Leif Gunnar Smerud: Norway's history-making psychologist-turned-coach

Norweigan U-21 coach on burnout, resilience & psychological support within football

If Leif Gunnar Smerud isn’t the only coach in Europe with a UEFA Pro Licence and clinical psychology qualification to his name, he’s among a select few.

The Norweigan U-21 manager, who led his squad to this summer’s European Championship for only the third time in the national team’s history, is perfectly positioned to comment on football’s response to players’ growing demand for psychological support.

Smerud, who represented Norway during his playing career and worked as Deputy Technical Director for the Norwegian Football Federation, took time away from the training pitch to discuss the conflicting demands of the coaching and psychology professions, the role of resilience in elite sport and the need for improved integration of mental health and performance specialists.

You can listen to the interview via the audio player below or scroll down to take a look at some of the highlights from our conversation:

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Balancing coaching requirements with psychological considerations

Whilst it’s natural to assume that Smerud’s psychology expertise aids his coaching, the former Norway women’s team coach - who helped the side to third place in the 2009 European Championship - explains the often-competing interests of his two professions.

“People ask me how, ‘How do you use psychology and the fact that you're a psychologist when you're a coach?’, but it's one thing having the knowledge and another thing being in the role (of coach),” he says.

"So, as a coach, it's important to support players, but also to push and tell them, ‘This is what you need to do’, and the natural evolution of this is that some are not made to go all the way with all that pressure that's actually there.

“As a psychologist you take the very supportive side if you're working with the athlete: you're concerned with that athlete.

“As a coach, you have a team, you have a culture, you have an obligation to the organisation and the ambition of the organization, so you need to balance those.”

Smerud’s view was encapsulated in a meeting the ex-Honefoss manager attended prior to making the jump from player to coach.

“I remember before I went into the coaching, I attended a workshop with an older psychiatrist,” he says.

“I told them my (psychology) background, said I'm going into coaching and asked ‘What will be my challenge?’”

“He said, ‘The challenge will be that you will see a lot of stuff that you shouldn't get involved in.”’

Integrating psychology within an elite sporting environment

Smerud - who, as a coach - has worked with fellow psychologists, believes his counterparts need to be well-versed in some of football’s intricacies in order to be fully integrated with other parts of a manager’s backroom team.

“If I were to bring in a mental coach I would like them to know football and I would like them to use football language, so there’s no division (with colleagues),” he says.

He also believes psychologists and coaches need to be working in unison on the training pitch.

“They need to be looking at what (type of drills) create emotional load,” he says.

“How can we work with it up and down…and what is a cognitively high-loaded session compared to a lower one? When do we use it?

“You get specialists who are obviously very well trained in psychology or in the physical aspects, but a lot of time, maybe don't have the contextual…understanding of, of the specifics of that sport.

“There's been improvement, but traditionally this has been a challenge, and I find that those specialists can really help, but they help the most if you integrate them into a setup that is mostly concerned with football.

“So, if I want to do some mental work, do you start with looking at what's happening on the pitch in the game or do you start by testing and evaluating and using tools outside of the game? I prefer to do the first because I like to see how much can we do within the football framework.

“You can't do everything - so, of course, you may need to go outside and work with a specialist to build some more self-confidence or visualization techniques or something - but if we can we do it inside football it's better because you don't get the loss of learning in transfer.”

Improving coaches’ education

The former Norweigan Young Coach of the Year also believes that more needs to be done to ramp up and improve the psychology-focused training that coaches receive.

“There are some gaps and challenges and conflicts in this field we are talking about now…and I think that a very good approach to (solving) this is to educate the coaches more,” he says.

“We have training on the other sides - physical and tactical, for example - and we have a little bit on the mental, but not nearly enough for the coaches to feel secure enough to lead that part of the game.

“For me, with limited resources (to employ specialists) it’s more important to educate the coaching staff and the staff that we have around the team on psychology, so we can integrate our understanding of those mental, emotional and cognitive factors into training and planning.”

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