Parent and Coach... The Other Stuff
Coaching is about more than athletes, practices, and competition. As Mike Krzyzewski, Duke's hugely successful basketball coach said, it's also about "the other stuff." For coaches of club teams, that means parents.
By Tom Slear, Splash Magazine special correspondent
"All that craziness," is how Monica Teuscher describes the rituals of
other parents who nervously follow their children's swimming
development. Teuscher, mother of Cristina, a 1996 and 2000 Olympian,
never owned a stopwatch and rarely bought a meet program. She didn't
track her daughter's times, yell during her races, or seek out her coach
after practices for private chats. During swim meets, she went off by
herself to read or knit, only to be amused when other parents gave her a
rundown on Cristina's swims, complete with split times.
"I thought it was important that I was there, but for support, not for
coaching or to add pressure," Teuscher explains. "My job was to take my
daughters (older daughter Carolina also swam) out for a good meal after
they raced. The last thing we talked about was swimming."
Most coaches would agree that the best team to coach is one filled with
parents such as Teuscher, who recognize the line between parenting and
coaching and avoid it as if it were radioactive. They somehow manage to
counterbalance their staunch support with a refreshing cluelessness.
Years ago Debbie Phelps, mother of Michael, the world record-holder in
the 200-meter butterfly, relocated the family so that her children would
be closer to North Baltimore Aquatic Club's practice facility. Yet when
asked about Michael's world record time, she can do no better than to
say, "I'm not sure - 1:50 something?" (Actually, 1:54.58)
"The swimmers I've had who have had the most success were unencumbered
by parents calling the shots behind the scenes," says John Collins, who
has coached Olympians Rick Carey and Lea Loveless as well as Cristina
Teuscher at the Badger Swim Club in Larchmont, N.Y. "These parents are
very good about backing up their kids, but they are hands off when it
comes to swimming business."
The Growing Intrusion of Parents
Most coaches will tell you that Teuscher and Phelps are hardly
exceptions. The overwhelming majority of parents instinctively, or with
gentle guidance, find their place in the background. A few, however,
can't resist meddling, such as the mother who wrote Collins a five- or
six-page letter every week for a year and a half. Rare is the swim coach
who doesn't have a similar story to tell.
"So many," says Chuck Warner, the head coach at Rutgers University who
coached club teams for years before entering the college ranks. "All
filed away in a painful spot."
The effect of such parents is all out of proportion to their numbers. A
survey by Dan Doyle, which will be published in his forthcoming book,
The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting, found that high school coaches
across different sports are convinced that the biggest change in their
profession over the last 15 years has been the growing intrusion of
parents.
"No other factor they mentioned even came close," says Doyle, the
executive director of the Institute for International Sport. The
top issues raised when the development coordinators for USA Swimming
solicit opinions from club coaches are "parent education" and "club
governance," euphemisms for the difficulty of dealing with parents,
whether individually or as members of the club's board of directors.
An Oasis
But a bit of perspective is in order here. While all coaches
labor to properly shape the parent-athlete-coach triangle, some suffer
more than others. Rick Wolff, chairman of the Center for Sports
Parenting (www.internationalsport.com/csp), calls swimming "an oasis."
Coaches of team sports have only subjective means to evaluate talent.
Even at its best, the process is imprecise and open to question. How
does a coach fix with any certainty which offensive lineman blocks
better, or which outfielder offers the best combination of hitting and
fielding?
Yet these judgments determine playing time, which is at the root of
nearly all parental complaints. Coaches are forced to defend themselves
armed with nothing stronger than an arbitrary standard. Who's to say a
guard with a deft shooting touch should play more than a tenacious
defender?
With swimming the only standard is time, so performance is entirely
quantifiable, measured precisely by a stopwatch. And playing time is
rarely an issue. The only barrier to entry at most age-group meets is
the entry fee. Everyone who wants to swim can compete.
"When you compare what coaches of team sports have to put up with when
they make decisions about who makes the team and who plays, coaches of
individual sports like swimming and track are not even in deep water as
far as their problems with parents," says Doyle. "They are barely in
three feet of water."
Swimming's preciseness, however, comes with a price. In sports such as
soccer and basketball, parents can judge their children's potential only
against the players they compete against, which typically stretches no
farther than adjacent counties. Not until the last two or three years of
high school do they step onto a stage that provides statewide or
national exposure.
