The CHAMPION Operating System™ for high-performing teams, proven in Olympic sport. We work with your leaders to build their CHAMPION playbook, which becomes how your team operates every day, so your people perform when it matters most.
Olympic committees, national federations and professional teams
One high-performance language and way of operating across every sport, from pathway to podium, for every head coach and pathway leader.
Companies and organizations
Teams that have to deliver under pressure. The Heart of a CHAMPION gives your people the standards and mindset proven at Olympic level.
College and high school athletic departments
One culture across every sport in your department: high standards, high support, and athlete development that holds through coaching changes.
Professional, college, high school and club teams
A team that owns its standards. Build your CHAMPION playbook with your staff and athletes: who your team needs to be and how it operates every day.
What Target Gold has delivered, and the coaching record it was built from. Most of that record is in rugby; the system is built for any team.
What Target Gold delivers
The Heart of a CHAMPION Workshop at the start of the season. The title came four months later.
It’s been amazing hearing our players refer back to The HEART of a CHAMPION Workshop in difficult situations off the field. They’ve said it’s changed the way they think and prepare.
A young, largely inexperienced team under a new head coach beat favorites South Africa to qualify for Paris 2024, then requalified for the World Series nine months later.
A key takeaway from working with Chris has been his meticulous planning and attention to detail, which helped the Kenya 7s team return to the series and qualify for the Olympics.
Where it was built
The program’s first-ever World Series tournament win in Biarritz, then back-to-back in Glendale and its first No. 1 world ranking. 2nd overall in the 2018–19 World Rugby Sevens Series, leading to automatic Olympic qualification.
The program’s first-ever World Series tournament win in London, a home title in Las Vegas, Olympic qualification for Rio 2016, and 5th in 2016–17, its highest finish at the time.
Your heart + your how = your outcome
Your Heart: eight character traits that define who your people need to become. Your How: eight playbook steps that build those traits into the way your people think, prepare, compete and lead. Select a letter to see how they connect.
Has the heart strength to do what most won’t.
Outcome: Brave decisions
Playbook step 1
Assess the vision, what it takes to win, where you are now, and the brave decisions needed to close the gap.
Your CHAMPION playbook isn’t a set of plays. Your coaches and staff own the content; Target Gold structures how it’s planned and reviewed across every pillar.
Intentions set and reviewed at every level, so leaders know what’s working and what to change.
A keynote, half day or full day introducing the eight CHAMPION traits to your leaders, coaches and athletes, or to your organization’s teams. Often where a partnership starts.
Where your team is now, what’s working and what’s holding it back. The audit becomes the opening draft of the playbook.
Your leaders and their teams build their CHAMPION playbook across every performance pillar.
Where the system takes hold. Chris works with your leaders and head coaches through the checkpoint rhythm, across the season or the Olympic cycle.
Engagements run from a single day to 12 months. Scope is shaped together: which teams, who is in the room and the timeline.
Once installed, your coaches and leaders run it. Ongoing advisory is there when you want it.
As a Special Operations Forces leader, I immediately recognized the transferability of Chris’ coaching expertise to high-performing teams in any industry. Chris’ CHAMPION Mindset is very similar to the mindset that SOF personnel learn through high-risk training that prepares their small teams for no-fail missions.
Two-time Olympic Rugby Coach. World Rugby Coach of the Series, 2019.
Originally from New Zealand, Chris coached in South Africa, Namibia and Kenya before spending the better part of a decade with Team USA, as Assistant Coach of the Men’s Sevens and then Head Coach of the Women’s Sevens. He later returned to Kenya to advise the national sevens team, which went on to qualify for and compete at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
After Team USA, Chris built Target Gold around what he learned holds true in high performance, whatever the culture or country. He leads every installation personally, bringing in specialists where a team needs them.
“As a coach and leader, Chris is guided by deeply held values. He is a systematic planner, focused on producing results, while never losing sight of his guiding principles. He deeply cares about the people he leads.”
Tell us where your team is and where you want it to be. Chris replies personally.
Target Gold powers the performance advisory work of Sevenfold Performance, which also offers leadership immersions and biology optimization.