Author: Vernon Gambetta
A Message for Today
I saw this at the entrance to a park next to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. This is a message our leaders need to hear and observe.
Kenyon College Swimming – Sustained Excellence
As many of you know I am fascinated by sustained excellence. Just the law of averages will allow a team or individual to win one championship but to win 29 straight NCAA Division III Men’s National Championships and 22 women’s championships is beyond incredible. This past week I spent three days at Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio. This year I am working with the Kenyon athletic department on staff development in athletic development. Jim Steen, the Swim coach was instrumental in arranging this. This is Jim’s 32nd years at Kenyon. His fire, enthusiasm and desire to excel is contagious. Three years ago I designed their dryland program and he wanted me to upgrade the program and help the other sports. Here are some lessons reinforced during my visit: You must have a system. Coaching is not something you do to the athletes it is something you do with the athletes. Quality is more important than quantity. Winning is process. Winners are constantly learning. Management and organization are essential. Continuity is essential. The premium is on coaching, not on training. Facilities do not matter you can get it done anywhere.(Just a note until three years they trained in a six lane pool, it wasn’t always like this) The sprint swimmers spent more time training out of the water than in the water. Starting at 6:00 AM they come to dryland every 10 minutes matched up in pairs. It was really fun working with this group. The distance swimmers do their dryland on pool deck. I know if I were a beginning swim coach I would go to Gambier Ohio and see how this works. In fact any sport can learn from Jim Steen, his staff and his swimmers. I did not even need an airplane to fly home I was so excited from this visit.
Wake Up Strength Coaches
I have been thinking of writing this post for a long time. I have been hesitant because of the risk of pissing off a whole bunch of people, but so be it. I say wake up because those of you that identify yourself as strength coaches are painting yourselves into a corner. The more you chase numbers in the weight room, the more you create adapted athletes that are disconnected with what they are trying to do on the field, the court, the pool and the track. How many of you actually attend practice and see what is going on outside the weight room? If you do not do that then you better, because if you are not connecting the weight room to the sport then you are not doing your job. Oh I have heard all the excuses why you can’t you, they are just that excuses. I have been places where there were there were eight graduate assistant strength coaches for football. They spent all their time polishing the chrome and mixing “recovery “ drinks. It takes planning, communication and organization. Do you get along with the trainer, probably not? They are no longer on your side because they see the injuries that are occurring because of biased one sided training. They don’t get hurt in the weight room; they get hurt because of the weight room. Trainers you are not without fault, you need to get out of the training room understand what is going on and stop pointing fingers. Just getting your CSCS does not make you anymore of an expert on Strength and Conditioning than it does the strength coach. We are all part of a support team that is supposed to help the coach put the best prepared, healthy fully adaptable athlete on the field, court, pool and track. We need to get back to coaching. We need to emphasize complete athletic development, not just strength. In the immortal words of the sage social philosopher, Rodney King “Why can’t we all get along?” Don’t paint yourself into the corner, take charge, and be a leader not a follower. Get out of the weight room deal with the complete athlete and be a coach. It is easy to get strong and achieve numbers; it is hard to apply that strength to the sport that is our job.
Looking for Ghosts – Screening for Postural Dysfunction
A good athletic profile or screening will serve a guide for what you need to do next. I do not think an athletic profile, especially done by a coach should go searching for dysfunctions or malfunctions. Remember each sport has adaptive postural response. The longer an athlete participates in a particular sport, especially if it is one side dominant, the more evident the response will be. (An example is the hypertrophy in the forearm of a professional tennis player) It is much like when we were kids and sitting around telling ghost stories at a sleepover. As soon as the lights went out and everyone got quiet, there were noises and light flashes that everyone was sure were ghosts. The moral of the story is the same with postural dysfunction. Go to a conference on screening and dysfunction and then come back on Monday and you will see many more dysfunctions that you ever knew existed. We have to remember that the body is asymmetrical, we are not balanced and that the body is highly adaptive and self organizing. I use a variation of the Athletic Profile http://www.movementdynamics.com/index.html developed by kelvin Giles, it is practical, easy to use and translated immediately into exercise progressions that are part of my training program.I am a firm believer that a sound well rounded training program that emphasizes training the whole kinetic chain using coordinated movements will allow the body to find it’s optimum performance level in the climate of repetitive stress. Too many people have gone the route of “corrective exercise” to the exclusion of actual training. If you are doing this, you are doing the athlete a disservice. This is quite prevalent in the NBA. The solution is to include remedial components in the strength training and movement programs that address the common problems that occur. It should be transparent. Understand the demands of the sport, the position and what the individual athlete brings to the table and design a program that addresses all those demands. Get out there and coach and train them, keep the ghosts in the closet.
