The York Y Rambler

23 January 2007

by Coach Michael Brooks

IT TAKES A VILLAGE;

THANKS, VILLAGE

            In order to run a swimming meet well, it takes a tremendous amount of work.  I have been very impressed by the amount and quality of the work of our parent volunteers in organizing our Tournament of Champions.  Thank you all very much for your efforts, and for those of you who have not yet had an opportunity to pitch in, please give us a hand on Sunday morning to ensure that the meet runs smoothly.  Whether or not your child is competing, this meet is the responsibility of our entire team.  I would like every visiting coach, parent, and swimmer to be in awe of our meet management skills, and I want them begging to come back to any meet we host.

MINIMAL COVERAGE

For a coach to be allowed on deck at YMCA championship meets, such as Districts, State, and Nationals, he has to have taken a course in the Principles of YMCA Swimming Coaching.  This course is offered once in a blue moon, so when it is offered, a coach who needs it had better take it.  Coach Clyde and I need it, in order to be on deck at our future meets, and it happens that the course is being offered at exactly the same time that our swimmers will be competing in our Tournament of Champions meet.

Which means that while our kids are doing battle this weekend, Coach Clyde & I will be in Philadelphia cracking the books.  (Please note that we would much rather be at the meet watching fast swimming).

Which also means that Coach Andy will be taking the entire team of 80+ swimmers.  This is an awfully large load for one coach to bear, and I feel more than a little guilty in asking him to bear it, but unfortunately it cannot be helped.  So please cut him some slack this Sunday.

WORDS OF WISDOM

“Swimming slow is easy.  Swimming fast isn’t.”

Paul Bergen, coach of Olympic champion swimmers

            Boy does this sound obvious, to the point that you may be wondering why I include this in my pantheon of great quotations.  I love this quotation, because like most of Coach Bergen’s words, there’s a lot more to it than first appears.

In order to swim slowly, you don’t need to do or think much.  There are no demands, no standards by which to compare your performance, no expectations.  You don’t have to come to practice.  You don’t have to care about how you do.  You don’t have to work hard.  You don’t have to overcome your weaknesses, or even think through what are the weaknesses that are holding you back.  You don’t have to be conscientious about how you perform skills.  You don’t have to think about your strokes.  You don’t have to get your times in practice.  You don’t have to set goals and strive to improve.  You don’t really have to do anything – and presto, slow follows naturally.  Swimming slow is easy.  It requires no effort mental or physical.

Swimming fast is difficult, because it requires tremendous effort mental and physical.  You’ve got to pour all of yourself into what you are doing.  You must measure yourself against continually rising standards.  You must expect a lot from yourself.  You must come to practice consistently and make swimming a priority.  You must work very hard and care very much about what you do and how you do it.  You must be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses, and you must overcome your weaknesses, no matter how difficult that is.  You must focus your attention and be conscientious in training.  You must work constantly to improve your technique and efficiency in the water.  You must get your times in practice so that you can see if you are getting faster.  You must set goals constantly to motivate you to constantly improve.

All of this is very difficult, and the difficulty of doing all of these every day and maintaining them explains why “swimming fast is difficult.”

UNCONSCIOUS & CONSCIOUS

A swimmer who has very poor turns does not swim into every wall thinking to himself, “I need to slow down my strokes here, so that I lose momentum, then somersault very slowly, hitting the wall at a strange angle so that I don’t get much push off the wall.  Make sure I don’t streamline or kick hard off the wall, then take a huge breath as I start a first, very inefficient stroke… There, a perfectly horrible turn!”

            Putting the process of a slow turn into words makes it sound silly – OF COURSE no swimmer TRIES to do a turn slowly ON PURPOSE.

            And that is just the point.  A swimmer with slow turns doesn’t consciously think about doing turns slowly.  Instead, he doesn’t think at all.  The mind is a blank, or is focusing on who’s going to win American Idol, which is about the same thing.

            When you have a skill that is poor and needs improving, you cannot simply go about your swimming on auto-pilot, never engaging your mind in what you are doing.  You must think about what and how you are doing the skill EVERY SINGLE TIME; you must really focus on doing it right and fast EVERY SINGLE TIME, or you will never build a habit of doing the skill well.

            It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a Michael Jordan to do a proper swimming turn:  it takes neither superhuman intelligence nor superhuman coordination.  A turn can be broken down into three or four steps, none of which is very difficult even for your typical eight-year old.  Doing a good turn isn’t very difficult.  But focusing the mind on what you are doing, every single time you approach a turn, so that you perform each of those three or four skills well, is difficult.

Good turns are more a matter of mind – attitude and attention – than physical ability.  Good turns have to be important enough to you that you are motivated to think about your turns every time you are approaching and doing one.

WHY DON’T YOU JUST FIX IT?

The other day a swim-mom asked me, “My daughter is really getting crushed on this set; is her stroke right?”  “Yes,” I answered, “she is getting crushed, and no, her stroke isn’t quite what I’m looking for.”  She was shocked and horrified by my response, sputtering, “Then why don’t you just fix it?”

