Coaching swim groups

This is what I was taught by my mentor coaches, and has served me very well. It isn't about how to coach a practice, but how to push the group and what is the right amount.

First, I began with coaching a group of around forty 11 - 12 year old girls and boys. My father (my head coach) told me that I had to teach them the basics; not to worry too much about making the fastest kids faster, but get them to swim right. What happened was my top end still got fast, and the rest of the group did catch them a little, but overall everyone benefited. The approach was that if a swimmer really wanted to get a lot faster they needed to commit and join the club team. It is like a goldfish, a goldfish can only get so big in a small pond, but when put into a big pond they can grow even bigger.

Now when it came to coaching club swimming. Here Phil and my dad told me the same thing. "You always base your practices off your best swimmer." They didn't mean that if your best swimmer was a butterflier; that you concentrate on butterfly. No, they meant that when it came to training and the amount you pushed in your sets, intervals, and yardage; would be based around your best swimmer. The idea being that everyone in the group is striving to be better, and they will compete to be at the top. The bottom and middle tier will push to try to keep up with the fastest swimmer in the group. The top tier lacks actual motivation in front of them, so they must be self-driven to become better, but the coach must assist them by giving the challenges to push them to the next level. This approach provides motivation and that extra push to all levels of the group.

With the Club format of training, what happens to the non-competitive person? Well, hopefully through talks that I provide (Phil did these to us all the time), we can motivate the swimmer to want to be better, and develop that competitiveness in them. It may take a couple of seasons to finally get that desire to be better in some non-competitive swimmers, but normally I've been able to get the swimmers interest to compete. So, the little side talks are very important to how I coach. Many times the kids don't get anything from it, but if you can reach one swimmer each time you give a little talk, then eventually you end up impacting the whole group.

Summer seasonal swimmer, I was taught to coach much more basic to prepare them for training, but with club swimming I was taught to challenge the fastest swimmer in the group, and allow the rest of the group take advantage of having that person to chase.