Author: Vernon Gambetta
Thought Provoking
"The truth is more important than the facts." – Frank Lloyd Wright You can spin the facts, but it is harder to hide the truth.
A Sad Time for US Track & Field
Around the world successful sports and sporting nations know that that the following paradigm must be in place and fine-tuned. That paradigm is simple: 1) A system must Athlete Centered – they are the ones who perform in the competitive arena. 2) Coach Driven – they prepare the athlete, provide stability and continuity, they are the cornerstones. 3) Administratively Supported – This is pretty self explanatory, get out of the way and support the athlete and the coach. For years USAT&F and it’s predecessor TAC has had it backwards. For them it is administratively centered, athlete driven and oh by the way, as an after thought, we have somebody out there called coaches, lets crap all over them. The events of the past several days in regard to the Coaching Education only serve to underscore this. I was fortunate, along with Dr. Joe Vigil and Gary Winckler to be one of the three founders of the program. I also served as the first director for the formative years. It was a program designed by coaches to raise the standard of coaching through education and to empower the coach through knowledge. There were no political agendas, but immediately there was very powerful and vocal; opposition form the old guard left over from the AAU days. They saw it as a threat to their little fiefdom, but thanks to Berny Wagner who pushed it from the inside we got it off the ground. And it really took off, much to the oppositions chagrin. I was not involved for a period of time, although I followed it quite closely. I got back into it in 2001 as a teacher at some of the schools. It was apparent that the program was a great success; in many ways it was the most successful program in USAT&F. It raised the standard of coaching, it trained coaches whose athlete's won medals in international competition. Despite the success I knew that the opposition was still there from1983, they were just waiting until they could get at the program and compromise its structure and integrity. Well it took until this year with the reorganization and the committee to study USAT&F to finally begin to undue all that had been done. There is no question that the new regime has a very strong political agenda that is resistant to change and innovation. Their agenda is to feather their nests and protect their constituencies, make it administratively centered and keep coaches in the dark. This demands a strong call to action. All of us who are concerned about the great sport of Track & Filed and coaching must stand up and do something. Flood the national office with emails and letters, even phone calls, coaches must be heard, the coaching education program must go on in the vision of all those who labored so hard to build it to where it is today. If you have a blog write about it. If you are on Twitter, Tweet about it. I am not a politician, but I am pissed, this is an insult to coaches and coaching. EVRYONE WHO HAS GONE THROUGH THE PROGRAM GET INVOLVED AND SAVE THE INTERGRITY OF COACHING EDUCATION.
Help them be remarkable
"To help young people become remarkable, we need to challenge them with lessons they will use for the rest of their lives" Rafe Esquith in Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire. Reading this last night caused me to reflect on the teachers and coaches who challenged me with those kind of lessons. Thanks Mr Keuhl and Father Aleander, you gave me a chance. I hope each day I can give a lesson or a workout to the young people I work with that will help make them remarkable in sport and life.
No Pain, No Gain?
No pain, no gain was a very prevalent attitude when I began coaching in the late Sixties, surprisingly it continues to persist today in certain circles. I have never been able to figure out the appeal of this approach. Proper training in the weight room or on the field demands that the athlete be pushed to test their limits at various times in training. Some workouts are very difficult and other workouts will almost seem easy. This ebb and flow of hard efforts interspersed with easier efforts is essential allow for proper adaptation. The no pain, no gain approach is a direct outgrowth of the fact that historically Strength & Conditioning was a field driven by football. It was the football strength & conditioning coach who set the tempo for the programs because they were often the head strength coach. The mastodon mentality that pervaded football in the fifties and the sixties served to reinforce the no pain, no gain approach. In those days players were not allowed to take their helmets off during practice and not allowed to drink during practice. The more it hurt, the more pain the better. The whole goal was to make the players tough, so without pain there was no gain! So they thought. I know this approach does not work; it makes you tired but not better. It is totally Darwinian only the strong survive, and no one thrives. I do not know about you, but I want my players ready on game day. That should be the goal of training.To achieve that, the training load and intensity must vary. A thoroughly conditioned athlete who is supremely confident in his or her physical preparation will be mentally and physically tough. Physically and psychologically an athlete can only go to the well so many times before it will begin to deplete their reserves both physically and psychologically. There is no doubt in my mind that a good sport coach or a strength and conditioning coach can get athletes to train and perform beyond levels that the athletes ever thought possible. To achieve this does not mean you have to inflict pain. Pushing the envelope is uncomfortable. Athletes in training learn over time to get comfortable with a certain level of discomfort through gradual adaptation to stress. Train your athletes to thrive in the competitive arena by training intelligently.
Reading
I love to read. I think it is becoming a lost skill. Too boring I keep hearing. In another post I will talk above how I acquired my passionate love of reading. Before that I want to share with you a couple of paragraphs from an amazing book I am reading. A colleague recommended it. The book is Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire – Methods and Madness Inside Room 56 by Rafe Esquith. I sure wish I would have had this book 41 years ago when I started teaching and coaching. It is a must read for teachers, coaches, and parents. I am thinking about buying some copies for our local school board. I wonder if Arne Duncan has read this? "Teaching our children to read well and helping them develop a love of reading should be our top priorities. People seem to understand this. Millions are spent on books and other reading material, celebrities make public service announcements, and thousands of hours are spent training teachers. The spin-doctors at various publishing companies tell us that our students are doing better, but honest people know this is simply not the case. Concerned teachers have learned not to bother raising their voices, because powerful textbook companies have carefully prepared answers to anyone who points that the emperor has no clothes. Young teachers are afraid of being crushed by bureaucrats whose only real mission is to keep selling their product. As testing services compete to rake in millions of dollars, nervous school districts anxiously await the latest results. And year after year, most children do not become passionate lifelong learners." "It’s complicated. There is a lot of finger pointing. But to borrow a phrase from another big fat book that won a Pulitzer Prize, our children are victims of a sort of “confederacy of dunces.” Powerful forces of mediocrity have combined to prevent perfectly competent children from learning to love reading, these forces include television, video games, poor teaching, poverty, the breakup of the family, and a general lack of adult guidance."
