Author: Vernon Gambetta
Good Quotes
The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. – Ralph W. Sockman At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved – if it can be achieved at all – within the next few hundred years. – Arthur C. Clarke Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. – Nikola Tesla
Current Reading
Just finished reading two excellent books, both of which I highly recommend. The first is probably more related to coaching: Change By design – How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations And Inspires Innovation, by Tim Brown. Brown is now head of IDEO, the premier design firm in the world. I have immersed myself in studying design and how design influences innovation and change; of course my interest has been to apply these ideas and concepts to teaching and coaching. I firmly believe that innovation in coaching is going to have come from outside. Sport and coaching are too into monkey see, monkey do. We have to look beyond tradition and what is today considered current best practice. This book really nails it, especially his last two chapters. If you are interested in this area I also recommend The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley & and Jonathan Littman and The Ten faces of Innovation:IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization by Thomas Kelley and Jonathan Littman. These books have certainly influenced me to take another fresh look at the whole process of coaching and Athletic Development. The other book The Fourth Star – Four Generals And The Epic Struggle For The Future Of The United States Army by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe. This one is right out of today’s headlines. It tracks the rise of Gen. John Abazid, Gen. George Casey Jr, Gen Peter Chiarelli and Gen David Patraeus. It is fascinating to see how these men rose through the ranks to be in the positions there are in today. How each of them worked to change the huge monolithic organization, the US Army. It is a great study in change, innovation, communication and leadership methods and styles. This book certainly provides a behind the scenes look at today’s news.
!!!!!!!!!!!
Whatever you do each day put an exclamation point on it. No matter how small or big. Make a difference. You can!
Leadership through Respect
I saw this in the current Sports Illustrated in an article about the young NFL head coaches. I thought it was quite enlightening given the prevalence of military metaphors in coaching. Bob Mayer, a former Green Beret who writes books about leadership, says coaches get military authority backward, viewing players as infantrymen—interchangeable and replaceable—rather than as Special Forces elites. Mayer says coaches typically demand respect as a condition of employment. Instead, they should award respect up front and challenge players not to lose it. "A lot of these younger coaches are operating off a World War II mind-set," Mayer says. "They're about 60 years out of date."
Success, Failure and Learning
I am always interested in learning. I want to learn why teams win and why teams lose. Over the years I have found it interesting when and how coaches and teams learn. I am reminded of an incident about twelve years ago with the Tampa bay Mutiny in the MLS. The previous week we had lost a match one nil and the head coach went ballistic after the lose. The following week we won a match one nil and the coach was ecstatic, jumping up and down and praising everyone in the locker room. Walking off the field after practice of the game that we won, one of our forwards a veteran player from Italy who had player for several top teams in Serie A and on the Italian World Cup team said to me: “ Prof (In Europe the fitness guys are called Prof) we win everything good, we lose everything bad, not so.” He was spot on in the “win” we had played terrible, no team concept, poor execution of basics but had been lucky and scored on a mistake. In the lose the opposite was true. We had played brilliantly, great team play, crisp passing and execution but the other team scored a lucky goal. The coach had missed the opportunity for two teachable moments. The moral of the story, if you look at great teams and coaches, they maintain an even keel. They learn from both the successes and the failures. Improvement is all about constant learning. The great ones focus on the process. Sure winning ugly is still winning, but generally it does yield championships. Consistency is what is rewarded, consistently both mentally and physically.
