As the athletes I coach get older, many go into coaching or teaching. My first reaction to all of it is “There goes my secret sauce!”. I spent over 50 years learning and re-learning, experimenting, researching, and learning my craft. An athlete comes along and gets this information in a matter of hours; information that took me years to obtain.
My second thought is “uh oh” because now I have to coach against my own knowledge. Then, a strange thing happens.
Those athletes, (like I had to), have to learn how to coach. They have to be invested. They have to 100% be in their athletes’ corners. Those players who have been with me the longest, do a great job of the above, plus the secret sauce.
So what competitive edge do I have? Years of working with different people gave me different ways of explaining something. Being sensitive to an athlete’s feelings and needs are qualities that a good coach will have. When I first started I had one or two ways to teach mechanics and footwork. Today, I can walk on a court, and take an athlete through 20 different drills in one hour of movement with no breaks and not have to write anything down (although I often do) as the drills are in my head. The fun of coaching is inventing new drills to take the place of old drills because I want my athletes to never be sure of what is happening next in a lesson. That makes each lesson different and challenging and keeps the skill bar moving up for that person.
The bottom line of coaching is this. How many world or national champions have you coached? Have you ever coached the greatest of the greats? Do all of your athletes get better? To answer yes to those questions takes a long career, not a few years! In the meantime do your athletes get better. The answer to that latter question is probably the most important. World and National champions will come in time if improvement is there.
Back to the Winterton Coaching Tree. The more knowledge that gets out there, the better for racquetball. In all those lessons from the young coaches remember, they do know what I taught them, but not what I know!!