Coaching and Care of Athletes

PREFACE THIS book is the o~tcome of more than forty years of practical . experience, for I do not think that I can have been more than six or seven years of age when I ran my first race. Since those far-off days the -sport known as Track and Field Athletics has provided me with something which is a great deal more than a hobby, for it has given me a lifelong and wonderfully absorbing interest. It is an interest which never flags, simply because one still goes on learning. The exceedingly happy days of competition are over, and many of the good friends w.ho shared them fell in the Great War, but the joy of coaching remains; and so one lives again in one's children and one's pupils. The fact that stands out most clearly in my mind at this stage of my life is that I might well have been a far better athlete than I was if such coaching as can be had to-day-yes, even in England-had been available when I was a boy. The realization of this fact induced me to take up pole-vaulting when I was just on forty years of age, in order that I might get the 'feel' of the event, and thereby better qualify myself to train my son into a champion. Much the same considerations have caused me to write this book. In foreign countries ·the necessity for adequate instruction is accepted ·as a matter of course, and the professional coach takes his proper place in the communal scheme of things. He is a person of no small social and professional importance, the value of whose services is recognized, as, indeed, it should be. In Great Britain we have maintained a strangely illogical out– look-that there is something unfair about winning through the help of a professional coach. A great deal of money which would have been better spent on the athletic education of our young athletes has been wasted upon the encouragement of pot-hunting at handicap meetings, where the prize fund may amount to more than £roo. If there is anyone who still disputes the value of coaching let him explain away the success of the United States, in which country there is a first-class coach in every college and school; T