To the coaches of visiting swimmers:
The holiday travelers, the home-from-colleges, the spring breakers, the summer-vacationers. These swimmers need a place to train, because we can’t expect swimmers to be chained to their home pools and home clubs 365 days a year.
But coaches of travelling swimmers are not just stop-gaps. They aren’t just a warm body with a big bucket of water in a convenient location.
The relationship between visiting-swimmer and visiting-host coach is a unique one, and one full of opportunity for both sides.
This time of year, it is easy for athletes and yes, coaches, to become distracted, to coast a little bit, to write lazy sets, and to cut back on their underwater dolphin kicks. We’ve all been guilty of it. There’s lots going on this time of year.
But at the same time, this is an important time of the season, the halfway point, the ‘first turn,’ if you will, ahead of the big spring and summer championship meets.
One time, an old coach who swam at he YMCA where I trained popped in to do some guest coaching. Some of you probably knew Bruce Rollins, an important figure in Texas private school coaching, who passed away earlier this year.
At one point, knowing that he had given them instruction that he had heard me give throughout the year, he winked after push-off and said to me “sometimes the best coach is the one who’s 5 miles away.”
And his point rang true. Sometimes, athletes get tired of listening to the same coach. They get tired of the cadence, the jokes, the sets, even the vocabulary.
Sometimes, a ‘new coach’ is exactly what they need, especially a young swimmer in the depths of winter training, to re-engage the learning centers of the brain. And for these visiting coaches, it’s simultaneously an opportunity to evaluate what you do and how you communicate.
It’s a fantastic feedback loop. Imagine a swimmer showing up at your pool from one of the true juggernaut club programs like Carmel or Sandpipers or NCAP. Imagine the ability to see how that swimmer works, how they process a practice.
Even if the visiting swimmer is not from that program, it gives your athletes the chance to battle against a new swimmer. Maybe the holidays are a chance to throw some relays in, something competitive, something new and fresh for your whole team that gets them out of their routines. If they’re college swimmers coming back, use them to excite your current swimmers about the future and the goals they’re working toward.
Don’t underestimate this opportunity.
The best coaches are always looking for these opportunities to re-engage their athletes. High engagement is the secret superpower of the best coaches, and can overcome a whole lot of educational deficiencies in physiology or psychology or training theory.
College swim camps don’t always have superstar coaches, but they offer an opportunity to engage athletes in a whole different way, get them to go full-swimmer for a week. That’s what makes the experience so special for the athletes; that’s the brew that makes them magic. Holiday training can tap into this too.
In a way, this can be an opportunity to both get athletes a mental vacation without disrupting training. There’s a reason that Leon and Ceccon are going to Australia for a little bit after the Olympics.
So to these coaches, especially the ones in southern states like Florida and Arizona and California that get a lot of holiday visitors, thank you for taking this role seriously.
And to the swimmers: allow yourself to engage and acknowledge. You will learn some things. Some of those things will be useful when you go home, some will not, but if you play it right, and buy in quickly, you will have more of those tools in your toolbag that the world’s most successful coach of the moment Bob Bowman loves to talk about, plus some new friends in another state.
That’s very cool, and something that I wish all swimmers could have.
It may not be exactly what you’re used to, and depending on your age and aptitude, you may or may not recognize where your visiting program is better or worse. But just embrace it for a couple of weeks. Enjoy the experience. Don’t overthink it. Go swim.
Happy Holidays to all, and to those away from home, safe travels.
When I was in high school, I remember fondly when additional kids would show up to Christmas training. It was usually people who were home from college for break, but occasionally we would get someone still in high school who was visiting family in our city. It was a welcome opportunity to share a lane with different people, and offered some extra motivation to swim through difficult training.
Anecdotally, a lot of club coaches welcome visitors well & seem to respect the commitment to train. Shoutout to Swim Atlanta and Nova coaches for positive experiences over the years when our swimmer needed a place to practice.
Swimmer’s who take break’s reset there science