Working over 20 years in the human performance industry in multiple roles, Darcy’s past 10 years have primarily been focused on creating and implementing methodologies, applied data, building strategic relations, hiring, training, and managing medical, rehab, fitness, nutrition, psychology, and sport science staff at the highest level. Having lived and worked in four countries with scores of invitations for speaking engagements around the world, Darcy’s professional relationships and networking span the globe in all sports.
Understanding the body in motion, Darcy feels fortunate to have been on the front end of the human performance industry, working side by side with numerous sports performance leaders: individuals, teams, men, and women. His strengths continue to evolve in big picture implementation while never overlooking the importance of details. Currently, Darcy is Lead Performance Strategist for Kitman Labs and Performance Coach with the US Men’s National Soccer Team.
Nate Huffstutter: The interdisciplinary model of high performance depends on S&C, sports science, medical, nutrition, and all the groups involved communicating with common definitions, terminology, and goals…and with AS Roma and Bayern Munich, you’ve been in situations where the stakeholders were literally speaking different languages. How did you overcome communication challenges in those roles and what skills and takeaways from those experiences have helped you in terms of establishing or working within interdisciplinary models where that same language barrier does not exist?
Darcy Norman: There’s a lot of things to unpack in that question—but it does show the complexity of the situation, because communication is the grease that turns the wheels and the interdisciplinary model of high performance does depend on all those groups involved communicating with common definitions and terminology.
More importantly, though, what I’ve learned through the years is the importance of the involvement of your executive and leadership group. At the end of the day, it’s not this simple performance team that’s on their own working with the players—it starts with the leadership group of the organization, because they should be providing the vision, mission, and values on how you want to get those things done that then become the filters with which the performance team specifically executes their job on a day-to-day basis. And I think that’s where a lot of teams miss the boat—if there is no direction from above, then the performance staff should create their way and standard of doing things, but hopefully the team has a bigger North Star that they can tie into, so then it’s a common message through and through making it really clear for everybody what the ultimate goal is in that scenario.