Kristen Hellier

Kristen Hellier

• Coach Profile

The coach within always lurked close to the surface in the make-up of Kirsten Hellier who seamlessly combined self-coaching with being a trailblazer in the competitive arena of women’s javelin in the 1990s.

Once her decorated career as an athlete was over, Hellier quickly found her niche in the coaching ranks in a variety of roles, most notably as coach of champion shot putter Dame Valerie Adams from 1998 – 2010. The dynamic partnership went on to achieve greatness on the world stage at both junior and senior level with gold medals across several Olympic, Commonwealth Games and world indoor and outdoor championship campaigns.

“I used to joke, that it’s my drug of choice,’’ she said of coaching. “I do enjoy coaching and I could say all the right things, that it’s about the challenge, the learning and getting people to perform really well, but actually in essence, it’s just about people.

“I’m really fortunate that I’ve been able to work with and continue to work with some great people, whether those are athletes I work directly with or the people that surround the athletes in the performance teams or staff, or club people, or centre people, national sports people, high performance sports people.

“Just in general, when you are a part of something where 99 percent of the people are all on the same page and are doing what they’re doing because they have a genuine desire to want to support people, and, obviously, to support their own intrinsic desire to get value out of what they’re doing, then it’s a pretty cool place to be.’’

The first New Zealand woman to throw the javelin 50 then 60 metres, Hellier was the national champion in 1987, then from 1989 – 95 and again in 1999, her highlight being winning the silver medal at the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada while she also competed at the 1990 Auckland Commonwealth Games and 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Through her success as both an athlete and coach, Hellier has been recognised on numerous occasions, including being awarded the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal, celebrated as Coach of the Year at the Halberg Awards in 2007 and 2008, and her appointment as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2018.

A natural curiosity was the catalyst for Hellier’s transition into coaching while still an athlete and which has continued to evolve over the last 30 years or so.

“I was really fortunate that I had an amazing coach, (decathlete) Max Stewart from the Manurewa Athletics Club, who looked after me for a good eight years, up until just after the 1990 Commonwealth Games and by then I’d started to become a bit more curious and a bit more involved in the prescription of what I was doing and when I was doing it,’’ Hellier said.

“And it evolved that I just started to basically self-direct, so was self-coached for probably the last five or six years of my career. Max was still very much a strong influence in my athletic career and was very much a mentor at that stage but, in essence, that’s where my coaching started.

“I still very much had my athlete hat on, so the curiosity was around, `how can I make myself better’ and I probably didn’t really think about it as coaching as such. It was more `what else can I do, what are other people doing.’

“The more I did it, and it’s that thing about knowledge…… the more you find out, the more you discover what you don’t know, so I probably found myself in a space that was really, really interesting for me because I was obviously learning about some things that I could apply and put into action straight away but also I was learning about a lot of things that in the coaching world and athletes’ performance were evolving, things around mental skills, the development of strength and conditioning.

“It was quite a vibrant time in the sense that there was a lot happening, there was a lot of new information that was coming to the fore and it was pretty cool to find yourself diving down deep dark rabbit holes and, initially, learning about stuff that would help me be an athlete, but there was an awful lot of stuff that I ended up learning that was about just being a decent person as well.

“Through work and my engagement with other people, I discovered I did enjoy sharing that knowledge. Even while I was an athlete, I was doing a little bit of coaching at club level with junior athletes and things like that, so that was probably my first real taste of coaching and I enjoyed that space.’’

At the time there were no great aspirations to make coaching a career but Hellier thrived in the environment and found her happy place.

“The curiosity, the knowledge and the learning were quite contagious and that really opened my eyes up to just the possibilities of what was available and what you could do and how you could develop people. Once I got a real taste of that, it was pretty cool, pretty contagious and my curiosity has just continued,’’ she said.

“To be fair, I’d probably say, I think I ended up being a much better coach than I was an athlete, so maybe it was one of those things that I just needed to dabble in one space to find the right space that I needed to be in.’’

With a change in priorities after the birth of her first child followed by retirement from competing, Hellier found herself at a crossroads. Involved with Counties Manukau Athletics at the time, she was offered some coaching at the club which formally started her coaching chapter.

Hellier then moved into the secondary school sector where she was a sports co-ordinator at Macleans College for 13 years followed by two years at Howick College.

“During that time, it was full noise coaching,’’ she said.

“I was coaching Valerie (Adams) by that time, so I was working fulltime at Macleans and coaching Val plus several other athletes, and then in the school system I was coaching volleyball, netball, even had a wee dabble at rugby, track and field, softball……you name it but that’s what you did when you were in the school system.’’

A diverse mix of experiences, including on-going success with New Zealand athletes, throwing coach with the Chinese programme for three years and a stint at another code in a Coach Development role with Netball New Zealand, have all helped reinforce Hellier’s coaching philosophies.

