The saying goes that the story of every coach starts with a failed athlete. 

by Andrew Sheaff 

That was certainly true for me.

As with most of us, I never really accomplished my goals in swimming, and you can probably relate.

While all athletes are ultimately limited by one thing or another, for me, it was skill.

It wasn’t necessarily my fitness or my strength, I just wasn’t a good swimmer.

I lacked the skills (and probably a lot more!) to get to where I wanted to go.

As I started to get into coaching, correcting that issue was my focus.

I was on a mission to learn everything I could about swimming skill.

I tried to learn every stroke flaw, how to see it in action, and how to constantly communicate that information to the swimmers I coached.

While well-intentioned, it blew up in my face on a couple occasions.

There was one athlete I coached during those early days that was big, strong, and smart.

He had NO skill.

So, I promptly ‘taught’ him how to swim.

He made a lot of progress in training and in some meets, but it all fell apart when it really mattered.

He was terrible at the conference meet, but it wasn’t his fault, it was MY fault.

I made him think too much, and when it was time to race, he was so in his head he couldn’t just GO.

I had another athlete who also wasn’t very skilled.

She was one of the slower athletes on the team, and she wanted to try a different stroke.

It was a change of pace and neither of us took it too seriously, so I didn’t ‘coach’ her much on her skills.

She just trained the stroke a bit, and she did a lot of drill work fast and hard.

She proceeded to swim very fast.

It worked so well that I stopped doing what we were doing, and I started ‘coaching’ her!

As you can guess...it blew up.

She stopped just ‘doing’ and started thinking, and all that progress went away.

Swimmers need to learn skills, but just telling them what to do doesn’t really work nearly as well as we’d like to believe.

It seems to be a theme in my life- I like to learn the hard way!

These were formative experiences in my coaching, and in my next couple emails I’ll describe some of the solutions I found to stop making these mistakes.

I’ll clue you on in how I started to take a better approach.

Keep it simple…

Andrew

P.S. If you’ve already gotten into the course, I’d LOVE to hear what sets you’ve come up.

Just e-mail me what you’ve got!

I know I'm going to learn a ton by seeing what you're doing.