Episode 4-The What If's

Coach Rick, the host of the podcast, Gotcha, Coach, had been sick but is now back and ready to share his experiences. He wants to encourage new coaches and help existing ones. He talks about his time as a P.E. major in college and how he realized there is more than one way to teach athletes. He gives examples from different sports. He also discusses his experience coaching a girls' cross-country team and facing challenges due to his lack of knowledge in distance running. He relied on the help of others and emphasizes the importance of utilizing relationships. He then talks about coaching track and field in a snowy mountain resort town and the difficulties they faced in training. Overall, he shares his experiences and the lessons he learned as a coach. Hey, welcome back, coaches, to Gotcha, Coach, the podcast about coaching for coaches presented by a coach. I'm your host, Coach Rick, and I'm glad to be back on the scene. After a couple of trips over the last couple of weeks to Texas and Oregon, I came back home and was hit with a huge head and chest cold that knocked me on my keister for, well, it's been about 11 days now. I thought I had another case of COVID, but it tested negative. But because I have an asthmatic condition, chest colds always cause me major breathing problems. But I'm back and ready to share again with you. So let's get started. One of the reasons that I'm doing this podcast series is to encourage brand new coaches and to help existing coaches with some of the things that I experienced during my 50 plus years. So I've changed my plan on the series and decided to go into what I will call the what ifs. The what ifs is, in my opinion, another term for problems or alternatives and how I handle them. And that's exactly what we're going to explore today. You see, I've always considered myself to be kind of a devil's advocate and would always present the other side of a proposal while I was serving on the board of directors for both the AYSO and Little League Organizations while I lived in South Lake Tahoe. And that concept, I believe, started when I was a P.E. major at San Francisco State in 1973, before I moved to Lake Tahoe. I transferred into San Francisco State from a community college, and I was a P.E. major as a junior. I had classes that many would think were easy and should be hardly considered as a class. These were theory and practice classes in varied sports that I took that I took baseball, basketball, track and field. I figured that these were going to be extremely easy to get A's in and quickly found out just how skewed college classes could be. My experience in coaching baseball had been with kids from 8 to 12 years old, and I had a very limited playing experience after the age of 15 myself. But I felt very confident going into the class. That confidence was quickly shot down by the school's baseball coach. I will never forget the day that we were with the excuse me. I will never forget the day that we were in class. I will never forget the day that we were in class. And the coach asked the question, how would you teach a player to field a ground ball? Simple question, right? Well, my hand shot right up, and I was hoping to get to respond and make a good impression on the coach. I was called on to give my answer and proudly proclaimed, for a right-handed player, bend down with your right knee on the ground and both hands in front so as to close the gap between your legs. Field the ball, stand up, and throw to the bag. Sounds pretty good, right? Well, turns out that my explanation was not what the coach wanted, and he chose a member of the baseball team and asked him, is that correct? And the brown-noser proudly said, no, coach, it should be like this, and proceeded to explain how an experienced collegiate or major league player actually fields a ground ball. Well, as you can imagine, for those of you who know me or have listened to the first three episodes, that pissed me off. Was this a class to teach new coaches, or was this a class designed to be given an A grade for the school baseball players? That incident set me on my career campaign of understanding that there is more than one way to teach athletes. Think about it. One of the best free throwers in the history of the NBA was Rick Barry, and he shot free throws underhanded, or as it was affectionately referred to, granny style. Dick Fosbury changed the entire way that the high jump was done track and field in 1963 and wound up winning the gold medal at the time. With what has become known as the Fosbury Flop, in direct contrast to the previously accepted western roll or scissor technique. The shot put in track and field is another event that showed that there was more than one way to succeed. It went from standing sideways, to standing with your back to the throwing ring, and gliding, or doing the discus spin in the mid-70s, which is still a thing today. Or doing the discus spin in the mid-70s, which is now the accepted teaching method among those athletes who wish to throw over 70 feet. Through my career, I have sought out different ways to coach the youth sports that I had been involved with. As an example, as I stated in my introduction podcast, I was teaching baseball players at a young age how to drag bunt and doing other things that nobody else was doing. What if I hadn't done that? Would I have set myself above all other coaches in the league at that time and been someone that parents requested to have