“At the time, the China stint was scary as hell to be frank…..going into a country where you don’t speak the language, not quite sure how the system works….There was a whole list of things I looked at and thought to myself, `My God, what are you doing’,’’ she said.

“But three years working with the Chinese athletes was great and probably the thing I learnt the most was the validation of the style of coaching that I had because it was very different to work in a country such as New Zealand where athletes have a much higher level of autonomy around what they do and engagement in the decision-making.

“So, to take how I work with athletes and apply it into the Chinese system, respectfully, in the sense that I didn’t go there to ruffle feathers, that was really exciting and really cool just to see young people evolve.

“It was a massive, massive learning for me and huge value in working in a country that is where the performance outcomes are the same but how that’s done was quite different between the two countries.’’

Since 2017, Hellier has had various roles with Athletics New Zealand, currently as High Performance Coaching Manager, which in essence is to work with and support its high performance and contract coaches.

However, Hellier finds it near-impossible to resist the hands-on aspect of coaching, two years ago coming back into the coaching fold when she started working with javelin thrower Tori Peeters, who made her Olympic debut in Paris last year and more recently national discus record-holder Connor Bell.

“I’d moved away from Auckland and come to live in Tauranga with the expectation that I was moving away from the (hands-on) coaching…..it didn’t quite work that way, and here we are,’’ she said.

“I also have a number of athletes that are based here in Tauranga, and to be fair, coaching is probably not something that I’m not going to do. There’s a vast amount of coaching that I do that’s done in my personal time.’’

With an ever-changing world, the need to keep evolving how she goes about her business is always front and centre for Hellier.

“One of the greatest challenges with working with individual athletes, is that it’s a real box of chocolates,’’ she said. “You can’t stay current in coaching or in any field where you’re looking to help people to enhance performance or to learn and grow themselves.

“Thankfully, for me, the curiosity around how we do things, how we can do things better and why we do things is always there and will always be there. The challenge, probably like most people, is finding the time to do that.

“You just can’t rest on your laurels. The world is just changing so, so quickly, technology is changing and now we’re dealing with and looking at things around artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality and how’s that going to have an influence on our sport, and how can we use it to capitalise on getting performances out of our athletes?’’

In a career that’s been littered with success stories, it always comes back to the people for Hellier.

“I could go to the obvious and having an athlete win world championships or Olympic medals, those are special, but the highlights still probably come back to the things that I think about the most, and that is the relationships that I have with the people, and those are the things that you probably take with you more than anything,’’ she said.

“But they also go hand-in-hand, the performance and the person are hard to separate. It’s a hard ceiling to replicate when you see an athlete standing at the very top of the dais at the very highest level, that’s an amazing feeling knowing that you’ve had a part in contributing to that.

“But equally, re-connecting with people later in life and seeing how they’ve evolved as people and grown into different areas of their life and continued to be successful or seeing them with families and stuff like that, that’s pretty special as well.’’

As to the future, Hellier’s happy to keep doing what she does best but building on what comes next is as equally important.

“I still very much enjoy working with athletes and equally, love working with other coaches,’’ she said. “I’m really conscious that we have to look at providing pathways for the next generation to come through.

“Although I don’t quite put myself into the old person’s category, at some point in time, there’s a lot of us that will step away from the sport, so it’s ensuring that we’ve got young people coming through and that the legacy continues.

“When you’ve been a part of something the way I’ve been a part of something for so many years, I have become a Kaitiaki, a guardian of the sport and part of that guardianship is to ensure you hand it off to the next guardians in a better place than what you found it. That’s pretty important.’’

A second-generation New Zealand representative after her father Lionel Smith competed in the high hurdles at the 1950 British Empire Games, Hellier feels blessed that it provided her with the opportunity to rub shoulders with a bygone era of New Zealand athletes who laid the platform and set the standards for what was to follow.

Her original coach Max Stewart is first to come to mind.

“Max was well ahead of his time with regards to how he coached and how he coached me. He was also instrumental in helping to mould me into the person that I wanted to be, as well as the athlete I wanted to be,’’ she said.

“He was just a gentle soul and knew what he needed to do to get me to the level that he got me to, for which I will be forever grateful.’’

There was also a close association with coaching guru Arthur Lydiard, who presided over New Zealand’s golden era of track and field during the 1960s, the pair having many coaching conversations when working out of the Papakura Athletics Club.

Former middle distance running greats in John Davies, Dick Quax, Peter Snell, who had a strong connection with Macleans College, and world-class multi-disciplined field exponent Yvette Corlett, all from her father’s generation, were the greatest ambassadors Hellier could get to meet as an athlete, and who she continued to have touchpoints with over the years.

“I was just really fortunate to be of that generation and being exposed to those people,’’ she said. “It’s the stories that you would get told and within the stories there was just so much learning around the trials and errors they went through.

“I thought it was hard doing what I was doing in my generation but gosh, sitting down and talking with them about what they went through in their preparation……. we just had no idea. So, I learnt plenty of them.’’