Coaches First

The most wonderful and challenging part of my job is how much I learn. It is not an exaggeration to say that I am very compelled to learn. Every failure is intensely personal and emotional. After all, I named the company after myself. When I fail, I often struggle to find somewhere to deflect the blame.

The advantage of that is the same emotional energy that often leaves me distressed is fuel for growth. Almost always in the moment I catch myself thinking how hard it is, but when I look back in time to where I was I feel the complete opposite.

Recently, I had an a-ha moment that hit me like all such moments. The second I realized it, I wondered why I ever thought the reverse. While it felt sudden, it’s probably more accurate to say I had a nagging feeling for a long time, and now it’s no longer disputed in my mind.

Let me cut to the chase and give the revelation. Coaches should go first. Before I work with a group of athletes, their day to day coach has to have a good level of immersion in what I’m going to be working on.

Something for the Athletes

I’ll back up for a minute and explain why it often goes the other way around. Many times there is demand for me to speak to a group of athletes. That demand, rightly so, comes from a coach.

Coaches are like heat seeking missiles where the heat is “what could make these athletes better”. I’m grateful that coaches often think that what I have to offer is additive to what they’re already doing.

These coaches, quite obviously, have some level of exposure to what I’m all about. They have almost always met me in some context or been a listener to my podcast. So far, they’ve liked what they have heard and there’s a genuine interest in more.

The difference between what I do now and when I was coaching day to day is that I have to by nature be a little bit more provocative. I work in small bursts, I do not have the benefit of slowly and subtly introducing new information. That means that often I say something that can leave heads spinning in the audience.

What I have found is if the coach and the athlete get this head spinning moment at the same time, it can be a huge challenge for the coach. I’ve worked with some coaches who make walking that tight wire look effortless. Still, a coach may find themselves on the receiving end of some pretty aggressive questions when I leave.

If the coach is themselves not ready for those questions, it undercuts the value of what I’m doing. Now we’ve reached the moment where it may seem obvious what the solution to this is. Tell the coaches first, so they can prepare for the hard questions well in advance.

I’ve given a lot of thought to why I “missed” this, and I’ll reproduce my process below, so hopefully you can learn from my mistakes (and not from making the same mistake yourself).

1. I almost always err on the side of assuming knowledge on the part of coaches. I think this is good, mostly. Coaches often lack specific “education” in a topic and then will blow you away with what they’ve picked up “on the job”. It’s never a good idea to underestimate that. However, not knowing what parts of what I’m delivering are actually likely to sound controversial on first listening is a blind spot worth addressing

2. I didn’t quite reckon with something that was working from 1:1 coaching. When I introduce more provocative material in a 1:1 setting, I have so many tools at my disposal to control how that information is received. Owing to my ADHD, I find myself hyper-aware of subtle facial cues, essentially allowing me to guess how information is received and double back before someone goes the opposite of the way I intended. In a group setting, it is impossible to do this for 20+ people at a time.

   The culture has changed with regards to coaching coaches. When I started I didn’t really see opportunities to work with other coaches. There’s probably a lot of reasons for this. One obvious one had nothing to do with the overall environment and much more to do with me. When I started I was just 33 years old basically marketing wisdom. Most coaches were older than me and less likely to see me as someone they would want to employ for “wisdom”.

The culture has changed with regards to coaching coaches. When I started I didn’t really see opportunities to work with other coaches. There’s probably a lot of reasons for this. One obvious one had nothing to do with the overall environment and much more to do with me. When I started I was just 33 years old basically marketing wisdom. Most coaches were older than me and less likely to see me as someone they would want to employ for “wisdom”.

So in the future, I will be trying to start with coaches. This past month I finished a 20 week program for Division III powerhouse TCNJ. You can listen to my podcast with their coach Dave Dow. If you’re thinking about educating the coaches on your team, write me. If a D3 public school can afford it, you probably can too.

Greg Meehan Coming into His Peak

Frequent followers of the blog will notice that I only occasionally comment on the “hot” story of the moment. Even with that, I often wait until the dust settles for a few days before offering my reaction.

The news came down at the end of last week that Greg Meehan would be the next National Team Director for USA Swimming. I will offer my analysis of that hiring below, as well as discuss the now open Stanford Women’s position.