their kid on my team? If I hadn't had the negative experience at San Francisco State, would I have been an advocate for and strive to learn and teach multiple training performance experiences? I very much doubt that. You've already heard about some of the issues that I experienced when I started coaching the girls' AAU cross-country team in Tahoe. I was a sprinter, didn't care for running distances, and had no real interest in learning how to coach distance races. But I was thrust into a situation with little time to think, let alone learn about it. So what did I do? What was the alternative way to learn what I needed to do without the internet, without YouTube, without DVDs? As I stated in my last episode, I turned to my best friend, Bob Smith, who was our long distance distance coach since he lived in San Jose, some three or four hours away. Based on his vast years of running long distance, Bob was able to give me some basic information as to how to get the girls started. We had plenty of different courses in Tahoe to utilize, which I alluded to in our last episode, and continued to switch up those courses so that nobody came bored and they got different terrains to train on. I was also blessed to have two other gents that helped me with the actual running with the girls so I didn't have to. And that also provided the necessary chaperone to watch the girls while they were out on the course while they were training. My younger brother Bruce, a basketball stud at South Tahoe High School, and Dave Roadrunner Price, the sports editor for the local Tahoe newspaper, the Tahoe Daily Tribune. Dave was an avid distance runner in Tahoe, and the girls loved him. While my brother used this training to get ready for basketball, and since he was closer to the age of the girls, they loved him as well. So what's the what if in this situation? Well, what if I didn't have a best friend that was a distance runner? What if my best friend was a, say, discus thrower? What if I didn't have a good relationship with my younger brother who embraced this opportunity to get in shape himself and related to the girls? What if I hadn't met Dave Price and struck up a friendship with him? What if he had been, say, a wrestler instead of a runner? My point is this. Utilize the people that have been put in your path as you travel through life. You never know how relationships forged at birth, in school or in life, can play a very special part in any success that you may achieve. Embrace those relationships and foster them, for they are, indeed, extremely special. I want to shout out to all three of these wonderful men for the unselfish support and love that you showed me and to my teams. The next challenge was coaching track and field in a mountain resort town where snow was on the track from January through April, and sometimes longer. As I explained in an earlier episode, the 1968 Men's Olympic Track and Field Trials were held in South Lake Tahoe because of the attitude equivalence, altitude equivalence, with Mexico City, where the games were being held. As the completion of the trials was done, it was determined that the track would be rolled up and transported from its location at the top of Echo Summit and placed within the city limits where it could be utilized by all members of the community. This meant that the obvious location would be at South Tahoe Intermediate School, which became South Tahoe Middle School some years later with the addition of sixth graders. This location was in the middle of town and easily accessible to all community members as opposed to having it placed at South Tahoe High School, which was perched on a hill and the football field was in a bowl surrounded by forest land and would be difficult for the community to access on a regular basis. Having the track available to us was a huge plus in getting girls signed up for the team because of its history and central location. With the track being on school property, it fell under a joint agreement with the South Tahoe Recreation Department that made the rec department responsible for the upkeep of the track. At least that's what I thought. You see, on average, South Lake Tahoe receives between 42 and 48 inches of snow in January alone and averages over 100 inches at lake level between December and April. So, picture this. The track is located just off the side of the outdoor basketball courts at the school and these courts are utilized as an evacuation point in case of a fire or any other disaster. This means that the school district needs to keep the courts completely clear of snow at all times, which left them with only one place for the snow to be blown, the straight away of the track. Any of you who have lived in a snow country before know that when snow is blown through a snowblower and lands on another pile of snow, it compacts and freezes, which means that 10 inches of snow becomes 10 plus inches of icy snow. This made early season training very difficult, if at all. The Steppers started track practice right after Christmas break in early January and our first competition was usually held in early March, either in Sacramento or the San Francisco Bay Area. And I was content with training inside the school gym because, well, this was how it always had been done. But you can only run around a basketball court so many times without it becoming boring. And don't even think about trying to hurl or taking block starts or doing relay handoffs or long jumping. Yes, we could