A Case For Coaches
By Ethan Adkins
Being a Student-Athlete is exhausting. We are expected to give hours each day to our sports, which includes multiple hours before and after school. It doesn’t help going to Jenks where the word ‘excellence’ is around everywhere makes us feel the pressure of being the best in the state on the field and in the classroom. On top of that when we get to our sport we have a coach yelling at us and demanding that we do it this way instead of that way. However, in the moment we might not realize how much our coaches actually do.
Recently in the past few months I got hired on to be a Student-Coach for the Jenks Trojan Swim Club, with this job comes with a variety of new responsibilities. One of these responsibilities I take on is learning the process of understanding a program's goal. Learning the ropes of a program puts into perspective how much a coach actually does to develop not only an athlete’s in sport skill but also develop teenagers into responsible adults.
There are multiple courses I had to do to get my coach certification as a Junior-Coach(Student-Coaches under 18). I had to be CPR/AED certified, have Concussion training, in water safety training, online safety training, read the USA swimming rulebook(Which in case you were curious is 136 pages long) and be quizzed over it.
That also doesn’t include additional studying I did to learn the most I can about how the body is supposed to work and function during in-water training and out of water training. And I’m just a Junior Coach, I don’t lead practices, I don’t determine what we do each meet or what the kids swim at meets.
Coaches alike whether in swimming or other sports have to be certified in a lot of things just to start the job, not even to fully execute the job. Take a walk by Allen Trimble Stadium during football season and you’ll see a coach working the offense, a coach for the defense and a coach for strength and conditioning.
Coaching requires a little bit of knowledge of the sport, how the body works, and how to communicate and teach the athletes. Becoming a swim coach comes with its own education. I thought coming into the job that I fully understood how things are supposed to look, feel and how they were supposed to move during in water sessions and drylands sessions. As I further my education I realized that there is so much more than just what I thought I knew.
To help coaches learn, ASCA (American Swim Coach Association) has manuals over everything coach related, from learning all the strokes, physiology of the sport, nutrition and overall health, to even how to write and plan workouts. There is a lot of education that comes with the job that coaches have to do. As an athlete I didn’t realize until I started coaching how much actual education goes on when learning the ropes of coaching.
When taking my certification courses I spent a lot of time on how you speak to athletes. How do we positively approach them with critiques? Coach Morgan (Jenks Swim club’s head coach of the Advanced group, but also assistant coach to the High School Team) believes that communication is extremely important.
“When correcting, communication is vital because it’s making them better and keeping them from being injured,” said Morgan.
The ability to help athletes correct incorrect forms to prevent injury is extremely crucial. The book I'm currently reading, “Just Add Water” by Olympic champion Katie Ledecky, dedicates a whole chapter to her childhood coach who for a whole season yelled at her for the same thing to make sure she didn’t have shoulder problems as she got older.
Coaches are responsible for teaching correct form to prevent any and all injury that pertains to the sport. As I’m involved in more and more coaching discussions, a huge priority of ours is correct form. Coaching correct form doesn’t just prevent injury in the meantime but can help put less strain and pressure on parts to prevent injury in the long run.
One question that raised almost right as I started coaching was, how do I properly reach everyone?
“As you get with the older kids, communication can be a bit more technical and a little more blunt, than it can be with younger kids. With them you’re going to have to break things down in a way that isn’t gonna be confusing,” said Morgan
Being on the high school side of swimming as an athlete it is really hard sometimes to come into the 7th-8th grade group I work with and not explain it like how swimming is explained to me. It’s easy to explain things the way you would want to hear them, but it’s much harder to break them down in ways that allows younger athletes to understand.
Coaches are also responsible for setting the tone for the team and leading through all challenges. Coach Gaylor (the new head coach for our high school football team) thinks it’s a crucial part of leading athletes and a team to success. Holding yourself accountable and leading by example are some of the best ways.
“You’ve got to model behavior, you can talk about all these things you want, that you ask of your players, but if you’re not willing to do that same things it starts to erode your credibility,” said Gaylor.
When coaches ask you to show up at 7:30 in the morning, they are there at 7:00 to prepare. When practice ends at 7:45 at night, coaches stay late to finish up practice and competition plans. I know multiple times my coach has mentioned he stayed at the pool till midnight working on competition line-ups. As a coach, if I'm told warm-ups are at 12:00 I’m there at 11:30 just to be there to help out if any of my athletes need anything.
Coaches do a lot for us as athletes, for the program they lead and the sport they coach. Coaches change their explanation style, learning and reading as much as they can about the sport and give up hours of their time, from early mornings to late nights, just to help push us as athletes and as people. So the next time a coach is yelling that they’re human too and that there's a lot going on behind the scenes that us athletes don’t see.
