Coaching and Care of Athletes

CHAPTER V COACHING EDUCATION THE best way for a coach to educate himself is by coaching. That is an axiom, but it needs amplification. Some people are born instructors; others acquire the art of coaching by the sweat of their brows, the constant study of technique, and the qurning of much midnight oil. But even the born genius must take thought to add many cubits to his stature. As it has been said, genius is very largely a matter of an infinite capacity for taking pains. If a man has been an active athlete of any standing, or even an intelligent person who has taken his sport seriously, irrespec– tive of the degree of success in competition he may have attained, such a man has already laid the foundations of future success should he desire to take up coaching either professionally or as a hobby which he can follow without losing his amateur status. Another method of learning how to become a coach is that of watching coaches at work, listening to the instructions and advice they give to their pupils, and studying the actions and reactions of the athletes themselves. This method, however, should be regarded as nothing more than an adjunct to one's education, because athletic coaches do not lay bare the whole storehouse of their knowledge in coaching a squad of hurdlers or other athletes. There is no need for them to do so, nor would it even be desirable for a coach to enter into a long dissertation upon hurd– ling to ensure that a particular man should do a particular thing in a particular way. Of athletic text-books there is no end. Some are good, many are indifferent, and still more are worse than useless as general guides to athletic technique. In any case all that the majority of such books set out to teach is style. Many of them are goocl where the style ~nvolved is that necessary for the particular event in which the author of the book in question himself excelled. All too often the author's knowledge of the technique of other events is rather of the order of what "The captain told the mate, the mate told the crew, the crew told me, so I know it must be 57