Swimming, on the other hand, allows comparison between a 10-year-old
breaststroker in Pennsylvania to one in California right down to the
hundredth of a second. The temptation for parents to extrapolate is
irresistible. If a son or daughter is among the Top 16 when they are 10,
shouldn't they be in the running for a national championship when they
turn 18?
In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Improvement is not a steady,
positive slope, especially for prodigies. A study by USA Swimming using
the All-Time Top100 swims in each age group through 1996 found that only
10 percent of the Top 100 10-and-Unders maintained their status through
age 18. Only half of the swimmers among the Top 100 in the 17-18 age
group had made any top-100 list when they were younger.
"Those winning races at 10 probably won't be winning races when they are
20," says John Leonard, the executive director of the American Swimming
Coaches Association. "This is one of those things that is obvious to
coaches but is a mystery to parents. Coaches understand the long-term
nature of the sport, parents often don't."
This misunderstanding creates swimming's equivalent of playing-time
disputes. As swimmers begin to slip in national, regional, and even
local rankings, their parents scramble for solutions. Sue Anderson, a
former world record-holder and one of USA Swimming's development
coordinators, saw the pattern repeat itself many times when she was head
coach of the Scarlet Aquatic Club in New Jersey during the 1990s. These
"pressure parents," as she calls them, begin to micromanage their
children's swimming by arranging for extra practices and seeking out
meets not on the team's schedule. When expectations still aren't met,
they invariably blame the coach, who is mostly defenseless because no
one can say for sure why young, talented swimmers stop improving. Maybe
it is the coach's fault, though the problem just as likely could stem
from the swimmer's early physical maturation or a mindset that has
become mis-wired because of parental pressure, or a host of other
reasons. Regardless, the conflict heats up until the swimmer jumps to
another club, which is often the first of several such moves.
"What the parents think is helping their kids is only putting them under
a lot of pressure," says Anderson. "Many of these kids do very well when
they are 10-and-under and 11-12, but eventually a lot them they stop
living up to expectations, and they fall apart."
The Other Stuff
Of course, not all disputes fall under the category of
domineering parents and underachieving swimmers (though they tend to be
the most intractable). A coach's personal style can cause problems,
particularly if he focuses almost exclusively on the senior swimmers.
There is also the matter of different outlooks. Parents see only their
sons and daughters and the next few weeks and months. Coaches see the
entire team and the upcoming years. Then there's the issue of how
coaches are viewed. Many parents don't see a professional, but a former
jock slumming between real jobs.
"It was amazing how differently parents acted when I started coaching at
the college level," says Warner. "I knew nothing more than when I was
coaching a club team, but the parents assumed that I did."
Mike Krzyzewski, who, over the last 20 years at Duke has established
himself as one of the most successful college basketball coaches ever,
once said, "The coaching I love. The kids I love. It's the other stuff
you have to watch out for."
What often matters to parents is the other stuff, whether coaches are
returning their phone calls promptly or thanking them for their
volunteer work on behalf of the club. These small courtesies seem
insignificant by themselves, but when taken together they acknowledge
that the coach is meeting the parents halfway. They also keep disputes
to a minimum. A meticulous plan handed out in March for the summer
season will inhibit parents from overlapping family vacations with major
competitions. Regular parent meetings run by the coaches and board
members that both inform and educate will minimize rumors and alleviate
concerns over the cyclic nature of competitive swimming. Set office
hours for the coach will discourage interruptions from parents during
practice.
The biggest courtesy of all, Leonard believes, is listening. A handful
of parents are unreasonable. Others simply have healthy concerns about
what's best for their children. Separating the two requires more than a
five-minute conversation.
To make his point, Leonard refers back to his first coaching job, which
was in Illinois during the 1970s. The father of a talented girl
initially gave off all the signs of trouble.
"The classic horror story of a parent," Leonard recalls. "He was a trial
attorney. Very pushy. His style of conversation was confrontational."
Yet Leonard endured and gradually came to realize that despite the
father's bluster, he had a lot to offer. After two years, they were
running together. Leonard would talk about his new ideas and the father
would poke holes in all of the right spots.
"He'd question me on everything I was doing, which gave me a lot to
think about," Leonard says. "Our relationship lasted for eight years and
the daughter represented the United States on national teams. The mother
and the father were the most active parents in helping to run the club.
They were the best swimming parents I have ever known. It took me a
while, but I discovered they were only interested in the best possible
experiences for their daughter - both in life and in swimming - and they
wanted to learn all they could about the sport.
"It just took a little bit of willingness to understand what they were
after, and a little bit of patience to give them the opportunity to do
the right thing."
Good advice, both for coaches and parents.
