Dan Travis

Press Release: Brighton Man Questioned by Police for taking pic of his child in Park

Dan Travis — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:40:46 +0100

Brighton Evening Argus

Parent banned from taking a picture of his child in Park

Following the police questioning of Glagow resident Chris White for taking a picture of his child in a shopping centre, a Brighton man has been questioned by police for taking a picture of his child in a park.

As well as having the fear of God put into him, the man was perplexed as to why another adult would treat this as suspicious. The Glasgow man was stopped on the pretext of breaching anti-terror laws.

Our Brighton based group has been part of a campaign to make the banning of photography a thing of the past. We see banning this type of ban as an important step forward.

Intergenerational relationships, the most fundamental in our society are continually poisoned by this type of intervention on the part of the state and it's quasi-proxies. What is worse is the state encouraging the worst kind of behaviour in adults. That of snitching on people going about their day to day lives. In what appears to be a harmless attempt to create a risk free environment for children, we forfeit our ability to engage or discipline them. Without this ability the relationship with our children is severly compromised

The police are right to point out the threat they face from the erosion of adult authority, compounded by the summer riots. Banning parents from taking pictures of their children is a direct threat to adult authority as well as individual autonomy.

Dan Travis

Tel: 02071931717 Mobile: 07582226379

Sky News on School Sports Days - Dan Travis

Dan Travis — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:18:21 +0100

'Culture of British Sport' lecture to the University of Arkansas

Dan Travis — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:44:57 +0000

Thanks to A.H.A international and Susie Thomas for hosting 'Culture of British Sport' lecture in Holburn. Although this is one of my favourite lectures of the year, it can also prove the most challenging. Questions from the American Audience where interesting. They included: "what is cricket?" "Why is everyone running in the UK?" What is Polo?" Looked at the role of international rivalry in UK sport. The ambiguity towards competition and the desire to win. Why the NFL was unable to establish itself in Europe. Uk and the Olympics. Looking forward to new series of lectures at the end of the month including "How do you recreate a sporting elite?" Looking forward to Tennis Tigers Tournament at Brighton College this Sunday.

Blog posted here.

Barcelona - Sanchez Casal Tennis Academy "Mental Toughness" Day Three

Dan Travis — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 22:07:02 +0100

The last three days was pulled together by Lorenzo Beltrame with the 'importance of rituals' session that started on court this morning. Looking at the 'between points' situation that makes up for around 90 per cent of a match, Lorenzo and colleague at the Human Peformance institute Jessica. The development of rituals between points is seen as a process that has for components. The intergartion of the routine into the match is taken very seriously by the HPI and is seen as crucial in developing the Ideal Performance State. The between points ritual has to be rehersed regularly if it is to become habitual.
We spent the rest of the morning revisiting the course as a whole and looking at the most effective ways of introducing the programme to our players.
The importance of writing in the whole IPS process is one that was stressed repeatedly. The thought that is written by hand rather than typed or spoken, is said to be far more powerful in both changing the thought process and for memory. Will be very interesting to hear Rob Clowes take on the primacy of the written word. It is certainly the first time I've heard it introduced in sports coaching. Looking forward to seeing some results by trying this out over the next year.

Barcelona - Sanchez Casal Tennis Academy "Mental Toughness" Day Two

Dan Travis — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 19:35:13 +0100

The second day with the coaching elite of Spain saw Dr Loehr and his assistant J establish the need to identify the main barriers that your students have in reaching IPS (Ideal Persformance State). It was discussed at length what the IPS might be and consist in. In summary, IPS sees the individual able to establish the ammount of energy they have at their disposal prior to engaging in competition or training. This is done largely assessing the quantitive and qualitive nature of nutrition, sleep, hydration and exercise the individual has partaken in. This having been established the building blocks of an IPS are in place.
The coach initiates and the student follows, a candid assessment of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy. The assessment consists in examining the energy managment habits of the individual in an attempt to identify the blocks on energy flow that are occuring.
It was Dr Loehr´s assertion that the block on energy flow is a barrier that is accomopanied by a voice, the result of a rationalisation that contributes to the perpetuation of the barrier. Compounding this problem is the formation of habits. Dr Loehr emphasised that if the barriers to energy flow are not dealt with then they will become habitualised.

The most powerful way to intervene in the unblocking of energy and bringing down the barriers is changing the destructive 'voice' that speaks to us when we are competing and training. To do this one first has to recognise it. The voice can take many forms but is most likely to be parental, particularly if the host is a child or teenager. Around the voice a story has been constructed that needs to be changed from old to new. Constructing a new story by hand writing/journal writing is claimed by Dr Loehr to be by far the best way to change the story and in fact to confront any of the blocks on energy flow. The first phase of rescripting in this way was said to take up to 17 days, at least to begin the process.

