Young Coaches Development

Went home for the weekend for a funeral as my great grandmother died.

The rest of the time I spent mainly with my immediate family. We are an aquatic family, as most of them are very involved in aquatics, and our conversations pretty much revolve around swimming. (It drives some people around us crazy though).

During the conversations, I got to thinking about my path and where I once was to where I am now. My mother is running the Learn to Swim Program that I designed last year, but since I moved on to become a full-time coach, I was unable to follow through with the program. But she talks about some of the teachers, then I am doing a bunch of ASCA stuff and reading articles, and I begin to relate and put things together.

The first thing a young coach should do is find a mentor, according to ASCA. Well, I did this without even thinking of them as Mentors. I always asked questions of my father and paid attention to how he did things. I also asked many questions to my age-group coach, who is now a head coach, Phil Black. I also ran by a lot of things by my brother and we would discuss ways to go about things as well. I also spent a lot of time at swim meets trying to over hear other coaches talk. So, I had many mentors I guess. I never really thought about them as mentoring me but they were.

Another thing for young coaches to know is that the more you do it, the better you get at it. You will learn lessons along the way, and you find out that you didn't really know as much as you thought when you were younger. The more you're willing to accept that you don't know exactly what you are doing as a young coach, the more you learn, and the better that you can become because you are more open to taking in things. Remember though, you don't have to take everything you hear as the only way. Fast swimmers are created through various different ways, take in the knowledge and apply it to your coaching.

All coaches need to coach the lowest levels to really get it. You can see how to then construct a stroke, and then you can learn how to tweek a stroke. If you don't know how to construct a stroke, how can you tweek a stroke? It takes time to develop into a good coach. Some have a head start as they took in knowledge through being in an age-group program and a senior level program. I didn't have a full experience in an age-group program, so I didn't have much of a head start. The thing I had though was willing to to learn and adjust. Those with experience sometimes lack this, and I think that I might have passed some that had a head start on me from the beginning.

Even though I now have around 12 to 13 years of coaching some sort of swimming, I am still thirsty for more knowledge. Still study and read, and look for ways to advance myself.