Someone asked me why I am working with the teams and sports I am working with so I thought I would share with you my thought process. After my NY Mets experience and Nike Oregon Project experiences I am being a lot more careful in my choices of who I work with. Certainly I do not make enough money between Venice High School Volleyball and Eckerd College Rugby to cover the value of my time or the cost of gas, but I trying to design my business where I make my living consulting and teaching, so the actual day to day coaching I do is not my main source of income. That being said one of my main criteria is to work with teams who have coaches who get it. Coaches who want to innovate and make athletic development an emphasis not an afterthought. Second I try to pick situation where I can learn as much as I teach. Rugby is a new sport for me that many of my good friends are working with, that gives me a better understanding of what they are doing. Thirdly I only want to work with coaches who will make a long term commitment, three to six week crash programs do not work, they end up crashing sooner or later. In addition to Venice and Eckerd I do consult with University Michigan Women’s Swimming and Field Hockey. I work with them for the same reasons mentioned previously. I cannot be there for training, which is a shortcoming, but the quality of the coaches more than makes up for it. It obviously has to be a slightly different model, almost a distance learning model. That type of work really forces you to hone your communication skills and really fine tune terminology so that each term or name of an exercise is precise in meaning and application. Jim Richardson, the women’s swim coach has taught me a lot about the interaction and interface between Dryland and the work in the water. He is the first swim coach that I have worked with that has really done a superb job of blending. For Jim dry land is not another way to beat them up. (As an aside in four years now there has only been one shoulder problem, and we do not work on the shoulder! M ore on that in another post) The bottom line is that these situations enable to pursue my passion for coaching and maintain credibility that I am coaching day to day at a developmental level where coaching can make the biggest difference.Please contact me if you are intersted my coaching consulting services, I do have to make a living. Altruism will not pay the mortgage.
