It will come as no great surprise to learn that the policy of centralised coaching has never been flavour of the month on these pages. The policy promoted here is the one followed by Arthur Lydiard when he was Head Coach of athletics in Finland. In those years no individual runners were coached by Arthur. Instead he tirelessly toured the county coaching coaches, lifting their standards and tending to their needs. Arthur realised a fundamental truth – that if athletics in Finland was to be successful it had to come from a sound infrastructure of many good coaches, not one man coaching a few athletes in Helsinki.
And, because the policy was right, it worked. Finland won seven Olympic track and field medals at two consecutive Olympic Games. But for 20 years Swimming New Zealand has doggedly tried to make the centralised Millennium model work. And it hasn’t. The product of 20 years work and millions of dollars – my guess is about 25 million – has been nothing. Not one Olympic medal of any sort. Worse than that, two generations of New Zealand swimmers have been lured to Auckland with the promise of “the best coaching in the country” and have retired hurt and disappointed. They trusted the Swimming New Zealand promise. And they were betrayed.
What has made it even worse is that the SNZ policy has undermined and weakened the coaching structure of swimming in New Zealand. The Millennium message is clear. Your home coach, it says, is okay but if you want the best come to the North Shore. For twenty years SNZ has sent out a clear message – local coaches are not as good as those at the Millennium Institute. But it is even worse than that.
Recently Clive Power, coached the centralised Millennium team. He came in for a short period after David Lyles jumped or was pushed out of Swimming New Zealand. While Clive was in charge I was also coaching at the Millennium pool. And I was impressed. In difficult circumstances I thought he was doing a super job.
But with the exception of Clive no other New Zealander has been considered good enough to coach at the Millennium Pool. I’ve lost track of the foreigners that have coached there over the past two decades. I do know there have been at least two Englishmen, a German and four Australians. And do you know what that says?
It says that there is not a coach in New Zealand good enough to be the National Coach. To fill the county’s leading coaching position SNZ has always looked overseas. Make no mistake if you tell a person they are no good for long enough sooner or later they will be no good. And that’s what Swimming New Zealand has done. There are New Zealanders good enough to do that job. There are New Zealanders who should be doing that job. I appointed one of them, Gary Hurring, to his first coaching job. He should have been the New Zealand Head Coach years ago.
Instead of that Swimming New Zealand employed an American age group coach. Once again the message is clear. Every local coach in New Zealand, including Gary, is not quite as good as an age group coach from the United States. That is both a savage put-down and not true.
Let me be very clear I am not being personally critical of Jerry Olszewski. From discussions I’ve had with coaches in the US he is a good guy and has done a good job of the swimmers he has coached. He ran a successful USS silver standard club in Chandler and Scottsdale, Arizona.
But this is not about Olszewski as a person or a coach. This is about the position he has been put in and the message his presence continues to send to every coach in New Zealand. While the current Swimming New Zealand 2016-2020 High Performance Strategy document lists the Millennium Institute as its first point of “Focus” and the “Development of a World Class High Performance Centre” as its “Key Work Stream” the presence of a foreign age group coach in that position will always be a negative. Just to be very clear and as it has been for twenty years – it is not the person that is wrong here, it is the policy – made worse by the manner in which SNZ has implemented the centralized coaching policy.
Strangely enough, Saudi swimming has followed the SNZ policy of importing foreigners to run centralized swim camps and has met with the same lack of success. Paul Kent from Auckland was hired to bring swimming success to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But it did not work. Not because Paul is a bad coach. In fact he is a very good coach. But because the policy was bad, his task was lost before it began. And so, as normal, Saudi Arabia ended up behind Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf States’ international. After all that failure you would think administrators would consider trying something different.
On the subject of SNZ head coaches can SNZ check the final expenses of David Lyles the day before he left their employment? You see on that day Lyles and I went to lunch at the Artisan Vineyard in Henderson. The purpose of the lunch was to discuss the possibility of Lyles standing in as coach of West Auckland Aquatics while I went to my daughter’s wedding in the UK. I offered to pay for lunch but Lyles insisted he would pay and I agreed. I was surprised to see him use his SNZ credit card to make the payment; surprised because the lunch had nothing to do with the business of SNZ and I had serious reservations about whether Renford and Cotterill would think buying David Wright lunch was a good use of Miskimmin’s money.
It is entirely possible Lyles could have refunded SNZ with the cost of the lunch. But if he did not and SNZ did not know that the lunch had nothing to do with their business then SNZ is due a refund.
Incidentally Lyles did coach West Auckland Aquatics while I was away. I personally paid him $3000 for his time. When I got back he asked me for more but didn’t get it. In hindsight and in my opinion the $3000 was the most costly and worst investment of my career.