Tomorrow am looking forward to the conclusion of the Instututes work. There have been some intrestiing concepts raised by Dr Loehr's research. I will highlight a few tomorrow and look forward to putting theory into practice. Just to warn you in advance you'll like the process of 'mylinisation'.

Barcelona - Sanchez Casal Tennis Academy "Mental Toughness" Day One

Dan Travis — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 22:00:19 +0100

Dr Jim Loehr introduced the concept of IPS (Ideal Peformance State) to an international group of coaches and players. Dr Loehr claims his system will help augment an already dominant Spanish position in world tennis.
Drawn from his life's work observing and working to improve the performance of both top flight sportsmen and those aspiring to be so, Dr Loehr introduces his concept of 'Energy Management'. Managing energy is fundamental to our achieving what we ourselves set out to achieve. I hesistate to use the term 'Success' as this is somewhat contentious as it is referred to by Dr Loehr as as an 'external' motivation and can be misused with negative consequences.

Directing energy is an interesting take on the performance question. Humans, it was claimed, work far better in short bursts (aroung an holur and a half). Eneregy needs to be conserved, saved and directed to the projects that contribute to our self defined 'mission'.
Flowing from the Energy principle we have the concept of the 'voice'. We have internal voices that speak to us all the time during training, during competition and off the court. Agassi was used as a most recent and self confessed example of this phenomena. The voices tell us a 'Story'. This story can be positive or negative, but if negative will be the biggest barrier to performance and developing IPS.
This process of unblocking is approached in a new way by Dr Loehr. Tomorrow we will be looking at controlling the voice, rewrting the script and changing the story, which should be fun.
It was particularly interesting to hear the impressions of working with children in the performance sporting environment. Views from the US and UK seem to agree that we have become more child centered and Little Johnny gets what little Johnny wants. It was observed that this child centric approah can be difficult for the parent, child coach realtionship to work in harmony. The Spanish coaches where also referring to the new cultural problem of "Rey de la Casa".
We finished at 7pm and back on at 7am - Myself and the only other English person on the course took on an El-Salvador and Spanish combo in a doubles in the fading light and humidity of a Barcelona evening. Suffice to say we won in two. Good Night.

Marathons: running away from The Race

Dan Travis — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:14:23 +0100

This Article originally appeared on spiked-online Arpril 30th 2010

Judging by the flailing, portly people taking part in Brighton’s Marathon, running is no longer about the thrill of competition.

The recent ‘Marathon By the Sea’ held in Brighton on the UK’s south-east coast was certainly a success from the point of view of participation: 8,000 people took part. But while such mass involvement seems like a good thing, there are also some serious downsides to our changing attitude to running.

