Coaching: Do we need to?

[jBirch]

Was doing some general reading and came across this article:

http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies...n-the-Wall.htm

Got me thinking...

Do we, as coaches, complicate this whole fencing thing a little too much? Can we achieve superlative results by simply giving kids that come to our class a weapon, the gear, some basic safety rules and then turn them loose on the piste?

As an anecdote, we got some pool noodles for an open house once and gave it to some kids. It was remarkable how fast they were doing very nuanced tempo changes, attacks, feints, etc... with absolutely no instruction from any of the coaches.

Thoughts?

- James.

[bunbury]

Scrub vs coached. I wonder who will win.

[RITFencing]

Interesting article.

I think that coaches definitely do help (otherwise the distrobution of good fencers would be much more random.) If nothing else, coaches will encourage students to practice and fence more, take care of club spaces and act as a general support staff that allows fencers to keep fencing.

However, I think it is also possible to use people's tendancy to figure things out for themselves, and even hurry it along.

One thing I like to do while giving a lesson is ask questions of the student, mainly rhetorical ones. "Why did it work when you did that with an advance lunge rather than a lunge?" "Why did it work when you started slow and then accelerated?" "Why DIDN'T it work when you just moved fast throughout the action?" "What happened to the distance there?" "What about the tempo?" "How was it different than when it did/didn't work?"

Probably the most important one: "Why do you think that did or didn't work?"

I generally ask these questions after providing a simple answer to a problem, like telling them to throw in a change of tempo from slow to fast on an advance lunge where before they were just going full bore the whole way. I don't always tell them why it worked.

Also, I tell them not to answer right away. Even if they come up with the wrong answer, they're still THINKING about it, and that's very important. If after a little while they're still not getting it, then I drop a few hints or just explain why somehting did or didn't work. Sometimes I just provide fencing examples. To draw on the tempo change example: I have them do it first with the tempo change, and then without. I tell them to really pay attention to what the distance between us does, or what the tempo does, or whatever. Basically, I leave little hints for them to figure things out, because then not only do they get used to thinking about things, they get a better understanding from it and they get a feeling of accomplishment because they figured it out.

I think it's very important to harness a person's power to figure things out, and I try to gear my lessons in that direction.

To sum up: People tend to think about things and figure them out on their own, and I think coaches work best when factoring those tendancies into their lessons.

PS There were a group of papers written by a hungarian sabre coach posted here a while ago, and in one of them he mentioned using a very similar phenominon in his lessons. When a student just couldn't grasp something, he dropped it for that lesson and moved onto something else. A week later, he had the student take it up again and generally found a marked improvement. According to a study mentioned in the paper, people tend to think about unsolved problems in their spare time and can often come to solutions on their own.

[Mr Epee]

Originally Posted by bunbury

Scrub vs coached. I wonder who will win.

Depending on the age, temperment, and length of time involved?

You might be very very surprised.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

Originally Posted by bunbury

Scrub vs coached. I wonder who will win.

Look.

A coach can do two things, make a great fencer into a better fencer, or make a loser into a sucker-with-style.

Some fencers will kick ass whether or not they have access to a coach, the rest are pretty much gods way of getting money to the clubs.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

Another thing you should take into account is that, past the beginner/low intermediate stage, coaching won't do much good unless the coach is top banana (By top banana, I mean really good, like Kornel, Marx, Soter, ect).

An inadequate coach is just a stairway to stagnation.

[rcmatthews]

I wonder how many self taught fencers there are competing internationally?

[bunbury]

Originally Posted by D+F+P=Hadouken!

Look.

A coach can do two things, make a great fencer into a better fencer, or make a loser into a sucker-with-style.

Some fencers will kick ass whether or not they have access to a coach, the rest are pretty much gods way of getting money to the clubs.

For some reason, I don't think a six year old walks into a club as a "great fencer".

Also, what do you mean by beginner/low intermediate? Pretty vague. I have a strange feeling that the guys who talk to the people fencing in the World Cups in the break periods *might* be helpful.

[feinte]

Originally Posted by D+F+P=Hadouken!

An inadequate coach is just a stairway to stagnation.

