Sally Needham: How neuroscience holds the key to understanding behaviour

Every coach has players they remember throughout the rest of their careers.

For Sally Needham, one of those she struggled with the most turned out to be the one that changed her life.

“I had a player who I really get on with now, but, at the start, she was a nightmare,” she tells Women’s Soccer Coaching.

“I used to come home and nearly be crying sometimes. She would disrupt my sessions and was awful with me. It got to a point where I was starting to dislike her and thinking: ‘Do I stay, do I go?’”

Needham unloaded her stress on her best friend, who was working in a primary school with children with emotional and social needs, and the advice she got surprised her.

“She said to me, ‘You’re looking at that behaviour all wrong’.”

The insight from her friend led her to sign up for a training course with the company Thrive, based around what they call the ’Thrive approach’, an intervention designed to improve the emotional and social wellbeing of young people.

Needham learned about what happens with brain development from conception and throughout childhood, how to understand behaviours, and the role of the adult in supporting a child. It changed her entire outlook on coaching as well as her understanding of herself.

“I had a player who was a nightmare. I used to come home and nearly be crying...”

She had been coaching for many years and during her time in coach development with the Football Association had been selected as a learner for the Advanced Youth Award pilot in 2012.

“There were 60 of us - 59 males and me,” she notes, wryly. 

Needham was especially interested, even then, in the elements of psychology and sociology and began to think about the ways in which coaching can encourage and support the qualities they want to see in their players.

“[The word] ’confidence’ gets bandied around,” she says. “Well, what is it? Where does it come from? Why do these sessions help that?”

Needham benefited from the support of the late Doncaster Belles coach Julie Chipchase, who welcomed her on board with the club and gave her space to try out her new learning with coaching sessions.

Since then, and with a Uefa A licence in hand, she has developed her expertise in human development and performance culture, working with Sheffield United, Cymru [Wales] Women and her own coaching company, 4Growth. She is also completing a doctorate in the subject.

Neuroscience might sound a complex and complicated term, but Needham says it’s fundamental to coaching - and something that coaches are already familiar with, even if they don’t know it yet.