Author: Vernon Gambetta
Coaching is:
Teaching,Work, A Craft, Leading Change, Changing Habits, Fun, Uncomfortable, Continual Learning, Blending Art & Science, Accountability, Process, Results, Satisfying, Frustrating, and A Way of Life
Very Basic – WWWHW
No, I have not lost it. As any follower of my work knows I am a big believer in the basics. The most basic of the basics before anything else is Who, What, Why, How, When. Let’s look at each: WHO – Who are you coaching, is it young developing athletes or mature athletes? Males or females. All have different needs and qualities are you taking that into account? Never forget we coach people who do the sport not machines. WHY – Why are you planning on doing what you are going to do. Is it age and developmentally appropriate? Know why and invest in the why to make everything more meaningful. WHAT – This is the nitty gritty, the training methods and exercises. In many respects this is the easiest part of the process. Too many coaches start here and make the exercises and drills an end to themselves instead of a means to an end. HOW – Exactly what is necessary to insure how things are done are done with precision and intent. How are you giving athletes ownership and room to grow or is the HOW so rigid that the athlete becomes a robot? WHEN – This is the timing of the application of the application of the training. When in a career and when in a year? This entails understanding progression & regression and the concept of mastery Start here and invest in the process and you can’t go wrong.
Good Enough?
Good enough is never good enough! That seems harsh and leaves no room for nuance but watching people in my 52 years of coaching has convinced me that accepting good enough is a clear path to mediocrity. Too often good enough means going through the motions with no focus and minimal effort. It is being physically present without being there. I set a standard of expectations for myself and the athletes and coaches that I work with. It is an expectation that we expect perfect effort every session. Nothing less. It takes no talent, just focus and directed work to achieve or exceed your potential. As a coach I will not accept good enough. To be the best you can be is uncomfortable. It demands being comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time. There will be failure, but those perceived failures by others are learning opportunities for you. Take advantage, take risks never be satisfied with good enough. A quote from educator John Gardner is particularly appropriate: “Much education (coaching – my emphasis) is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving people cut flowers when we should be teaching them how to grow plants.” Let’s challenge ourselves and the athletes we work with to raise the level of expectation.
Connecting the Dots
Perhaps I am borderline ADD but as soon as I start to answer a question or explore something new my mind starts racing with ideas that connect. Some of the ideas are dead ends but others have proved very productive. Sometimes this frustrated me especially in school where everything was boxed in and rigid, it did not make for a great academic record until somehow, I got into graduate school at Stanford. All of sudden I found out that connecting the dots was what creative, productive people did. Being on a campus like Stanford with experts in so many disciplines opened a whole new world for me. Sometimes I would run into people that were so specialized they could not communicate outside their specialty. More often it was the opposite those that were great in one field were polymaths. Their interests were broad and deep. In the subsequent year’s I have specialized in being a generalist. I have spent countless hours connects dots. Some of which at first seemed unconnected and in fact unconnectable until I dug a bit deeper. I had to get away from conventional wisdom, the textbook if you will and see the world with different eyes. Here are a few thoughts on connecting the dots that may help you: “ABCD – Always be connecting the dots” Danny Myer, Founder of Shake Shack Look for the spaces between the spaces Fill in the blanks – Exploit space Make no assumptions Much of coaching is managing chaos, making chaos normal so you can do something about it. Connect a known idea in one field with an unknown idea in another field and run with it. Always read the fine print One person’s noise is another person’s music No physical quality exists. In isolation, therefore they cannot be trained in isolation “FIO – Figure it out” Dan Noble Look for structure where there is apparently none GAIN Vision Always look under the hood! It’s there you just have to look for it “Question are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go.” Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School Mix and remix ideas, disconnect and reconnect
The Golden Gate
Saturday morning on my morning walk around Lands End and then through the Golden Gate I saw the bridge and teared up. It looked different than it looked the day before. It had a golden look with the morning sun reflecting off the structure. It again looked like the symbol of freedom and tolerance that represents what the US is about. If you will, the west coast version of the Statue of Liberty that has welcomed millions into this country to pursue the American dream, including my parents 96 years ago. I also thought about those whose last view of America was the Golden Gate on their way to fight for our freedom. To them we owe the utmost respect and a tremendous debt of gratitude. Now, hopefully we can put the turmoil and madness of the past four years behind us, unite for the common good and win back the respect this great country deserves. Let’s go out of our way to be civil to each other, encourage healthy discourse and work together for only together and united can we be the best we can be.