So that you don’t have to read all the way to get the general sense of how I feel, I am very positive on this hiring for USA Swimming. I have offered critiques of Meehan and USA Swimming in the past, but it’s hard for me to imagine a better hire at this particular moment. I will explain why. As for Stanford, rather than speculate on who will fill the position, I want to use the opening to discuss Stanford and where it stands in the college swimming environment.

Workhorse

That Meehan has arrived at this position is a testament to his work ethic. Climbing the coaching ladder means much more than having success in the pool. There are hidden requirements to fulfill, and consider yourself lucky if someone offers to show you what they are.

I think that the narrative of Meehan’s tenure at Stanford is often told backwards, partly owing to the simplistic way we often evaluate coaches. For shorthand we always go to the top peak result of a swimmer. or team In those terms, Meehan’s career peaked almost instantaneously during his time at Stanford, when he coached a collegiate team with Katie Ledecky, Simone Manuel and ripped off three consecutive NCAA Championships.

By the same criteria, you could view 2024 as a second peak with Torri Huske’s breakthrough in the Paris Olympic games. Beneath the surface however, I’d argue that Meehan is a considerably better coach (and better prepared for the role he has now) than he was when Stanford was three-peating.

There’s a humbling that comes for everyone after they reach certain heights. As it the swimming gods want to remind you that absolutely no hubris is tolerated. It’s probably not an understatement to say that the pandemic was lighter fluid on that humbling fire for Meehan.

In our profession, the level of difficulty does not get higher than trying to coach US Olympic hopefuls. Meehan had a roster about as full of them as you can get for a period of time. The probability that you will succeed in that environment is low by virtue of the sheer competitiveness.

There is a certain momentum that I see forming, a herd mentality with elite level swimming. A place becomes the “hot” place and swimmers flock there, until their comes a moment of inevitable disappointment. A coach is first overvalued and then almost instantaneously undervalued. In Meehan’s case, it appeared Stanford would never lose an NCAA Championship.

Then the pandemic, and on the other side you had Simone Manuel publicly saying she was overtrained going into the 2021 games, and the high profile departures of Claire Curzan and Regan Smith. All of a sudden it wasn’t inevitable.

What happened next is what I think makes Meehan excellent for the job he is just now embarking on. I want everyone reading this to imagine how they felt when a really good swimmer they coached left. Now try to imagine that swimmer was a gold medal winning, world record breaking talent. You probably can’t imagine it, I certainly can’t.

That had to hurt. The critiques (like the ones I launched) had to hurt. Through it all, Meehan maintained something that made me respect him above all: kindness. Swimming is a small world and no one would have blamed Meehan had he privately fumed. Instead he was gracious.

I think thick skin is overrated. It’s resistance to harm, but the best of the best go further than that. Meehan found a way to turn the hurt into improvement. He chose neither to believe the hype nor the critiques were actually who he was.

United States Swimming needs someone in the position of National Team Director that coaches can respect. Someone who can think strategically about the organization of high performance. I don’t think they could have done better than to hire Greg Meehan for this role.

What now for Stanford

On paper, the job that Meehan vacated is one of the absolute prime jobs in college swimming. However, color me shocked if it is filled by a “high” profile coach. Like I said, I don’t want to focus on the predictions, but more comment on what the opening tells us about Stanford and the model it applies to sports.

Stanford in many ways represents an old school form of collegiate athletics, and in many ways I respect that. They are staying true to the student-athlete model, and still want to be competitive at the very top.

In terms of their coach, in a bygone era almost no swim coaches were well paid in a general sense. There was an implied prestige in the position, and frankly we hadn’t found as many ways to maximize every moment for performance so the level of competition was lower.

The prestige was part of your compensation. You didn’t get paid well but you were the coach of STANFORD UNIVERSITY or YALE. or DUKE. That has changed in that many of the top NCAA coaches are by any standard well paid especially in reference to the cost of living.

Swimswam has reported that Stanford is offering a salary range between $160-195k a year for the position. For reference, it is probable that Pitt paid Chase Kreitler a starting salary of $175k three years ago to be their head coach.

By rough estimate of the cost of living, Kreitler’s purported salary equivalent in Palo Alto would be around $300,000. So in other words, Stanford is willing to pay at most 2/3 of what the University of Pittsburgh is willing to pay, albeit for a combined head coach vs a single gender coach.

