Mas Watanabe

The other day I was watching the workout of our level 5 and 7 teams during my break.

The level 5’s were working on vault and they were doing the front handspring drill. The drill was to develop good blocking action by using the under arm swing when they punch the board. I was impressed because the entire group was doing the same under arm swing and all the girls were reaching their hands to the table very quickly. Most of the girls were getting a quick turn over of the body from the board and getting a fairly good blocking action.

Of course their handspring vaults weren’t even close to perfect, but the consistent emphasis of good technique was very evident.

Then I looked over to the bars, there were level 7 girls doing back giants, but some of them were still working on their three-quarter giant.

Here too, I was very pleased to see that all the girls were trying to use a proper tap swing to make the giant. Some of their body positions were not good yet, but the tapping action was there. Also, the girls who were struggling with the three-quarter giant were also using the tapping action to kick stronger and lift the swing higher.

I could tell that they will eventually learn a good back giant if they continuously try that way.

Educating all the staff so they teach the specific technique on key skills is not so easy. Many of the younger coaches do not have much coaching experience.

One of the key things we found is that we needed to place one or more coaches who have some optional coaching experiences on the compulsory staff.

When the compulsory staff teaches skills without vision of the future development of each skill, they might make a very critical mistake without realizing it.

For example, not correcting the gymnast who is over using the head (throwing the head back) to initiate the back somersault will cause many problems when she starts to learn to twist the somersault. It is the same as not teaching a proper tapping action on the flyaway.

In the compulsory levels, these may not be a serious problem, but this bad technique becomes a habit and it will slow down the gymnast’s future development.

We have a very experienced coaching staff among the compulsory and the beginning optional groups. All are doing individual event coaching so that multiple coaches coach all the gymnasts.

The experienced coaches are assigned to teach a few different events according to the need. Many times, we will combine two groups and both coaches work together. This way each group is coached by at least 2 to 3 different coaches during the course of the week.

The inexperienced staff education is done amongst the staff members during the workout. Also the experienced coaches are able to watch and learn proper technique from the upper optional level coaches.

The verbal communication and the direct coaching exchange are done frequently between the upper level coaches and the coaches who are working with the lower optional levels.

As we made the switch from “one coach is responsible for one whole group” to the current arrangement, the communication among the staff members has improved and the girls are starting to learn faster.

This organizational set up is not perfect by any means, but it is helping us so much now so I wanted to share our experience with you.

Have fun coaching.

Edited by Dan Connelly