Day: February 23, 2016

How To Q&A Teammates & Coaches

Question of the Day

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Hi Kayleigh!  I am a junior in college and due to a combination of good and bad experiences with coaches as well as a love for the sport,  I’m seriously considering coaching once I graduate and just had a few questions.  Would you say you need a specific degree to coach,  or is the saying “A degree is worth the paper it’s printed on” true? Do I have any chance of getting the opportunity be a grad assistant if I’m not studying exercise science, sports management or something else related? In general what advice would you give to someone who wants to coach? Thank you!

Ah, I love this question!

You definitely don’t need a specific degree. I studied exercise science because I went into college wanting to do research with/on athletes. (You know the show Sport Science on ESPN? I basically wanted to do all the stuff John Brenkus does.) I guess in some ways having that background has helped with coaching but I can’t think of a specific instance where I’ve actually used my degree in the four years I’ve been coaching. (Literally me.) Off the top of my head, the majors of the other coaches at the boathouse when they were in college were history, law (our head coach was a lawyer for 15ish years before he started coaching), theater, sociology, biology, political science, and English. Ultimately I think it’s less about whatever degree you have and more about how you apply the skills you learned while getting it … which I guess is true for most jobs.

Grad assistants and volunteer assistants are kinda the same and kinda different. Grad assistants sometimes get paid but they also obviously have the added hurdle of getting into grad school first. Volunteer assistants don’t get paid at all (NCAA rules, limit on number of coaches, etc.) and don’t have to be in grad school to coach there. I looked at a few schools that were hiring grad assistants but I’m just so burned out on school that I never pursued it. (Learning is great but school is blech so getting another degree, even if I can do it while coaching, is tabled for the foreseeable future.)

The best way to get into coaching is to just find a junior team that’s hiring coaches and reach out to them. They’re practically a dime a dozen so as long as you’ve got some rowing/coxing experience it shouldn’t be too hard to get involved. I definitely think starting out with juniors is the way to go because even if it’s with a top program, the environment is just more conducive to you being able to figure out your coaching style and trial-and-error stuff to find out what works. In some cases it’s something you can do while you’re still in school too. One of my friends started coaching his junior year and would coach the novices twice a week in the afternoons when they were in season and then four times a week during winter training. In the summers he helped out with the learn-to-row camps they offered and then after graduation he became their head coach for a year or two while working for a local company.

I was at a coaching conference a couple years ago, around the same time I decided coaching at the college level was what I wanted to do, and I asked Kevin Sauer (UVA’s coach) if he had any advice. He said that the best way to start coaching at this level is to go be a volunteer assistant because not only does it give you a lot of valuable experience but also because pretty much no team is ever going to turn down free help. I had a lot – like, a lot – of people tell me that was an awful idea (including other coaches I know who had been volunteer coaches … they compared it to indentured servitude) because you don’t get paid (the biggest deterrent, especially for people my age who are saddled with a ton of student loans and can’t really afford to work for free) and it’s not always a positive experience. One of the coaches I talked to told me that I’ll either figure out exactly what I want in a team or I’ll find out exactly what I don’t want and the latter kind of sums of my first experience with volunteer coaching.

I was initially really excited about it (and blatantly ignored any and all reservations that I had, which was stupid) and then spent the next few months thinking “I’ve made a huge mistake“. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep coaching after that, at least at this level, but my high school coach encouraged me to keep looking and that’s how I found my current job at MIT. One of my friends rowed here so I knew a little about the team and I figured what the hell, I’m moving back to Boston anyways, might as well reach out. I think within like, ten minutes of talking to our assistant on the phone I was like … this is where I want to be. At the end of our conversation he said he still had two or three other people to interview but I flat out said (a lot more aggressively than I’d intended) that I wanted the job and that was pretty much it. It was very much a “when you know, you know” situation for me and I haven’t regretted it once since. (I could seriously go on for days about why this has been such a positive experience for me but I’ll spare you.)

