Rodger Harkins driving ahead with Scots athletes

FOR many of us, this time of year is a chance to look back on what went right and what went wrong over the preceding 12 months. But Rodger Harkins is already looking ahead to 2015, and is reluctant to spend much time dwelling on what has by and large been a successful year for track and field in Scotland.

Rodger Harkins works with sprinter Diana Ramsay at a coaching conference at the Emirates in Glasgow. Picture: Bobby Gavin

In part this is because, having only taken up his new post of director of coaching with Scottish Athletics at the start of September, the Glaswegian is by necessity planning ahead.

But it is also a matter of choice, and of temperament: Harkins feels that coaches and athletes alike have no time to indulge in self-congratulation, no matter how merited.

So, when we met at the governing body’s headquarters in Edinburgh and he was asked if he was pleased by what has been achieved in 2014, he replied positively, but quickly insisted that learning from mistakes is far more important than celebrating success.

“Generally, yes, I would say the team was successful at the Commonwealth Games,” Harkins said. “But coaches never think of the here-and-now success.

“A coach always looks at missed opportunities and thinks ‘Where could we get more medals and personal bests? How could we have made things better?’ And I think if you’re that type of person who’s always reflective, then you’ve got a better chance of moving positively forward.

“If you stop to smell the roses, you find that you’ve missed the bus. So I think generally it was successful, but deep down I still look at other opportunities.

“There was an expectation on athletes like Eilidh Child and Lynsey Sharp, but that’s the pressure they deal with week in, week out. Whereas some of the younger athletes who were having a first-time experience at the Games, they thought everything was going to be wonderful.

“I spoke to one particular athlete who was really eager to get in there – but when he did get in there, the crowd and the atmosphere, the village, the whole thing, was surreal for a young person to take on board.

“He knows he could have done better, and he’ll learn from that. Hopefully in the Gold Coast in 2018 that experience from Glasgow will be fresh in his memory and he’ll make sure that some of the things that might have affected him won’t affect him.

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“You’ve got to learn from your experiences. Often the athletes will be harder on themselves than we are. They know if they could have done better – they don’t need me to tell them that. And they will learn from that and move forward.”

A former Scotland international in the triple jump and 400-metres hurdles, Harkins is best known, for the time being at least, as the coach to Lee McConnell.

But his new appointment means two big changes for him.

First, he is at last, in his mid-50s, involved in athletics full-time, having previously balanced his coaching commitments with the need to earn a living elsewhere.

And second, as director of coaching, he is no longer allowed to coach individual athletes.

“I originally worked for Glasgow City Council in the construction department,” he explained. “Then, for the last 14 years, I worked in further education, teaching in the construction department again, with dysfunctional kids who were excluded from school with behavioural problems and giving them a vocational outlet. It was satisfying – and extremely challenging.

“I’ve always enjoyed a challenge. That’s why I’ve taken this job.

“I would like to do this job for at least one Commonwealth cycle, ideally two if they’ll keep me. We’ve had some good national coaches recently, but a high turnover. They’ve all probably had good ideas, but they’ve been pulling the ship in different directions.

“The sport needs some stability. So first of all I need to provide stability and leadership, and then I need to say ‘Okay, how are we going to drive everything forward?’ ”

Hawkins is certainly right to emphasise the need for stability, but another challenge for him lies in the fact that his immediate predecessor, Stephen Maguire, was so successful.

Now with British Athletics, Maguire spent two years as Scotland’s director of coaching, and was widely admired for the improvements he made to the sport north of the Border. A calm and reassuring presence, he was particularly successful, as Hawkins recalled, in helping the team prepare themselves for the unique demands of competing at a home Commonwealth Games.

“There was a huge amount of national expectation because we were having a home Games,” said Hawkins. “Stephen had to manage that expectation for the athletes, because if they’d let themselves get carried away with the fervour of a home Games, then they could have crashed and burned long before it.

“Stephen set up a holding camp in Kilmarnock, that he thought would be the best thing to take the athletes away from the whole massive, multi-sport thing that a Commonwealth Games is. It’s great in the Athletes’ Village, having that interaction with all the other sports, but I don’t think you can have it for too long. You shouldn’t have it for two or three weeks in advance.

“The camp worked really well. We had peace and quiet.

“An athlete will go right off the precipice if they’re having a 24-hour-a-day focus on an event. You need to have a balance.”

When it comes to Scotland’s coaches, Hawkins believes there is also a need to find a balance. If individual coaches continue to work in relative isolation, as has been the custom for many, he thinks they will risk passing on their particular strengths and weaknesses to their athletes. But if they pool their resources, particularly by younger coaches using older colleagues as sounding boards, the weaknesses can be ironed out.

“Becoming a coach is like having a child. Nobody prepares you for it: you just find yourself in that situation and you need to learn. And one of the best ways to learn to cope with it is through mentoring – if you can be involved with another experienced coach, they can keep you right.

“It doesn’t have to be a coach in your own event, so you don’t have to fear there’s a rivalry. It can just be an experienced coach you can chat to about how best to deal with certain situations. So I think mentoring is a big thing, and if we can get coaches to share their experience with other coaches, the sport will just flourish and grow.

“The best way for athletics to flourish in Scotland is to take the experience that people have got, and share it out with everybody. Coaches might have lots of experience in one department but not enough in another department, so if they can work in partnerships that helps – not so much sharing an athlete, but working together.”

Too often in the past, a lot of experience has gone to waste as athletes have retired and moved away from the sport. One answer to that, according to Harkins, is to approach them about a move into coaching before they hang up their spikes. Another is to re-engage those who were successful in the past – something he has already done with sprinting, an area in which Scotland has been conspicuously unsuccessful over the past decade or so.

“Sprints is an event in Scotland that is not at its best at the moment, so I set up a national relay programme and used former international athletes to drive it. I got Allan Scott, Chris Baillie, Carey Easton, Dougie Walker, Ian Mackie – they actually run the programme.

“There are a lot of good youngsters that we’re looking at bringing through. Both the men’s and women’s teams got a run at the Grand Prix at Hampden before the Commonwealth Games, and we’re going to look to develop that over the next couple of years.

“The 100m is a difficult event, because the standard set by Caribbean and English athletes means that the qualifying standard is going to be 10.1 or 10.2 seconds. So it’s going to be hard to go from where we are to that.

“But if we can drive forward a relay programme and get relay teams to qualify, that in itself will make a groundswell, so people will want to be part of that relay programme and they’ll need to up their game to get into it. For our relay teams to qualify for the next Commonwealth Games in 2018, the standard of Scottish sprinting will have to rise.

“I’ve got other current athletes too, field-event athletes who are coming towards the end of their careers, who I hope to steer into coaching. If I know athletes are thinking of winding down or retiring, I’ll be having a chat with them about not letting their expertise go to waste. What can they do? How can they stay involved? Is coaching something they’ve been thinking about?”

The more who stay involved, or become involved again, the likelier it is that, in December of future years, Harkins will be able to look back on another 12 months of success for Scottish athletics. Even if he chooses not to.

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