Focus On Your Technique - Be Ready To Learn - And Try It The Coach's Way!

Swimming has a bit too teach Football in Australia, but that's a subject for another time.

The ACT swiming club - Tuggeranong Vikings Swimming Club is a  first rate swim club, producing high achieving swimmers at all ages, with one essential ingredient - highly qualified coaching staff. The swimmers in serious training are carefully managed and train hard every day of the working week and Saturday - very often, mornings and afternoons.

The underlying focus is always on what I would call achieving "perfect technique". Its seems to be a never ending quest as swimmers grow, mature, take on more responsibilities in life, decline other alternatives for their meagre recreational time, progress at work, excel in education, establish and maintain relationships and wrestle with the demands of competition.


The Coaches were asked to explain their coaching philosophy and provide specific advice to swimmers who hope to do well. First thing - do they have a "coaching philosophy" - do they know what they want, what to expect from their swimmers and how to get it from them. They are very likely to know more than the parents on these matters and not unexpectedly require parents to take a back seat and let them get on with the job. As in Football, parents seldom bring clarity where their children are concern in sport. In swimming the final arbiter is the clock - you can't argue aginast it. In Football, their is a lot more wiggle room for players to blame other players and coaches, and for parents to work to the "angles of uncertainty" (as one old coach labelled the strategy of a mednacious parent who was being particularly obnoxious).

But back to the importance of good technique and the willingness to listen and learn.

One  Coach at TVSC is Yuriy Vdovychenko

Yuriy’s coaching philosophy:

To bring together all aspects of swimming training in a fun and enjoyable way that will also allow the swimmer to perfect their technique and achieve high results.

Yuriy's advice on how to be a better swimmer:

· Swimmers with better streamlining swim faster with less effort
· Warm-up set should be done with excellent swimming technique and moderate pace
· Main set should be done with excellent swimming technique and hard pace
· Sprint set should be done with excellent swimming technique and 50m race pace
· Swim-down should be done with excellent swimming technique and easy pace

The TVSC Head Coach - Jaan Murphy makes some points that should resonate with every Football player that wamts to be as good as they can be.
 
Jaan's coaching philosophy can be summed up as:
 
 "If you work hard, think hard, and race hard you will be hard to beat".
 
And one quote that Jann Murphy favours, which I think applies to my PL Football Club as the Coach moves them toward a system of play and "winning club culture", so necessary to be a genuine Premier League Club:
 
"The fact is, that the athletes who came to me ready to learn, ready to listen, ready to act on what they learned and try it my way, even if it was more challenging, more difficult than they imagined, were ready to get more out of our program. And they were my favorites."
 
John Leonard, Executive Director, American Swim Coaches Association.