think there is such a thing as reality, and perceptions can differ but are constrained by reality. We do not want coaches in the business of deception—trying to sell a different idea to each athlete with some not being consistent with the reality. But there might be some types of environments where somewhat different types of values and different types of goals can still be made consistent?

Do goal setting exercises create a shared set of goals or do they give each individual the time, space, mental latitude to reconcile a shared goal with their own beliefs? I tend to think the latter.

Yulsoo’s [lead researcher on the athlete-team fit study] most recent study shows that when the environment is extremely demanding (either because the coach has an authoritarian leadership style or because there is normalised overtraining) fit actually stops being protective and can even become harmful. This is because the athletes that are high fit in those situations are internalising the values and norms of the coach and the team, which is detrimental to their wellbeing. When you have an authoritarian coach, it might be better to have low fit. The point is, we have athletes that “fit” with stuff that we know is not good for sport.

As Chris and I discussed his paper and its potential application, I found myself thinking about an analogy used by Dr Paul Callaghan in his book The Dreaming Path when a tree faces a storm. If the tree is too rigid, the arriving storm becomes a collision between the irresistible force and the immovable object. When that happens there is a real risk the tree will be ripped out of the ground.

Whereas a tree with flexibility bends with the storm. Its canopy may be pushed almost to the ground as the trunk flexes and sways, yet it survives because it can accommodate what is being thrown at it.

I think we can extrapolate that out to the environments we create. We often think great cultures should be immovable — clear, consistent and unwavering. But perhaps the strongest environments are less like the immovable tree and more like the one that bends with the storm. They retain their roots, but they have enough flexibility to respond to the people moving through them.

The danger of excessive rigidity is not simply that athletes struggle to fit. As Chris highlighted, some athletes may fit too well, internalising norms and behaviours that are ultimately harmful. Equally, other athletes may never get the opportunity to thrive because the environment lacks the flexibility to accommodate what makes them unique.

It’s not uncommon in professional sport that athletes have little control over where they end up, whether through the draft or a trade. As we discussed, when an athlete joins a new team they are frequently the one expected to do the adapting, not the team.

Yet if organisations hold much of the power in determining where athletes go, perhaps they also carry some responsibility for creating environments that allow those athletes to thrive. Not environments that expect every athlete to be the same, nor environments that simply seek compliance, but environments that are demanding without becoming damaging.

Maybe there is an evolution here for sporting organisations.

If athlete-team fit matters as much as the research suggests, the ultimate challenge may be reaching that third step and creating an environment capable of helping more athletes fit.

Liverpool Academy Director Alex Inglethorpe had a wide ranging conversation to the team at the High Performance Podcast, which included some great insights into the maverick nature of some of the best players coming through the Academy system. Worth the listen!

Want to discuss anything you’ve read? Email us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

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