Let’s face it, everyone who goes into coaching is usually pretty good at their chosen sport. It’s generally what happens when they have reached the pinnacle of their game and there’s nowhere left to go and so they decide to put this long acquired knowledge to some use and give something back. But, being at the top of your game (or maybe past the top of your game) regularly comes at a cost…
“I’m skilled and knowledgeable in my sport, how could there be a cost?”, I hear you ask. Well, none if you’re solely coaching advanced athletes, they’re proficient in their chosen sport and they have found their place within it, they are reliant on your knowledge to see them achieve their goals. With beginner athletes, there are a whole raft of other factors to starting into a new sport which can be forgotten by the coach. That’s not to say that the coach forgets how physically hard it is to start in a new sport, we can all vividly remember those first steps into the sport and how much hard work it was! It’s the other things I’m talking about, such as finding your place in a new circle of people, finding out the way that you have been doing the sport is wrong and learning how to correct it, the effects on your confidence, all that peripheral information that you have to process and how a small comment can have a massive effect.
Whilst off on injury I decided to try swimming, a low impact sport that should allow me to keep my fitness up whilst I recover. I’d been watching my son get better and better at swimming as he’d been coached at LincsQuad, seeing his skill and confidence growing as time went on was amazing to watch and so, I thought I’d have a go too. If nothing else, it would be something that we could do together. Considering that I had never really taken and formal swimming training since school and only really swam on the odd occasion when drunk on holiday since then it was unsurprising (but still pretty disappointing) to be put in the lane they called “little splashers” when I started. This is a lane for mainly 6-10 year old kids, and then there’s me in there with them, a 43 year old balding man covered with crappy tattoos. Pretty embarrassing, and generally in these situations there’s two ways people go; quit and never go back again or work hard to get out of there! If you know me, you know I’m not a quitter.
I found learning to swim, really difficult. Swimming is a very technical sport that I am still a long way from mastering. One thing I did find was that it began remind me about what it was like when I first started running. The whole experience of how I felt psychologically was a fantastic refresher. Things like how hard it was to try to learn a new skill that was pretty alien to me, the way I felt when the coach gave me the thumbs up and how elated I was to finally move out from the little splashers!
The whole experience reminded me of the role of the coach to novice level athletes. It helped me remember how it feels psychologically in that environment, those little nuances that are easily forgotten once you settle into it all.
If you’re a coach, I recommend you try it, it might not be swimming, but something that involves using your body in a new way that requires you to be coached. It’s been a great refreshing experience and I believe it has made me a more empathetic, mindful coach.
