Episode #106 Nobody Talks About Failure at the Skate Park — Craig Harrison on Designing Rooms Where Getting It Wrong Is Cheap

This month's guest podcast: Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids are joined by Craig Harrison, who spent almost ten years running the long-term athlete development programme at AUT Millennium in Auckland and has just written a book, *Coach by Design*, about what he learned. Craig's central distinction splits environment design into two separate levers — structure (what the space lets a learner choose and perceive) and control (the force a coach applies to direct decisions on top of that) — rather than a single dial between drilled and unstructured training.

The conversation moves through the skate park as the clearest picture of designing for "everyday risk," the Maori concept of Tuakana Taina and cross-age mentoring, the "coffee club" Craig ran to help parents make sense of a more exploratory-looking programme, and the "Bambi effect" — the temporary loss of coordination that comes with a fast growth spurt, and why it calls for more structure and control rather than less. Late in the conversation, Ian connects Craig's framework directly to this month's theory paper review of Woods, Richard, Martin & Cairney (2026) on tightened and loosened space — the same underlying question, worked at two very different scales.

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