Interview: Tommy Boyle, coach

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 22:53

TOMMY Boyle once transformed the fortunes of two of Scotland's leading athletes. Now he wants to change the nation.

Two decades have passed since Tom McKean and Yvonne Murray won their events in the World Cup and ensured that Boyle began to receive global recognition. But, for all that he became known as the man who coached those two, Boyle was always convinced that mass participation was the key to success at that elite level.

And not just any kind of mass participation. The quality of the coaching, he learned, is at least as important as the quantity of the participants.

Teaching children a win-at-all-costs mentality, as he did for the first few years of his coaching career, was tantamount to branding most of them as failures. And someone who has been branded a failure is soon going to become disillusioned with sport.

While not exactly disillusioned, Boyle himself might have ended his active involvement in Scottish sport a couple of years ago, when he retired from his post in the electronics industry. But he turned down offers to coach abroad in favour of joining the Winning Scotland Foundation, the company founded and partly funded by former rugby international Sir Bill Gammell.

Boyle is now the director of Positive Coaching Scotland (PCS), the programme, run by the Foundation, which works with parents, councils, schools and other organisations. PCS aims to increase participation in sport by school-age children way beyond its current 20 per cent or so, and to keep them involved by ensuring parents and others offer positive encouragement.

It is a bold, vastly ambitious initiative, one which Boyle thinks could take five to ten years to bear fruit. Several councils are already on board, among them East Renfrewshire, which is why Boyle found himself in Giffnock on Thursday evening, conducting a workshop with 150 or so interested parents.

While encouraged by that attendance on an evening of abysmal weather, Boyle insisted that the bulk of his task was to reach beyond those adults who are currently most enthusiastic about his message, and to get through to the rest.

"The real target is the parents of the other 80 per cent of children who are not doing sport, or who are having bad experiences in sport and drop out," he explained. "If we believe, like most top business people and top sportspeople believe, that sport is the greatest vehicle there is for teaching life lessons, then we are failing as a nation.

"We need to start recruiting quadruple the number of young people into sport. And that needs to start now."

Lest anyone thinks Boyle espouses a woolly, optimistic approach in which competition is frowned on and there are prizes for everyone, he made it clear he believes kids love to compete, and that their will to win should be encouraged. What is more, although he insists that enjoyment is paramount, he is also convinced that hard work is the key to success.

"We need to teach people at a young age that they need to work harder," he continued. "Tom McKean and Yvonne Murray basically worked harder than any athletes in Scotland, probably in Britain, and probably in most of the world. And that's why they made it."

The ideals which Boyle is putting into practice now come from two main sources: his own days as a coach, and his experience in industry. Both reinforced the message that people respond better when encouraged and given responsibility, not when they are shouted at and mistrusted. "I was a failed athlete. I didn't train hard enough. A lot of the best coaches are people who recognise they didn't try hard enough. I started in the local YMCA, and when I stopped competing I was encouraged to put something back into athletics. The ethos we had was not about winning at all costs, not about running every Saturday. It was about teaching young people to learn the correct technique, to run as hard as they could.

"When the wee gems arrived, like Tom McKean, we were then able to strive to take some of them to world class, just by following that ethos that you can do things if you are professional in your approach and try your best. At Bellshill YMCA we had no money, and very few facilities.

"I coached Tommy from ten years of age. By the age of 21 he was on the world scene, and by 26 he was in the top ten in the world and stayed there for about three years. It probably took me about eight to ten years to realise he would become world class. It was that experience which led me to be so determined to try and help Scottish sport to follow a different path. To try to nurture people to make sure they enjoy it so they stay in the sport, so that at a later date when they're old enough and strong enough they can take loading which will help them to be the best they can be – and hopefully some of them will be world class."

There may not have been outstanding individuals such as McKean in the factory where Boyle worked, but he was able to engender a world-class attitude to work. "I started in electronics about 30 years ago. I worked up from the shop floor till eventually I was running a computer manufacturing company with 500 employees producing 5,000 PCs a day.

"We had to change the culture to move from a mediocre or normal 85-per-cent performing factory to a 99-per-cent factory, a world-class performance. That's very much what we're trying to do with this programme: moving from where we are today to becoming a world-class sports country.

"We reduced absenteeism from six or seven per cent down to one per cent within two years, because everybody looked forward to the challenge and felt it was partly their company. There was no supervision on the shop floor, for example: everybody was asked to do a job and charged with the responsibility of doing it. It's exactly the same process (in sport]. That's why I was so attracted to joining the Winning Scotland Foundation.

"A lot of the success I had in business was due to the fact I was deeply involved in sport, and that's one of the things we're promoting in Positive Coaching Scotland.

"There's a very close correlation between academic achievement in schools, health and fitness, confidence in people, and ultimately creating a nation of people, or a company of people or an organisation, where every person strives to do the best they can do. And that's all we can really ask of any child, and right now we're not achieving that."

But McKean and Murray did excel, as did other athletes under Boyle's charge. Asked to name his proudest moment as a coach, he could not settle for one, but had to itemise a handful.

"There are maybe three or four. Probably the first one was Yvonne winning a bronze in Seoul (at the 1988 Olympic Games] after only coaching her for a year. That was tremendous.

"Then Tommy and Yvonne winning the World Cup in their relative events in '89. And the European Championships they both won within an hour of each other in 1990 – that had never been achieved before.

"Tommy winning the European Indoors in Glasgow, the crowd lifting the roof in the Kelvin Hall – that was phenomenal. And when he beat Paul Ereng and broke the Scottish record which still stands today, at Crystal Palace. And Susan Scott breaking the Scottish record at two successive Commonwealth Games – first in 2002 in Manchester and then in 2006 in Melbourne.

"Peaking on the day, on the minute, on the hour. That's the big message we've got to get across for sport. We have so few people involved at the top that they need to learn how to peak on the day."

Yet for all Boyle's justifiable pride in what he has achieved, he is more interested now in what might be done in the years to come, and in the thousands, not dozens, of highlights he could be able to look back on in five or ten years.