I recently had the unpleasant experience of acquiring coaching certification.  I have to admit that I was skeptical going in, and rightfully so.  The whole experience was a waste of time which only bureaucrats would think a worthwhile requirement.

There is nothing wrong with these courses, per se.  For someone who has very little experience, and who has not had the opportunity to compete at a high level, or to have experienced a range of coaches, or to have rowed at several clubs which go about things differently, then a coaching course is not a bad idea.  It provides opportunity for those who would not otherwise have access to such opportunities.

It is also true that no matter how much someone knows, there is always room to learn more.  In that respect, it is good for even the most experienced coaches to compare notes.

The problem I have is mostly one of bureaucracy.  The act of having done a course confers nothing in and of itself.  Experience is the best way to learn, and a course can be no substitute for that.  Quantifying people based on whether they have done a course is silly.

I have done my coaching in countries which do not coaching certification courses which are required for anything in particular.  I have therefore never done a course, until now, and have remained uncertified.  Swiss bureaucracy has now caught up with me, forcing me to get Level One certification.

I have been involved in the sport of rowing for eighteen years.  I began coaching over twelve years ago, and for the last nine years I have been primarily a coach.  When I first started coaching, I had already been coached by an assortment of coaches, several of them well-known and respected, within different programs.  In my first years as a coach, I was still competing, and had the opportunity to see the elite levels of the sport in more than one country, with international oarsmen and under the guidance of national team coaches.  Therefore, when I became primarily a coach, I already knew a fair amount more than the average beginning coach (not to mention that I had already done some coaching).  Furthermore, having been a coxswain for so many years, coaching was a part of the daily routine even as a competitor.  As a result, I jumped in without a coaching course.

The deeper I got into coaching, the less and less a course became necessary, which is exactly the advice I was receiving from other coaches I respected: what was the point of doing a course?  This is not to say that I decided I knew it all and did not want to learn any new tricks.  I was often comparing notes with other coaches.  Folks who remember me in Oxford may recall me perched on my bike on the banks of the Isis, analyzing a wide range of rowing styles (my crews rowed with a technique quite unlike anything else used in Oxford at that time, which meant the converse was also true: my crews attracted much attention by other coaches trying to figure out what the hell I was doing).  I regularly watch and analyze clips of international crews – be it at Worlds or Henley or wherever .  And whenever I get the opportunity, I continue to compare notes with a variety of coaches at a variety of levels.  Certainly one of the big advantages to my stints in Cambridge, Mass., in the Summer of 1998 and then again when I lived there from 1999-2000 were the chance to ride around in launches and review video with the likes of Charley Butt, Ed Kloman, Gordon Hamilton, and Dan Boyne behind elite, club, and collegiate rowers, sweep and scull.  In Switzerland, I have benefited from being able to observe a new country and a new system, as well as being a part-time assistant at one of the country’s premier rowing clubs.

This leads to the next issue: coaching courses are sequential.  For me to get certified after all this required me to start at Level One.  No credit is given for experience or whatever else I may have done - I could not jump right in to Level Three, I had to start at the beginning.  This confirms that the entire approach is a bureaucratic exercise and has nothing to do with coaching training and everything to do with control and busywork.

Coaching courses differ from country to country, so I will not dwell overly long on the specifics of the Swiss course.  Suffice it to say, from the curricula I have seen in several countries, the one consistent element is bureaucracy.  Most countries have three or four levels of certification, and the progression is therefore similar.

