Coaching for Coaches is a High Yield Investment

What do you think of when you hear the term “moneyball”?

Do you think of the Michael Lewis book? Do you think of the actually quite good movie they made with Brad Pitt?

Do you draw a blank (please don’t)?

---

In my re-emergence into entrepreneurship I’ve had to wade back into social media vectors I hoped to never touch again. I’m guessing because I’m (almost) 40 and have two kids, I’ve been targeted for all sorts of influencers in “investing”.

I find myself almost always making the same critique. Most of the “genius” investing strategies are sort of reverse engineered. So, for example, trust this guy because he invested in Google when people were like “what’s a search engine?” or trust another person because he got in on Apple in the 1990s when it seemed like everyone but my family thought they were going out of business.

It’s weirdly designed for a social media environment where clout is built around having a lot of “followers”. But if an overwhelming amount of people follow something, does it turn out to be a buy low sell high proposition for most of them? By sheer probability, it does not.

So here’s my pitch, based off the podcast I recorded earlier this week with Trever Gray. If you are a coach, and want to make the biggest positive impact on your team, yourself and your family, invest in some coaching.

Right now, if you get into private coaching, that’s not where the money is. Coaches, for the most part, are not wealthy people. They are not thinking about investment in themselves because it doesn’t seem like an option.

Earlier this year I debuted a six week coaching module for coaches. I asked one coach how much they would have otherwise spent on themselves had they not forked over the $210 for my course. The answer is all too obvious: nothing.

---

My favorite author Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a saying that goes something like this:

Never ask a doctor what you should do. Ask them what THEY would in your situation.

Never ask a chef what’s good on the menu, ask what they eat.

Basically, don’t trust decisions that other people tell you to make, figure out what decisions they make when they have skin in the game.

So you might read what I’m writing here as a bald plea to hire me to be your coach. To be honest, I’m pretty confident that I’ll be full up coaching on that front sooner rather than later, regardless of whether anyone reads this blog.

So instead I’m offering free advice. It’s not advice that I think you should do, I’ll tell you what I DO. I invest in coaching for myself.

Before I had even turned the page and devoted myself full time to this business in January 2023, I had already hired not one, but two coaches to help me. Before I’d cashed a single check for anything Chris DeSantis coaching related, I had committed nearly $10,000 in investment to something that I would never be able to quantify with an earnings statement.

The first person I hired was Nikki Kett, without whom I can’t even imagine how the launch of my business would have gone without. The coaching she has provided me in terms of emotional management paid for themselves in real time.

The branching possibilities from the progress I made with Nikki mean that I expect to reap many times what I paid over the course of my career. Not to mention the unquantifiable value to my relationships with my wife, my children and the people I work with.

The second person I hired is Sherri Fisher. Sherri is probably less familiar to people within the swimming world. I reached out to Sherri for help after I finally, fully admitted to myself that I was struggling with ADHD.

Sherri has a made a career out of helping people “like me”. I walked away with a completely different understanding of how I could make the way I’m wired work for me. In essence, take the positivity that I had in the video above and multiply it by a factor of ten and you might approximate what I consider the opportunities from my “learning disability”.

So don’t take my advice to hire coaching because you think it’s what I want you to do. It’s what I did, it’s what I plan on doing for the future, even though I didn’t “know” what the exact dollar and cents payoff for me was going to be.

Ultimately if you’re coaching you’re part of an organization that is investing in the experience for athletes in your program. There has been an explosive growth in people who will bring consultant-coaches in to work with athletes on their team.

Only a smart few are getting where the real biggest opportunity is, however. Coaches are a force multiplier. Investing in coaching is the “Moneyball” investment of our time for coaches everywhere. Go where everyone else is going to want to go, when the opportunity is cheap and available.

What To Do With "Data"

Two years or so ago, I went to the doctor. I’d like to come up with something poetic to say about why, but it was pretty simple.

I felt like shit.

Naturally, I surmised that years of medical school, training, and real life experience treating thousands of patients would help Doctor Sharma to come up with a good path forward for me. I wanted to feel better, and I wanted to do what it took to feel better.

Dr. Sharma listened to me patiently, and promptly order a “comprehensive” blood panel. We were going to get to the bottom of it! They drew what seemed like an infinite number of vials of my blood and sent them off to a lab for analysis.

Weeks later, the results were in. I dutifully went to my follow up appointment, ready to finally find out what was “wrong” so I could fix it.