Did I not read in an earlier thread that you were coaching? Are you good?

[Ordway]

Yes, it matters.

People do have the capacity to think things through for themselves. However, in order to come to useful conclusions, they have to be working on *the right questions.* One of the most useful things any teacher does is focus the student's attention on the right problem. In the end, no teacher or coach can "teach" in the sense of putting the knowledge into a head: he or she can only "create the conditions in which learning can happen," so that the student can put the pieces together himself or herself.

Those pieces can come together independently, of course, but there's no guarantee that they will... or that they will in a useful order... or that they'll do so as quickly as they could... or that one or two pieces may be jammed together in a way that "works" but that impedes further progress.

I had basic coaching as an undergrad, and then I was let loose, ending up spending 5 or 6 years self-coaching. I managed to pull myself up from a U to an OK D-rated/weak C-rated fencer... who needs coaches, right? Well, the fact is that I hit a wall and couldn't progress any further. Now, I'm very smart and very motivated, and I'd managed to get that far by myself, so the unfortunate conclusion seemed to be that I was about as good as I was going to get.

Then I moved to a new state, a new division, and a new club, and started working with a great coach. Whaddaya know, two years later, I'm a much better fencer than I was (by a LOT) and I see a lot of progress ahead. Guess I wasn't at the end of the line after all. The issue wasn't with my ability, my intelligence, or my motivation - it was in the fact that, as the student, I simply wasn't able to analyze myself from the outside perspective, with the benefit of additional knowledge, insight, and experience. I'm still responsible for doing the learning, but my coach sets up the structure so that I know what problem I'm trying to solve (and some guidelines on how to solve it).

Yeah, we need coaching - or I do, anyway, because I want to keep improving. And trust me, the beginner students I coach end up being much better fencers, much more quickly (and enjoy themselves much more) than the beginners I've seen who were allowed/left to just learn on their own. Effective teaching is less about *content* and more about *structuring a learning environment* - that's makes the difference.

[Grasshopper]

Originally Posted by bunbury

Scrub vs coached. I wonder who will win.

No I don't want no scrub
A scrub is a guy that can't get no love from me

[veeco]

Originally Posted by D+F+P=Hadouken!

Look.

A coach can do two things, make a great fencer into a better fencer, or make a loser into a sucker-with-style.

Some fencers will kick ass whether or not they have access to a coach, the rest are pretty much gods way of getting money to the clubs.

Actually, you're forgetting some of the most important thing a coach should do:

A coach should be able to motivate his students and show them what their true limits are.
A coach, especially one coaching kids, should be capable of putting his students into situations where learning the right move, and doing a correct technical execution of the actions comes naturally.

Let me try to explain myself.

A student can learn the technical aspects of something two ways: by being spoon fed the information, which will after some time (perhaps a lot of time) give results. That's the "sucker with style" argument.

But there is another way: if the coach can demonstrate what are the benefits of the correct technical execution, the information is more likely to stick in their memory. They will also be able to analyze their mistakes better, because they will know what each error they made was. Most importantly, they will be able to know WHY it is that each move or action has to be performed a certain way. If they don't do it the right way, they will be able to know it, because they will be able to make a link between the mistake and its consequences.

Saying that talent is everything is not the whole story. It isn't true that some people are just hopeless.

A good coach will be able to turn a talented fencer into a great fencer. A great coach will be able to turn any fencer into a decent fencer.

Unfortunately there are a lot of coaches out there who follow the same line of reasoning than yours, and it is sad to do that. I wish there were more coaches who were willing to take on the challenge of teaching fencing to "less talented students"

[Allen Evans]

I constantly maintain to my students that my job is to make myself useless to them. In between them starting with me and that happening, however, there seems to be a lot of work for the coach.

The article that started this thread talks about illiterate children learning to use a computer. But the article also points out that the children's use was in a very limited way: the manipulation of found objects that were easy to discover. It's not like the kids learned to make changes in the operating system, for example. The children didn't discover the MP3 player until someone intervened and "coached" them on it. I'm actually pretty surprised at the tone of astonishment the article held. What seemed to be happening didn't strike me as too remarkable a feat: curious children are given some bright, colorful objects to manipulate, and -- Wow! -- they manipulate them! I see little kids do this every day.

