Adam Commens: Managing high performance

The EuroHockey Institute Podcast

Adam David Commens is a former field hockey midfielder from Australia, who was a member of the team that won the bronze medal at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney.

Commens was nicknamed Billy by his teammates, and earned a total number of 143 caps (20 goals) for Australia.

Commens was named head coach of the Belgium national field hockey team on 4 July 2007. Commens was coach and a key player of the Royal Antwerp Hockey Club (RAHC). His new assistant will be Murray Richards.

Commens became coach of the Australia women's national field hockey team at the start of 2011, but was stood down by Hockey Australia in 2016 after their investigation into allegations that Commens "had engaged in behaviour amounting to serious misconduct", which is reported to have involved Commens exposing himself and making lewd remarks to some squad members during the Rio Olympics. When he took over as coach, he dropped five experienced players from the national squad:Kate Hollywood, Fiona Johnson, Alison Bruce, Shelly Liddelow and Amy Korner.

Since the Rio Olympic Games, Commens has been appointed as the High Performance Director of the Belgian Hockey Federation and won Belgium's first ever World Cup in 2018.

In conversation with Jack Rolfe, Founder of The Coaching Lab.