Author: Vernon Gambetta

The following quote is from an interview with Jose Mourinho, Manager of Inter Milan: “At this level of pressure,” he said in heavily accented but pointed English, “if you are not self-confident, if you don’t believe in your work, you are a step down. If you are a leader and you can influence people’s attitudes and you want people to follow you up and be as strong as you are, you must be strong.”  How will your athletes believe in your methods if you do not have self belief and lead? It is amazing to me to see many coaches shirk this leadership role. The successful coaches are those who embrace the pressure and thrive on it. They use the pressure to create a positive energy that the whole organization feeds on. They set a standard of excellence that in turn determines a level of expectation that everyone is expected to achieve. This is true at any level of sport. Your level of expectation determines your level of achievement.

Phillip Bazzini wrote the following in response to my post about Jim Steen : Which leads me to a thought I have been pondering; if coaches’ success is measured almost exclusively in wins/losses, how do we measure our success as coaches of athletic development? Phil, this is a great question. Especially in light of the fact that I think we are in a crisis situation in regard to caoching today. There is a distict lack of trained coaches accross sports at the developmental level. The attitude is "anyone can coach." I don't think so. Just becaue you plyed the game at any level does not qualify you to coach. (That is another topic for another post) Let me begin by giving my opinion of a what makes up a good coach in general and then I will get specific to the Athletic Development coach. This is something that puzzled me from the day I got into coaching in 1969. I saw coaches that were recognized as great coaches that could not coach their way out of a wet paper bag. My observation then and now is that they were blessed with talent and were smart enough not to screw it up. I saw this at the high school where I coached. They were dominant in football for a long period, but when the talent ran out, the same coach doing the same things was terrible. He was not a very good coach. he coach football, not the people who played football. A good coach coaches people not the sport. I am also convinced that recognition does not necessarily make a good coach. There are so many coaches at junior high schools, high schools, small colleges, swim clubs and tennis clubs that consistently do a great job of developing the talent they have. Helping them to be the best they can be. There may not be any DI athletes come out of those programs but the kids learn their sport and have a great experience competing and improving. Good coaches are good teachers of fundamentals, they have discipline that is fair and firm. Great communication skills are very important to be a good coach, communication with everyone, the administration, parents, assistant coaches and most importantly the athletes. What makes a good Athletic Development coach? The same as above, the coach who makes the most of the talent they have to work with. Do the athletes consistently improve? Are they free of preventable injuries? At the pro level do they actually work with the players? In so many situations the AD coach is a figurehead that the players avoid like a plague because they do not have faith in the coaches ability. I know one coach who is considered a great S&C coach because of the championship teams he ‘worked “ with,  who never worked with more than four players on the team on a regular basis. So winning is not a validation of a good AD coach. How about being S&C coach of the year? Most of the time those are popularity contests, if you drink and socialize with the good old boys then you are a candidate for coach of the year. AD coaches are part of the support team. As support team members they should be anonymous, not upfront. The same holds true for doctors and trainers. The focus should be on the athlete. A good AD coach is organized, and knowledgeable. They have ability to communicate and motivate the athlete. They should have a growth mindset. They have a thorough plan and then implement that plan. They thoroughly understand the sport they are working with.  These are my opinions, I would be interested in your thoughts and ideas.