The number of people in the UK putting themselves through what is a significant test of stamina has been growing steadily in recent years. According to Sport England , between 2008 and 2009 ‘participation in athletics (including running and jogging) increased by more than 215,000 to 1.827 million’. In the last year alone, Britain staged 55 marathons with around a total of 80,000 participants. Little wonder that it seems that every other person I know is either ‘running a 10k’ or preparing to run a marathon.
The current popularity of distance-running is in stark contrast to my own experience of running while at school during the 1980s. The obligatory cross-country ‘race’ around the school playing fields during the winter was an activity that was dreaded and despised, particularly by the girls. In fact, cross country seemed to us to have been invented as a form of torture. We, the unwilling participants, saw the whole exercise as unpleasant and pointless. While the 1980s might have been a golden era for British running, with Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram all breaking world records, their feats did not inspire the majority of secondary school children.
It seems strange to see some of the very same individuals who were once openly hostile to cross country now enthusiastically running round the park in preparation for an endurance event as extreme as the marathon. What is it about these extreme endurance events that is attracting so many people?
Part of the explanation is that the entry point to running is very low. If you can put one foot in front of the other for any length of time then you can run. There are no equipment costs, apart from a half-decent pair of running shoes, and there is little need to pay for coaching as the skill level is minimal.
Some of my more mean-spirited sporting colleagues point out that running is the only option open to you if you lack the skills necessary for any other sport. Looking at the field in the Brighton marathon it was clear that 30 years ago hardly any of the participants would ever have dreamed of calling themselves runners. The majority had very poor technique and many looked as though they were heading for injury before they completed the 26 miles. Pre-1980, no one would have called themselves a serious runner if they were over 13 stone in weight. Now, style or body type is no barrier to entering the running craze. This may fit well with todays ‘everyone can participate’ culture, but it leads to a very curious spectacle.
A Guardian writer attempted to explain running’s popularity in pragmatic terms: ‘Due to cost and time pressures, the figures indicate that people are abandoning the gym and organised team sport in favour of more flexible and informal pursuits such as running and cycling.’ This may be true, but the appeal of running as opposed to other sports amounts to more than it simply being cost effective. Running also allows for a continual sense of self improvement: there is always a time to beat, another marathon to train for. Or, instead of trying to better your times, you can simply increase the number of marathons you run, an option taken to the extreme by the once portly and now sporty comedian Eddie Izzard with his 43 marathons in 51 days.
What this means for the distance runner today is that the focus on beating your own time has taken the place of beating other people. For the modern runner, the removal of the explicitly competitive aspect of running - that is, The Race - allows for a more self-centred and non-comparative approach. Running as an individual pursuit is ‘continuous’. It involves continually improving your time and fitness as well as increasing the number of events that you do.
Training for a competitive race is a very different experience from training for a run. Training to compete means closure and a considerably higher level of intensity. I was watching the Brighton marathon with my father, who won the UK schoolboys’ 880 yards (roughly 800 metres) in 1961. He maintains that athletes in the 1960s and 1970s trained far faster and far harder than anyone today. His observations seem to tally with the decline of elite running.
There is a paradox here. At a time when more and more people are taking part in distance-running, Britain is producing fewer and fewer elite distance-runners. In 1984, there were 75 sub-2hr 20min British marathon runners. In 2009, there are just five. ‘The fastest’, reported the Telegraph, ‘is Andi Jones with two hours 15 minutes 20 seconds, good enough for 321st place in the world rankings, behind 169 Kenyans’. This is not a relative decline, it is an absolute decline replicated in all the events from 800 metres upwards.
Several attempts have been made to explain this dramatic fall-off in British distance running, such as runners not training hard enough or not participating in cross-country events. I think technical factors such as this do play a part, but they do not explain the decline of distance-running as a whole. Others have noted the increasing role of charities in these events (see Running isn’t just for fun , by Alan Buckingham). A more likely candidate for explaining the decline is the rapid change in what it means to be a runner. Today, putting on your running shoes does not mean emulating the greats and aspiring to beat all-comers; it means beating your own time and becoming just that little bit fitter.

The Myth of Motivation - A Review of "Smile or Die" - How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World.

Dan Travis — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:58:23 +0000

Aiming to duplicate the habits of top tennis players takes more than physical training alone. It also means becoming familiar with the ‘success modelling’ process of the recently emerging field of sports psychology, and reading several texts that Barbara Ehrenreich highlights for particular criticism. Sport, tennis in particular, has spawned some timeless classics (at least within the tennis playing world) that predate many self help books, from the early 70s Buddhist approach to tennis, Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis through to the Machiavellian classic Win Ugly by Brad Gilbert.

Click here to read full article

The moodiness of a long-suffering tennis player - A review of Andre Agassi autobiog 'Open'

Dan Travis — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:56:15 +0000

In spite of the headline-seeking, drug-taking confessions, Andre Agassi’s autobiography offers a fascinating insight into the inner life of a sporting great.

When I think of Andre Agassi, three things come to mind. First, there was his brash, outlandish and ‘inappropriate’ fashion sense. Second, there was his ability to ‘counter-punch’ and to return and neutralise the 135mph-plus serves that were threatening to dominate tennis in the 1990s. And third, there was his incredible revival from 141 in the world rankings in 1997 to world number one just two years later.

To read full article please click here

Why Britain cannot find a Tennis Champion

Dan Travis — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:14:30 +0100

I wrote this article last year and would be interested in feedback. I will also have to eat humble pie if Murray wins this year.

During this year’s Wimbledon, I kept asking myself two questions: why did only one British male, Andy Murray, make a minor impact on the tournament, and why were British women so dire? What has happened to British tennis?

The fact that it took the victory of British 14-year-old Laura Robson in the Wimbledon girls singles competition to stir the passions of a nation showed how low the expectations of the national tennis establishment have sunk. The great John Newcombe’s explanation of what is wrong with Australian tennis players rings true for British players, too. He told the BBC: ‘When they are training they think they are giving 100 per cent but they are only giving 60.’

I have been a tennis coach in the UK for 15 years now and I keep making similar criticisms to Newcombe’s, but find myself constantly accused of being ‘stuck in the past’ or of being ‘too motivated by winning’.