Gravity – A Movement Constant
Gravity will kick your ass Gravity wins every time So does gravity suck? No way! Gravity can be your friend Gravity instructs if you are willing to learn from it Gravity can be chanced and enhanced Learn to cheat it and use it to your advantage and you will be great! Run Fast, Jump High and Throw Far!
Discipline – Outdated Concept or Necessary?
I spend a lot of time with friends who are coaches. Invariably the topic turns to today’s athletes, and to one question: “Are they different? They certainly are different in many ways from the athletes of 1969, when I started coaching. But the biggest differences are not in the athletes themselves, but in the society we live in. One of those differences has been a breakdown in discipline. Discipline is the foundation for excellence, and self-discipline is the highest form of discipline. Of course, for youngsters to learn self-discipline they must have guidance: what is right, and what is not right? That guidance takes the form of rules. Coaches today have become reluctant to set rules, because then they must enforce them. That could be uncomfortable. What if a parent challenges them? Will they receive backing from the administration, from the school board, the principal, the vice-principal, and the athletic director? That’s certainly a legitimate concern, when anything from an attack by a parent to the coach’s job to a lawsuit could be at stake. My conversation with various coaches who have been coaching for more than twenty years indicates that such backing from the school system, or lack of it, is the basic problem. Coaches believe in discipline just as they always have, but they do not have the backing they used to have. Younger coaches are reluctant to set rules and enforce discipline because they will not be popular and they know they will not be backed. What is the answer? Sport is not isolated from society; it is a microcosm of the society in which we live. So it is naïve to think that the problems that exist in society will not exist on our teams. For the young athlete to learn discipline demands guidance. We as coaches must provide that guidance. We must set the standards by fair rules that carefully lay out the behavioral expectations involved in being part of the team. These must be written. They must be clear so that there is no room for debate. Essentially as the coach you are providing a structure to begin to improve their abilities and their enjoyment of the sport. I think many of today’s athletes crave the structure we can give them, even though it may not be part of their everyday life outside of sport. But they have to understand that it’s a two-way street – that they can’t just follow the rules they like, but sometimes they must obey rules they don’t like. That’s the price they have to pay for the structure the coach provides. Discipline is a responsibility of coaching. If we do not enforce discipline then we are shirking our duty as coaches. We must understand that we are not coaching a sport; we are coaching young men and women who are competing in a sport. We owe it to them to provide the most positive experience that we can. Through firm and fair discipline we can create a favorable learning environment that will allow them to reach their potential. How can we do this? We can start by getting everyone on our side. You and your coaching staff should decide on the behavior that you expect of your athletes and then set the rules that will define those behaviors. Review them with your athletic director and if need be, the principal. Get them to buy in and support you before any challenges are made. It might be even better if you can get your athletic department to set rules that members of every team at your school must observe, to insure consistency from sport to sport. To those general rules, you can add rules specific to your sport. And if you feel comfortable doing so, you might want to involve the senior athletes and the parents in the process. If they’re part of the process, it’s easier for them to buy in. Once the rules are set, schedule a mandatory parents’ meeting to go over the rules and responsibilities for their youngsters to be on the team. This meeting should also educate the parents to practice procedures, nutrition guidelines, lettering policy and criteria for varsity selection. Take the opportunity to educate the parents about the sport. I repeat this is a mandatory meeting, not optional. Both the parent and the child must sign a statement that they will observe the rules. If they do not they will not be allowed to participate. Emphasize that to be an athlete is special. It is a privilege to participate, not a right. There should also be a pledge from the coaches as to the behavioral standards the athletes and parents can expect from the coach. The ultimate goal is to create an atmosphere of mutual respect. Remember as coaches we have a responsibility to teach our athletes. Very few will compete past the high school level, but they all can have the great growing-up experiences of testing their limits and being part of a team. The beauty of track is that there is a spot for everyone. Discipline will help insure a positive experience. It is not outdated, and it never will be.
Odds and Ends
If you did not see this Frontline from this Tuesday on PBS, it is worth watching http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ it is Titled Digital _ Nation life on the virtual frontier. It answered many questions for me and raised many more. Is all our supposed digital progress a zero sum gain? Super Hype – More people watched the Champions League final last year than will watch the Stupor Bowl. Real football is much more exciting than our static version. For every stroke in the Olympic final in rowing Matthew Pinsent trained for 15 hours! The road to a gold medal is paved with sacrifice and sweat. For those of you who are interested you can follow me on twitter @coachgambetta Read Linchpin – Seth Godins new book. It is a game changer! Finished it last night going to reread it this weekend. Full of gems. Some spots left in GAIN Apprentorship – looking for motivated professionals who want to define Athletic Development. Special scholastic price available. What is the infatuation with the Functional Movement Screen? Multi Tasking = Distraction, confusion and mediocre output. If you think it works look closely at result, it does not. I did not need research to tell me that. "When you make the complicated simple, you make it better. But when you make the complex simple, you make it wrong." Dave Gray Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company