Last Saturday I went to an all-day wrestling coaching clinic. (How about that for a lead-off?) The instructors included Olympians, national champs, and college coaches. I learned some new technique, and, as you will in any kind of immersive conference-like environment, my mind was able to focus on this one thing. But the clinic was about more than push-ups and stand-ups. What I was struck by, particularly through one clinician, was how these people who’ve competed and coached at the highest levels in one of the toughest sports voiced consistent philosophies of coaching moderation.
I’ve watched youth coaches burn thousands of calories yelling and writhing during competition, and it always troubles me. Andy Hrovat [1], 2008 Olympian and trainer for the Cliff Keen Wrestling Club [2], was particularly good in reflecting on these behaviors. Hrovat works with some of the best athletes in the world, but he also coaches young kids in Michigan, and he asked our group some hard questions about what we are often asking our young athletes to do.
He offered some great, generalizable approaches to practice. First, he inverts common practice approaches in saying, “Don’t teach first.” In wrestling, as in many sports, we teach technique and then reserve the end of practice for scrimmaging. But with kids, they have all this energy. They want to play and compete. Hrovat suggested that after sports-specific warm-ups, kids should wrestle live. Instruction can come at the end.
He also had a collaboration model for coaching and instruction, saying, “The athletes help each other the most.” We should create opportunities in which our athletes watch the best kids on the team, and we should help structure the practice experience so kids can learn from each other.
This all prefaced a discussion of coaching expectations. Bluntly, our expectations are often based on a variety of sheer misperceptions about what our athletes can do. We want athletes to do sophisticated things with their bodies, like react to an attack or evade a defender, but in practice, we ignore that they can’t do simple things like hop on one foot, do a cartwheel, or keep their backs straight while doing a push-up. They don’t have fundamental strength and coordination yet.
Of course this leads to frustration. It’s kind of like getting angry at a student who cannot do calculus after we have just seen that the student could not reliably multiply and divide. We have to curb our expectations so that we provide kids with a realistic and thus constructive learning frame.
It will be much easier to curb our expectations if we approach coaching with moderation, something you may not expect to hear from a world-class athlete. Yet Hrovat said coaches often just get in the way of athletes’ development. He’s right. We talk to – and at – the athletes too much. In a quest to be that iconic inspirational mentor, we fill any empty space with our words — and our surveillance. We do too much. We make everything about how we complete their activities by watching, talking, counting reps. While I took furious notes, Hrovat said that a coach-to-athlete relationship boils down to this: “I’m going to give you the guidelines to win, but it’s up to you.”
Youth coaches, particularly those of very young kids, can do many things to win. We can stack our teams. Cheat. Micromanage. Bench lesser players. But if we, as coaches, simply provide athletes with the tools, opportunity, and guidelines, then they will develop — and we will get to do that fun thing during competition: Sit back and watch. If that’s good enough for an Olympian, then it’s good enough for me.
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[5]Scott Warnock [6]
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