Developing Age-Group Coach

How to grow and develop coaching skills. This is of course my opinion, so you don't have to use it as the you develop as a coach.

As a coach of a group of age-groupers, your main goal is always stroke development. Sure there is so conditioning in there, but the conditioning really begins at the Advanced Age-Group Level. Most new coaches start by coaching a beginning level group, if not, see if you can. It is the place where you can see so many things wrong, and it is easy to pinpoint. Just by watching your swimmers, and reacting to what you see, will help develop a coaches eye. If you go right to coaching high level swimmers, it is much harder to see flaws in a stroke, but with training with watching younger swimmers, you can train your eye to see things better. All new coaches, try to convince your Head Coach that you want to at least work with a lower level group to help develop your coaches eye.

It has become pretty standard that coaches write a workout in advance. Many times senior level coaches can use these written workouts to review and evaluate a previous season, so writing it down becomes very useful for future development. My experience with my senior coach was that he showed up with a workout, but never really stuck to it, but watched and listened, and changed the workout to what he felt like the group needed. So, when I started coaching younger groups I began with coaching on the spot. I think this type of practices developed my coaches eye, and made me realize more about developing strokes. I began writing workouts, and soon realized that I wasn't developing my swimmers enough, so I went back to improvising. This doesn't mean that you don't have a plan. You know what the basic idea of the workout is going to be, and you know how hard and how fast you want the training to be for the workout.

My opinion, the worst thing for a developing coach who is coaching age-groupers is a notebook. Why? Because in the beginning they tend to look at their notebook when they could be watching their swimmers. Think about when you do private lessons for competitive strokes. You watch, and then you instruct, and then they try to fix it. Apply that to how you coach, but instead of talking in personal words, use broader terms. You teach your group strokes together. It is the same as a private lesson, but you use terms that speak to many rather than an individual. Stop it with the notebooks.

If you go into coaching knowing how to fix everything, then you probably have know idea what you are doing. developing a stroke is different than changing minor things in a stroke as you do with senior level swimmers. Develop your coaching skills and your coaching eye, by watching your swimmers and reacting to what you see. You see a young swimmer not extend their front arm in freestyle. Maybe the haven't developed the shoulder muscles to do this. I should do more kicking on their side and develop those shoulder muscles, and then move onto to catch-up freestyle to continue to build those muscles while doing a freestyle motion, then I'll do 3/4 Catch-up Freestyle to continue to develop the muscles plus they learn the timing for front quadrant swimming. Let's then do some regular freestyle smooth concentrating on extending on the front arm, and surfing on the arm in front. You just did a whole workout off one thing you saw. All the kids need to work on it a little, some more than others. Plus in the regular freestyle portion you developed the term surfing on the front arm. Now hopefully you don't have to go over the whole thing, but just use the term to reference this correction. Quick Corrections. Of course if you have 10 and unders, you only planted the seed for the term, they really won't pick it up until about the 1000th time you repeat the term because their kids. You can create a progression of drills and small lessons for every correction that you see. That's when you know you are getting good. You pick up tricks and drills through the years, and you get better at creating a workout from looking at one instance during warm-up. make sure you check your self though, so that you are covering all the skills you needed to cover during the 4 week cycle.

I began coaching this way. I didn't know a whole lot of drills, so I just made stuff up. It worked, and many times I would find out the name of the drill later. Yeah I came up with drills, but really, many others were doing similar drills, I just didn't have a big enough coaching toolbelt back then, so I improvised. It made me better. I developed a coaches eye. I went to my brothers college meets, and senior meets with my dad, and watch warm-up. You see a lot of things in that warm area that give you ideas. The tough reality though was that some things young kids just can't do well. They are senior level skills and drills. You figure that out with experimenting as well.

Two things from this blog entry: Developing your coaching eye to become a better coach, and put away those notebooks with written workouts. You can spend that time you are looking at your notebook to watch your swimmers, and come up with a more meaningful practice and you become a better coach by training that eye.