The Coach as a Source of Confidence
Last week I was talking to one of my students as she was studying for my English exam. The student, a sophomore girl named Morgan, is easily one of the best students in the class, as she has earned an A on almost every assignment throughout the semester. During this particular tutorial session, as she didn’t laugh at my jokes and her lower lip began to quiver, it became clear to me that Morgan, who is very hard on herself and demands excellence from herself academically, was on the verge of a meltdown.
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I couldn’t understand why. There were plenty of students I was more concerned about than her. Where were they? Why weren’t they in my classroom after school seeking extra help? And why was my best student, who I felt certain would do well, stressing out over the upcoming exam?
Then she mentioned that she felt most worried about one particular part of the exam that I had discussed in class: the long essay. I told the students they would have to write a compare/contrast essay on two of the novels we had read earlier in the semester, and that it would be worth more points than any other part of the exam. This was what Morgan was freaking out about. Why? Because she had done relatively poorly on the two in-class essays we had done earlier in the semester. Those two assignments had been the only two on which she hadn’t earned an A.
“I hate in-class writing,” she said. “I suck at it.” With essay that I had my students do at home, they had plenty of time to gather their thoughts, put together an outline, and write a rough draft. Morgan was the type who would get started on an essay right away and come to me at least once to review a rough draft so that she could revise it before turning in the final draft. I encouraged my students to engage fully in that process, and Morgan was one of the students who took full advantage of it. Her rough drafts had been okay but not great, but her final drafts had been virtually flawless.
In-class essays offered no such opportunities for revising. With an in-class essay, you have to put together an outline and write an entire essay in the space of 40-50 minutes. You have to think on your feet. And thinking on her feet was not one of Morgan’s strengths.
I realized that I needed to provide a practical rationale for her to believe that she would do better this time around, and I needed to let her know that I cared.
So I had her retrieve the previous in-class essays, and we went over them together. I went through them and explained to her what she had done wrong and what she could do next time to improve upon her mistakes. I also gave her a practice essay topic to write about, with the promise that I would read it and give her feedback on it the next day. Finally, I just sat and talked with her about life, about expectations, about pressures. What I learned from that exchange is that a student can be quite capable of excelling, but she won’t excel if she doesn’t believe she can. The teacher’s role, then, is to instill that belief.
The in-class essay, I can see, is the equivalent to the race for the hurdler. In training sessions there is plenty of time for analyzing mistakes, troubleshooting them, correcting them, experimenting with new ideas. But when the gun goes off, there’s nothing to do but run. There’s no time to think, to plan. And if you mess up, you can’t go back and do it again. That’s why even the best hurdlers need a coach who understand their doubts and fears and who can serve to quell them.
To me, it’s important to remove emotions from the situation as much as possible. I love a pep talk as much as the next guy, but it has to be a practical pep talk, not a rah-rah pep talk. I’m not going to tell you I believe in you if I don’t. I’m not going to tell you that you can beat a particular opponent if you can’t. My motto is, whatever you train to do, you can do. And I’ll base any motivational talk on that simple fact. I keep my motivational talks practical, not positive. That way, when you go into a race, and I’ve told you what you’re capable of doing, you know you’re capable of doing it.
In another article for this issue I talked about a girl I coach named Scout who is transitioning from four-stepping to three-stepping, and from nine-stepping to eight-stepping to the first hurdle. Because she lives about two hours away and I only see her once a week, we haven’t had time to implement much that I want to implement. Mainly, we haven’t had an opportunity to work on her start, as we’ve been plagued by cold weather or facility issues. So I did get her to where she was eight-stepping from a standing start without any problem, but we had yet to put the blocks down.
Unbeknownst to me, she decided in her meet yesterday to go ahead with the eight-step approach to the first hurdle. It didn’t work. She ended up nine-stepping, clearing the first hurdle with her weaker lead leg, and clearing three of the five hurdles with her weaker lead leg. When she told me about it at practice today, “I could’ve told you that would happen.” And I wish I had told her. I had assumed that since we hadn’t practiced it out of the blocks, she wouldn’t try it in a meet. But she didn’t know any better.
Today we worked on her start for a solid 90 minutes, and she was able to consistently eight-step to hurdle one out of the blocks, and transition to a smooth three-step to hurdle two, although the second hurdle was moved in three feet, and then two feet. So when we talked after the session, I told her two things: 1) she is definitely ready to eight-step to the first hurdle in a race, and 2) she is definitely not ready to three-step yet to the second hurdle in a race. With both pieces of information, I was being practical, not positive nor negative. She was able to eight-step at race height even after her legs had turned to jelly. The three-step, meanwhile, is still a work in progress. We can keep working on it, and as I told her, once she is able to three-step consistently at race height with the second hurdle moved in only one foot, she will be ready to three-step in a race.
By being practical instead of being an emotional cheerleader or, on the other end of the spectrum, a growling motivator, the coach is able to infuse confidence into the heart of the hurdler. To me, this ability to relate to the athlete and to develop a relationship of trust with the athlete is as important as any aspect of coaching, especially when coaching an event that is as cerebral as the hurdles.
The hurdles can really get into an athlete’s head. So the coach always has to be present for the athlete, always needs to be reading the athlete’s emotional state of mind. That way, you will never be caught off guard when the athlete’s confidence wavers, and you will always know how to deal with the situation without feeling the need to press any panic buttons.
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