COACHES CORNER

 1. HAVE CLEAR GOALS
You can’t get to where you want to go unless you know exactly where that is. Your success as a swimmer starts with a dream, a goal of how far you’d like to go in the sport. The more detailed a picture you can paint of this goal the better your chance of turning your dream into reality. Saying you want to be as good as you can or go faster are goals that are general and too vague to be useful. Qualifying for Age Groups, New Englands, YMCA Nationals, or going 50 flat in the 100 Free are clear, specific and more reachable. Your goals are like magnets which will pull you in their direction. The more specific and detailed you make them and the more time you spend thinking about them, the stronger the pull. Try to have your goals broken down from long term to intermediate to short term so that even on a daily basis you will have specific goals for practice. This will help you stay motivated over the long haul.


2. MAKE YOUR PRACTICES IMPORTANT
Use Simulation in Practice – Most swimmers spend the same amount of time practicing weekly. However, only a small fraction of athletes improve to their full potential. The reason behind this lies in your practices. Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. Too many swimmers go through the motions in practice. They put their time in but not their minds or their emotions. They daydream during sets or wish they were elsewhere. During difficult sets they look for ways to dog it. You will compete the way you practice. Practice just like meets, mentally as well as physically, that is make your practices important, use your imagination to simulate meet or race conditions. Take a few of those long, boring, painful sets and pretend you’re actually competing. Practice race turns, finishing fast, getting your pain to work for you, etc. The more important you can make your practices and the more similar to actual meets, the more you’ll get out of them. Every chance you get, set-up specific race-scenarios in your head and then swim as if everything was on the line. If you consistently practice this way, the way champions do, you’ll soon find your meet times dropping.

3. MENTAL TOUGHNESS OR REFRAMING ADVERSITY
Learn to look at obstacles and setbacks as a way to get more motivated and to increase your confidence. Most swimmers complain bitterly about pool temperature, lane assignments, rain, and fatigue. The great swimmers use any kind of adversity to help them get the competitive advantage over their opponents. For example, you can do 1 of 2 things with the pain and fatigue of a practice/race. You can dread it, fight it, complain about it and consequently tighten up and back down from it-going slower; or you can reframe it. You can say to yourself, “Everyone in this practice/race has to deal with this pain, and I’m mentally tougher to handle it than everyone else…pain and fatigue is an indicator that I’m going fast, that my body’s working well, and a signal for me to move towards it, stretching it out and lengthening the stroke.”
Learn to think like a winner by reframing. Accept the pain of practices/races and use it to your advantage!

4. BE POSITIVE – NOTHING GOOD COMES FROM NEGATIVITY
When you’re negative or down on yourself you sap your energy, drain your confidence, and insure that you will swim poorly. Practice being positive about yourself, teammates, and coaches, NO MATTER WHAT THE SITUATION! A positive attitude will help you overcome hardships and setbacks and keep you going. A negative attitude will trick you into giving up too soon or before you even start. Winners in and out of the pool are positive. “Can’t,” “Never,” and “Impossible” do not exist in the dictionary of their minds.

This also applies to parents, coaches, and board members. Negative thinking and positive thinking are very contagious. They spread like wildfire. When negative thoughts, emotions, and comments are passed about in idle conversation they cloud the vision of the group as a whole. Successes turn into failures. Passion for the sport turns into cynicism. In turn, positive thinking and comments may be the edge between “We tried” and “We did!”

These 10 sayings have been passed along for generations for a reason:

  • “If you don’t have anything pleasant to say, don’t say anything at all”
  • “Look at the bright side.”
  • “Why say the glass is half empty when you can see it’s half full?”
  • “Nobody likes a backseat driver”
  • “Say it with a smile”
  • “Criticism is nothing more than intellectual gossip!” Don’t believe me? Look at the definition-----“to comment on or point out the faults of people or things, or find something wrong or bad about them.”
  • “Don’t give advice when none is asked for!” – Ann Landers
  • “There is always a silver lining!”
  • “Every diamond has a fault, if you search hard enough!”
  • “Those that can’t, give advice!”

The journey to happiness follows a long and arduous path. Positive, forward thinking will help you avoid the potholes and reach your goal. Negativity will take you down a detour of turmoil and despair.
Which direction do you want to go?

5. LEARN TO QUICKLY LET GO OF YOU MISTAKES AND FAILURES
Champions do one thing better than everyone else. FAIL!! When a champion has a bad race they use this failure for feedback. (“What did I do wrong….How can I improve”) Remember to communicate intelligently, (not emotionally) with your coach after every race-good or bad! If you’re too emotional your mind will not focus on learning about what you did right and what you can improve upon.
Just as important – let it go quickly. In other words, don’t dwell on the past. When you hang onto your bad races and mistakes in a meet, the one thing you can count on happening is that you’ll get more of them! Learn to recognize when your mind’s in the past and quickly let it go. Telling yourself things like, “I’m no good anymore,” “Here we go again”, “Why does this always happen to me”, are indicators that your focus is stuck in the past. Only go into the past if your past is a positive, self-enhancing one. Try to focus on races in which you have swum fast and what you did right, rather than the bad races and what you did wrong.

Parents, this is a time when you need to be supportive of your child NO MATTER WHAT! They have coaches that will give them a critique of their performance. They will already be feeling low if they’ve had a bad race. They are not swimming slowly on purpose to make us mad! CRITICAL COMMENTS FROM A LOVED ONE ONLY PUSH A CHILD INTO A MORE NEGATIVE ATTITUDE. A bad race or a bad meet does not equate with a bad child or a child that is a failure.