Review: Archie Henderson
The Barefoot Coach: Life-Changing Insights from Coaching the World’s Best Cricketers. By Paddy Upton (Self-published).
Paddy Upton worked with two of the best cricket teams in the world, South Africa and India. He was fitness trainer for the former and mental coach to the latter. Was it any wonder, then, that India won a World Cup and South Africa didn’t?
South Africa’s cricket team, the Proteas, one of the fittest teams in the world, are famous for having lost World Cups in their head as well as on the field. At the most recent World Cup, they lost on both, but that is another story. This is about an extraordinary man who delved deeper into sport than most, and discovered that motivating athletes was no different from doing the same with the athletes of business, a path he is now pursuing.
Upton, a pretty good cricketer himself, had ambitions of becoming a sports scientist, which was how he was recruited by Cricket SA in the first place. He worked with the team during Hansie Cronje’s era as captain, then abruptly left to broaden his horizons beyond sport. This entailed backpacking through Asia and joinning an NGO in Cape Town to work with homeless youths. It opened his eyes to life beyond cricket. Continue reading →