Coaching and Care of Athletes

COACHING AND CARE OF ATHLETES Mussabini, like Micha€1 Murphy, had a positive genius for getting to the heart of things and picking out for himself new training methods to suit the particular mental and physical attri– butes of those athletes who came under his all-seeing eye. After Mussabini must rank our premier university coaches– Thomas at Oxford, who has produced a wealth of hurdlers and distance runners, including at least one world's champion in J. E. Lovelock, and the ever-cheerful Alec Nelson, who has served Cambridge University so well for such a long period of his life. Apart from these men, coaching is still almost a dead-letter in the British Isles, although there is every hope from the activities of the English Summer School for Athletes and Loughborough College School of Athletics, Games, and Physical Education, that a frater– nity of first-class coaches will be produced in the not too distant future. Comparing for a moment the systems which are to-day in vogue in America and Great Britain, one sees quickly that much of America's athletic success is to be found in the fact that boys are educated in athletics from the day they enter their preparatory schools, and are thus well versed in all the fundamentals of tech– nique by the time they come to the university coach. It follows, therefore, that all the head coach at an American university has to do is to improve the technique of his charges, and to see that they are fully trained for the performance of those feats which so greatly distinguish their careers. In Great Britain, on the other hand, coaching at the Public Schools is almost unknown, and I am sure that either Thomas at Oxford or Nelson at Cambridge will bear me out when I say that the majority of young athletes report– ing for instruction at Iffiey Road, Oxford, and Fenner's ground, Cambridge, are as totally ignorant of the real technique of any athletic event as they can possibly be. This makes the work of the English university coach about ten times as difficult as there is any need for it to be. In the circumstances the results which Nelson and Thomas have produced are little short of astounding. It must be admitted that the English university coaches have had some of the best, if not the very best, natural talent in the world to handle. None the less it is a terribly hard task to teach even the most naturally talented young athlete the whole technique of his event in the space of the three or four years which an English youth spends at his university. Again, we have to remember that the authority, if not always 30