First of all, what a slacker I have become with this blog. I need to stay up on this a little more.
Yesterday our team did one of Age-Group Practices. I think that these are good as coaches get to coach some kids that they don't normally coach, and they get to find out what some of our swimmers are like at practice. I think that as we try to create a team of coaches this is a good thing for our team.
Since our coach who normally does the competitive Stroke Swim Lessons was busy coaching the 13 and Overs, I took the Competitive Stroke Swim Lesson Group. Teaching kids strokes from the beginning remains to be so much fun. I love to construct strokes. I may like to do it too much, as I have to hold myself back at times with my older group, as they really should be beyond the constructing of a stroke and should be in stroke development and early training.
My first two years as a club coach, I was supposed to be constructing strokes, but really I had no idea what I was doing. I was given no guidance, and my Head Age-Group Coach didn't really know what she was doing in regards to developing young swimmers. I really didn't swim in a true age-group team, but rather went to sporadic practices and did summer league. So, I just watched, observed, and made stuff up as I went. My next two years I began to study stroke construction, and then I became pretty good at it each year that continued to develop. During my fourth or fifth year I began to realize that I had to do more than just construct strokes, but learn how to know take those strokes I developed and develop them into more advanced strokes. During this time I also began to realize that I needed my swimmers to train a little bit more, as all I had done up to this point was stroke work and sprint. I had been successful developing good swimmers for the area, but I knew I wanted to develop swimmers at a different level.
Now I am finally doing my ASCA Schools, and School 2 was pretty much a nice reassurance of what I was doing. I also like how much they admit that there is no one way to do things, and success has been accomplished doing various ways of developing a swimmer. Now I am reading School 3. The beginning made me have horrible flashbacks of Biology Class at Reedley College. Then the next part reminded of what I remember from the Swim Coaches Bible. As I am about to take on my first Senior Level group this Fall (lower level senior group) the information seems to be more real now though. I already started to create my new plan (as I have never developed a seasonal plan for a senior group before) and I am trying to implement some of the ideas I am learning into this training plan. Again, there is no exact science to it, so I am going outside the box on some aspects of the plan, but keeping some the main concepts that I want to incorporate.
I know my current strength, that is constructing and developing strokes, but when I started almost ten years ago I really was only good at one thing, "selling myself." I was able to sell to all those swimmers and parents that I was the best coach around, and I really knew very little about the sport at all. I taught myself how to construct strokes by reading, watching, and listening. I then learned to develop strokes by reading, watching, and listening. And now, I am going to learn training by doing the exact same thing I had done with the prior two. This was the area that I knew I was not good at, and I knew I needed to learn a lot more about. I continue to, "coach like I know everything, and study like I know nothing."
I am excited about this new phase of development coming, and I have confidence that I will get it, as I was able to do with the other aspects of swim coaching. I can't wait for what I can become in the next three to four years.
Note to young coaches: The best thing for me was to be humble and hungry. Humble enough to except that you may be doing everything wrong, and always hungry to make sure that you strive to be better. Note that when I began, the only thing I was good at was, "selling myself," and I was darn good at selling that I was a coach you wanted to swim for. It is the main quality for any beginning coach. Forget the other stuff, you can learn that as you go, but make sure that you can make your swimmers and parents believe in what you are doing. Sometimes age-group swimmers only need to believe in their coach, and they can go faster.