Fall College Tour
I have not been posting as frequently because I am on my annual fall college tour. I started out at North Carolina State on August 28 working with both Track & Field and Swimming. Very enjoyable visit catching up with Rollie Geiger, an old friend and competitor from my college track coaching days back in the Pleistocene era. Then off to University of Michigan for women’s swimming. Then a “wonderful” four days in one of my favorite places, Las Vegas for the ASCA Convention. (Notes for those presentations will eventually be posted on my web site – just need to catch up) the convention itself was great, the venue sucked. Just returned from three days with Harvard Women’s swimming, this is the second year they are using the dryland program. Always enjoy Cambridge, when I leave there I always feel a little smarter just for having walked around Harvard Square and the campus. This next weekend I complete my college tour in Gambier Ohio at Kenyon College. While there I will work on staff development for all the sports and focus on swimming with Jim Steen. This is my second stint with Kenyon after a three year hiatus. I am looking forward to the year with Kenyon. All the coaches from these programs are great coaches who are trying to grow and learn, they are all willing to share which makes it a wonderful learning experience for me. That being said I can’t wait to get home for the month of October to be able to spend more time with Venice Volleyball and Baseball. Both teams have outstanding coaches and eager kids focused on getting better. The volleyball team is off to a great start, they are 8 and 2. I know they are going to surprise a lot of teams along the way. This group of girls has worked harder than any team I have ever worked with. They get it. They are fully committed to making themselves the best you can be. I get fired up every day I can be in the gym with them. They are young and relatively inexperienced, a great quality because they don’t know they are not supposed to beat the teams they are beating.
A Must Read
In case you did not see this article in the New York Times, it is a must read for everyone interested in collegiate athletics. It speaks volumes of the distorted values present in Division I sport today.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12bissinger.html?pagewanted=1&ref=opinion
The Holy Grail
Why is it that each generation of young coaches has to go in search of the Holy Grail, that place or person who has the answer? Over the past several months I have run into too many coaches starting out in the field or early in their career who are seeking the answer. The problem as I see it they do not yet know what questions to ask. They have not made enough mistakes yet to sharpen their skills. I do not know who said this, but truer words have never been spoken – It takes twenty years to be an overnight success. That certainly reaffirms what I have seen. The other quote that resonates for me is from is from Gertrude Stein – “The answer is there is no answer.” The fact of the matter is there is no Holy Grail or fountain of knowledge, nor is there no one answer. The challenge is to keep learning, keep asking questions. Formulate a philosophy and that should not change. Your philosophy is your guiding light, your core beliefs. These core beliefs should then guide your search for answers, it should provide a context to evaluate what is good and what is bad in what you are doing and adjust accordingly. It is my opinion that there is no entitlement in coaching, you have to prove yourself at each step of your career. Frankly I feel sorry for some of the coaches I have seen thrust into positions they did not earn or are not ready for. They quickly become experts who do not know what they don’t know. Unfortunately there is too much of this today. Coaching and the ability to coach is special. It demands a focus and commitment second to none. There is no simple way to prepare for this except to acquire hands on experience. I think every coach should start out at the elementary school or middle school level that is the real world. The basics and the skills you learn in teaching and coaching at that level are invaluable. The other day at volleyball practice I flashed back to almost 40 years ago when I was working with one of the girls on throwing. A simple skill that is a precursor to much of what happens in striking a volleyball. Without my experience teaching Junior High School gym class I would never have learned that. The JV coach asked where I had learned that. I must have had a class somewhere but all I can remember is that early on I had a bunch of kids who could not throw so I had to teach them. There is no substitute for that kind of experience. The last thought here is to remember that coaching is high touch not high tech, there is no substitute for being able to demonstrate the skills. Enjoy the journey, make up your mind to continually learn. Don’t be satisfied with one answer, keep asking questions.
Strength Training – A Definition
Frans Bosch in several of his presentations has defined Strength Training – as coordination training with resistance. I think that is a good starting point. My adaptation of that definition is as follows: Coordination training with the resistance and mode that is appropriate for the sport or activity trained for. I think this definition gets us away from chasing numbers in terms of maximums and put the focus on the application of strength rather than strength you can measure.