I know a few fencers who regularly do well without a coach, and who haven’t been coached by anyone in years. But these fencers usually have had a history of excellent coaching in their background, and seem to spend a great deal of time analyzing their own -- and others -- fencing.

I’ve known a few “self taught” fencers in my life, or fencers with very limited or very poor coaching. These fencers don’t fence with skills much beyond the “backyard broomstick” stage. There is almost no skill development, just a “faster, harder” approach that gets them a few touches locally, and wins a DE or two in the novice tournaments. I’ve seen them fence two or three years between observations, with no improvement.

At the same time (this coming after a long night of lessons) I often wonder if there isn’t a better way. Fencing seems to be the last sport that has such a time-intensive approach towards building high quality performers. You can do a lot with classes, but at a certain point, high performance seems to require a combination of time at the coach’s plastron, and good bouting partners, as well as all those indefinable qualities it takes to make a good athlete.

Is fencing the only sport that requires this one-on-one coaching? Is it limited to the “combat arts”?

Allen

[Phincer]

Originally Posted by Allen Evans

[color=black]
Is fencing the only sport that requires this one-on-one coaching? Is it limited to the “combat arts”?

Allen

In fencing you get to one-on-one coaching faster than many other sports if you want to get better, but other sports have one-on-one coaching at the higher levels.

One person I know has a daughter that is an NCAA softball player. She had a pitching coach and a batting coach, in addiition to her school's coach. Tennis has one-on-one coaching, gymnastics, baseball (specific skills)...

While other sports have individual coaches for specialized circumstances, the fencing coach coaches every aspect of a fencer's game.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by jBirch

As an anecdote, we got some pool noodles for an open house once and gave it to some kids. It was remarkable how fast they were doing very nuanced tempo changes, attacks, feints, etc... with absolutely no instruction from any of the coaches.

Thoughts?

- James.

Originally Posted by AllenEvans

I’ve known a few “self taught” fencers in my life, or fencers with very limited or very poor coaching. These fencers don’t fence with skills much beyond the “backyard broomstick” stage. There is almost no skill development, just a “faster, harder” approach that gets them a few touches locally, and wins a DE or two in the novice tournaments. I’ve seen them fence two or three years between observations, with no improvement.

That is quite a contrast in experiences. Can the two of you specify more details about those cases, so that we can see from what the differences stem?

Furthermore, there is research showing that it is not best to work on a few things and get them perfect before going on to something else. In contrast, that research indicates that it is best to teach a lot of stuff concurrently, and keep coming back to each topic. The motivation is that this method creates patchy knowledge of each topic, but wrongly learnt things are not allowed to get themselves firm-wired into the brain, in which case they cause a lot of problems.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Bryn Ralph]

Perhaps I missed the intent of the original query. Perhaps Canadians are more advanced than Americans when it comes to nuanced activities.

"...turn them loose on the piste." Wow. There is an idea come of age.

Fencing, as most already know, is a complex, fast-paced sport. Activity without instruction or direction is tantamount to chaos. However, exceptions do occur -- rarely.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

Originally Posted by feinte

Did I not read in an earlier thread that you were coaching? Are you good?

Yep, I coach.

But I'm not anywhere capable of taking a fencer past that C-B (strong on a local level) stage. If I was coaching a fencer around that level, it would be a complete waste of their time and money.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

Originally Posted by veeco

I wish there were more coaches who were willing to take on the challenge of teaching fencing to "less talented students"

I sort of see where you're coming from, but I don't think its reasonable. Why would a coach devote time to a less talented fencer? It takes time away from the talented athletes, the ones who are actually going to make results.

With that said, I do coach pretty much everyone at the club, even the people who are not innately talented. Given the choice though, I put the fencers with talent as my first priority.

[darius]

With that said, I do coach pretty much everyone at the club, even the people who are not innately talented. Given the choice though, I put the fencers with talent as my first priority.

Even above those who are less talented, but have more drive?

darius