For example, someone “has” confidence, or they don’t. Another person might “have” motivation, or not. When I coached in Denmark, I noted several swimmers when quitting or contemplating quitting would say they had “lost” their motivation. It was almost as if it were a set of keys they had left under a couch cushion and had given up on finding.
Confrontation is a life necessity. If it wasn’t, I’d guess that most of us would hardly ever do it. Constitutionally, I think human beings are designed to be confrontation averse. That is, we are all more or less “pro-social”. Our extent as a species rely on the fact that we have found ways to cooperate with each other at a very high level.
I’ve often spoken about “Fireman Mode” coaching, where you find yourself running from place to place putting out fires. Most of the time, it’s in the context of the mental health of the coach. Fireman mode is very detrimental over the long haul of a coach’s career, as you begin to anticipate (with considerable worry) problems popping up and having to react to them.
Like me, you’re probably getting deja vu from Chuck Wielgus’ disastrous representation of American swimming from a decade ago. To give Hinchey credit, he at least appears to be slightly ashamed that he hasn’t even read the code of conduct for the organization he heads. Wielgus would have been incredulous at the suggestion that he was in any way supposed to know what was going on.
I’ve spent my fair share of time fired up about what gets venerated in the sport I love. The International Swimming Hall of Fame is home to Paul Bergen, Laszlo Kiss, and Jack Nelson (who despite some reconsiderations about Diana Nyad, is not off the hook.)
When I was young my family would spend most of the summer in Denmark. Around age 14, I started to get serious about swimming, which made these long trips a bit of a problem. So I joined up with the local team and started practicing.
By the second summer I had friends on the team. As I was about to enter my senior year of high school, 2001, I was well into swimming nerd-dom.
So I was shocked when I brought up Michael Phelps and my friend Emil deadpanned back to me:
“He’s totally on drugs, right?”.
I was shocked, offended, angry and more than a little defensive. How could he! Michael Phelps was totally legit (by the way in case of any ambiguity, this is something I still believe) When I recovered, I learned something pretty important. Your perspective on who is and who isn’t clean in sport has a lot to do with what passport you hold.
YES! OF COURSE!
NO, HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT?
I wrote about the doping sanction and subsequent retirement of Conor Dwyer last week, but only tangentially. Beyond how we have very different empathy for him despite a blatant violation of the rules, there’s another couple really important angles to this story.
The first is to disentangle the question of whether “America” swimming has a doping problem. There have been several prominent doping violations at the elite level of American swimming, ranging from being a total dumb dumb head (Ryan Lochte) to Dwyer’s big cheat.
Part of the problem in discussing this is that it’s clear that there are really two lanes for athletes doping. After all, doping controls are not completely inept, and therefore it takes coordination and resources to evade detection.
One way to do this is through a state coordinated program. There is ample evidence that both China and Russia have such systems, and I’m not going to get into the weeds of that conversation here. There are likely others but those two are by far the most prominent.
The second lane is one where on an individual level, there is sufficient money on the line. The slow growth of “professional” swimming unfortunately also increases the monetary incentive to dope, even as the newfound ISL has tried to address that with its zero tolerance policy towards dopers.
The second path is what we’re likely to see more in the US. I’m not so cynical that I believe that an NGB is actively coordinating a doping program. Although, when you consider everything else they are willing to ignore and obfuscate, it’s not surprising to find out that a coach like Alberto Salazar in Track and Field was able to operate so blatantly for so long.
That is to say, if we have such bad actors in swimming, I have little faith in the authorities to root them out.
There’s one more big thing to discuss here, and that is some paradoxical logic I see around this topic, particularly in swimming. Somehow, there are many Americans who believe wholeheartedly that doping is a huge problem, and that cheating is rampant and confers a significant competitive advantage.
And yet, the United States dominates in swimming at any international competition they go after. Do we truly believe that everything we do is so much better than our competitors that despite their cheating we still win?
I still remember the first Olympic Trials I ever watched on TV in 2004. During the course of the meet, swimmers training at Stanford conspicuously wore patches on their arms. It drew some scrutiny at the time, and both Stanford coach Richard Quick and this blog’s favorite (s) swimming boss Chuck Wielgus bristled at any question of a doping violation. If the patches were just what Richard Quick said, where did they go?
It went barely without mention when swimming legend Matt Biondi was named in “Game of Shadows” the book about doping mastermind Victor Conte. According to the book, Biondi was a client of BALCO, the company that Conte used to provide “undetectable” performance enhancing drugs to athletes. It’s hard to imagine that Biondi was the only elite swimming athlete in the talent rich Bay Area that availed themselves of Conte’s “cutting edge” approach.
Sadly, it’s not only “elite” athletes who have felt strong enough motivation to do this in the US. One of the great shames of my coaching career was in my second year as an assistant at Penn. An athlete all but admitted steroid use to us (the coaching staff). You know what we did? Nothing. We closed our eyes and hoped it wasn’t true. I’d like to think I’d handle it differently if I got another chance, of course I probably would be even more ostracized than I already am.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of American swimming is that we are so successful, so dominant that a collective groupthink justifies, ignores or condones all sorts of horrible behaviors. We’re good at pointing the finger outwards but much harder to reflect on our own problems.
