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.

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A coach, in a way, is like an automobile mechanic, and among the thousand-and-one things he or she is called on to do, one of the most challenging, yet important, is to fix things when they become broken. 

Unfortunately, in the wild and wooly world of sports, broken skills pop up pretty much every hour on the hour. There’s hardly a day that passes when one or more of your students doesn’t come to you with their world in free fall, because their curveball or jump shot or backhand or something else has suddenly thrown a bearing. 

Understanding the Coach’s Role as a Skills Mechanic

If automobiles were as prone to breakdown as athletic skills, we would park our cars and ride horses.

But the worst possible broken skill is the one that breaks at the last moment before the big competition when you barely have time to get your toolbox open before the contest begins. 

In 1978 a nine-year-old gal on my team looked like a certain bet to win the American championship in the high jump. But over the final days before we caught our flight across the country to Miami, Florida, where the meet would take place, her jump unexpectedly came down with a broken takeoff that turned it to garbage. 

So I threw the hood open and started fixing it like mad!

When Skills Break Before Competition

The golden rule of repairing broken sports skills is that you don’t try to fix the “symptom”, but the “CAUSE” of the symptom. For example, If an automobile is spewing black smoke out its tailpipe, the mechanic doesn’t begin his repair at the tailpipe catching smoke, but at the front end of the exhaust system in the engine where the smoke is being caused by some other problem. 

Understand? 

The smoke is simply a symptom that something ELSE is wrong.

Well, the symptom of this young girl’s jump was that she suddenly couldn’t clear a bar without knocking it off with her heels. 

But her heels were only her jump’s black smoke. To get to the CAUSE of her heel problem, I needed to work my way back to the root cause, which was the sad fact that she had suddenly begun leaning into the bar at the take-off.

This gal was not only a very good athlete but was also an excellent scholar in a family of scholars. She was very smart. She was performing at such a high level in the classroom that she had been advanced to a higher grade, and her ability to apply her intellect to her jumping was one reason she had become such an “exceptional” jumper. 

But… when a flaw creeps into a sports skill, it can be a bugger to get out, because it bypasses “intellect” and destroys “confidence”.

Well, my student and I worked our tails off to correct her takeoff flaw… but couldn’t.

The Golden Rule of Skill Repair: Cause vs. Symptom

Then we RAN OUT OF TIME! So… the day before we left for Florida, I did the unthinkable!

Realizing that she was taking a flawed takeoff to the national championships and that all efforts to mend the flaw had failed, I put away my tools… threw aside my efforts to correct the “cause” of her problem (the takeoff)… then I took out my bailing wire and went after the “symptom” (the heels)! 

It was wrong-headed coaching of the first order!

But when time runs out, you do WHATEVER WORKS!

So in that last practice, I moved the starting spot of her approach in a way that caused her to come at the bar at a flatter angle, thus allowing her to slide ALONG the bar rather than passing directly over it. This gave her an additional split second above the bar to clear her heels before they knocked the bar off.

And IT WORKED!

Three days later at the end of a long airplane ride, and using this makeshift, bailing-wire approach, my young student got her heels over a bar at a height good enough to make her the American champion. She won!

But that’s only the beginning of her Florida story.

Emergency Solutions: When Time Runs Out

The morning following her cobbled-together win in the high jump, she competed in the long jump. As a long jumper, she was good enough to have met the qualifying mark, but she certainly wasn’t exceptional, which an American champion must be. Her best jump through the season was, as I recall, something around 12’ 6″.

But that morning, with her national high jump title in her pocket, she once again competed like a champion.

Her first preliminary jump was 13’ – the best of her life by around half a foot.

Then… each jump thereafter (six in all), was farther than the last until she ended the competition with a jump of almost 14’ (which is “exceptional”). She didn’t win but placed an astonishing second. I had nothing to do with her stunning performance that morning. It came from inside her. But I’ve never been prouder of a student.

But now THE TOPPER:

 At the end of the meet when they awarded the team trophies, they announced that the third place trophy for the nine and under division was awarded to our team! The points this young girl had accrued with her first and second places were enough to place her third in the team contest… ALL BY HERSELF! 

I’m no great fan of team trophies and team awards in the sport of track and field, which I consider to be an “individual” sport. But following the meet when we returned home, I got a duplicate trophy made and gave the original to this student of mine who had won it as a TEAM OF ONE. 

 My duplicate trophy still sits on a shelf behind my desk, and it holds a coaching memory I’ll cherish forever. People like you and I who coach children are generally underpaid (or not paid). But if you work at it long enough and well enough and a little luck comes your way, you’ll become wealthy with memories, which are better than money because they last forever.

The Importance of Proper Skill Development

In my book, The Coaching Book, I have several chapters on skill teaching and skill correction. I firmly believe that the teaching of the skills of whatever sport you are coaching is YOUR FIRST MATTER OF BUSINESS. It’s where you BEGIN! Athletes and teams of athletes with superior skills will excel!

There is a process to both skill teaching and skill correction, and this little episode I’ve just related in which I applied an incorrect temporary fix to my student’s high jumping is one I never again repeated. And when she and I returned to Oregon that year following her cobbled-together win, I promptly took her flawed jump apart, went straight to the CAUSE of the flaw… and fixed it the slow, tedious way… THE RIGHT WAY.

Have you ever faced a “last-minute crisis” with an athlete’s technique? How did you handle it, and what did you learn from the experience? Share your story.

* The stories in Winning Ways are of actual athletes but names have been replaced for privacy.