In my experience, there are three factors contributing to the failure of British tennis players on the international scene. Firstly, young tennis players in the UK are not as fit and not as determined or single-minded as their southern and east European counterparts. Second, the tennis bureaucracy in the UK is not able to tackle and overcome particular, negative sentiments held by its predominantly middle-class membership. Third, the competitive player base is shrinking.

The elite tennis players that I have helped and observed in training are skilful and technically proficient. The problem is that they are neither pushed nor encouraged to push themselves hard enough. They rarely train to the point of exhaustion and an regrettable ‘stop when you’re tired’ attitude is ubiquitous.

Spanish tennis offers an inspiring contrast. From the moment they step on court, Spanish tennis players start to work hard. At the end of gruelling physical sessions, Spanish players have to be stopped by their coaches. Their attitude to failure is noticeably different, too: they do not seem to be bothered by it. If they lose a point or are not playing in the way they want to in a particular training session, they will carry on regardless.

This attitude to the game could not be further from the British one. As a professional coach, I ‘hit’ with high level junior players and one of my biggest frustrations is how they tend to go on a downward spiral of sulking if they are not playing perfectly; their ‘failure’ continually affects them instead of spurring them on to learn from their mistakes and do better next time.

This attitude can be found in the coaching world as well. In the past, if an elite player approached a coach we would assume they could already play. The coach’s attitude would have been: ‘We can work on the mental approach and your competitive side but you are expected to give 100 per cent.’ We would not have to put up with tantrums, mood swings or the whole plethora of bad excuses that is now used to explain away youthful inconsistency and poor performance.

Moreover, the role for coaches has been expanded to include personal support for issues which have nothing to do with tennis. As well as being physical and technical coaches, we are now expected to act as psychotherapists, social workers and motivational self-help gurus. This new coaching approach is wholly endorsed by the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA).

Aside from running Wimbledon, a world-class tournament, one fortnight a year, the LTA is a national joke. But, except for during Wimbledon, the LTA is rarely in the spotlight and its monumental failures are not subject to any significant media or public pressure. In addition, the inevitable one-off wins for those British players outside the world’s top 200 who are given ‘wild card’ entry stave off criticism of generally woeful under performance. The LTA is still able to wheel out the same tired excuses and reassurances that ‘things are improving at a grass roots level’.

Instead of producing world-class elite tennis players, the LTA, as other members of the new ‘sporting bureaucracy’ in the UK, like Sport England, has imposed draconian restrictions on volunteers and coaches. Under the guise of ‘professionalisation’, the LTA introduced licensing schemes for all coaches as well as mandatory attendance on child protection and health and safety courses. Alongside this, the LTA deploys a rigid and secluded coaching structure. The LTA dislikes the Spanish coaching system - and just about any other successful system in the world. The LTA is the self-appointed governing body of tennis - and everyone has to toe the line. Despite a woeful track record, it still monopolises the training of elite players and will not let anyone else in, except by their own appointment. Coaches’ licenses are withheld and one simply cannot take part in training elite tennis players if one does not adhere to everything the LTA dictates.

Paradoxically, the LTA should be all too well aware of the shrinking competitive player base in the UK. In 1998, an audit of UK tennis was conducted and steps were taken to improve participation, particularly amongst children. In the 10 years since, the number of children actively participating in tennis on a weekly basis has fallen from one in eight to one in 20. Membership of tennis clubs in the UK has fallen dramatically as has the competitive player base. Alongside sports such as athletics, the number of competitive tennis players has dwindled to the extent that the number of tournaments and competitions held has been drastically reduced. Without the week-in-week-out competition of leagues and tournaments, the critical mass of competitive players falls. This statistical appraisal in the Independent newspaper demonstrates the problem: ‘Now compare the number of clubs in Britain (2,400, down from 5,000 a decade ago) with the number in France (10,000). France has one million licensed adult players and 500,000 licensed juniors. Britain has around 100,000 licensed players in total and the LTA says there are only a few thousand juniors regularly playing competitive tennis (20 or more matches a year) at any level.’ (1)

That children and adults are now encouraged to play tennis as a ‘healthy activity’ has contributed to stemming the tide of adults leaving the game. This trend has also been seen in the massive increase in the number of those who now consider themselves to be ‘runners’. Unfortunately, the increase in numbers of participants simply does not equate to a rise in the level of elite performance. It is what one is participating in that will raise the standard not just the ‘taking part’.

That we cannot produce a championship winning British tennis player is a loss because it fails to inspire and sets a limit on the ambitions of young players. The therapeutic and holistic approach to coaching will continue to inhibit the self-discipline intrinsic to excellence and achievement. My advice to British tennis players is to ignore the LTA, work very hard physically, be brilliant on court, and learn to play in Spain.