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Parent and Coach...The Other
Stuff
Coaching is about more than athletes, practices, and
competition. As Mike Krzyzewski, Duke's hugely successful
basketball coach said, it's also about "the other
stuff." For coaches of club teams, that means
parents.
By Tom Slear, Splash Magazine special
correspondent “All that craziness,” is how
Monica Teuscher describes the rituals of other parents who
nervously follow their children’s swimming development.
Teuscher, mother of Cristina, a 1996 and 2000 Olympian, never owned
a stopwatch and rarely bought a meet program. She didn’t
track her daughter’s times, yell during her races, or seek
out her coach after practices for private chats. During swim meets,
she went off by herself to read or knit, only to be amused when
other parents gave her a rundown on Cristina's swims, complete with
split times. "I thought it was important that I was
there, but for support, not for coaching or to add pressure,"
Teuscher explains. "My job was to take my daughters (older daughter
Carolina also swam) out for a good meal after they raced. The last
thing we talked about was swimming." Most coaches
would agree that the best team to coach is one filled with parents
such as Teuscher, who recognize the line between parenting and
coaching and avoid it as if it were radioactive. They somehow
manage to counterbalance their staunch support with a refreshing
cluelessness. Years ago Debbie Phelps, mother of Michael, the world
record-holder in the 200-meter butterfly, relocated the family so
that her children would be closer to North Baltimore Aquatic
Club’s practice facility. Yet when asked about
Michael’s world record time, she can do no better than to
say, “I’m not sure – 1:50 something?”
(Actually, 1:54.58) "The swimmers I've had who have
had the most success were unencumbered by parents calling the shots
behind the scenes," says John Collins, who has coached Olympians
Rick Carey and Lea Loveless as well as Cristina Teuscher at the
Badger Swim Club in Larchmont, N.Y. "These parents are very
good about backing up their kids, but they are hands off when it
comes to swimming business." The Growing
Intrusion of Parents Most coaches will tell
you that Teuscher and Phelps are hardly exceptions. The
overwhelming majority of parents instinctively, or with gentle
guidance, find their place in the background. A few, however,
can’t resist meddling, such as the mother who wrote Collins a
five- or six-page letter every week for a year and a half. Rare is
the swim coach who doesn’t have a similar story to
tell. "So many," says Chuck Warner, the head coach at
Rutgers University who coached club teams for years before entering
the college ranks. "All filed away in a painful spot."
The effect of such parents is all out of proportion to their
numbers. A survey by Dan Doyle, which will be published in his
forthcoming book, The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting, found that
high school coaches across different sports are convinced that the
biggest change in their profession over the last 15 years has been
the growing intrusion of parents. "No other factor
they mentioned even came close," says Doyle, the executive director
of the Institute for International Sport. The top
issues raised when the development coordinators for USA Swimming
solicit opinions from club coaches are "parent education" and "club
governance," euphemisms for the difficulty of dealing with parents,
whether individually or as members of the club's board of
directors. (The coach-board relationship will be covered in a
future issue of Splash.) An
Oasis But a bit of perspective is in order
here. While all coaches labor to properly shape the
parent-athlete-coach triangle, some suffer more than others. Rick
Wolff, chairman of the Center for Sports Parenting
(www.internationalsport.com/csp), calls swimming "an oasis."
Coaches of team sports have only subjective means to evaluate
talent. Even at its best, the process is imprecise and open to
question. How does a coach fix with any certainty which offensive
lineman blocks better, or which outfielder offers the best
combination of hitting and fielding? Yet these
judgements determine playing time, which is at the root of nearly
all parental complaints. Coaches are forced to defend themselves
armed with nothing stronger than an arbitrary standard. Who’s
to say a guard with a deft shooting touch should play more than a
tenacious defender? With swimming the only standard is
time, so performance is entirely quantifiable, measured precisely
by a stopwatch. And playing time is rarely an issue. The only
barrier to entry at most age-group meets is the entry fee. Everyone
who wants to swim can compete.
“When you compare what coaches of
team sports have to put up with when they make decisions about who
makes the team and who plays, coaches of individual sports like
swimming and track are not even in deep water as far as their
problems with parents,” says Doyle. “They are barely in
three feet of water.” Swimming's preciseness,
however, comes with a price. In sports such as soccer and
basketball, parents can judge their children’s potential only
against the players they compete against, which typically stretches
no farther than adjacent counties. Not until the last two or three
years of high school do they step onto a stage that provides
statewide or national exposure. Swimming, on the other
hand, allows comparison between a 10-year-old breaststroker in
Pennsylvania to one in California right down to the hundredth of a
second. The temptation for parents to extrapolate is irresistible.