Something I see repeated a lot (and that I agree with) is to not assume that just because you’ve been rowing or coxing for awhile that you can just jump right into coaching (especially at the collegiate level) and be good at it. You do have to humble yourself a bit and put aside your own success and recognize that that has little to no bearing on how good of a coach you’ll be. There’s definitely some work that goes into figuring out how to communicate the things that seem like common sense to you to a group of rowers (especially novices) who might not conceptually understand what you’re saying. I think that’s probably what I spent most of my first year coaching working out how to do.

Definitely work your contacts though and keep your eyes and ears open for coaching or other volunteer opportunities in the summer as a way to get your foot in the door. One of the camps I coach at (Northeast Rowing Center) has college kids work as the counselors so that’d be something worth looking into if there are any camps being hosted near you. (If you want more info on NRC feel free to email me.) It’s super low-key and chill since your main responsibility is to make sure the kids get from Point A to Point B and don’t do anything stupid outside of practice and you get the benefit of being able to spend time with other coaches who could prove to be helpful connections in the future.

There’s probably a lot more I could say on this that I’m just not thinking of right now so if you have any other questions, feel free to ask!

Coxing Q&A Teammates & Coaches

Question of the Day

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Hi! I’ve asked you plenty of questions before, and your blog is so helpful for me to be a better rower and coxswain. Recently, my team voted for women’s varsity captain. The girl who won is in her third season on the team, and her second season coxing. I love her as a person but I am not a fan of her coxing – I’ve raced with her before. (Just for some background.)

I personally don’t agree with many of the decisions she makes. For example: on our team, if the rowers aren’t cooperating, the coxswains have the authority to assign pushups. If ONE rower in her boat is unable to roll their oar up, then she gives her entire boat pushups, and one day, she was coxing my boat (a mixed NOVICE eight) who has just recently been learning how to roll-up, and she gave them pushups for not being able to do something that they haven’t learned.

Also, there have been several instances where a boat has needed to be put away and one more person was needed to carry it. I offer to help and then she tells me that the rowers need to be the ones carrying the boats. I don’t agree with this because the rowers bring their boat down and up, they bring oars down and up, and they help other boats. If each boat was carrying their own boat on their own, I’d agree with her. But if you just need someone else to put it in the racks, what is the problem if it is a coxswain (formerly a rower; perfectly able to lift a boat) versus a rower?

Thirdly, there are many cases where she has to ask me what we’re supposed to be doing, who’s going out first, etc., and that just seems very backwards to me. This along with the fact that the novices (who didn’t get to vote) wish that I were captain and believe that I am a better coxswain than her, handle myself better under pressure, etc.

I obviously cannot change the fact that she’s captain, and I am happy for her. My question is, how do I respect her even though I have more experience and frankly more leadership skills than she does? (I don’t know if this sounds totally jerky or not… I really do like her as a person, I just feel that she isn’t fit to be captain – at least, not yet.)

There’s a lot of flawed logic in “coxswains can assign pushups if the rowers aren’t cooperating” but power, responsibility, or whatever you want to call it like that in the wrong hands is basically just giving them a clear path towards becoming a full on Napoleonic personality. This is one of those situations where I think it’s in the best interest of everyone, including her, to have someone (you, another captain (if there is one), her stroke seat, etc.) take her aside and basically have a “you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself” conversation with her. Throwing your weight around like that, especially with novices, isn’t the best way to earn your team’s respect and if she wants to actually be a captain and not just wear the title like a crown she needs to chill.

I agree that if you need somebody to help carry a boat it doesn’t matter who it is as long as they’re actually capable of helping (aka your 5’0″, 114lb coxswain probably won’t be of much help but your 5’6″, 127lb coxswain might be). This is one battle though that probably isn’t worth fighting. In this case I’d probably go to one of the people carrying the oars and say “hey, let me grab those and you go help them take the boat up”. You still get to help out and she gets to have a “real” rower carrying the boat … practically a win-win.

