This week we want to spend a little time talking about us; the Purple Patch team, specifically the coaching team.  Over the last months we have spent a considerable amount of time reflecting on how to optimize how we structure ourselves as a team to achieve a few important elements:

1. Facilitate ongoing coaching development.
2. Spread the individual coaching team’s expertise across all Purple Patch athletes and not just a handful of individually coached clients.
3. Create a connected community of coaches and athletes who all lean into the same mindset and beliefs around performance.

To appreciate the above, we think it is important to realize that being a Purple Patch coach is not like coaching for most other companies.  We could easily stamp a logo on shirts and send coaches out to the wilderness, and some coaches would be happy with that arrangement. After all, a steady stream of athletes is nice security.  None of our coaching team carry this mindset.  

Our coaches have a thirst for learning and improvement.  We say with confidence that all of them want to learn and improve, so it is up to us as a company to set up a culture to facilitate this, but then also leverage this learning for the benefit of all athletes across Purple Patch.  We now have a wide range of expertise, passion, and interests in the team -- and there is too much passion to limit knowledge sharing to just the athletes the coaches guide on a 1:1 basis. We evolved.

The start of the change was the compensation structure, away from the classic and worn out revenue split per athlete, but that is a conversation for another day.  The important piece is that the evolved structure leaves our whole coaching team equipped and eager to spread expertise across the athlete group while being left with more than enough time and energy to fully support and coach their individual clients.

It is with the framework of above that we are growing existing athlete education channels, as well as test-launching some exciting new venues of education.  These include:

• Coaching Education Curriculum:  A complete curriculum of coaching education and roundtable to drive team-wide expertise and learning.  Each of these individual sessions result in:
• Peer-to-peer education and support
• Development of meaningful educational content for the education hub
• Alignment across the team of points of view and best practices.
• Office Hours:  You will begin to see more and more robust coaching office hours anchored around specific performance topics suited to the interest and expertise of the hosting coach.  These sessions are recorded and proving valuable for those who attend and also those who review the recording following.
  
  
• New! Community Discussions:  We have just initiated an ongoing athlete community coach-led discussion forum -- hosted in the Purple Patch education hub.  This week was Michael Olzinski leading an online Q and A session around strength-training when gym access is a challenge. All were welcome to add questions directly to Mike and learn from others.  The concept is a forum to ‘carry on the conversation’ stemming from Meetings with Matt sessions, office hours, common workouts executed across Purple Patch and more. Mike has high expertise in strength, so why shouldn’t we all learn?  Next up is a session focused around the Artery Session in swimming, which many athletes (including the SF Squad and Squad athletes) executed last week. Dive into the why behind the session, some lessons learned, and have your questions answered. You can find these Community Discussions under the Community Tab on the Education Hub ->Coach Forum and Dixon's Question of the Week.  

We don’t just educate and support our pro athletes and individuals we coach, we aim to support all Purple Patch athletes and our coaches shouldn’t just lead their own athletes.  The collective is always better than the individual if we remain committed, coordinated, and passionate about it.  

As we go into 2020, we encourage you to lean in and embrace the learning as you now have many great experts from which to learn.

 From proud leaders of a wonderfully committed team.

Cheers,

Matt Dixon and Matt Hurley