Because of the way sports are organized in Switzerland, we had a large component geared towards coaching14-year-old novices who may not be rowing all that seriously but are instead looking for an after-school activity.  Given that I am unlikely to ever be coaching at that level, it was not necessarily the thing for me to focus on.  Nevertheless, I suspect that coaching 14-year-old novices – particularly ones who are just looking for something to keep busy and are not necessarily looking for a sport - may be just about the hardest group to coach, and so if we learn how to handle them then we are really learning about a lot of fundamentals, elements of which can find themselves in any coaching situation.  The problem is that Level One is too basic.  Although other countries vary in their approaches – and even vary within country from instructor to instructor - the basic idea is the same everywhere, and I am not so sure that these courses are worthwhile substitutes for experience.  For those who have no other way to gain experience, they can't be bad, but I would not recommend this course, and absolutely will not take level two or three (there are only three levels in Switzerland, which I think is pretty much the same everywhere.  The US has three certainly and maybe four, but I don't think it goes higher.  I certainly hope not, or coaches will die of boredom).  I got the highest grade in my course - whoopie!  I also think I burned a hole in my stomach wall from drinking several gallons of coffee (I was using beer mugs instead of coffee cups) - and when I make coffee, I don't mess around and I make it extremely strong.

To be honest, I am not even sure that the folks at the Level One course who had never coached a day in their lives before (there were a couple, who simply want to coach and have only rowed for about three years in the same club with the same coaches - exactly the sort of people a Level One course should be designed for) even really benefited.  The course seemed to be designed to keep them occupied for six days, and not really to feed them useful info.  On the evaluation forms at the course’s end, I had one main critique (evaluating the course not on a personal level, but on a theoretical level assuming I had been the sort of person the course was designed for): either make the course shorter (one day theory and one day practice) or provide more useful subject matter.

The sad thing was, three of the four instructors were really top-notch, but there was only so much they could do given the subject matter.  We had a Austrian come in to discuss physiology - Holger Weißböck, a former Austrian team coach, is the new head coach at my club, and is an expert in physiological sciences.  I thought it would have been interesting to have him discuss, for example, why he does blood and lactate tests on regular junior rowers of no special seriousness, and then how he uses those results to design a training program.  I can of course find this out myself by asking him in the club, but a formal presentation in a course environment would have been very enlightening (and certainly for the folks taking the course who don’t see him on a regular basis).  However, the course organizer said this was too technical for a Level One course - even if those of us taking the course could understand the subject matter, we did not necessarily have the access to the correct tools to conduct and analyze blood and lactate tests.  I think this under-rated everyone’s intelligence.  Furthermore, even if most people do not have the facilities to conduct these tests which Holger does in our club, it never hurts to learn the latest methods - there is always something people can apply (or not, if they so choose or if they do not have the resources - it is possible to learn things we lack the means or ability to do).

We had a product of the old East German system conduct the sessions on conditioning and cross-training.  I think hearing more about the East German system (minus the drugs) would have been a useful way to spend our time, but that was also considered too advanced.  We spent an entire afternoon in a gymnasium, where I expected we would review stretching exercises and weight technique - always helpful.  Instead, we ran around and learned new games.  Is this a rowing course or a course in how to be a phys ed teacher?  I must say that, although I did not agree with many of his ideas (for example, he said that swimming was not a useful sport for cross-training - although I personally do not like to swim, I highly recommend it as a non-impact, joint friendly, strenuous exercise very good for winter cross-training, especially for injured athletes or athletes whose knees prevent them from running stairs or running at all), I did find his insights on specific exercises enlightening.  However, he was not allowed to get too complex here.  Weight training was also right out.

The most useful sessions were conducted by an Australian who is the head coach at Grasshopper Club Zürich, a men-only club a few boathouses down (famous for producing Xeno Müller, among others).  He did the sessions on rowing technique and boat rigging.  He got the lowest marks in the evaluation, I am told, mostly because his German has a heavy English content and was not easy for most of the Swiss to understand.  I thought he got dealt the best hand - it is always useful to review basic rowing technique, and to hear someone else from a completely different background analyze a stroke is an excellent way to either gain new technical ideas or new technical insights into ideas a coach already uses (I once thoroughly analyzed traditional Oxford technique in order to determine why I thought it was ineffective, which helped me fine-tune the way I thought of and taught my own technique).