When it comes to her asking you what you’re supposed to be doing, who’s going out, etc. I don’t think it’s a big deal to occasionally fill her in if you know the answer to her question (particularly if she was legitimately occupied with something else while the coach was telling the team what the plan was) but more often then not I think you have to default to saying “you should talk to [your coach]”, “[your coach] posted the workout/lineups on the cork board upstairs”, etc. At some point you might just have to say “it’s not my responsibility to know this stuff or communicate it to you”, which might come off as passive aggressive or whatever but it’s true. I don’t expect the people in my boat or the guys on our team to tell me or our coxswains what the plan for practice is because it’s just not their job to do.

Looking at this from her perspective though (and to give her the smallest benefit of the doubt), it’s possible she’s asking you because she sees that you have more experience (both as a coxswain and a leader) and she’s looking for some guidance without having to outright say so. I’ve done that (and sometimes still do) but whoever I’m asking usually catches on and is like “you know you can just ask for help if you need it, right?” and it’s like … OK, they’re willing to help and don’t think I’m a total idiot. When you’re put in positions like she’s in, not just as a coxswain but with the added responsibility of being a captain too, there is a lot of pressure to have your shit together and if you don’t it can be pretty overwhelming (which in turn some people compensate for by going a little over the top with how they handle things … aka the pushups incident). Basically what I’m saying is don’t misattribute her attitude as being one thing when it might actually be the result of something else.

Like I said earlier, I think it’d be beneficial to have a quick one-on-one to address how she interacts with the novices and how she handles assigning pushups (which I still think is stupid and ineffective but if it’s a team policy then I guess you’ve gotta find a way to work with it … which basically means only using it as an absolute last resort). From there I’d just put it out there that you know having all this responsibility on your shoulders can be overwhelming at first so if she wants/needs advice on anything you’re willing to listen but, as previously mentioned, she’s gotta figure this out on her own and not rely on you to give her the lineups, workouts, launching order, etc. In situations like this I really believe the best thing you can do is just offer your support and if she wants it she’ll ask for it and if not, you just have to accept that and move forward. It’s hard – like, grit your teeth and cringe hard – when you want to tell someone how to do something or a way to do it better so they can avoid shitty situations but you also have to recognize that they’ve gotta make their own mistakes if they want to learn anything. That’s probably been the hardest thing for me working with our coxswains is just knowing when to sit back and not help. To the untrained eye I think it probably comes off as being a jerk for not helping (because obviously if a coxswain screws up it doesn’t just effect them, it effects the whole boat/team too) but I’m not about to force my knowledge or way of doing something on someone, even when I know it’s unequivocally right, just because they haven’t figured it out on their own yet (within reason obviously). So instead I’ll put it out there that if they want help, want to discuss something, etc. all they have to do is ask and we’ll find time to talk … otherwise, they’re on their own for better or worse.

I don’t think it makes you sound like a jerk to say all that. I think the only thing you’ve gotta be conscious of is not overstepping or undermining her authority when you interact with the novices. You can try to temper situations if a problem arises but they still have to respect the fact that she’s the captain, even if/when she does thing they don’t agree with. Even if you disagree with it too, it’d be better for you to try to help them understand where she might be coming from or why the team does things a certain way vs. saying “I don’t know why she’s making you guys do that…” or bickering with her in front of the team about who’s allowed to help carry the boats. If you want to be seen as a leader or theoretically in the future if you wanted to be captain, you’re not going to achieve that by badmouthing her or getting sucked into the groupthink where all the novices praise you while at the same time hating on her.

So … best way to respect her when you don’t (yet)? Find ways to work with her so you can better understand where she’s coming from. At the very least you’ll pick up some strategies for dealing with this type of personality so that if you encounter someone similar in the future (which you most definitely will in college, at work, etc.) you’ll know the most effective ways to deal with them.