Dr. Sharma looked at my chart dispassionately.

“You’re low in vitamin D, I’ll prescribe you a high dose of Vitamin D”.

“That’s it?” I asked, incredulously.

“That’s it, you’re fine, maybe you should work out more.” she demurred.

“I work out five times a week, are you saying I should do six?” I stammered. She looked confused.

“Maybe you should eat some more vegetables” she added.

---

When we go to make decisions, we’re always weighing subjective and objective factors. In my case, the subjective was easy: I felt like shit. So I went in search of data to explain why. I didn’t get any kind of explanation in that moment.

Another way of looking at what I did was to look to confirm what I already thought. After all, I felt pretty sure of how I felt, and no data was really going to tell me otherwise. It’s not an entirely wrong approach to take, but it is important to think about, what will you do when the data doesn’t match your subjective take of what is going on.

Lately, when I swim by myself, I’ve renegotiated my relationship with the most important “data” collection anyone does in a swimming pool. At either end of where I swim, a red glowing LED all-knowing entity known as a “pace clock” tells me how I’m doing.

Much like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character from “The Terminator”, it has the following characteristics:

It can’t be bargained with

It can’t be reasoned with

It doesn’t feel pity, remorse or fear

And it absolutely will not stop.

It just ticks on. Sometimes it tells me what I want to hear, that I’m doing well. Sometimes it doesn’t. There are moments when I push off and feel as if I’m floating on a wondrous cloud. Then the clock brings me back down to earth: just another rep that’s roughly the same as all the other reps you usually do.

So as I previewed, I’ve renegotiated. I don’t dutifully pray to the LED god every time my hand touches the wall. Most of the time, I give the clock no heed. Go ahead and ask me how it feels.

IT FEELS GREAT.

What I’ve realized is that at any given time you can only focus on so much. I was giving a lot of my attention over to processing how fast each repetition I was doing was. What that meant was that I had scant attention left over for everything else I was trying to accomplish every time I pushed off a wall.

So I’ve found more brain power to consider how I’m swimming, where my limbs are at any given time, and how my body is actually moving from one end to the other. I’m having fun trying things that I would have otherwise dismissed as they were likely, in the short term, to earn me a quick reprimand from the pace clock.

Every so often, I still do a “spot” check for quality. I make a quick apology to the clock, ask it to remind me of what time it is, and push off. Then I look again whenever I’m done.

What I’ve found, consistently is that I’m going much faster than I think. Checking in on my “data” less often has allowed me to actually make progress, in real quantifiable terms, faster than if I was constantly checking.

---

I get my blood drawn every six months now. A few days later, I have several pages of data to pour over with my new doctor. I didn’t accept the first opinion to “work out more” and take a ridiculous amount of Vitamin D. So I have someone else guiding me on how to square the numbers I have on the page with my subjective account of how I actually feel.

Swimming is a sport where all roads tend to lead to a quantifiable outcome. We’re almost all striving for times on the clock. That can lead us to reduce and simplify. If the clock is what we want to improve, let’s do as much measuring with the clock as possible.

The clock, despite my jokes, is not all-knowing. If you cut yourself off from the subjective experience of being in the water, feeling immersed in that foreign environment, then you’re missing out on half of what you need to make effective decisions on what to do next.

That becomes even more crucial as I swim by myself and have to attempt to “coach” myself. The ideal set up is to have someone else who can constantly help you synthesize your subjective experience and data (clock and otherwise) into gradual improvement of decision making.

Now, I shudder already at the response of anyone reading this and jumping to the conclusion that I believe everyone should shut the clocks off and run practice with no “data”. Don’t mess with success, baby! That’s my motto, but maybe, just maybe, reconsider whether devoting as much attention as you have to that ticking mess is actually the best way to improve the way you swim.

I Have Bad News: Private Colleges are A Scam

Several years ago, I could think of no better “average job” in the sport of swimming than working at a decently paying college. This was partly colored by the fact that I had the time of my life coaching for almost nothing (University of Pennsylvania) and more than nothing (Georgia Tech).

If you coached at a decent college, you got to work in a professional environment., at least as far as swimming goes You probably had some benefits, got some nice free polos to wear and got to stay at the Hampton Inn for travel meets. You had a job that you could tell people outside of the world of swimming you were doing and it made some kind of sense to them.

