I've spent a little bit of time now over the last week with a few very experienced coaches as part of the process of getting level two accreditation.  It's been very educational so far, although I've only scratched the surface of what they do.  There's some interesting things that have cropped up so far.

Some obvious things :

Everyone has different approaches and methods and styles, as John Beasley would say "there's more than one way to skin a cat".  Everyone's also got different agendas and that brings me to the meat of this article.

Who does a coach work for?  The answer is fundamentally important. 

If a coach is employed by an athlete, the coach works for that athlete.  Their goal at that time is to help that athlete achieve their personal goals.  There's a role there for the coach to guide an athlete towards appropriate long term goals but there's no selection policy and the rider's wants come first and if a rider can't or won't do something, the coaches job is to find alternatives that the rider will do.  If a rider wants to specialise in a particular event, then the coaches job is to help that rider achieve in that event.  The aim is to develop that rider, one egg, one basket and handle the basket very carefully, so to speak.  Donna-Rae told me once, and I'll never forget it "As a coach you may have many athletes, but each athlete has only one career".  This is a fundamental defining aspect of the role of the coach for the individual rider.  The rider is trusting the coach to help them achieve their goals.  The rider has the power to hire and fire the coach.

If a coach is employed by an institute or a team or a club*, then the coach doesn't work for the individual athletes any more.  They work for the institute and have to provide the results that the institute wants.  This may not always be in the best overall interests of every one of the individual athletes in a particular squad, or meet up with the wants of those individuals.  The athletes then become tools to be used by the institute to achieve its aims.  A common name for the institutes is the gold medal factories.  They have a very different job to do than that of the coach for an individual rider as their master is focused on different outcomes.  They have selection processes, they have performance criteria and they have to not only select athletes but also de-select them. 

From the outside, the training programs look similar, but from the inside the process and motivation is different.  Somewhat similar to the difference between a training bunch of roadies and a race.  It looks the same from the outside, but inside it's a vastly different animal.  The institutes, development squads and national teams are funded by political decisions and they have to produce politically acceptable results.  In the context of the AIS, this means gold medals at Olympics and World Champions, for example.  It doesn't matter to the political masters how many athletes the institutes churn through to get those results.  While the coach of a squad like the AIS, NTID etc will certainly care for the riders in their squads, they know that they serve a different master.  The individual riders may want the same thing that the coach wants for them and that the institute's funding relies on, but the rider is, ultimately, a disposable entity.  They (the riders) know this and accept it as part of joining the squad.  If they don't make the grade, they're out.  It's a different world.  This is, crudely, the "chuck the eggs at the wall and keep the ones that don't break" world.  Some squads are more overt about it than others, but this is the fact of the matter.

[*] Often at club level this is different, many clubs 'employ' coaches to provide introductions to the sport or general 'club training' and there's no selection criteria or much in the way of performance requirements.  Showing up is often sufficient!