Three good ideas

[RITFencing]

This is an idea I stole from a very high level coach. He told me about a conference he went to where everyone was required to bring three good ideas about anythign their club does, no matter how obvious, and they were all exchanged, leading to a huge amount of forehead slapping and wondering why no one else every thought of such brilliant (and easily apparent things.)

So, it's a bit unorthodox, but everyone, please try and post three good ideas about coaching. It could be anything from specific drills to class structure to philosophy to lesson plans to locker placement.

I'll start:

1) Be positive in as many ways possible. Not necessarily sweet and nice and hippie-esque, just positive. Focus on what people can do rather than what they can't. Give solutions instead of problems. Try to encourage your fencers to do the same. Humans focus on whatever we are told; if we are told a problem, we will focus on it and repeat it. If we are simply given the solution to the problem (instead of "your feet are too close," say "part your feet a bit) then we will perform that solution much more easily, and we always have more fun being told to do something rather than not to do somehting.

2) Keep rotating activities and insert breaks. If possible, switch between fencing, drilling, more bouting, more drilling, etc. People, especially kids, have short attention spans. If you can keep full attention for 10 minutes, you're doing well. 20 is amazing for young children. It always starts to wane, but if you keep things fresh, it sort of resets the clock and allows for a much more enjoyable and profitable experience.

3) Have a plan. Lessons and group classes are so much easier if you plan them out beforehand, especially when you want to use multiple lessons/classes to build towards a single concept (which is also a really, really good idea.)

[Tomas N]

Great thread. It's early in the day, but here's my crack at three ideas.

1. Make sure that the more experienced fencers talk with the returning fencers. The best way to retain new fencers is to get them integrated into the group as quickly as possible. Most people stick with an activity because they have friends there. It helps if you have really good student leaders.

2. Watch fencing videos of high level fencing as a group. This is especially important if there aren't some very good fencers in the club that you can hold up as a role model. Get students early on to analyze what is happening in a bout between good fencers.

3. If you're a club sport at a college, find out all the ways that you can get money from the school. Student governments have several budgets (e.g. operating, capital purchases), and you may get rejected from one, but get tons of money from another. The athletic department might have money for club sports. There may be money available if students are getting PE credit by participating in the club. This used to be the case at our school, where we had a PE requirement.

Tomas

[catwood1]

1) Make sure people have fun. Especially important at the beginning level. It fencers don't have fun, they won't come back to practice. Fencers should enjoy every practice. At more competitive levels, you can include a few things that are important but not as fun (running/cross training) but you need to be really careful in doing this.

2) Let them succeed. Every drill that is done should have a high level of success on the part of the fencer. If its a 1 on 1 lesson and the student is failing at the drill 75% of the time, the drill is too hard and needs to be adjusted.

3) Teach less. If a fencer spends an hour learning how to do something really well (or in a variety of different scenarios) he will walk away feeling accomplished and know that skill. If he spends an hour learning how to sort of do 5 different things, he will walk away feeling muddled and confused, and not really knowing how to any of them well.

[thekoby]

1.) Be involved. Not just involved with teaching the drills, but participate in them. Something I have noticed with my college club is that when I jump in with the new fencers and run footwork drills with them it helps them feel more welcome and not segregated from the senior members or you as the coach. This leads me to my second idea...

2.) Get your students involved. Two years ago my club started to play around with a new idea of allowing new members to lead footwork drills. It was an attempt to make the members feel like they are actually part of the club, and worked fairly well. Run your members through footwork drills, then randomly choose a member to lead the next set of drills while you hope in with the rest of them.

3.) Spend time with your members and get to know them. This may not work with every coach, but college coaches it should be easy to do this. After practice, everybody go out to grab something to eat together or plan a weekend party/cookout and invite all the members of the club. I feel that the more a member knows who is teaching them, the more they will trust and respect that person. Last year I held game nights every month around campus and invited all new and older fencers to play board games, eat junk food, and just have fun outside of practice.

[MdA]

Here are my three good ideas (actually 5)…go to one of the following three coaching education clinics…

1.) Sep 20, 2008 - Polo Road Park: Columbia, SC http://askfred.net/Clinics/moreInfo.php?clinic_id=6717
2.) Sep 21, 2008 - Midwest Region Foil Clinic - Sept 21, 2008
3.) Sept 28, 2008 Training for College Club Coaches

4.) After you attend the clinic, write up a report on all the things that were good and bad and post it on this forum so others can learn and we can improve the clinics.
5.) Also plan your coaching education several months in advance…provide your input for dates, topics, presenters for the next series of clinics at the following link Next USFCA Coaching Clinic in San Antonio?