The single biggest factor that impinges on a salary at Stanford is the cost of housing. It is true that Stanford has helped some of their coaches find housing, but I wouldn’t gather that there is a guarantee for the incoming coach.

It’s impossible to verify what I’m about to say, but I would venture that Meehan was not the first choice, or even among the first choices when he was hired. The fact that Stanford found a coach who could not only recruit but retain Olympic gold medal caliber swimmers for a period of time under this model in the recent past is actually quite lucky.

The previous few paragraphs may seem like i am talking down about Stanford, so let me sum up my opinion with this. I think the Stanford coach should get paid better. I am unlikely to influence that. In my ideal world, the coach would still try to fight for the values that are ever more dear in an increasingly mercenary NCAA.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

Do What Leads to Growth

Within the swimming world, I’ve encountered a dichotomy when it comes to Masters Swimming. First, the types of people you meet at Masters swim meets are amazing. The overall atmosphere is more or less beaming with positivity. While there may be the usual grumblings and disappointments, at the foundation are people who have no ambiguity about why they’re there. Because they want to be!

When I interact with coaches, many of them on the higher end of the club or collegiate level, there’s what I could only describe as a borderline hostility to Masters. To be sure, this is entirely the same part of the population that doesn’t choose to compete anymore, for many valid reasons that I will enumerate below. Yet the eyes of many a coach roll when considering adults continuing on in the sport.

So in this post, I want to talk about why I swim, and compete in swimming. Lest I sound like I am passing moral judgment on others, I will add why I very much chose not to swim for large parts of my post collegiate life. The answer to why is pretty simple: because in my day to day life, I love it.

Learn by Doing

I’ve written before that I believe in the concept of “learning differences” although perhaps not in the way many other people interpret that term. That is, I think that people can be more or less open to receiving new knowledge depending on the way that they encounter it.

I’ll give you an example from my own life. During my work with Sherri Fisher I completed a four hour battery of aptitude testing. The test, which I have discussed before, was actually many small tests trying to isolate various cerebral tasks. At the end you were given a percentile score to compare yourself to others.

I scored 5/100 (that is, 95% of others were BETTER than me) on a particular test. I was shown an image with fifteen or so items on it for 30 seconds. Then the screen went blank. Then a new screen appeared and I was asked three questions:

1. What objects were removed?

2. What objects were added?

3. What objects were moved (i.e. in a different location of the image)

I was in a complete panic completing the test. I could not, for the life of me, remember the first image. As soon as I saw the second image, that was all I could see.

Now it may be accurate to say that I’m not a “visual learner” or have a poor “visual memory”. It may also be accurate to say that like any other human being, I can’t remember simple details when I’m panicking.

Our emotional state has profound influence over our ability to absorb information. Which brings me back to swimming, and why it is so important to me. When I am swimming, I am happy and open to learning. And in those moments, I find that I can learn things that are applicable to my life, both personal and professional.

So for me, swimming is a sport that I enjoy. I’ve even learned to enjoy the competition much more than I did in my “real” competitive days. It is also a vehicle for growth.

So do I advocate other coaches swim? Yes! As long as swimming is something you enjoy and therefore grow from. I also understand why that’s not the case for many coaches, because I was one.

Another Hour at the Pool

I started training and competing most recently on January 2nd, 2023. My last day as a full-time, day to day coach was December 31st 2022. I would have started on January 1st but the pool was closed for New Years.

It wasn’t by accident that the two lined up. When I was spending considerable time on the pool deck coaching, I didn’t much feel like showing up at other odd hours to do my own swimming.

In perhaps an aside, I was talking with a coach this week about what is the optimal distance to live from the pool you coach in. Coaching swimming involves irregular hours and it can really help you if you live close by work, allowing you to easily go from home to your “office” multiple times per day.

Even with proximity, for a lot of coaches swimming themselves could mean another round trip to and from the pool, or cutting into work or personal time at particularly inconvenient times. It could also mean training alone, which I tried for quite a while and which cannot, in any way, compare to a coached workout.

Beyond practicing there is also the issue of attending meets. When you already go to a meet every few weeks, do you really want to spend one of your other weekends swimming in a meet? I sure didn’t! But your mileage may vary.

At the end of the day, the point of doing something voluntary is that you feel like it adds and doesn’t detract from the rest of your life. I’ve found that swimming is a valuable addition to mine, but that value is situational.