This is from today's New York Times. I think it really captures what Jim is about . It makes me count my blessing that I am able to work with people like this. New York Times February 25, 2009 Coach Keeps Truths and Swim Titles Flowing By KAREN CROUSE GAMBIER, Ohio — A two-lane highway that accommodates Amish buggies and cuts through the farmland of central Ohio may be the road to success. One day last spring, Ohio State’s football coach, Jim Tressel, made the hour-long drive from Columbus to learn from the coach Jim Steen, whose Kenyon College swimmers have won 47 N.C.A.A. Division III men’s and women’s team titles. Tressel, who has guided the Buckeyes to five Big Ten titles and three Bowl Championship Series title games in eight seasons, sat in Steen’s office and scribbled pages of notes one afternoon as Steen shared his philosophies. “Jim is one of the most intriguing people I’ve ever met,” Tressel said recently by telephone. Steen, 60, bears a resemblance to the actor John Lithgow and stars as Kenyon’s version of the absentminded professor. He is 6 feet 5 inches but walks with a slouch, as if he cannot bear to tower over others. His work attire is shorts and flip-flops, but he exudes a formality that is rooted in good manners. During the season, which runs from September through March, Steen frequently misplaces his cellphone or his eyeglasses, and he often forgets to eat. But his focus on his swimmers is so keen, it cuts through the chlorine haze of their lives. Many of the 33 women and 29 men on this year’s teams speak of Steen as if he were the Stroke Whisperer. They say he can finish their sentences, articulate their unspoken fears, read their minds. Kellyn Caldwell, a freshman, recalled a story told by her mother, Kris Kennard Caldwell, a former Kenyon swimmer who spent one season as Steen’s assistant. Her mother said that Steen studied one of his relay swimmers as she stood behind the blocks, then said: “She’s going to false start. I can tell.” Sure enough, she did. Judy Holdener, an associate professor of mathematics at Kenyon, said there was no scientific formula for Steen’s success. “You can copy his methods, but it’s the intangibles that set Coach Steen apart,” she said. “He has this ability to connect with people, to figure out what makes them tick. He’s a genius when it comes to that.” Before last week’s North Coast Athletic Conference championships, Steen met with the 14 men and 12 women who had surpassed the qualifying standards for the Division III national championships in March. They would not need to shave their arms or backs or training mileage for the conference meet. Steen, who speaks in a raspy voice and run-on sentences, emphasized the importance of qualifying four more men and six more women to reach the team cap. He was counting on the top swimmers, he said, to provide the waves of enthusiasm and inspiration that their shaved and tapered teammates could ride to national cuts and best times. Though swimming is an individual pursuit, Steen treats it as a team sport. He preaches to his athletes that everybody has a redeeming quality; as teammates, their job is to find the positive in one another and let go of the rest. “We need to be ready,” Steen said. “You guys as much as anybody will set the tone when we go into the conference meet.” He added, “We could not win it.” Then he reiterated one of his simple truths: “Not winning the war is not nearly as bad as not winning the battles.” The men and women finished second, behind Denison, while adding six automatic N.C.A.A. qualifiers: two men and four women. The loss ended the men’s conference winning streak at 11 and the women’s at 4. Steen, whose wife of 32 years, Marcie, and two daughters swam for him, is a big believer that the result should never overshadow the process. It is why he rarely mentions his 29 consecutive national men’s team championships or his 22 overall women’s crowns in his 33 years at Kenyon. (He arrived in 1975, and has taken two one-year sabbaticals.) Sitting in his office at Kenyon Athletic Center, which houses a beautiful 50-meter indoor pool, Steen swiveled to meet a visitor eye to eye. He leaned in close and said the pursuit of a single goal often inhibits the risk-taking and creative thinking necessary for personal growth. Steen challenges his swimmers to reshape their contours of success. In one mass e-mail message to them, he wrote, “Find a place within yourself where success and failure don’t matter, a place where you can engage in battle without compromise.” For the senior Michael Machala, success and failure last year became as blurred as his vision through his tears. Machala was caught in a numbers crunch, which happens regularly at Kenyon because more swimmers are on the team than are allowed to compete in a meet. After failing to achieve a national qualifying standard his first two years, Machala surpassed the cutoff time in the 100-yard butterfly at a last-chance meet. Machala was ecstatic. “Then reality set in,” he said. Machala was the Lords’ 19th qualifier, and they could enter only 18. He attended the meet as a spectator after accepting another of Steen’s simple truths: it is better to qualify for nationals and not swim than to have never swum fast. This year, Machala qualified for nationals in multiple events. Looking back on last year’s experience he said: “It was a really big time for mental growth. I don’t think I’d be where I am today if that hadn’t happened.” Steen preaches the art of adaptation, of reinventing yourself as circumstances dictate. One of his best breaststrokers, Tracy Menzel, a senior, came to Kenyon as a freestyle sprinter. Her best events were the 50 and 100 freestyles, but she hit a plateau as a freshman and declined. At Steen’s suggestion, she started training in the breaststroke. In four years, she has lowered her time in the 100 by more than six seconds. As a sophomore, she won the national title. Menzel said, “I wonder what would have happened if I had been at another school and hadn’t had a coach who said, ‘Let’s do something completely different than what we recruited you for.’ ” Asked which of Steen’s simple truths she has most tightly embraced, Menzel did not hesitate. “The one that’s really stuck with me,” she said, is, “you can approach anything two ways: under a threat or for the challenge.” The best swimmers at Kenyon would be challenged to make the traveling squads for the top Division I programs, though not for lack of training. They spend as much time working out as their counterparts at powerhouses like Michigan or Stanford. The difference is they are swimming for personal satisfaction and not for fear of losing scholarships, because no athletic scholarships are awarded in Division III. “Swimming here is like a partnership you enter into with Coach,” ” said Nat Carruthers, a junior from Boulder, Colo. The investment that Steen makes in each of his athletes seemed to impress Tressel. “One of the things that jumped out at me was Jim’s passion for working to be certain that his young people reach their potential,” Tressel said. “It’s even agonizing for him the thought of that not occurring.” Steen said that he told Tressel that he stopped watching the telecast of the 2007 B.C.S. title game because the favored Buckeyes were well on their way to a 41-14 loss to Florida. “I felt physically ill,” Steen told Tressel. “Because I could imagine that being us two months later: being heavily favored and losing.” Another of Steen’s simple truths comes from the Bible: The exalted will be humbled and the humble will be exalted. The road to success, he will tell you, has no neon signs to herald your arrival.