Growing the Athlete

Growing the athlete is an organic not a mechanistic process. For
years I have used the metaphor of building the athlete but over the past few
years I have become increasingly uncomfortable with that metaphor. Certainly
building is part of the process, but I find that building evokes a mechanistic
image of constructing, of replacing parts as opposed to the cultivation of
synergistic relationships between training means and methods and the systems of
the body. Certainly the whole is much more that the sum of the parts as the
athlete is nurtured and develops throughout their career. It takes time and
timing of the appropriate stimuli for the level of the athlete’s
stage of
development. My father was a gardener and I remember the first time he took to
work with him, I was probably ten or eleven years old. As any youngster I was
impatient and full of questions. I wanted to know why this patch of garden had
no plants. Why we had to water this area and fertilize another section. Why we
had to trim these plants and let others grow. I wanted to know why he didn’t
plant all the seeds at the same time. He explained it to me but I must admit
that I did not fully understand it until years later after I had started
coaching. The carrots had to planted at a certain time. The winter and summer
squash were different. Some vegetables thrived in the cold of winter and others
need the heat of summer. The same is true with the nurturing of the athlete.
You must carefully cultivate the soil by developing physical competencies. Then
you plant appropriate levels of training of the various physical capacities.
You allow those capacities to grow and develop and then you carefully harvest
them in competition. Nowhere is anything forced, it is a long-term time
consuming process that requires constant attention from the gardener/coach.