[MdA]

Here are my 6th and 7th good ideas
Michael Marx clinics in Raleigh, NC (Oct 3-5, Oct 31-Nov 2)

[JEC]

1. Group - Stretch before exercising.

2. Do Footwork as a group or at least in pairs - prior to bouting and with weapons on hand (if pairs, then masks; it gets you into a rhythm)

3. Encourage your fencers to tape their bouts and analyze them. (this could be the warm down session)

[thekoby]

3. Encourage your fencers to tape their bouts and analyze them. (this could be the warm down session)

I've actually started doing this with one of my foil fencers. It came in handy when he kept performing a fleche WAY out of distance and would not listen to me when I told him to stop until he has learned more about distance control.

[oiuyt]

It came in handy when he kept performing a fleche WAY out of distance and would not listen to me when I told him to stop until he has learned more about distance control.

Ahem. See RIT's suggestion #1.

1) Be a fencing evangelist. Convey your love for fencing (I'm assuming here that this is part of why you're in the sport, rather than the massive paychecks and supermodel girlfriends). Be enthusiastic. Love what you do.

2) Teaching fencing is a partnership. It isn't you building the best fencer you can. It isn't a student trying to suck out whatever knowledge s/he can from what you teach. The coach and the student are working together to help the student achieve what s/he wants to achieve. Likely this involves competitive success, but even if it doesn't the goal is to work with the student to aid the student in progressing towards his/her goals.

3) It's important to know multiple aspects of your chosen sport. Know how to referee. Know how to run a tournament. Know how to repair equipment. Know how US Fencing and the FIE work. Know about the other weapons. Know about other styles. Know about other fencers and other coaches. One of the best ways to do so is to be involved as something in addition to being a coach. It's not necessary to master all of the above, but having enough knowledge to understand what's going on in each of those domains (and about a dozen more) will improve your teaching. Don't be an insect.

4) (bonus) Always keep learning. Learn from your students. Learn from other coaches. Learn from bouts that you watch. Think about why people do certain actions. What makes them work? What would make them not work? Experiment with new ideas. Experiment with old ideas in a new context. Share your knowledge. One of the best ways to learn something is to try teaching it to someone else. Or even just explaining it to someone else. Bring ideas from other sports. Spend some time just playing with fencing. Question why things are done the way they are and what happens when you vary them in different ways.

-B

ps MdA- Here's 21 more ideas (a few repeated from your first 7).

[NUcoach]

Greetings all. I am new to Fencing.net but thought I might join. My name is Laurie Schiller and I'm the USFCA Midwest VP and head coach of Northwestern university. I will try and keep up with the discussions. I like this 3 idea thread.

Laurie

[RITFencing]

Greetings all. I am new to Fencing.net but thought I might join. My name is Laurie Schiller and I'm the USFCA Midwest VP and head coach of Northwestern university. I will try and keep up with the discussions. I like this 3 idea thread.

Laurie

Thanks, Laurie. Got some ideas for us?

[Allen Evans]

1. Don't let what you don't know interfere with what you DO know.

2. When you find out what you know is wrong, don't be afraid to change it, and tell the student's why you're changing it.

3. Every day, work to put yourself out of a job. The evolution of the student/teacher relationship is that the student should need you LESS not MORE as time goes on.

Allen Evans

[Tyldak]

Three things I've learned just in the past few years...

1. Make sure students pay for their lessons/classes/equipment.

Generally speaking, people do not value that which they do not pay for. They may like it, and they may enjoy it, but (generally) they won't value it. Many in our sport, worried about our (at times) anemic numbers, have gone out of their way to give out lots of freebies for classes, buying lots of equipment then lending it out so students don't have to buy anything, etc. all in an effort to make fencing as financially painless as possible. The thinking is, "Once they get involved and see how cool it is, they'll want to spend money needed to be a real fencer." In my experience this way of breaking in newbies tends to attract lots of people who aren't terribly serious, and the coach winds up spending a lot of time and energy on people only to have them gone in a couple months. By all means, make it affordable and work hard to market the sport, but don't try too hard to shelter students from the financial pain of the sport - that way you'll be better able to find the Really Serious/Committed Ones much sooner.

2. Don't be afraid to spend money, especially on location and advertising.

You have to spend money to make money. Don't be shy about (wisely) spending money for a good club location and widespread advertising. If you have your club at the cheapest location possible - that back alley industrial space that is out in the middle of nowhere - and you don't spend any money on advertising, how are people going to find you? Much like point #1, if you have cheap/no advertising, and you have a cheap/bad location, guess what kind of students you'll attract? Yup, cheap. OK, once in awhile you'll get a good one, but generally speaking, businesses that succeed are the ones that are willing to risk a couple bucks in order to make more than a couple bucks.

3. Enable your students to take care of themselves.

If your student is helpless at a competition without you, you're not being a good coach. Upon entering their first competition, students should know/understand: what equipment they need, how the equipment is tested, how competitions are organized/run, how to keep score, how to keep time, how to speak to the referee, how to (basically) analyze an opponent, and how to (basically) set up a good first intention attack, and how to (basically) diagnose/fix equipment problems on the strip. If the student is too young for all of that, teach/work with the student's parent. In practice bouting ask your students, "How did he/she hit you? How can you turn that around?" to get them to be able to think for themselves. If you run around a competition taking care of your students' every need, fixing their equipment, fetching their water, and constantly yammering strategy stuff on the side of the strip, then you don't have a fencer, you have a puppet.

