By David
I have just read the Auckland elite swimming delivery proposal. You can find it on the Auckland Swimming Association website. Their plan has assumed huge importance now that the old regime is on its way out. Something new, something better has to take its place. The Auckland proposal is a mighty fine place to start. Of course there will be details that can be debated. That is not really important. Whatever plan replaces the old, discredited regime, it must achieve the following.
It must have swimmer as its primary focus and it must re-enfranchise all New Zealand’s swimming coaches. For most of the past decade that liaison has been badly handled in New Zealand. Unfortunately any program that gets the swimmer/coach relationship wrong will normally fail to deliver the best results. In my first book, “Swim to the Top”, I used an important article written by Roger Robinson, the Professor of English at Victoria University in Wellington, to describe my “mission statement” of the swimmer/coach relationship. Here is a summary of my chapter on coaching from “Swim to the Top”:
“The British athletics team to the 1928 Olympic Games took no coaches with them to assist the athletes. But they did take five masseurs, one of them known for his severity as “Jack the Rubber”.
The dedication of Japan’s leading marathon runners to their great coach Nakamura, who died in 1985, went beyond their absolute trust in his advice, to a reverence for him as a spiritual leader and Master: “In the race, we call out the name of sensai (Master) and ask him to guide us,” they said.
The Rubber and the Master are extremes of status in the patchy and variegated history of the sports coach. At one pole, the coach is a menial servant, a mere sort of valet or stable hand for rubbing down the pedigree athlete; at the other, an infallible godlike leader. It is instructive to look at some aspects of the history of the sports coach, both to understand such extremist attitudes and why they arise, and to seek for a more enlightened and balanced view as modern sport finally reaches its maturity.
The five masseurs accompanying the 1928 Olympic team were typical of the kind of assistance which was deemed appropriate. There had been a brief period when British athletics had a full-time coaching adviser, the colourful ex-pro Walter Knox before the First World War, but it took until 1947 for coaching to begin to be taken seriously (and then against considerable resistance) with the appointment of Britain’s first permanent coach, Geoff Dyson, who later travelled to Canada to add to his achievement there.
Subsequent progress has been uneven and often still uneasy, as all coaches know, but the new era has certainly made progress. The bucket-and-sponge man, the degraded kind of groom or valet for gentlemen-racers, has almost disappeared. Sports coaching has erected a few of its own gods – Cerutty, Lydiard, Bowerman, Nakamura. So what, to return to my opening question, is the best balance between these two extremes?
It lies, I think, partly in the training of the coach, partly in the definition of the coach’s role. The “old pro” could teach only by repetition of his own skills as a practitioner and by requiring imitation. The new coach is a person trained not only as an expert in the skills and knowledge of the event, but in the skills of communicating that knowledge. This is an academic training, and gives to coaching the academic responsibilities of mastering a discipline and an area of knowledge, and of fostering these and passing them on.
To define the coach’s role, I should like to be dryly academic for a moment and define the word itself. Kotcz is a small place in Hungary, between Raab and Buda, which gave its name back in the fourteenth century to a special kind of vehicle, a “kotczi-wagon” or “kotczi-car”, used for passengers on the rugged local roads. The term passed across to England after a hundred years or so, and by 1556 was anglicised as “coach”. “Come, my coach,” calls Ophelia in Hamlet, and she was a lady who could certainly have used help with her swimming. In fact, the word began to take on the modern meaning of an instructor only in nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge universities, where by 1849 to “coach” a pupil meant to “prepare in special subjects”, to carry the student along, as it were, like a coach and horses, to the destination. Soon, sporting “coaches” appeared, first of all in rowing, the social leader of Victorian sports. The Oxford English Dictionary cites “…coaching from Mr Price’s steamboat”. Dickens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) keeps the sense of conveying passengers when he describes Mr Crisparkle, Minor Canon of the Cathedral and previously a private tutor in Latin and Greek, as lately “Coach upon the chief Pagan high roads.”
So a coach is someone with whom you travel, who is a means of conveying the student or athlete along a rough road to a difficult destination. There is a moral in the dry dust of the dictionary. If we think of coaching as a means of travel, we may perceive more clearly both the importance and the limits of the coach’s role. The coach has indispensable functions: to instruct, to motivate and to inculcate strategy, especially that long-term strategy which no young competitor can know by instinct. The coach should also observe clearly defined limits: not to intrude into the ultimate aloneness of the competitor nor to diminish the essentially individual satisfaction of sporting achievement. The coach’s achievement and satisfaction are equally real, equally valid, but different. The means of travel is not the traveller. I am made uneasy by coaches who speak of “we”, as if athlete and coach were a composite being.
Arthur Lydiard recently told the story of a question-and-answer session with a group of middle-aged joggers in Chicago. Arthur was asked “What is occurring today that will benefit US runners generally?” Someone answered “Most of the older coaches are retiring.” He meant that the satisfaction of running would be enhanced by the end of the rigid interval training and excessive inter-college competition, which were the means of many post-war American coaches subjugating the athlete to their own domination and to the success-record of the team, usually the College team. It is a relief to see their day passing. Even the antiquated British bucket-and-sponge method left more space for fulfilment for the individual who was actually competing. Arthur Lydiard viewed our recent past in swimming in exactly the same light. So do I.
As coaches gain more confidence in their status, and as more weight is given to individual fulfilment as against the team’s, or worse, the coach’s success, so we may hope that the proper role of the coach will be acknowledged. As a vehicle, as the essential means of transport along the high road, both for the growth of the individual engaged in sport and for the development of the body of knowledge associated with the event, the coach has a vital and satisfying role.
For what it is worth the relationship described here must be the core principle guiding the structure that replaces the Millennium regime. The Auckland proposal seems to include this set of values. It has the athlete as its centre of attention and views the coach relationship as a guide and facilitator of an elite athlete’s unique journey. Coaches, like me, are here to assist. David Wright, NZSCTA and its members must never attempt to run the show.
One other word of caution. I notice that the Athlete’s Federation has played a role in developing the Auckland plan. That is a good thing. They have much to offer. Their advice and protection is essential to a healthy sport. But beware, they are a trade union and like every similar organization can quickly develop ideas well above their station. By definition the Athlete’s Federation is a socialist collective in a world that performs best as free market, private enterprise. We would do well not to replace a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with control by the proletariat. The journey here belongs individually to Melissa Ingram, Rhi Jeffrey, Hayley Palmer, Glen Snyders, Daniel Bell and their colleagues. It does not belong to, nor should it be dominated by, Rob Nicol, Heath Mills and Helen Norfolk.