            If only coaching, and life, were that simple…

            In the first place, I have talked to this swimmer several hundred times about this stroke problem, trying to get her to fix it.  I’ve tried a hundred different ways of explaining what I want her to do, and used a hundred metaphors to try to get my point across.  She’s made a few minor adjustments, but no significant progress yet.

            Second, while this swimmer’s particular stroke isn’t what I want, the particular problem she has here is actually a virtue in the other three strokes, and I am very wary about messing up something that is in most situations very very good in order to substitute something that is only moderately better in this situation.  Why make her breaststroke slightly faster if the result is making her other three strokes much slower?

            Third, strokes are very very complicated.  It isn’t like arithmetic where you simply change your answer from 2 + 2 = 5 to 2 + 2 = 4 and you are fine.  Changing one small part of a multi-part whole changes every other part; in other words, make one small change and you change the feel of the whole stroke, because all the parts have to accommodate to one another.  When you change Mona Lisa’s smile, you have to change the whole picture.  This is why a “good change” can sometimes make a swimmer slower for a time; previously, his stroke might have been bad and inefficient, but it was “economically inefficient” in that all the parts fit together.

            Fourth, no stroke, even a “perfect” or “model” stroke, is right for everyone.  Kids aren’t built the same, and the ideal strokes for their bodies at this moment (it will change as they grow) cannot be the same.  And often figuring out what adjustment of the “model” is necessary to maximize this swimmer’s technique at this moment is not at all clear.

            Fifth, a coach cannot be in a swimmer’s face all the time about a stroke change.  I can give them several different things to try, in order to get the stroke that I want, but sometimes a coach needs to stand back and watch to see what, if anything, is happening.  I can give ten swimmers identical instructions, and I will get ten different results, stemming from their different ability levels, strengths and weaknesses, levels of focus and attention, body sizes and types, willingness to change something that has “worked,” etc. A coach misses a lot by talking all the time.

            Sixth, if I were to stop a swimmer every time something wasn’t perfect, we would never get any training done.  Sometimes you just need to train on what you have, rather than on what you would like to have.  And oftentimes, when a swimmer builds more physical capacities in training, she builds the ability to do and maintain the stroke change that I had wanted in the first place.  This is frequently the case in butterfly and breaststroke, which are “power” strokes:  unless kids are in very good shape, they will not be able to maintain the proper stroke mechanics for very long without rest or aid (e.g., fins).

            Seventh, a coach cannot change a swimmer’s stroke.  Only a swimmer can do that.  A coach can, and should, give the swimmer help in doing so, but in the end if the swimmer isn’t willing to do the continual work to change, or cannot maintain the continual focus that change requires, then the change will not happen.  Changing a stroke means living outside of the comfort zone, because changing means being uncomfortable for a long time until the change has been grooved into your mind and muscles.

            I’m sure I’ll think of more reasons, but those will do for now.

TECHNICAL CLARIFICATION

            At a recent “prelim and final” meet, we had several of our younger swimmers involved in “swim-offs”, which seemed to confuse them a bit.  So, to clarify the issue, and the opportunity:

“Swim-off”:  only eight swimmers (or six, in a six lane pool) can qualify for a championship final; only eight swimmers can qualify for a consolation final.

If two swimmers are tied to the one-hundredth of a second for eighth place after the preliminaries, then those swimmers must race to figure out who will be in the championship final, and who will be in the consolations.

If two swimmers are tied for sixteenth place after the preliminaries, then those swimmers must race to see which swimmer will compete in the consolation final, and which will be the alternate.

If two swimmers are tied for seventeenth or eighteenth place after the preliminaries, then those swimmers must race to see which swimmer is the first or second alternate.

Getting into a swim-off is a good thing:  it gives you another chance to race and to swim fast.  Your swim-off time counts (and it is almost always the case that kids swim faster in the swim-off than they had in the prelims, often significantly faster), but the major goal is to get your hand on the wall first, so that you get to swim again that night in a favored position.

MARYLAND MADNESS

The recent SPY Winterfest Invitational at the University of Maryland was a wonderful meet for the York Y swimming team.   So many kids stepping up, moving up spaces, qualifying for finals, swimming faster at night – just plain SWIMMING FAST!

After each meet, I pour over the computer meet results, going through times and splits and comparing them with the notes and mental notes I took during the swims.  I circle in red pen the truly outstanding swims – not just best times, but best times by substantial margins where the race was also swum intelligently and tough.  Red circles are hard to get, because my standard is very high.

After a decent meet, I may have fifteen or twenty red circles on my meet results sheet.  After a particularly good meet, I may have forty or fifty circles.  Well, after the SPY meet, I had 66 red circles on my results.  That is quite impressive, especially considering that circles were spread among numerous swimmers, and not concentrated on a few kids.

