I have finally finished my last sports trip of the school year. Finally a sigh of relief, a step back. I now only have a couple weeks to spend all those afterschool hours wrapping up my academic stuff rather than athletics. Needless to say, I will be looking forward to the summer so that I will finally have time to recuperate and do things for me. I've done lots of coaching throughout the year. I ran some cross country practices, coached the senior girls basketball team, helped run junior boys and girls basketball practices, coached junior and senior high badminton and coached junior and senior high badminton. I was coaching from late November straight through to early June. Being an athletic person and the phys ed teacher at the school, I took it upon myself to do a lot of the coaching in my small school of 130 (gr.7-12) (small town of 800). I wanted to give my students quality chances to improve on their athletics. Aside from soccer, badminton is probably the sport I know most about, so coaching that was not only easier, but enjoyable. I've played basketball before and enjoy playing. I knew little about coaching defense though, but I learned as the season went on. My biggest struggle was coaching track and field.
So, my track and field experience goes all the way back to grades four to six where I did well and collected lots of ribbons :p Other than that, I don't even remember my high school of 800 students having a high school track team. So, I was in charge of coaching track and field with no experience under my belt. Now, track isn't like other sports, it's a collection of many different events. Students can only enter a maximum of four events, so you can't just coach one thing at a time because some athletes aren't competing in that event. So for practices, I'm trying to set up a bunch of different stations; we have athletes throwing javelins, shot puts, discus, long jumping, triple jumping, long distance runners, sprinters and hurdlers. Yes, I did get help from students, but it's still hard to put in a good coaching effort for each athlete, especially when we only had two weeks to practice before divisionals (another shitty thing about coaching other sports, didn't start track and field practice until badminton was completely done with).
Like I said before, I knew very little about track and field, but I wanted to do my best to help out my athletes. I found that I reverted to my academics to help me out. I was using a lot of my undergraduate university degree to help me out, especially my biomechanics course. I kept asking myself while watching a student, "How can this athlete get more torque, how can they get more speed, how can they get more spring?" I found I could actually help out my students with the science I took in my kinetics program. I also took a little time to look at some YouTube videos of some events, but understanding the movements behind it made it easier to actually coach it.
The great thing about my students though, is that the ones that come to practices are ambitious. They actually care about getting better, they care about doing well. For the most part, these are the students who are also ambitious in school (oh how I wish all my students had ambition). I am lucky enough that my students are great at coaching each other. This was especially important in the throwing events (javelin, shotput, discus; events I have very little experience in and ones that the majority of my athletes competed in). I had some great seniors who did an amazing job helping out up and coming athletes work on their technique. They taught me quite a few things, what to watch for, which helped me to give feedback to them as well as other athletes.
In the end, I had around twenty athletes compete at divisionals. Sixteen of them made it to zones (regionals) to which half of them walked away with a medal. I was able to take three seniors to provincials in Edmonton. Considering that they were seeded very low, my boys did really well. We had one athlete who had a great chance of medalling in javelin, but an elbow injury prevented him from competing to his potential. To put it into perspective, the gold medal provincial throw was as far as my athlete's divisional throw...which was against the wind. Next year I have high expectations for my athletes. Last year one athlete made it to provincials, this year three, next year I aim to double and bring six students to provincials. Now that I got my first year under my belt, I look forward to next year (as long as we actually get some time to practice)
A note on provincials, it was an amazing experience. It was like watching the Olympics. Seeing teenagers reach accomplishments and distances of unimaginable proportions for that age was ridiculous. In retrospect, I probably watched future Olympians compete, which is cool to think of! Seeing these athletes compete also made me feel terrible about my own personal fitness. In high school, I was never lucky enough to be that kind of caliber athlete (probably thanks to a combination of no external push from others and little ambition to be the best; I'm glad that has changed). It also made me feel pretty crappy about my fitness level right now. Oh well, you can never have too much motivation to push yourself! Best time to start is now.
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