The final trait is that all of the clubs had a
standard of excellence. You have to create an
ongoing policy of coach education. If the ASCA
clinic is in your area, go and take your staff. You
should have a POLICY, and please take note that the
word POLICY is in capital letters; education should
not be something you think that might possibly
consider doing sometime in the future. It has to be
a POLICY of the program; it has to be a personal
POLICY on your part. Every one of your coaches needs
to be educated! You have to keep them smart. Why?
Because if they’re dumb, they are going to teach
dumb stuff to your young kids. There must be
progression for coaches. You know how progressions
work. Some little kids come to the pool and they
don’t know how to swim and they end up going to
nationals in a few years. That’s a progression.
You should raise your coaches
from being novice coaches to being “B” coaches, to
being “A” coaches, to being “AA” coaches, to being
ready to take their own program. Coaches must
progress, and if you are coaching the coaches, you
need to be sure that you are teaching them how to be
better coaches at a higher level. You cannot expect
that the novice coach is going to be there in 10
years if you are paying him $5 per hour, unless
you’ve got someone who is really, really special.
You might have someone who is a magnificent teacher
who is going to stay in one place and who likes
little kids. You treat this person like gold!
You pay as much as you can early
on for education. As your team builds and gets
stronger, as it should with better and smarter
coaching, pay for all coaching education. Don’t be
afraid that they are going to leave. They are! Coach
them to leave smart and under good terms with you.
Don’t coach them to leave, move into the pool down
the street, and run you into the ground. I don’t
mind having a fast team next door. I figure it’s
just going to help us go faster. What’s going to
hurt me is if the coach of that new team is someone
who used to assist me and who now bad-mouths me. If
his team goes fast, we go fast, everybody goes fast,
and life is good.
Beware of too much
sophistication for little kids. Eight year olds are
not little senior swimmers. Compared to mature
swimmers, eight year-old swimmers are completely
different animals. They are different. They can’t
generate lactic acid, they can’t do a lot of things
physiologically that a 25 year-old can do. They are
a blank slate and they are going to learn everything
you throw at them. They may not be able to show it
right away. You keep saying to Bosco to do the right
thing enough times, and somewhere down the road,
Bosco is going to say, “Oh yeah, you do it like
this.”
Each of these successful teams
has a legacy of excellence from top to bottom.
Excellence runs as the marrow in the bones of their
programs. It’s as real as the water in their pool,
and it can make you do remarkably. Excellence must
be the standard from novice to national. You dare
not have one coach over here teaching excellence and
another coach over there accepting mediocrity. You
cannot have it. Excellence has to be coach
maintained and board certified. The board has to buy
into it. If you ar going to build and go for
excellence, the board has to say, “Yes we agree, we
back you, we certify everything you say.” You strive
for excellence daily. If someone chooses less than
excellence, then you can choose whether to have him
or her as a member of your club. The board should
then say, “We are excellent and we are going to go
that way, and we are going to strive to be
excellent. If you don’t like it, we’re sorry, but
this is the way we are going and maybe you need to
find a program you believe in.”
How would you measure
excellence on a 12 and under level? You measure it
by looking at what you are asking for and by what
you are getting back. You will have an excellent kid
if he comes to practice and loves to be there, a kid
who’s doing the best that he can. Is the swimmer
someone who is listening, someone who is trying to
apply what he hears? At 11-12, the best that you can
ask for is that they try to apply what you teach,
not get in the way of other kids, and be supportive
of teammates.
I’ve seen little kids tell each
other after practice how excellent the other kid had
been that day. Little Bosco comes over and says
“Mary, that was really cool! That was neat the way
you did that.” I’ve seen little kids do that. It’s
not impossible if you teach and expect excellence.
How did you do that? If you catch a kid doing
something bad, maybe you talk to him off to the
side. Kids that do something magnificent, something
excellent, you bring up in front of everybody. At
Kansas City Blazers, I was able to point at kids who
grew up in the program. That is a wonderful tool.
That will promote faster that anything. “You guys,
Janie Wagstaff just broke the American Record. Five
years ago she was sitting on the deck in this pool
doing what you are doing. You can be excellent,
too!”
And you can promote it just
like it’s a product, like it’s something special,
because it is! There are too many places where kids
go in this world not to be excellent. Your kids are
not normal. Excellence is not normal. Excellence is
an aberration. You need to teach core values to your
kids. Why? Because normal is C’s in school, normal
is skipping out every once in a while, normal is 40
hours in front of the TV every week. That’s normal
for American kids. I never wanted my son or daughter
or my swimmers to be normal. I wanted them to be
excellent.
When I was in high school, I took
a class that was called Civics. It taught you how to
be a citizen of the country, the city, and the
state. Now it’s part of your job. Teaching right and
wrong is now a part of all of our jobs. You cannot
build a team with a bunch of people who don’t
understand right and wrong. And there’s nothing
wrong with walking up to someone and saying, “YOU’RE
WRONG!” as long as you do it in a civil, polite
fashion. I would say in a soft voice, “Excuse me,
you are wrong! That was incorrect and do not ever do
that again.” Sometimes that soft voice has the
bigger impact. How many of you on a daily basis have
to raise your voice to be heard? How many of you on
a daily basis get ticked off at a kid and say
quietly, “ I need to talk to you.” And which one
gets the bigger response? If you want your kids to
be honest, you have to be honest with them. If you
want your kids to be forthright and hard working,
then you have to be just as forthright and
hardworking. And you should be working to benefit
them.
You have to teach your
swimmers the work-goal relationship. There’s a
constant, a connection between what they do and what
they get. There’s no guarantee that if you come to
practice 100% of the time, you are going to win the
gold medal. The guarantee is that if you come to
practice 100% of the time, and work hard and do what
you are supposed to do, when the opportunity gets
there, you will have a better chance than most other
people. I can guarantee you the opportunity of for a
better outcome. I cannot guarantee you the outcome.
I have given seven traits to work
on. I have thrown in a lot of different facets to
each of these traits; you need to work them all. You
can’t leave one out. As I said way back when this
started, there may be more than seven traits, but
there aren’t fewer than seven. If you ignore one, it
would be like leaving one plank out of a boat. It
doesn’t work. When you go back home and you start
looking at what you are doing, please, please,
please keep in mind . . .You are involved in the
best sport there is! You have the tools in your
hands to do any building that you have to do. Even
if it’s rebuilding the club you are in, the tools
are there. If you use them, you will be successful,
I can promise you that.
Taken from an edited transcript of a
presentation that Mike Lewellyn gave at the National
Age Group Coaches Conference in April 1999. |