I celebrate the outcomes possible when an athlete or team chooses to collaborate with us to achieve their sporting goals.

Why? Because I have found it to be a very effective period of time to work with an athlete or team.

This premise has been reinforced by many thought leaders in recorded Western civilization, in words to the effect.

We overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade.

Can great things happen in shorter time frames? Yes. I have helped athletes podium at the Olympics in shorter time periods.

However, the rate of change achieved by the athlete will be determined by many factors, including the competence of the coach and the readiness of the athlete.

Is a decade the best time frame to plan and enact high-level sports preparation? Probably not. More likely, the quadrennial time period is more appropriate – a four-year period, coinciding with the time frame of the Olympic Games.

Most Olympic sport athletes measure their time and careers in Olympic or quadrennial cycles. My expectation for a long and fulfilled period of Olympic involvement is five Olympic cycles, which equates to two decades ore twenty years. A number of Australian Olympians have achieved that goal, including an athlete whom I worked with leading into his first Games in Clint Robinson.

A decade of time as it relates to an Olympic athlete will only span two and bit Olympic cycles. If an athlete can achieve this, I expect they would feel satisfied e.g. Brownyn Mayer, an Australian female water polo player who attended the Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004.

However, World Championships are typically annual and therefore a ten-year period does not fit mathematically into the ten-year or decade time frame.

Or at least, not normally, however in the period when the Winter Olymipcs switched from being parallel in year to the Summer Games to being in the alternate two years, three Olympic Games became a possibility. For example, Canadian Alpine skier Rob Boyd attended three Winter Games in a 10-year period – 1988, 1992, and 1994.

However, high-level non-Olympic athletes (or say professional athletes that competed in an annual competition and also are eligible to attend the Olympic Games) would lean towards or resonate with a decade or even a two decade period of time. For example, the 20-year milestone in professional basketball is noted and celebrated. In the US NBA, only 11 players have achieved this. I have not found the equivalent statistic for the Australian NBL, but I know it has been achieved, having helped legendary Brisbane Bullets and Australian Olympian ‘Leaping’ Leroy Loggins achieve the milestone.

There is, however, no argument for a shorter period of collaboration being more effective than a minimum of a decade.

And the superiority of this time frame has been supported by my personal experiences, with multiple teams and many individual sports athletes.

How many? As those who are more familiar with me,  I am not into counting. I have and continue to leave that self-aggrandizement to certain colleagues. A quarter of a century ago, this interviewer worked out this point of difference. Enough to qualify for a professional or expert opinion on it. And to support this, I have only named case studies of athletes in this article where I have had first-hand involvement.

Now at the same time, I need to share that there is also a time for a coach, more so of a team or squad than of an individual coach, to move on. Sometimes, overstaying that mark does not end well.

I have employed this value as well over the decades, and seen instances where perhaps other coaches should have given this more thought.

These considerations about working with an athlete over a decade or more come to mind for me as another KSI athlete moves past this milestone, in my 5th decade of helping athletes.

And the exciting reality is that no matter how the years pass in these long relationships, we both learn new things continually, which will help us improve our performance.

Take today for example, when I was working with the athlete who has achieved this milestone of a decade with me, when we learnt a certain aspect about his skills that we had not uncovered before. A certain thing that will unlock further possibilities on the upside.

And that’s one of the many benefits of that long relationship.