Last week, I watched two stories grip the swim coaching community. One was a story of doping, and then ultimately retirement. 30 year old Conor Dwyer, a decorated international swimmer for America, was revealed to have had testosterone pellets injected into him
Last week delivered the “bombshell” that the FBI is investigating USA Swimming, particularly around the captive insurance scheme they operated (the USSIC) but also in regards to their handling/intimidation around sexual abuse complaints.
Many people are enjoying the youtube series “Darkhorse” with Shane Tusup and Ilaria Cusinato. I am not one of those people. Through five episodes I had completely avoided it. On episode six, a friend texted me and finally broke my will.
In the case of (former) Indiana Associate Head Coach Mike Westphal, I found out his fate after one of my coaching friends jokingly texted me that he would “squash” me. Confused, I ended up getting him on the phone.
But I digress, this blog post is not about all that. I was speaking with someone (vague stories are all the rage now) who was curious about why a certain international team was essentially getting their PR done for them by a certain Swimswam “reporter”. I’ll explain all the scare quotes later, I promise.
I got my first “assistant” coach in 2013. I was an assistant myself, coaching at Georgia Tech. I had a big group (18 swimmers) and therefore I often found myself in the company of our volunteer assistant at the time.
I didn’t know what to do with her. I mean, I had ideas like holding a stop watch and taking times, sometimes I would assign her to work with a certain swimmer on a certain thing. I now realize that having an “assistant” in that capacity is a massive waste of resources.
As I stand here in 2019, I simply don’t believe in the concept of assistants. Nicholas Nassim Taleb sums up part of why in this tweet:
Grrrrreat advice I got: have no assistant. pic.twitter.com/yPcNoraAzn
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) May 13, 2017
Now, I say partially because there is a second part of this. You may infer from the above that I believe in working alone almost exclusively. Not at all. What I have come to understand is that no matter the relative level of experience or skill or knowledge, you should look for partners in what you do.
This is no semantic difference. An assistant is part of a hierarchy. A partner is not. The nature of many of our sporting structures is that they are very hierarchical, and for reasons well beyond pure performance, I think there’s a much better way to do it.
In order for someone to be at their best in a workplace, there are three things I find absolutely critical. One is that they are highly motivated to do good work. Another is that they have applicable strengths to bring to the table. Finally, that they can work autonomously, that is, they can apply their strengths without constant supervision.
Let’s talk about autonomy first, because it bleeds into the other two. Autonomy is about the ability to make decisions for yourself. None of us have “full” autonomy. We are always limited by external factors in our ability to make decisions.
However, you want someone that works with you, even if you are the boss, to be making a lot of decisions for themselves. Otherwise, you will waste time with them checking back with you about what way they should go, often missing critical windows to do the right thing.
In order to cultivate that kind of autonomy, you’re going to have to let go control a bit and be willing to have your assistant/partner do things differently than you. You’re going to have to have a forum for discussing those differences which both recognizes when you know better but also allows you to be wrong.
Which brings me to my second point. The great part about working with other people is that nobody has identical strengths. So, the synergy of two or more people working together is incredibly powerful. Hierarchies diminish the potential to leverage different strengths by creating more fixed paths for problem solving.
Again, you’re going to need a way to evaluate and discuss what strengths each of you bring to a partnership. I am a fan myself of the VIA Strengths, but you may find your own model.
The great thing about a model like the VIA strengths is that no matter the experience, knowledge or skill level of who you partner with, they have strengths. Knowing what they are is key to understanding how they might work autonomously to apply those strengths to the problems and challenges that you face.
Motivation is such a tricky subject. It often gets mixed with other terms. I don’t really like when it is used as a verb or an adjective. Let me give you a couple of examples:
“Coach is not motivating me”
or
“I don’t find this environment very motivating”
What I really think the two statements above are conflating is inspiration. Inspiration is very much about how external factors augment internal drive. Motivation, while influenced by external factors, is far more about internal emotional states and thinking.
How does it feel to be trusted and treated like a partner versus an “assistant”. Better yet, how does that feel when you’re keenly aware (and the person you work with/for is keenly aware) of just what strengths you have to bring to the table? I’d argue that’s an environment where I would feel a lot of motivation.
Within the first year of coaching in Denmark, I found myself pulled away for Junior National team duty. On training camp with the National Head Coach, he walked up on me with a furrowed brow typing a workout into an e-mail.
“What on earth are you doing?” he exclaimed. I explained. My assistants couldn’t write workouts themselves, so I just HAD to do this.
“Why have assistants if they can’t write a bloody workout?” was his retort. And he was write.
Later on in my coaching career, I actually scheduled a practice where I was not present, but my two assistants were. They designed the entire workout and coached it cooperatively.
They loved it, the swimmers loved it, and I should have found ways to do more of that or incorporate the same energy into the practices that we coached together. Good thing there’s still time.
Chris DeSantis coaching is currently on vacation, so if you have specific questions regarding this or other posts, expect some delay in response.
Readers of this blog know that I’ve taken some hard stances against coaching organizations governing bodies, and coaches. So it may come as a surprise to some that I’ve decided to be a guest speaker at the ISCA Hall of Fame Summit this coming August.
