Gymnastics Coaching.com

do elite athletes make bad coaches?

Iâ€™m a coach. And was a lousy athlete.

Itâ€™s easy for me to go along with the conventional wisdom that â€œgreat athletes make poor coachesâ€.

The sport came â€œeasilyâ€ to great athletes so, the thinking goes, they cannot relate to the normal child.

Certainly this is wrong â€” in some cases.

Charlie Tamayo from Cuba is certainly one of the greatest gymnasts of all time. But heâ€™s also a naturally gifted coach and motivator.

Click PLAY or watch Charlie on YouTube.

Heâ€™s wearing â€œold manâ€ make-up at Woodward West Gymnastics Camp in California. Spotting Stalder on bars.

Do elite athletes make good coaches?

It may simply be the case that there are very few elite athletes in any sport. And that very few of those go on to be coaches.

This could be the simple explanation why most of the great coaches you can name were not elite athletes in their sport.

using athletic tape GRIPS on Bars

At Woodward West Gymnastics Camp the trainers have had plenty of experience protecting hands for swinging bars. (They have over 100 gymnasts some weeks.)

Unless you have a system you like better, this is what you get when you go into the trainers room for “repairs”:

In practice, they seemed to work very well.

Of course athletic tape is very expensive. You would not want to make these on a daily basis.

tumbling video – Marinich stretched

“Marinich” is the name of a difficult and somewhat dangerous dive roll from a forward handspring. (Adding a full twist as Jared Walls from Canada did on Floor Exercise is definitely dangerous.)

Coaches from Woodward West Gymnastics Camp show the skill â€” without twist.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

should parents watch sports training?

Still a controversial question, I agree with the Sports Girls Play blog:

Some of the gyms I have coached at in the past (before I had kids of my own) actually had â€œno-watchâ€ policies. I donâ€™t agree with that philosophy ….

As a parent paying tuition or players fees, it is your right to observe what your child is learning. Additionally, I would be very cautious allowing my child to participate in a program that regularly held closed practices unless there were multiple coaches that I knew well and trusted present at all times.

On the other hand, parents in the observation areas do sometimes cause some problems:

Years ago I had a student whoâ€™s Mother watched every practice. She would sit in the stands and count how many turns each child took and if her child got any fewer turns than anyone else, she would make a point of letting me know after practice.

She was constantly comparing her daughterâ€™s progress to the other girls and it put a lot of unnecessary pressure on her daughter.

Should Parents Watch Sports Practices?

My personal philosophy is to explain to the parents why it is not optimal to watch all of every practice.

gymnastics video – LEAF DROP from Bars

Where I come from we call a back somersault from sitting on a bar a “leaf drop”. No doubt it has other names in other regions.

It’s not a competitive skill, but is good psychological preparation for future dismounts.

Once the kids can do leaf drop for “fun”, the flyaway seems less “scary”.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

From Mountain Shadows Gymnastics Camp, Okotoks, Alberta, Canada.

One gymnast does double back leaf drop. This is not recommended due to the risk of landing on the neck in the foam pit.

video – leg POWER training

Coach Suzi Goodmanson from California has an astonishing array of drills for improving leg power. Many she has “invented” herself.

To see an example (pike jump series) click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

HPTCamp.com

gymnastics video – SHOOT HALF on bars

Coach “Milo” (formerly with UCLA, soon moving to Melbourne, Australia) had two good set-ups for coaching the challenging bar transfer “Shoot Half”.

Woodward Gymnastics Camp 2007.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.