Peter Giles

Peter Giles

Our great coach on This episodes is Peter Giles.
Peter is currently the Australian under 19 Head Coach. A role he has had since 2011.
He started playing baseball in 1969, finished in 1994; and began coaching in 1995. He won a championship in 1998 with Sandringham; and then led Essendon in the Victorian State league to 6 successive championships from 2011 to 2018.
He has also coached the Australian U17 Baseball Team in 2015 was voted baseball Victoria Coach of the year.
In 2020 he launched the Academy of Baseball Excellence that he now heads up.
Peter is coach with a heightened focus on leading his club, not just the team of players who suit up each week. He is comfortable in his leadership philosophy in the way that only coaches with a long history of success and failure can be; and believes that his role is to be as fair as possible to everyone.
His background in teaching enables him to communicate in way that engenders both belief and motivation and this translates into a mantra of asking his players to know their role and do it to the best of your ability, which you actually also hear him say in the opening theme for this podcast.
This discussion with Peter is a masterclass in the art of coaching, it was actually one of the first interviews we did when we started this podcast, and his ideas have shaped many of the questions we have gone on to ask other Great Coaches.
Some of those ideas include:
The importance of not being afraid of bringing in support staff who are more knowledgeable or better than you in certain areas.
His advice on building culture by firstly have shared belief across the coaching group in the game plan, then ensuring that every member of the team, either playing or in a supporting role, feels valued, and then thirdly connecting the teams mission to something bigger than the present team or season.
Where culture is driven by the coach it is not sustainable, instead It must be led by the senior group of players in the team, and the example he gives of the All Blacks and Richmond Football Club to illustrate this.
And his view that the role of the coach is to ensure that the players have a good work life balance so that they don’t burn out or have their motivation diminished.
I am very excited to share this interview with you and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
If you would like to send us any feedback or if you know a great coach, who has a unique story to share, then we would love to hear from you, please contact us at thegreatcoachespodcast@gmail.com
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