Author: Vernon Gambetta

There seems to be a wide range of opinion on the ability to change running mechanics. I am off the opinion that you change running mechanics. This was reinforced to me yesterday when I was watching the baseball team that I work with do some running. Because of Christmas vacation I had not seen them in awhile, the head coach was doing the running so I was able to stand a little further back and observe. The changes in running mechanics were nothing short of astounding. It stood out in contrast to the players who had just come out from football. That being said it is not an easy process, it is time consuming and demands tremendous focus and attention. It is not just about doing sprint drills, in fact that is a minor part of it. I think it is matter of making connections. Proper strengthening throughout the kinetic chain is crucial. For nearly thirty years I have used the same system – PAL System™ an acronym for Posture, Arm Action and Leg Action. We use that to analyze the mechanics and then attack the areas where the athlete must focus to improve. I never stray very far from the whole action. There are specific drills for each component, but those drills are quite simple and never really isolate, they just highlight an area. It takes time. How much time? In general I would say six weeks to see significant changes. After that it requires constant attention to maintain the changes. Also it is important to recognize that each athlete has a movement signature, a little personal quirk that is essentially a movement fingerprint. I have learned to ignore those most of the time, because they do not significantly impact running form and they are tough to eradicate. Proper strength training and Plyometric work play a huge role. I will talk about that in another post. In summary if you take a systematic approach based on sound biomechanical and motor learning principles running mechanics can be significantly improved.

Those are harsh words so when I was channel surfing last week and heard those words I stopped surfing and listened. One of the ESPN pundits, a former pro football player(so of course he must know everything about football and even more about strength training) was expounding on the recent failure and perceived deficiencies of a pro football team. He identified the fact that even though there had been three coaches in recent years for that team the only common denominator had been the strength coach, so he must be the source of the problem. He had somehow survived all three coaching regimes. I was struck with the irony of this. Maybe strength coaching has truly come of age when the “experts” are pointing fingers at the strength coach. I don’t think that is the case. In so many professional situations across sports the strength coach is window dressing.  Get this, many NFL teams assign the strength coach as the “get back coach” on game day to keep the players away from the sideline so they won’t be penalized. I take affront at that, they don’t ask the trainer or the assistant line coach to do that. Many teams do not require the players to workout with the strength coach. Across sports the players have their own trainers and therapists, either because they feel the team’s personnel are not competent or they prefer the personal attention. Now that this is out in the open I think it is something that must be addressed. I was fortunate to work in a situation in professional baseball where the program was mandatory and we endeavored to make it cutting edge in all aspects from performance, to prevention and therapy. I had the backing of ownership and management. I am not sure that today, with a couple of notable exceptions that this is the case. In 1998 with the US World Cup soccer team I had the opposite experience. At best I was the warm-up coach. I was given a maximum of 20 minutes a day to help prepare the players for success in one of the toughest tournaments in the world. We were terrible, eliminated in the first round, very unfit. Was it my fault, yes to a certain extent. I should have never taken the job with those restraints. In 2003 my successor was given up to an hour a day. The result the highest finish ever by a US team in the world cup and a very fit team. It was a component that was emphasized and supported by the staff. I think that the strength coaches have themselves to blame for the current lack of support and respect. As I have said many times the label “strength coach” marrows the definition of the job and the perception of all those involved, that is one reason I have been pushing for the designation of athletic development coach. It implies a multi dimensional job that entails preparing the athlete for all the demands of the sport.

In training to gauge progress we need to have landmarks, either tests or workouts that allow us to measure progress or lack of progress toward the training and competition goals. In my experience these measures are often arbitrary because they do not relate to the individual athlete or team that is doing the training. I know this is something I have experienced in the training process with programs I have administered. The challenge then is to make the measurable meaningful. In my experience the best way to make the measurable meaningful is to relate it to competition. After all isn't the whole purpose of training to prepare for peak effort in the competitive arena? Sure it is important to have tests and progress indicators along the way, but those must be a means to an end and part of the big picture. Just because an athlete can jump X distance in a standing triple jump, throw Y distance in an overhead shot throw or bench Z amount does not necessarily indicate that they are ready to compete. To be meaningful these measures need to be placed in the context of the training year and the career. Once again it is not about chasing a number, it is putting all the pieces of the puzzle in place so the athlete can compete to the best of his or her ability.

