Coaching and Care of Athletes

COACHING AND CARE OF ATHLETES ensuring accuracy, will also provide simplicity in administration. Fourthly and finally the individual standard for the events must be satisfactorily determined. Before· setting out to devise scoring tables the coach should make himself thoroughly acquainted witli C. H. McCloy's book The Measurement of Athletic Power, and also with The Finnish Scoring Tables, officially adopted by the International Amateur Athletic Federation. These tables give equivalent values for the varying stages of difficulty in different events, while the system of find– ing a satisfactory curve for both track and field events appears to have produced as nearly as possible a scientifically correct criterion. The battery of events to provide the testing programme may best be left to the discretion of individual coaches, who, .however, should base their final decision upon such scientific works as McCloy's. In developing any method of handicapping, the variables of age, height, and weight must be taken into account. It should not be difficult to obtain this information. Athletes know their own ages, and the coach himself can measure and weigh the men. Experience will give the coach some data which are not usually available to the physical educationist, in that he can by his own observati~ns obtain fairly accurate knowledge of the strength, speed of muscular contraction, bodily development, and intelli– gence of each individual among the class of athletes he is going to put into training. In designing his testing prograii_lme and ulti– mately grading the athletes the coach should not concentrate his entire attention upon the team that is coming into his charge at the period in question, but should base the programme he will draw up on the experience he has gained in previous years, by making a statistical analysis of all the data relating to the athletes who have already passed through his hands. In determining the standard and grading of mature athlete_s the coach's main consideration will be ability and also the event, or kindred events, which the athlete is going to practise. First of all, after the tests have been carried out, it will be necessary to grade or group the athletes according to their events, and then, within the limits of a man's own event, to grade him in accordance with the revelation as to ability made in his test for general physical cleverness and also in his particular event. What I have said so far may sound rather alarming to the 132 -