Cricket. Above the shoulders.
Performance psychology coaching for cricketers, delivered by a practitioner who is currently coaching a First XI himself. The gap between the boys in your squad and the scoreboard is almost always psychological, not technical. The work here is about closing it.
Cricket is a sport of interruptions. What a cricketer does in those interruptions is the skill.
Three ways in
Pick the entry point that matches where you are. Each links through to the relevant engagement detail.
Individual player and family
A senior school or pathway cricketer who wants structured psychological work alongside their technical coaching. Profile, debrief, and a block of individual sessions.
Club or academy squad
A club, rep squad, or academy that wants to embed profiling and routine work into their pre-season and in-season programme.
Senior school First XI
An independent school with a meaningful First XI programme that wants a structured, annual programme running across the season.
Built by someone currently in the game
Rob Gregory · Performance Consultant
Fifteen years in AFL recruiting, plus junior and senior men's coaching across that span. Currently coaching the First XI at Sacred Heart College through the 2026 summer, and working one-to-one with current first-class cricketers. The Coaching Nexus is his consultancy. The CVMP is the cricket-specific profiling instrument he has built out, drawn from fifteen years of pattern recognition at elite level and grounded in established sport psychology frameworks.
The work is not academic. It is not sold by a practitioner who hasn't stood at a fixture in twenty years. It is built by someone who is currently reading a First XI from the boundary, making the same calls you are making, and testing what actually holds up when the pressure is on and the match is in the balance.
What the cricket work is built on
The CVMP
The Cricket Values & Mindset Profile. A 52-item structured assessment built specifically for senior school and pathway cricketers. Eight psychological dimensions, three-layer scoring, embedded credibility check, cross-dimension pattern detection. Anchors the coaching work.
The Four Rs for cricket
A between-delivery routine that turns the 15 to 25 seconds between balls into a structured reset. The flagship micro-routine in cricket. Applied across batting, bowling, and the longer breaks in a match. Trainable in the nets, grooved into matches.
For pathway and senior school cricketers
The private-client package. Built for a cricketer who is serious about the mental side of the game and wants structured, one-on-one work alongside their technical coaching.
CVMP profile plus a two-session debrief. The profile is completed online. The first session walks the player through what the output is showing. The second session builds a concrete three-thing coaching plan off the back of it.
CVMP profile plus six to eight individual sessions across a season. Focus shifts as the season moves: pre-season routine work, in-season mistake-recovery, post-match review protocols. Integration with the player's technical coach where helpful.
For players in a genuine pathway conversation. Multi-year engagement. Longitudinal profile re-reads, continuous individual work, and practitioner availability through the big moments. State trials, state carnivals, winter tours, selection conversations.
The work is structured, confidential between the player and the practitioner, and designed to sit alongside the technical coaching your son is already receiving rather than replace any piece of it. It is also not therapy. If your son is dealing with something that belongs in a clinical setting, I will say so and refer appropriately.
For clubs, academies, and rep squads
The team package. Built for clubs, academies, and rep squads that want profiling and routine work embedded in their own environment.
CVMP profiling of the squad. Aggregate squad debrief with the coaches. Two player-facing workshops (contest courage, routine building, mistake recovery). Individual debriefs with the six to eight players the profile identifies as most likely to shift.
Pre-season block as above, plus three touch-points through the season: a mid-season workshop, individual follow-ups with the priority players, and an end-of-season review with the head coach.
Standalone engagement for head coaches who want the profiling data and the pattern reads without the full programme. CVMP squad profile, aggregate debrief, and two one-hour coach consultations across the season.
For independent schools
The structured, scalable version of the cricket work. A five-part lecture series across the senior cricket programme, CVMP profiling of the 1st XI and 2nd XI, squad debriefs, three workshops with your coaching group, individual debriefs, leadership coaching with the captain group, and an end-of-season review with the Director of Sport. Three tiers, from Foundation ($9,000 / season) to Full ($32,000 / season).
Common questions
How is this different from a sports psychologist?
This is coaching work, not clinical work. The practitioner is a performance consultant with fifteen years in elite recruiting and an MSc in Coaching Psychology, currently coaching a First XI. The work is specifically about cricket performance. It is not therapy.
Is the CVMP a validated psychometric instrument?
No. It is a practitioner-built instrument drawn from established sport psychology frameworks and fifteen years of pattern recognition at elite level. For regulated or research settings it is the wrong tool. For coaching senior school and pathway cricketers it is built precisely for the purpose.
How do we know if it is working?
Two honest answers. First, you re-run the CVMP six to twelve months in and look at the direction of change on the dimensions the work has targeted. Second, the head coach and the player themselves will both have a clear read on whether the routine work is holding up under pressure.
Can you work with bowlers, not just batters?
Yes. The CVMP dimensions apply across roles. The routine work is role-specific: the walk-back-to-the-mark cycle for bowlers is structured differently to the between-delivery batting routine. The coaching work is built around what the profile and the coach together identify as the priority.
Also relevant
Get in touch about cricket work
Individual players and families, clubs and academies, or school Directors of Sport. A 30-minute first conversation, no commitment required off the back of it. I will bring a live anonymised CVMP profile and walk you through what the output actually looks like.
Email Rob →