I spent New Year ’s Eve working with the Kenyon swim team, what a party! Talk about an uplifting way to end the old and start the new. These kids are great. Focused and motivated. They come to Sarasota every winter break for ten days to train. It has been really neat to see their progress since September. They have made significant strength gains and some huge body composition changes. It was really cool to see one of the female swimmer doing one are dumbbell snatches with 40 pounds as part of a complex – that is strong! I am looking forward to a few more sessions with them while they are here. People want to know the secret of their success; well it is great coaching and good old fashioned focused hard work. No better way to kick off the new year than getting to hang out with a bunch of champions working to get better.

Happy New Year – 2009 begins my 40th year of coaching. Sometimes it seems like yesterday that I started and sometimes it feels like a century ago. The other day when I was swimming I was reflecting on the way things were in 1969 versus how they are now, it was certainly a different and simpler world in many respects. Please do not take this as an old man reflecting on the good old days. Everything was not better back then, but things were just different. I am very lucky to have a career that has spanned several eras in sport so I have seen many trends and fads come and go. I am also very fortunate to have a foundation in the great sport of track & field, even though over the past 39 years I have worked with many other sports it is the principles that I learned as a track coach that serve as the foundation for everything I do. We did not call it functional training, we just called it training. Good training is based on sound principles and it works in all environments and with all populations. Then Coaches were certified teachers Now Anyone can coach, some cursory requirements of certification Then             Mandatory daily physical education K -12, including meaningful fitness testing Now No mandatory daily physical education, watered down fitness tests Then             Sports centered in the schools at the elementary, middle school and high school   level Now Sport taken over by clubs away from school Then Outside competition restricted to summer break Now Outside competition year around Then Cost to athlete and parent minimal Now Cost astronomical Then             The core was the center of the apple Now             It is everything Then Fundamentals taught and emphasized Now Fundamentals an afterthought, it is all about style and show Then Competition limited centered around the academic calendar Now Competition unlimited Then             Television coverage limited to special events and a game of the week. No ESPN or regional sports networks Now 24 hour sports coverage on multiple channels Then No scouting services Now Scouting services for elementary school athletes Then Very limited opportunities for girls Now Unlimited opportunities for girls God willing I am looking forward to many more productive years of coaching and teaching. The opportunities for excellence are still there. I am blessed to have a supportive family and some great coaches and athletes to work with. Can’t think of anything better.

