Here’s something you won’t find most coaches openly promoting: we don’t have a big impact on performance. I’d be more reticent to admit it myself, except I’ve long since stopped insisting that increased performance is in any shape or form what is valuable in coaching.
To put it in more swimming specific terms, fast swimmers swim fast. They can swim fast for great coaches, and they can swim fast with fairly awful coaches. This is not to say that coaches are useless and obsolete. Far from it. But recognizing that our impact is very minor on performance can go a long way to coaching better.
How minor I can’t quantify. I’m not that kind of scientist (or any kind of scientist, really). Here are some of the important implications of that minor influence on performance:
Reverse-Engineered Coaching
Because fast people go fast, and swimmers going fast does a lot for the career of coaches, a lot of attention gets paid to fast athletes. Coaches, like any reasonable human trying to rationalize the world, ponder the simple question:
“Why does this (fast swimmer) go fast?”
For the most part being unable to study this scientifically, we start to make some qualitative judgments. We pick out behaviors that the fast swimmer engages in and declare that these are the reasons that they swim fast. Particularly if we like those behaviors.
When I was thirteen, my then coach Alan sat me down regarding a practice I was due to miss. We sat in the locker room of Brandeis University. Alan pointed towards a locker
“That was Steve Korbley’s locker.” he declared.
“Oh?” I mumbled.
He continued “Steve Korbley never missed a practice. On the night of his prom he brought his tuxedo to the pool, hung it up right in there and then met his date at the site”
Alan was trying to tell me something. That if I could just be like Steve Korbley, and never miss practice, I too would swim fast.
There are some obvious problems with reverse-engineered coaching. For one we as coaches don’t really “know” in any solid way what it is that makes the fast swimmer swim fast. We are making mostly uneducated guesses.
The second is that even if we did know, the answer of what works for that one fast athlete may not really be that applicable to the other athletes that we coach.
First, Do No Harm
Yesterday, I took my six year old to the science museum. After touring around for an hour, we sat down to watch a 3D movie narrated by Chris Evans. It was about super-powered dogs.
One narrative followed a dog that was raised by a firefighter to search for people buried under rubble in a natural disaster. It was obviously very demanding training for both the owner and dog.
The owner stated upfront what she looked for in a rescue assist dog: a dog that would play so intensely that nothing could shake it’s focus. She played with the puppy all day, and had her family play and co-workers play. The dog played all day.
Later it got rewarded with play whenever it “discovered” a person in fake distress.
It struck me that this dog was treated way better than most elite athletes. For decades manipulative, abusive and overly harsh training modalities have been utilized in sport. They have been justified on the basis of high performers.
But what if they have nothing to do with high performance? What if they are just to satisfy the ego of a coach, who wants to think that they play a big role in getting the athlete to perform at a high level? What if the best athletes are good despite the coaching they receive, instead of because of it?
So to me, an important rule of coaching has to be one that another profession has held for quite some time. As coaches, our motto should be to first do no harm. Whatever else we do for athletes, we must start by not harming them.
We should try to get “training” to be as close to play as we possibly can. Additional training should be a reward, and an athlete should see it as so because it’s so damn fun.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to reverse-engineer “fun”.