Article by Ron Cogdill, a seasoned educator and youth sports expert, has spent over 30 years inspiring young minds. As a published author and 7-time national championship coach, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his writing.
A couple of years ago my wife and I tore out our lawn and started from scratch. It had gotten a weed in it (called crabgrass) that flat-out took over.
Our new lawn looked like a putting green. It was beautiful!
Well… it’s now two years later, and guess what?
The weed’s back. But this time my wife and I have decided we’ve had enough of “starting over”! So we’re taking a new tack this time: We’re trying to convince ourselves that… we now “LIKE” weeds in our lawn!
The Never-Ending Battle of Teaching Skills
The reason I bring this up about our lawn and the crabgrass is this: In your life as a coach you’ll have a ton of skills to teach. And you need to understand that if you want your students to excel and your team to win its games, it’s IMPORTANT THAT YOU TEACH THESE SKILLS CORRECTLY FROM THE START. Incorrectly learned skills are not good! And worse yet, they are DIFFICULT TO CORRECT!
But life ain’t fair… especially a coach’s life. You can teach your students their skills like gangbusters, and when you’re finished you can pat yourself on the back because you’ve done everything right.
… Then a day will pass… or a week… or two months, and you’ll show up for the big game ready to watch your team rumble, and guess what? Your best player will have weed-out-of-nowhere growing in yesterday’s shot or kick or swing, and won’t be able to hit the broad side of a barn!
Welcome to coaching, coach!
You’ll spend half your life teaching your students correct skills… and the other half of your life FIXING them when they suddenly get weeds in them.
A High Jumper with a Flaw
I once had a student who came to my track club from a middle school program as a jumper with a specialty as a high jumper. She was talented, eager, hard-working, a pleasure to work with, and already good. My task was to make her even better – to bring about improvement. And the most obvious improvement I could make with her jump was to remove a technical flaw in her takeoff – a “bad habit”.
Most of this girl’s jump was sound – especially her bar-clearance position (called either “back layout” or “arch”). In fact, that part of her jump was exceptional. She could literally wrap herself around the bar.
But… somewhere along the line, she had developed the flawed habit of assuming that arched position a split second early – before lifting off the ground. To put it bluntly: She arched too soon.
When Perfect Plans Fall Apart
So I set out to fix her takeoff in the usual manner. I began by filming her so she could actually see what was wrong and understand it. “Seeing” and “understanding” are the first steps in fixing any sort of technical flaw. I followed this by isolating the problem from the rest of the jump, correcting it in isolation, drilling this new correctness into habit, and then finally re-injecting it into the actual jump.
But it didn’t work. An early arch is like crabgrass in your lawn. I swear, it moves in and takes over… and it’s there to stay.
Then I got an idea.
For some strange reason, this jumper came to me high jumping off her right foot and long jumping off her left. I had never seen this before, but she had ambidextrous feet, I guess you’d say. So the idea that came to me was to throw in the towel on fixing her right-footed jump and simply start over from scratch by teaching her to do her high jump off her left.
So I did… but it didn’t work. In fact, it was a dumb idea.
Finally, with the season winding down, I decided to send her into the big end-of-season championship meets with her old flawed takeoff alive and well and cross my fingers.
When Lightning Strikes in the Desert
The American championships that year were in Tempe, Arizona at Arizona State University. As the high jump contest proceeded and the bar inched gradually higher, it narrowed down to four jumpers – two from my team, one of whom was this gal with the flawed takeoff, and two beautiful jumpers from California. I watched the contest from behind a chain-link fence behind the pit. It was the best seat in the house, though there was no seat to sit on.
Well, as the bar height climbed, my two students began struggling, throwing in misses, and they were clearing each new height by the skin of their teeth. Meanwhile, the two California jumpers were jumping flawlessly and clearing each height easily… and it became obvious that my two students were fighting it out for third and fourth.
I don’t remember exactly what the final height was that day, but it was something a little over five feet, as I recall, which is an impressive jump for an eleven-year-old girl. My student with the flawed takeoff was jumping last in the rotation, with one final jump remaining at this final height. She had missed her first two attempts badly, and I assumed she would now throw in one last miss, and the contest would be over.
But then a miracle happened.
You’ve seen on TV where some end-of-the-bench baseball player steps up and hits a grand slam home run to win the big game… or some golfer sinks a match-winning hole-in-one on the last hole to win the tournament. It happens… but only in movies or TV, and always to someone else.
Right?
Well… no lightning flashed in the hot Arizona sky, but on her third and final jump, the miracle happened. She approached the bar, jumped (with her flawed takeoff in full bloom), bent herself around the bar with her beautiful arch as she always did, landed in the pit, then looked up at the bar THAT WAS STILL FIRMLY IN PLACE… then buried her face in her hands.
She was the American Champion!
Sometimes Imperfection Wins the Day
Given your druthers, there’s not a coach alive who wouldn’t rather his student or team win the championship with an outright flawless performance. I mean, we coaches will take perfection any day.
But let me say this: The miraculous ending that comes out of nowhere is the best thing in sports.
If this jumper’s season had followed the perfect script, she and I would have corrected her flawed takeoff, drilled her jump to perfection, and then buried her competitors at the American Championships without the drama.
But doing it the hard way, flaws and all, sure was fun!
I haven’t seen this girl (who would now be a woman) for many years, but I’ll carry the memory of her grand slam, hole-in-one jump with me to the end of my life.
Why Getting It Right From Day One Matters
We coaches can sometimes become pretty proficient at teaching skills. But when it comes to correcting flawed skills, we fail more often than we succeed. Bad habits show up from out of nowhere, and they’re harder to get rid of than crabgrass. And that’s why it’s so very important that we coaches TEACH SKILLS CORRECTLY FROM THE FIRST DAY!
In my book, The Coaching Book, I go into great detail about teaching skills and correcting broken skills. There’s a process to it that you need to know.
I might add one final word: My student wasn’t the only person to perform a miraculous jump that day in Arizona. I don’t want to brag, but a split-second following her wondrous jump, I nearly jumped over the chain-link fence I was standing behind. I wish someone had been there to measure it.
What’s your most memorable moment of watching someone succeed despite (or because of) their imperfections? Share your story.
* The stories in Winning Ways are of actual athletes but names have been replaced for privacy.