The fourth guy was just a bureaucrat, basically - nice guy, but all of his topics were completely useless (including an entire evening session on how to log practices and fill out training forms).  He lost me on the very first evening when he insisted that it was unsafe coaching practice to supervise more than one eight at once (for example, two crews doing pieces with each other on a protected bit of river would in his mind require two separate coaches), yet he thought it perfectly fine to send out six or so 14-year-old novices in single sculls on a large and often choppy lake (has to do with the number of athletes, not the number of crews, size of the boats, or ability of the rowers - only a bureaucrat would think this way).

I have seen the curricula for courses in other countries, and it is merely variations on a theme.  Often, the Level Three course is more useful.  But it requires getting through the first two levels.  Even then it still seems a waste of time - any coach who is really at that level does not require a course to go compare notes with colleagues.

In the US, for example, many of the courses are taught by various experienced coaches who do regional classes several times a year - it seems quite similar to the program in the U.K., from my observation.  The “easiest” way to gain certification in the United States is to go to the annual USRA convention - attend the lectures, pass a test, get your Level One cert.  I looked at this out of curiosity in 1997, 1998, and 1999.  In 1997, the Convention was in a sensible location (Hartford, Connecticut) and I thought of going.  Having spent so much time in Britain where coaching cert is not required but is heavily touted by the ARA, I was wondering if maybe it might be useful.  Since the 1997 USRA Convention had a long list of top-notch speakers, I thought this might be a good way to do it.  Then I thought about it: almost all of the coaches speaking were folks I had either personally worked with or with whom I was in regular contact exchanging ideas.  If they are giving generic talks to folks needing Level One certification, then they are not going to be saying anything novel.  What was the point, I wondered.  I skipped (was quite overworked anyway).

In 1998, the Convention was in California and not an option or an interest.  But I knew some folks who went and asked them to report.  They confirmed my suspicions.  The booby prize went to the coach asked to speak about how to develop a program from scratch.  She was one of these NCAA tools who was the coach of a newly-varsitied women’s program, and her formula was simple and started with several hundred thousand dollars (first, build a boathouse, buy a fleet of boats, hand out twenty-five scholarships…).

I think it says something about the USRA that she was asked to give the same lecture at the 1999 Convention in Philadelphia.  I thought of going to that - I was still living in the US and figured I could visit my parents at the same time.  When I looked at the line-up of speakers, I made the easy decision not to bother.  I was encouraged instead to attend the coaching convention hosted at roughly the same time by a well-respected Canadian, Jim Joy.  The contrast was unmistakable - Jim’s convention was meant to get a whole lot of coaches together and compare notes (not to mention learn some of Jim’s famously unusual and quirky ideas), and it gets rave reviews every year he does it (I unfortunately had a conflict develop, so I did not attend in the end).  But it does not provide any sort of certification, only enlightenment.  I’ll take enlightenment over certification, thank you very much.

In the end, though, a bureaucrat would rather see certification over enlightenment.  It truly amazes me to see who requires certification in the US.  Looking down advertisements for coaches, certification pops up almost exclusively in ads posted by collegiate athletics departments which have recently added women’s rowing and which neither know nor want to know anything about the sport.  Sometimes a small club program will ask for such a credential, but usually because it does not know any better and thinks the credential is actually worth something.  Ads posted by knowledgeable individuals rarely if ever have this requirement.  In one classic ad, posted by a backwards newly-varsitied southern program a few years ago, the athletics department listed as requirements certification in both rowing and weight lifting.  The logic was that varsity coaches were also expected to teach a physical education class, which meant to their warped minds that weight-lifting certification was necessary (I can think of a number of physical education classes which have nothing to do with weights - I would have hoped that they would want a good coach first and foremost and would then see what that coach was capable of teaching off the water).  Although rowing and weight-lifting certifications seem an odd combination, they found someone - and the program today is as dreadful as it has always been for the last thirty years.
 
 
 
 

Back to Charles Ehrlich's Letter from America.