Evaluating Results – Follow-up from Jim Ricahrdson
The following is from Jim Richardson, Women’s swim coach at University of Michigan. I have had the pleasure of working with Jim in an advisory capacity for the last six years as he has evolved and fine tuned his total program. It has been a great educational experience for me to work with a coach like this who is a true professional, willing to share and keep innovating. I know if I were a young coach I would be hanging out in his office every free moment I had, eager to learn. Jim response to the post from a member of the Michigan S&C staff disparaging his swim program and my involvement: Well I guess it would be appropriate for me to have some comment here, even though I have more important things to do than to defend my program and philosophy. While I appreciate the statistical analysis of our Big Ten performances through the years, my primary goal was always to perform our best at the NCAA Championships. Most years we have a number of swimmers who do not peak for the conference championship and that certainly has an effect on our conference placing, especially in years when we are not as talent laden (i.e. 2006). If you look closely at our NCAA placings we were trending down beginning in 2000 and bottoming out at 27th in 2002. During the 2002-03 season I began to reassess every aspect of our program. At the end of that year I asked Vern if he would consider working with us because what we were doing was not working – over 60% of our swimmers had recurring shoulder problems and we were not improving at the rate I thought we should. We began a basic functionally-based program designed by Vern in the fall of 2003. That program ensured that we would have a logical progression from basic strength to strength endurance to event oriented power. Within 3 months our shoulder problems all but disappeared. We swam faster in practice, in meets, and we had almost universal breakthrough peak performance swims. From 2004-2008 our NCAA performances were very solid based on our talent level (excepting 2006 when I screwed up our parametric progression, and 2009 when we were without our top 2 swimmers). In 2007 and 2008 we were the highest placing Big Ten team (9th) at the NCAA championships, which was one of our goals for each of those teams. In addition, in that time period we were the only Big Ten team to have an NCAA and USA Swimming individual champion – a swimmer who developed within the program. While I am not naive enough to believe that a team's performance depends totally on any single variable, I do believe that the selection and integration of those variables is the key to improved performance. Each of us (sport coaches) has to determine what we believe and why we believe it. Having a formal education background in exercise physiology and biomechanics I believe I have a fair grip on what we are trying to accomplish in the developmental process. Nonetheless, I have tried to remain open to different methodologies and philosophies. However, in the end there is only so much time and I need to ensure that we are getting the biggest "bang for our buck" – need to do versus nice to do, as Vern often says. I have tried a number of approaches to dryland performance development in my 39 years of coaching swimming at the international level. I have been influenced by many people in my career. All I can say is that I have great confidence in the things that Vern and I have implemented. I also understand that many others have contributed to this knowledge base and that it continues to be a work in progress. A final word on "success." Some of us are blessed to work with highly talented individuals. I've never believed that the performances of the most talented or placings at championships are the best criteria to use to evaluate the “success” of a program. Talent has a way of "forgiving" a number of mistakes in the training process (not to mention the recovery process). I look at the slower, less talented swimmers in our program and ask – "Are they getting faster?" To me, they are the most accurate measure of whether what we are doing is working or not. So when we have swimmers who have never placed in the top 24 at the US Junior Championships prior to coming to Michigan, now placing in the top 16 at the US World Championship Trials or qualifying for the NCAA Championships – well, they are getting faster. In swimming, at the end of the day, that is the only performance measure that really matters to me.
Back to the Roots
My roots are as a coach are deep in Athletics (Track & Field) so the opportunity to spend three days in Puerto Rico totally immersed in Athletics was a rich and fulfilling experience. In Athletics, I believe because of its very subjective nature, how fast, how high, high far, there is no BS. You need to do basic things very well and be able to repeat them consistently to have even moderate success. Listening to Wolfgang Ritzdorf, Gary Winckler and Klaus Bartonietz speak and getting to hang out with them was a great experience. It reminded again of the necessity to balance all components of training to insure success. Strength must be in context of all the other biomotor qualities. If you want to get to the essence of training immerse yourself in Athletics, the mother of all sports.
A Means to an End
Strength training and for that matter all training is a means to an end – improved injury free performance in the competitive arena. Because of the emphasis on this area, I am going to focus on strength training. For over 40 years I have searched for the answer to the question of how much strength is enough. I am convinced now that there is no single answer. I now think of strength training as coordination training with appropriate resistance and assistance that will put us on the correct path to designing effective strength training programs that complement the other physical qualities and transfer to the competitive arena. Appropriate is a key word – Certainly appropriate for the event or position, definitely appropriate for the individual, the time of the year and the stage in a career. This is the opposite of chasing numbers in the weight room on specified lifts, it much more about quality of movement, rhythm, tempo and controlling their bodies, not to mention more mindfully challenging to the athlete. We should NEVER lose sight of the ultimate goal.