TEAM RESULTS:  2^ND PLACE, OVERALL GIRLS’ TEAM; 7^th PLACE, OVERALL TEAM STANDINGS

NEW TEAM RECORDS

10 & Under Girls:

EMILY SCHMITTLE, 100 BR 1:27.79

EMILY SCHMITTLE, 100 FL 1:11.97

GIRLS’ 200 FR RELAY (MORGAN PFAFF, CAROLINE BIXLER, HALI FLICKINGER, SADA STEWART) 1:48.33

11 & 12 Girls:

SADA STEWART, 200 FR 1:59.88

SADA STEWART, 500 FR 5:19.50

SADA STEWART, 100 BK 1:03.90

SADA STEWART, 50 FL 28.76

SADA STEWART, 100 FL 1:01.80

SADA STEWART, 200 IM 2:13.66

MORGAN PFAFF, 100 BR 1:12.79

MORGAN PFAFF, 200 BR 2:30.79

MORGAN PFAFF, 200 FL 2:22.44

10 & Under Boys:

NOAH STEWART, 200 FR 2:19.84

NOAH STEWART, 100 BK 1:10.52

NOAH STEWART, 100 FL 1:08.08

NOAH STEWART, 200 IM  2:31.85

Senior Boys:

HARRY FOSTER, 100 FR 47.72

NEW STANDARDS

Note:  we are very very close to having the first “National Top 16 Reportable Times” of the season. 

AAAA TIMES

NOAH STEWART, 100 IM

NOAH STEWART, 200 IM

NOAH STEWART, 100 BK

SADA STEWART, 200 FR

SADA STEWART, 100 FL

SADA STEWART, 100 BK

SADA STEWART, 500 FR

MORGAN PFAFF, 200 BR

MORGAN PFAFF, 200 IM

ZACK PHILLIPS, 100 BK

AAA TIMES

ALYSSA BIXLER, 200 IM

SHANNON MULCAHY, 200 FL

ANNA SCHMITTLE, 100 FR

EMILY SCHMITTLE, 100 FR

NOAH STEWART, 100 FR

BRADLEY STRATHMEYER, 100 FR

MORGAN PFAFF, 200 FL

AA TIMES

Caroline Bixler, 200 FR

Kelly Dvoryak, 100 FR

Kelly Dvoryak, 100 BK

Harry Foster, 200 FL

Ashton Hensel, 50 FL

Emily Ilgenfritz, 50 FL

Allison Jacobs, 200 IM

Allison Jacobs, 200 FR

Maria Kinney, 50 FR

Chris Manning, 100 FR

Enya Messersmith, 200 IM

Emily Schmittle, 100 BR

Molly Shannon, 100 FR

Bradley Strathmeyer, 200 IM

Jordan Strine, 200 FR

Jordan Strine, 100 FR

Katherine Triggs, 100 FR

Hali Flickinger, 100 FR

Hali Flickinger, 50 FL

Morgan Pfaff, 500 FR

A TIMES

Brayden Bereznay, 100 BR

Ashton Hensel, 50 FR

Emily Ilgenfritz, 100 IM

Allison Jacobs, 100 BR

Hunter Kerestes, 50 BK

Coleman Stewart, 50 BK

Katherine Triggs, 50 BK

BB TIMES

Ben Chu, 50 BK

HERSHEY DUEL & ELITE MEET

NEW TEAM RECORDS

13-14 Girls:

JULIA KUCHERICH, 100 BK 58.83

JULIA KUCHERICH, 50 FR 24.87

8 & Under Boys:

JOSEPH KOCH, 25 FR  14.61

Senior Boys:

ZACK PHILLIPS, 200 IM  1:57.61

ZACK PHILLIPS, 100 BR  1:01.66

(Breaking a 37-year old record held by the seemingly immortal Tom Schaeberle)

NEW STANDARDS

AAA TIMES

Julia Kucherich, 50 FR

Julia Kucherich, 100 FR

Julia Kucherich, 100 BR

Julia Kucherich, 200 BR

Julia Kucherich, 100 FL

Julia Kucherich, 200 FL

Zack Phillips, 100 FR

Zack Phillips, 100 BK

Zack Phillips, 100 BR

Zack Phillips, 100 FL

Zack Phillips, 200 IM

Caroline Bixler, 100 FR

Anna Schmittle, 50 FR

Sada Stewart, 50 BR

AA TIMES

Kelly Dvoryak, 50 FR

Hali Flickinger, 200 FR

Zack Phillips, 200 BR

Shannon Mulcahy, 200 FR

Noah Stewart, 50 BR

Brian Strathmeyer, 50 FR

A TIMES

Hali Flickinger, 50 BR

Ashton Hensel, 50 BK

Maria Kinney, 200 IM

Katherine Triggs, 200 FR

BB TIMES

Joseph Koch, 50 FR

Joseph Koch, 100 IM

Coleman Stewart, 50 FR

Coleman Stewart, 100 IM

Lili Sweeney, 50 FR

Lili Sweeney, 100 IM

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

“A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual.”

Teddy Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life”