[MdA]

Welcome Laurie, another USFCA Fencing Master, to this forum and thanks for hosting two coaching education and training clinics this month at your facility at Northwestern. I know that it takes a lot of time and energy to host a clinic.

Some very good ideas by oiuyt; Especially like the Don't be an insect. and the list of referee and armory clinics.

1. Learning to be a good referee is very important to being a good coach. Many of the top referee instructors are also good coaches…so there is some good coaching stuff if those clinics…from a referee’s perspective.

2. Good armory skills are very important to a coach. I was thinking of this while I was wiring blades in my garage last night. You can teach your fencers to do their own equipment…but you can never just let them go….without doing some quality control and rolling up you sleeves and getting back in there….from time to time. They will lose important touches if you are totally hands off. You can also pick up some great tips at the armory clinics that will save you time and money…there are a lot of new tools and materials out there. We hosted Armory clinics at the Pan American Fencing Academy when it was up and running and we plan to do it again at the Alamo Fencing Academy here in San Antonio…in the near future.

3. Finally for those with the ability to travel to Germany, the AAI is sponsoring a coaching course on October 15-20, 2008. Most of the instruction is in English. I have attached the schedule, topics, etc. Contact Mike Bunke at the number below if you are interested. You don’t need to speak German to call Mike…he is a retired Navy pilot so he will get you set up. I think you need to be a USFCA member (and therefore an AAI member) if you plan to take any exams.

Mike Bunke, Fechtmeister ADFD
Schulstr. 12, 24867 Dannewerk, Allemagne
tel 04621-31201 fax 04621-31584
mobil 0172-6224446

[Tomas N]

Don't be an insect.

Hey, what has specialization gotten us other than 200 years of historically unprecedented improvements in human welfare?

Given that, I agree that specializing in the sport fencing requires us to understand many facets of the game.

Tomas

[tbryan]

Lots of good stuff already. I spoke to another assistant coach about this thread and we came up with a few to add that had not been mentioned already.

1) If the student is really struggling, you're almost certainly doing something wrong. Fix that first.

For example, you may be teaching something that the student isn't really ready to learn, yet. In a lesson, you might simply be making the cue or action a little wrong for what you want to see. Or maybe your instructions just weren't clear.

2) In any drill or lesson, make sure that you're focused on teaching one thing.

If we're working on lunge technique, then I focus on lunge technique. (Front leg reaches out, good push from the back leg, etc.) If we're working on setting up the lunge, I don't want technique to fall apart, but I focus on the preparation and timing and not the technique. It so much easier to teach when you highlight for yourself the focus of each drill, and it may help you construct better drills so that each drill focuses on what you're really trying to teach at that moment.

3) Think about the things that you're teaching that you don't know you're teaching.

It's especially useful to watch your students at a tournament or while a big practice is going on. Are there things that [em]everyone[/em] is doing that you don't think that they should be doing? For example, maybe everyone makes a big stomp with the front foot when lunging. Perhaps the way that you teach the lunge actually encourages that big stomp. Maybe the epeeists make parries with fully-extended arms.

Note that unwinding some of these problems to figure out how you accidentally taught dozens of fencers some horrible flaw can be difficult, but it can really help you accelerate future students' progress. If you can figure out how you accidentally taught it, then you may be able to figure out a new way to teach things so that you avoid those problems. Of course, you might not be able to figure out what's causing the problem. (Or maybe you can't figure out a better way to teach it.) In that case, you can at least create steps in your program where you unteach these things. Better to avoid teaching your fencers bad habits, but if you can't, you can at least acknowledge it and address it as early in the program as possible.

[AaronK]

I thought I might just give one good idea-

Require the students to ask one question EVERY class. (Depending on the size of your class this can get time-prohibitive). If they can't think of something fencing related, they still must ask you some question.
A friend of mine used this to close his class, every class. He spent the last 10 minutes of his class time (before the students free-bouted) to answer questions from his students- he did this while people did some stretching and conditioning. Everyone was required to ask one, even if it didn't have to do with the day's lesson (the more experienced students usually asked about something related to the lesson out of habit). His classes where small (average 8-12 students), so you might have to adapt this in a larger setting.

[Allen Evans]

"If you're traveling at the speed of light in a car, and turn on the headlights, what happens?"

Questions like this might lead to a long, uncomfortable silence. I would suggest (at the start) making them ask a fencing question first!

AE

[Insipiens]

"If you're traveling at the speed of light in a car, and turn on the headlights, what happens?"

Questions like this might lead to a long, uncomfortable silence. I would suggest (at the start) making them ask a fencing question first!

AE

An electric current passes through the bulb in the headlights.

Do you mean the speed of light in a vacuum, or through something transparent?
Are you reversing?
Is the power source for propulsion also used for the headlights?

[Allen Evans]

(long, uncomfortable silence)