Diamonds coach Lisa Alexander is not playing for second place

With nearly a decade under her belt as the world’s top-ranked netball team, Lisa Alexander has no need of a coach whisperer.

Diamonds head coach Lisa Alexander. Picture: Getty Images

Bradley Charles Stubbs has a habit of knocking on coaches’ doors, turning up at their homes, even standing on cafe tables to get their attention.

That pertly raised index finger has traversed across so many codes it’s half surprising the controversial $5500-an-hour self-taught, self-coined “coach whisperer” hasn’t been spotted in the Diamonds’ World Cup camp.

Or, at the very least, his catchphrases coming from the mouth of boss Lisa Alexander.

“Maybe because he doesn’t think I need him,” Alexander ventured.

With nearly a decade under her belt with the world’s top-ranked netball team, she probably doesn’t. That’s not to say the vastly experienced mentor doesn’t align with some of Stubbs’s concepts. She’s just fine-tuned her own methods surrounded by her own people, a combination she hopes will have Australia expecting to win.

“I’m a believer in that,” Alexander said. “In that you’re not here to take up second place. That’s why I’ve said anything less than a gold medal is not a pass. We expect to win the tournament.

“What we have to understand though is that there are other teams that are far more competitive than they’ve ever been before so it’s not going to be easy, but none of our tournaments so far have been like that anyway — we’ve had challenges along the way. We have a quiet confidence around the fact we can do that.”

The quietness of that confidence might be the key difference. And, unlike Stubbs, Alexander has no problem talking about the Diamonds’ opponents.

Or anything really — a distinction in itself from Stubbs’s heavily scripted references to the “subconscious”, “expect to win” and “we only worry about ourselves”.

But Alexander is big on sports psychology, on finessing the minds of players and maintaining an environment replete with all the elements necessary to create the most complete athlete. That can be a complex undertaking given the growing professionalism of women’s sport and its ­accompanying — sometimes alien — weight of expectation.

One primary Diamonds resource is Ray McLean from Leading Teams, a leadership and high-performance program used widely across the AFL, cricket and rugby league.

“He definitely uses positive psychology and mindset, but with practicalities around that in terms of the individual needs to pull their weight for the team,” Alexander said. “It’s all about team, which I’m into.”

Then there’s her own personal mentors, such as legendary former Australian and Great Britain swimming coach Bill Sweetenham, the man who helped her overcome the confronting setback of missing out on 2018 Commonwealth Games gold.

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