Unfortunately, for quite a while now, most colleges, and by extension their athletic programs, have been a scam. Many people- coaches, parents of college kids, college kids, athletic administrators, alumni, Presidents of colleges and universities- have been willing to go along with the scam. It was working alright for them. Even setting aside the massive disruption of Covid, the foundation was starting to crack.

Take, for example, my alma mater Colby College. For the 2020-21 school year, the estimated cost of attendance is…holy crap! It’s 76-77 THOUSAND DOLLARS. I didn’t even think it was that bad. When I started going to Colby, the cost was somewhere a little more than half of that amount, and already people were starting to ask themselves if it was sane.

Let there be no more questioning. It is completely, maniacally crazy to spend more than $300k on a Bachelor’s Degree. Yes, I know that many people that attend don’t pay this sticker price but it is in no way justifiable. This number just inflates to an even more ridiculous sum year after year and has been doing so for decades.

Now, this might be the point at which you’re asking yourself, “what the heck does this have to do with swimming?”. To which I answer- if you already read this blog you don’t exactly come here for the breaststroke tips amiright? Fine, fine, I’ll get there.

Colleges are big business. Like many big businesses, they’ve been set up to enrich a very small amount of people at the expense of a large group of people. Colleges take advantage of the prestige they have created to pay low wages to people who actually directly serve students, like adjunct professors and coaches.

Below them is an even more taken advantage of group that staffs the dining hall, keeps the dorms clean and maintains the student center.

Above them all, with each step more egregiously overpaid than the next, are administrators. Now, before you get your boxer briefs in a bunch, let me say that I don’t think there is no need for some kind of administration.

But there is probably a happy medium between no administration and what takes place at my former employer. Georgia Tech has twelve people listed in their “Executive Staff” department. I can guarantee you that most of these people have little to know impact on the experience of the athletes that play there, much less the coaches they supposedly “administrate”.

These are the type of people who say publicly that they have to cut swimming programs because they have to “manage the budget” of an athletic department but despite “managing a budget” of millions of dollars would quickly put the only Starbucks in an airport terminal out of business.

Let me give you one example of how athletic departments operate that you should consider before forking over your dollars to “endow” another program. When I came to Georgia Tech, it was 2009 and the country was in the midst of a financial crisis. Belts were being tightened, we were told. What this meant, practically, was that our salaries were frozen. Scholarships were reduced.

In other words, there was a reduction in funding to the athletes in coaches. Guess who got a raise though? Athletic administrators! Guess what else wasn’t reduced? Our “annual” non-scholarship, non-salary budget. In fact, at the end of the year we still “had money left” and had to go on a spending spree in order to spend our budget.

This practice was tacitly expected from the administrator class, who have somehow convinced themselves that line-item budget categories are far more important than the people who actually do the sporting or those that directly help them.

(Note: after reading this part, I questioned whether I would ever get employed in college swimming again before deciding “SCREW IT”. Any administrator that gets their feelings hurt by the above is someone I don’t want to work for anyway and should be out of a job)

This is a bummer for swimming, of course, since we as a sport haven’t figured out a way to make this administrator class rich. Thus, they look at swimming in many cases as something that hampers their ambition.

When I got into college sports, I wasn’t naive about where swimming sat in the priorities of Division 1 schools. Still, I thought that if you raised some money, had athletes doing well in school and representing the school with some class, you were alright. That’s just wrong, and we need to consider cutting bait on a system that not only doesn’t value us, but oftentimes perceives us as having negative value.

To end this on a positive note, I want to say that one thing that actually still makes sense in this day and age is public universities. Having been through my own experience at a Private College for the Rich, I can tell you that while there is absolutely no justification for their 300k price tag, the in-state cost of attendance at your local university presents a far better value.

For instance, consider the schools I recently did work for and compare them. Cleveland State is barely 1/3 the price for an Ohio resident at $27k a year. Washington State clocks in at 28k. University of Houston is insanely cheap (when considered in this context) at around $23k.

Now, I believe these numbers would be even lower if such schools were focused on just doing a good job educating young people and didn’t have to try and compete with the extremely expensive Private College for the Rich. Still, you would be so much better off in life if, living in Texas, you attended the University of Houston than going anywhere out of state.

Finally, having met the kids that attend these schools and populate their swim teams, I can tell you that they have at least as much ingenuity, intelligence and oftentimes a dash more grit than your average Rich Kid like me. So really, this could be one of the easiest decisions you make.