About Me
My name is James Blair but I have only ever went by Jamie. I currently live in Charlotte, North Carolina with my wife Ali and our three cats Charlie, Rosie, and Louie. I was born and raised in a medium sized town west of Edinburgh called Livingston. Being from Scotland, football is everything. I grew up being an avid supporter of my hometown team Livingston FC. My Dad is such a loyal fan that I am sure he still buys me a season ticket despite it being impossible to get to the games regularly, and if I were it would be quite the commute.
My passion in life is performance, it does not take much prompting to get me started on a rant relating to the matter. I have also been known to burn the midnight oil reading text or dissecting literature. I have become somewhat unpopular with some of my coaching friends by sending them papers in the small hours of the morning. Currently I am most fascinated learning about GPS data and using it to quantify match play and applying it to training design and prescription. I am mainly interested in manipulating intensive metrics within the session to align with training targets. Another area I have been focused on lately is my philosophy of strength training. I have felt that the value of strength training is now being overlooked now that the performance world is starting to focus on data analytics, speed development, and conditioning.
I started coaching when I was 18 years-old, in my last year of high school I helped assist one of the teachers who lead the first-year team (8th Grade). It was not until I had this experience that I realised how challenging coaching children could be. It is only now that I look back on my first coaching experience that I consider myself lucky that I started in the field with a realistic outlook on what challenges I would face while influencing young people. Fast forward 10-years and I am the Head of Performance at the Charlotte FC Academy. I oversee all age groups of which I lead U20 and U17 who compete in the MLS Next and UPSL.
The experiences between the beginning and where I currently am in my coaching journey have made it clear that it’s the people tied to the experiences that have made them valuable. I have made a few high-quality mentors and many friends through the performance world that have supported me when necessary to get the best out of me. In fact, the reason I love coaching is because it doesn’t matter where you are, the resources you have, or even the ability level of who you are coaching, you can always help someone get better. That is what coaching is all about.
The development of this website will be intended to generate discussion on social media, organise my thoughts relating to training, and share my outlook on performance.