If a son or daughter is among the Top 16 when they are 10,
shouldn't they be in the running for a national championship when
they turn 18? In fact, quite the opposite is the case.
Improvement is not a steady, positive slope, especially for
prodigies. A study by USA Swimming using the All-Time Top100 swims
in each age group through 1996 found that only 10 percent of the
Top 100 10-and-Unders maintained their status through age 18. Only
half of the swimmers among the Top 100 in the 17-18 age group had
made any top-100 list when they were younger. "Those
winning races at 10 probably won't be winning races when they are
20," says John Leonard, the executive director of the American
Swimming Coaches Association. "This is one of those things that is
obvious to coaches but is a mystery to parents. Coaches understand
the long-term nature of the sport, parents often don't."
This misunderstanding creates swimming's equivalent of
playing-time disputes. As swimmers begin to slip in national,
regional, and even local rankings, their parents scramble for
solutions. Sue Anderson, a former world record-holder and one of
USA Swimming's development coordinators, saw the pattern repeat
itself many times when she was head coach of the Scarlet Aquatic
Club in New Jersey during the 1990s. These "pressure parents," as
she calls them, begin to micromanage their children's swimming by
arranging for extra practices and seeking out meets not on the
team's schedule. When expectations still aren't met, they
invariably blame the coach, who is mostly defenseless because no
one can say for sure why young, talented swimmers stop improving.
Maybe it is the coach's fault, though the problem just as likely
could stem from the swimmer's early physical maturation or a
mindset that has become mis-wired because of parental pressure, or
a host of other reasons. Regardless, the
conflict heats up until the swimmer jumps to another club, which is
often the first of several such moves. "What the
parents think is helping their kids is only putting them under a
lot of pressure," says Anderson. "Many of these kids do very well
when they are 10-and-under and 11-12, but eventually a lot them
they stop living up to expectations, and they fall apart."
The Other Stuff Of course, not
all disputes fall under the category of domineering parents and
underachieving swimmers (though they tend to be the most
intractable). A coach's personal style can cause problems,
particularly if he focuses almost exclusively on the senior
swimmers. There is also the matter of different outlooks. Parents
see only their sons and daughters and the next few weeks and
months. Coaches see the entire team and the upcoming years. Then
there's the issue of how coaches are viewed. Many parents don't see
a professional, but a former jock slumming between real
jobs.
"It was amazing how differently parents acted when I
started coaching at the college level," says Warner. "I knew
nothing more than when I was coaching a club team, but the parents
assumed that I did."
Mike Krzyzewski, who, over the last 20 years at Duke has
established himself as one of the most successful college
basketball coaches ever, once said, "The coaching I love. The kids
I love. It’s the other stuff you have to watch out
for."
What often matters to parents is the other stuff, whether
coaches are returning their phone calls promptly or thanking them
for their volunteer work on behalf of the club. These small
courtesies seem insignificant by themselves, but when taken
together they acknowledge that the coach is meeting the parents
halfway. They also keep disputes to a minimum. A meticulous plan
handed out in March for the summer season will inhibit parents from
overlapping family vacations with major competitions. Regular
parent meetings run by the coaches and board members that both
inform and educate will minimize rumors and alleviate concerns over
the cyclic nature of competitive swimming. Set office hours for the
coach will discourage interruptions from parents during
practice.
The biggest courtesy of all, Leonard believes, is
listening. A handful of parents are unreasonable. Others simply
have healthy concerns about what's best for their children.
Separating the two requires more than a five-minute
conversation.
To make his point, Leonard refers back to his first
coaching job, which was in Illinois during the 1970s. The father of
a talented girl initially gave off all the signs of trouble.
"The classic horror story of a parent," Leonard recalls. "He
was a trial attorney. Very pushy. His style of conversation was
confrontational." Yet Leonard endured and gradually
came to realize that despite the father's bluster, he had a lot to
offer. After two years, they were running together. Leonard would
talk about his new ideas and the father would poke holes in all of
the right spots.
"He'd question me on everything I was doing, which gave me
a lot to think about," Leonard says. "Our relationship lasted for
eight years and the daughter represented the United States on
national teams. The mother and the father were the most active
parents in helping to run the club. They were the best swimming
parents I have ever known. It took me a while, but I discovered
they were only interested in the best possible experiences for
their daughter – both in life and in swimming – and
they wanted to learn all they could about the sport.
"It just took a little bit of willingness to understand
what they were after, and a little bit of patience to give them the
opportunity to do the right thing."
Good advice, both for coaches and parents.
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