This a story on Don Wakamatsu, the new manager of the Seattle Mariners. I had the pleasure of working with Don when he was a player with the White Sox. He came to us as a released player with limited future because of recurrent shoulder problems. He worked his butt off to regain the ability to throw and actually made to the big leagues for a short time in 1991. Don was a player that the other players respected because of his determination and leadership. I wish him all the best in his new position. New York Times December 26, 2008 Seattle Manager Hopes What He Does Highlights Who He Is By HUGO KUGIYA As a major league catcher, Don Wakamatsu was a footnote: 18 games for the Chicago White Sox in 1991. But he could say proudly that he played baseball at every level. Wakamatsu’s true distinction might have been overlooked but for his surname. He was a minority twice over, not just the great-grandson of a Japanese dairy farmer, but also one of the few Asian-Americans to play in the major leagues. “My failures put me in a position to be where I am now,” Wakamatsu, 45, said. “One of my goals as a player was to bring recognition to my heritage. Since that didn’t come to fruition, I’m especially fortunate to be where I am now.” When he was introduced last month as the Seattle Mariners’ manager, the first of Asian descent in the majors, Wakamatsu talked about serving as a metaphorical steppingstone for other Asian-Americans in sports. “I dived into my past, going back to visit my grandma, learning more about my family,” he said by telephone from his home in Texas. “They went through a lot of things. It meant something, and I thought I ought to know more about it since I wasn’t exposed to it much as a child.” The implications of his heritage first struck him when a government check arrived in the mail in the late 1980s, his father’s share of reparations for the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. Wakamatsu’s father, Leland, was born in the Tule Lake camp in California, just south of the Oregon border. “I didn’t understand what the check was for,” Wakamatsu said. “You don’t study that stuff in school. My grandparents never talked about it. I remember my dad’s reaction, that it was all too little, too late.” Wakamatsu’s paternal grandparents, James and Ruth, lost their home when they reported to Tule Lake, the largest camp. Ruth worked in the mess hall; James was a carpenter. After the war, Wakamatsu’s grandparents and their children moved into a pickers’ cabin, then a converted barn. James started to build a house nearby out of salvaged panels, which he bought off a truck from a man who said they came from the barracks of an internment camp, perhaps even Tule Lake. They live in that house to this day. Wakamatsu’s grandparents grew pears, apples and cherries to supplement their incomes. James worked in a mill, Ruth in a fruit-packing plant, putting in 30 years at their jobs. They can hardly comprehend that their grandson makes his living from a game. “We’ve worked ever since we were kids,” Ruth, 91, said. “Our whole lives, we were too busy working to think about anything else.” Over the years, Wakamatsu’s curiosity about his heritage has grown along with his influence in baseball, the sport closest to the hearts of Japanese-Americans. From a friendship with the baseball historian Kerry Nakagawa came detailed descriptions of Japanese-Americans who played organized baseball in the internment camps. Wakamatsu imagined the game he loved played behind coils of barbed wire, and wondered just how little he knew about his past. He was an all-conference catcher at Arizona State for three seasons, but only after he left did he learn that the university’s first baseball coach, Bill Kajikawa, was Japanese-American. Kajikawa, he learned, served in World War II, as did several of Wakamatsu’s great-uncles, with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the mostly Japanese-American battalion that was among the war’s most decorated units. Wakamatsu talked often about “those who came before me,” the men in his family, Kajikawa and other forebears like his boyhood idol, Lenn Sakata, perhaps the most successful Asian-American baseball player. “I love the game,” Wakamatsu said, “but I’m not in the game just to say, I was a big-league manager. I want to see how many players I can help. And if I can be some kind of positive influence for the Japanese and Asian-American community in Seattle, well, I have a greater chance of doing that there than in Pittsburgh.” He added: “I couldn’t have scripted a better place to be. It is coming home in a sense.” His paternal great-grandparents, Eataro and Hisa Wakamatsu, arrived a century ago in Orting, Wash., about 40 miles from Seattle, and settled farther south in Hood River, Ore., where Wakamatsu was born. His Irish-American mother, Sandy, a dental assistant, and his father, an ironworker, came from families who farmed the river valley. Although Wakamatsu grew up mostly in the Oakland suburb of Hayward, Calif., he spent many summers and holidays in Hood River, performing chores in his grandparents’ orchard. He watched his relatives pound mochi, a Japanese rice cake, as they celebrated the new year. He sat wordlessly at the foot of his great-grandmother, who spoke no English. She addressed him in Japanese, knowing he could not understand her. “I can still see her face laughing,” Wakamatsu said. “What a shame, I thought, that I couldn’t speak Japanese.” Although the number of Asian-Americans has grown to about 15 million from roughly 1.5 million in 1960s, when Wakamatsu was born, few have become sports stars. Champion figure skaters like Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle Kwan are exceptions, along with the tennis player Michael Chang and Apolo Anton Ohno, who has won five Olympic medals in speedskating. The burden Asian-Americans in sports view as their own is being perceived as not fully American. Oakland Athletics catcher Kurt Suzuki, for instance, said fans and sometimes players assumed he was Japanese. “It’s entertaining to see how many fans absolutely expect me to be Japanese,” said Suzuki, 25, who grew up in Hawaii. “I just look at them with this blank stare.” The first two Asian-Americans to play in the majors were also from Hawaii. Pitcher Ryan Kurosaki made seven relief appearances with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1975. Two years later, Sakata became the second, playing most of his 11 seasons with the Baltimore Orioles. Now 54, Sakata is a minor league manager in Japan. “He was the one guy that I followed,” Wakamatsu said. “For me, there was always that issue of looking for that identity.” After seven seasons as a coach with American League West teams, Wakamatsu said, he bonded with Suzuki “as soon as I walked in the door” and served as his unofficial mentor when he was Oakland’s bench coach last season. Suzuki’s parents are Japanese-American, but it was Wakamatsu who knew more about their struggles. He is actively involved with the Japanese American Citizens League, a civil rights organization, and well read on the history of Japanese-Americans in baseball. “He was the reason I read up so much about Japanese-American history,” said Suzuki, believed to be the only Asian-American in the majors last season. “We talked more about that than we talked about baseball.” They immediately felt the weight of the coincidence: two Japanese-Americans, teacher and pupil, on the same bench. As far as they could tell, this had never happened. “The truth is I really wanted him to succeed where I had failed,” Wakamatsu said. “I think it’s quite a coincidence that I ended up being the guy who came along and joined the team at that stage of Kurt’s development. What are the chances?”