One of the most interesting bits about coaching in Switzerland is that I am having an opportunity to coach in a foreign language. I highly recommend the experience.
One of the most important parts of doing any job is to remain fresh. Breaking the routine periodically is a critical part of that. Here in Switzerland, I am breaking several routines, and it is exactly what the doctor ordered. I am learning a new system, a new country’s way of going about things, a different stroke, am working with different levels of athletes than I am accustomed to working with (no collegiate athletes here), am coaching almost exclusively sculling, and am coaching in German.
Those who know me know I have coxswain-turned-coach syndrome: I talk too much (actually, I talk too much generally. These monthly columns probably attest to that). I am known for colorful metaphors. When coaching, I do not often think before words come out of my mouth – sometimes I have no idea where my metaphors come from, they just spill out. My rowers often ask where I come up with these things. I just don’t know. But the idea is to make the rowers think, so if I can put images into their heads then I am making them think about their rowing and maybe I am able to make them row better.
Well, when working in a foreign language, all of that changes. I have to think more before I say things. My German is pretty good, but limited – in total, I have only studied German for a year, and that was a long time ago. I can fool people into thinking I speak better than I do because I grew up hearing my Viennese-born father speak German to his parents (although no one ever tried to raise me bilingual, so no one spoke to me in German other than a few odd words like “Servus” – Austrian for “Hello” and “Goodbye.”) The rowers I coach do make fun of my Austrianisms and my other grammatical lapses, but I can generally be understood. The problem, though, is my vocabulary.
I cannot give wild metaphors because I don’t know enough odd vocab. So I have to keep things simple. Most of the rowers speak English, but if I try to explain a bizarre metaphor in English then it becomes they who don’t have enough vocab.
There is also the additional issue that the folks around here do not tend to speak German among themselves. The Dialekt spoken in Zurich is not quite as bad as points further west in Switzerland, but I can still only make out about half of it if I am lucky. So I cannot always understand what the rowers are saying to each other. It would be kind of like a non-native English speaker trying to coach in Glasgow.
Basic rowing vocab is surprisingly not the issue. German borrows so many foreign words that the results are often comical. “Jetzt werden wir das Finish-bis-Catch-Drill machen” means exactly what it looks like: “Now we will do the finish-to-catch drill.” Or “Fürs Warmup, rudern wir mit squaren Blättern” means “On the warm-up, let’s row with square blades.”
The problem comes when I am in mid-sentence, going along quite nicely, and then realize I have no idea how to say something. So I just make a noise or jump up and down in the launch.
It reminds me of a favorite Charley Butt story. Charley spent one summer coaching in Japan. He does not speak Japanese, and the kids he was coaching did not speak English. So he learned to cope. Then he returned to Harvard in the Fall, and for the first month barely said anything to us in English – he made funny noises at us and extreme gestures.
At least I speak German. Nevertheless, I can certainly see where Charley came from on this. What I am learning is how to say less and mean more. It is a different style of coaching – I still think using bizarre metaphors is a useful skill, but it is also good to remind myself that I can get just as much accomplished sometimes by being brief and to the point.