Coaching and Care of Athletes

CHAPTER VIII MAKING A CHAMPION THE properly constituted coach gets a great deal of pleasure out of handling a squad and building a team. There are so many diverse personalities to be dealt with, and one must, of course, know each of one's pupils intimately. There is also the joy of strengthening the weak links in the chain, until one has built up a team which, if they do not win the championship or inter– community meeting for which they have been trained, will at least make a showing that will not disgrace the coach. According to my poinf of view, however, the cream of coach– ing lies in the making of an individual champion. One may, of course, have several champions in embryo under one at the same time, although they need not necessarily belong to the same team or institution. Just once in a while, however, there comes under one's charge a particular youth to whom one can deNote one's whole attention. It is then, I think, that the coach gets the greatest pleasure that a man may enjoy from his profession. It has been said that a coach can make a champion only if he likes his pupil personally. This is not quite true, for I remember how intensely one of the greatest English coaches disliked a certain man whom he turned ultimately into an absolute world-beater. That coach told me that every contact he had with the athlete in question was unpleasant, aNd yet he knew ~hat he was training a great athlete, and so stuck to his guns and produced his champion. That, I think, was the high-water mark in the coach's profession. More than once it has been my good fortune to coach and train a young athlete whom it has been sheer delight to handle, because ofhis own very charming character and the great personal affection he inspired in me. Among sprinters I have in mind the two Bedford schoolboys Archie McNichol and the late Jack Holland; among hurdlers J oe Simpson, who won the 400 metres hurdles at the World Students' Championships at D4rmstadt, Germany, in 1930, and Clive Pearson, of Bedford School, who was so narrowly beaten in the Public Schools Championships high hurdles in I 93 I by Bs