Coaching and Care of Athletes

COACHING AND CARE OF ATHLETES If you are a coach at a university, college, or school, or to a regiment or club, the first thing you have to do at the beginning of the season is to assemble all your athletes and, having explained to them your system, test each man individually and grade him. If your pupils are to be with you for a considerable period, then, of course, you can grade them gradually by observation, and from time to time regrade them; but if, as happens at the Summer School, you are to have your athletes for only a very limited period, then the system we use at Loughborough is probably the best. In Course II-for active athletes only-the system is to assemble the whole of the pupils on the first day ofthe course and devote the entire day to watching the men themselves perform. Each man is given two, or possibly three, trials in each event he has come to learn, and, as I have said earlier in this book, a stenographer stands beside the head coach and the chief foreign coach and takes notes of their remarks upon the form displayed by each individual athlete. At Loughborough we grade the athletes in this way for the purpose of allotting them to the coaches who are best qualified to take charge of the stage of instruction which will suit the athletes committed to their care. The permanently employed coach, or the club _coach who has the same set of athletes to handle throughout the season, grades his pupils for a rather different purpose, in that what he is aiming at .is to find how far each pupil is advanced, so that he may scheme that man's instruction accordingly. When one has a large number of students to deal with it is wise to divide them into squads of not less than eight men and not more than twelve men. Squads of this size are convenient to handle, and the men can work well in pairs under the eye of the coach. You should put each squad under an assistant coach, or an 'active-athlete-leader,' and then, during training periods, go from squad to squad yourself, for the purpose of criticizing and correct– ing faults while you are generally supervising training. When you have watched this phase of the training for long enough you should assemble all the squads, and, in your capacity as chief coach, take each event in turn, letting each man practise his particular event under the eye of the assistant coach, or athlete– leader, who has been coaching him. While this is going on both you and the pupils should watch and criticize. Then you yourself can coach, as an example of how coaching should be carried out, 76