Making Shapes
Shapes was brought to the forefront of my thinking about 10 years ago when I was working with one of my swim teams. The coach kept talking about getting smaller into the wall and taller off-the-wall off the wall into a streamline. I left the workout thinking what he was really telling the swimmers was to make different shapes. This got me thinking about the whole concept of shapes and what we needed to do to impact the athlete’s abilities to make the required shapes. What are shapes? Shapes are postures, poses, and positions that enable the athlete to effectively produce and reduce force in the desired skill. What shapes do you need to make? What shapes can you make? How do you reconcile the two? This must be evaluated in the context of their particular sport demands. It usually involves work on body awareness, some strengthening and some lengthening. In my system, shapes are a specific training module. Shapes can be improved significantly with consistent investment of time. In analyzing programs for the last 10 years in volleyball and swimming work on shapes averaged about 30 to 35 minutes per seven-day microcyle. It does not seem like much but over a training year in addition to the individual athletes homework to help them work on specific shapes that they were deficient in it is a significant investment. To make shapes effective it is imperative that it is connected to the desired movement skill in the sport. The athlete must understand this connection. It is really interesting to see how they enjoy it and how much they do relate to it until it becomes a part of their movement vocabulary. Use video of the desired sport shapes and then relate exercise in the shapes routine to help them understand the connection. For example, the overhead squat for a swimmer is a categorized as a strength exercise but it's more than a strength exercise, it represents an essential shape coming off the wall and transferring into a streamline. It is easy to show this to the swimmer. Now the shape on dryland has transfer for them to the water. Shapes are FUNdamental therefore it is essential to challenge the athlete to make better shapes and have fun doing it.
Systematic Sport Development
Sport systems have always fascinated me, even before I started coaching. When I was in college, we played the great San Diego State Football teams coached by Don Coryell. It was obvious they had a system and played to that system and recruited players for that system. My junior year in college we had a clinic at Fresno State and the defensive line coach at San Diego State, John Madden, was the featured speaker. He gave insights into the system, how he selected players for the positions and what he did to develop them. Needless to say, that confirmed what I had seen on film and on the field, it left a deep impression on me of the need to have a system if you wanted to have sustained excellence. At the same time, I watched Bud Winter’s great San Jose State track teams. The knock on them was they had talent, so it didn’t matter what they did. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bud Winter took that talent and refined it and developed it through a well-defined system. The lesson here to me as a young coach once again that even if you have talent it is only through a system can you maximize that talent. My next exposure to a systematic approach to athlete development was the Bowerman system at University of Oregon. I would say that this had the biggest influence on my subsequent coaching regardless of the sport. In 1969 when I stared coaching, I was interested in developing my own system that was eclectic or if you will a hybrid of the systems that I could study and that I had seen firsthand. The more I studied and observed I could see that consistent performance was a product of some kind of a system. Sometimes very rigid and clearly defined and other times less structured. The proof was always in the pudding. Systems beat chaos. Systems with talent produced repeatable sustained excellence. 52 years later I am still enamored by systems. I have developed and refined my system over the years. It has been a process. A system lends order and structure to enable the coach and athlete to focus on the process. A viable system is not rigid and confining, instead it is organic and liberating. It provides a framework to build on. They system was always designed to fit the athlete, not the other way around. The system revolves around a well-articulated philosophy and clear core beliefs that everyone lives by. If those core beliefs are not well articulated and practiced, you have no system I urge you to take a look at your system and other systems. What can you learn from others? What are you doing well? What can you do better?
“Accidental Fitness”
“Accidental Fitness’ is a great concept articulated in a recent GAIN Coffee talk by University of Portland, Assistant Cross Country and Track Coach Jack Mullaney. Essentially “Accidental Fitness” is that small edge of fitness you get from general life activities, like walking to class, perhaps working in the yard or just moving meaningfully. Due to the pandemic he noticed that his athletes were not getting this. They were sitting more and moving less. Think about this, it does make a difference. I notice with the swimmers I am working with are complaining about sore necks from sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time. Something to be aware that can make a difference. Thanks, Jack, for this great concept.