do the high jump, but we had to carry in the pits from the storage shed outside and take them through the snow. And if anyone dropped one of those pits in the snow, well, it meant that we had to have towels available to wipe up the wetness before we could do anything. I know, I know what you're saying. First world problems. Still, it was not the best way to get a team ready to represent our city. And yet we had some very talented young ladies on the team, including my youngest sister Colleen, who was nationally ranked in the 100-meter dash and was an 11-year-old. In fact, we had so many outstanding young athletes on the team that the middle school's coaches couldn't wait until these girls got into seventh grade. I started to have to think outside the box, probably before it was popular to do so. And this proved to be very beneficial to me in both my coaching and medical supply chain careers. We used the bottom of each other's feet as starting blocks. Not ideal, but it still kind of gave the girls an idea as to what they were doing. Did relay handoffs in the school hallway and played games like Catch Me If You Can, which were both fun and useful in their training without them knowing they were actually training. This meant that for the most part, okay, let's be real, the whole part, we were going into our first competitions at a huge disadvantage. And a competitor in me was not happy with this at all. You see, I was raised during the Vince Lombardi era. Oh, yeah, for those of you who don't know who he was, he was the general manager and head football coach of the Green Bay Packers, where he won five NFL championships, as well as Super Bowls I and II. Amongst his most famous quotes was, quote, show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser. To me, that meant that I had to adopt a philosophy of winning and anything else was losing. And to me, losing was failure. And I couldn't stand that. Remember now, I was young, very, very young. Wow, did I just state that I was willing to put young female athletes ages 6 to 15 through the same tough, competitive, win-at-all-cost atmosphere that an NFL coaching legend did with his adult men? What in the H-E double hockey sticks was I thinking? Here's a reality check. During one of our track meets in the Bay Area, a young reporter approached me with his cameraman and asked if they could interview me for a documentary that they were doing. I agreed to participate. And this turned out to be the what-if moment that changed my coaching philosophy. In AAU track and field competition at that age, they do an event that is not conducted at high schools, the race walk. This event is conducted at the Olympics and combines a distance discipline with the extraordinary technique involved in events like hurdles or shot put. It requires the competitor to maintain contact with the ground at all times and requires the leading leg to be straightened as the foot makes contact with the ground. It must remain straightened until the leg passes under the body and judges evaluate the technique of race walkers and report fouls, which may lead to disqualification. All judging is done by the eye of the judge and no outside technology is used in making those judging decisions. During this competition, two of my walkers, who were ranked in the top five in Northern California, were deemed to have violated the rules and were disqualified. I was extremely upset as I felt that the local judges disqualified my two girls so that their girls could win. I was furious and unfortunately, it was shortly after this when the documentary people approached me and wound up questioning me on what had just happened. I was mortified when this aired on local TV and to say that it woke me up and slapped me on the side of the head is an understatement. I looked like a fool, a 20-something raging lunatic accusing meat officials of not knowing their butt from a hole in the ground and losing quite a bit of credibility amongst my peers and, more importantly, my team. From this point on throughout my career, with one major exception some 40 years later, I adopted an attitude towards officials where I would strive to not argue a call with them, especially in the eyes and ears of other individuals and especially the press. I also insisted that all my athletes, no matter what sport I was coaching, respected officials, coaches, and other competitors, no matter what. I shuddered to think what my career would have looked like or even if there would have been a career if I hadn't had to train indoors for track season and been thoroughly embarrassed on TV. Both of these events had a profound impact on my future as the indoor training due to the weather allowed me to come up with alternative means of coaching that helped me at all levels of my career and the TV incident made me look at myself and realize that this was not how I wanted to be viewed as a coach. So there are just a few of the what-ifs that occurred early in my career and how each situation formulated my future in coaching, but this is not the end. As we move through the podcast series, we'll veer off the intended path every once in a while to visit more of the what-ifs because they really do play a very big part in my career and could do the same in yours. Until the next time, take care, be safe, laugh a lot, and tell someone that you love them. And don't forget, you can send me your questions, feedbacks, and comments to coachrickb53 at gmail.com. We'll talk to you soon.