I have been
swimming for most of my life starting from the age of five until now. I have
always enjoyed the competitive nature of the sport and the idea that what you
put into it is what you get out. When I was in high school is when I started to
participate more in the competitions and going to state meets and even making
it as far as nationals. Before I came to high school the swimming team there
was never more than average and never amounted to much. But my freshman year in
high school we got a new coach, who has actually been my swimming coach fro the
past 5 years prior to me coming to the high school and with him we started a
team from scratch. Most of my teammates were actually people that I have been
swimming with since I was seven years old so we all knew each other pretty well
and the coach knew exactly everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. Going off of
this we were also able to retain some of the old swimmers from years past that
had potential and recruit new people that were willing to put in the work.
It was
quite a transition period for our swimming team and mediocrity was not accepted
anymore. The coach had twenty years of experience and he led the team with an
iron fist. This idea of hierarchy quickly resonated throughout the team and if
you didn’t listen to the coach then you would either not participate in the
meets or you would be cut from the team. The coach was at the top of the hierarchy
and the people that have been swimming with the coach for years prior to that
were the higher-ups. We knew the system and we knew what it took to be
successful. The coach quickly implemented practice schedules which would happen
twice a day; once in the morning from five AM to seven fifty AM and the other
would be from three thirty PM until six PM. These intense practices were new to
me too and many people dropped the team during the first week. Many stayed
though because the coach also brought in four assistant coaches who would take
the time to focus on each swimmer individually in order to either develop their
stroke or to give them specific workouts in order for them to catch up to the
best swimmer on the team.
Our coach
wanted us to become more ‘selfish’ in order to increase the productivity and
the motivation for everyone to be successful on the team. This however didn’t
mean no teamwork between the teammates but by us being selfish and wanting to
win meant that practices would be taken more seriously and a good practice
would be rewarded greatly. The coach from day one made it clear that in order
to survive on the team we must fight for it and nothing will be given for
granted. To this day I still consider this basic principle in my day to day
life and like the article When a Child
Thinks Life Is Unfair everyone expects to live a fair life but that is not
possible in day to day so we must acknowledge that and use the given strategies
in order to make everything more fair. One strategy that we used on our team
was the auction where everyone got the choice to choose what event they wanted
to swim at least once. Our coach knew what events everyone should be swimming
in because of the strengths he believed everyone had but regardless of that he
wanted everyone to get to choose an event that they believed they would do good
and if you would prove him wrong then you would get a chance to stick with that
event for the remainder of the season. Some of the events included different
styles of swimming and different lengths that one would swim for.
All in all,
the way my coach tended to the team included strict rules and strict practices
where you had to give it your all in order to still be on the team. He gave us
choices throughout the year and provided the right motivation and staff in
order for us to excel. Some of the lessons such as being more selfish when it
comes to your results are still things I use to this day.
Reading this, I wonder if you felt that you were writing to the prompt or not. You did make brief mention of the piece When a Child Thinks Life Is Unfair but you moved from it rather quickly. My take aways from your post are your beliefs that (1) an effective team requires very strong leadership from the top and (2) people must be selfish (which I took to mean they must really value their own excellence). If those take aways are what you intended, then the question is whether those points can be tied into our class themes and, if so, how might that be done?
ReplyDeleteLet's take on the strong leadership part first. You talked about the rigorous practice schedule that was installed by the coach and that some students quit the team, but those who stayed got individual attention. I wonder whether you continued to talk with any of the students who quit and if they felt the approach was fair. The part that is unclear is whether student commitment to the team might be built up gradually over time or if, instead, it is either there or not. This coach's methods seem based on the latter view. So he might have said of the students who quit, good riddance.
I'd like to note some parallel issue with our course and indeed with other courses on campus. I could raise the bar on how much work is required (or even simply enforce the late submission deadline). How would you feel if I did that? In both cases this gets to the purpose (of the team or of the course).
The other issue is the "selfishness" of the swimmers. I wonder if that is a life lesson for those students who stuck it out on the team. Excellence requires strong personal commitment. Do you show such selfishness in other areas of your life as a consequence of being on the swimming team? I will say here that I strongly believe learners must be self-directed but with that there are still social obligations to be maintained. As I said at the outset, your attempt to tie into the prompt was pretty weak. I can't say whether that's a consequence of selfishness, as you've used the term, or because who didn't invest sufficiently in writing this post.
You might think that one through. It could help you to understand more about what is going on with this topic.
Before going into technicalities of your post, I'll talk about your example. I feel like I was able to relate to your post in a way because in high school I ran track and field. While the sports are different, they are similar in the way that it has many events, individual and relays, and it was very much up to the coach's discretion on what everyone would be competing in. I had a coach that also wanted everyone to have the ability to participate, but he also had to weigh that with the fact that we wanted to win and be a competitive team.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I never experienced during my sport, however, was to be selfish. My coach took the coaching strategy of teamwork because he believed that we were more likely to give up on ourselves than give up on our teams. For me, that coaching style really worked. I personally would be able to get over having a bad race, but thinking about my team I knew I couldn't give up and had to get a good place in the race to make sure that I wasn't hindering my team. Maybe there's a difference in the way males and females should be coached, or just team culture overall, which would explain your coach's style and how it was effective to you.
Now at first, I couldn't really see how you were going to connect this post back to the articles, but I think I see where you went with it. I think you tried to talk about how your coach wanted to make sure that the team was kept "fair" even in a world where fairness isn't guaranteed. I think that the way that you juxtaposed this fairness with the "selfishness" your coach also introduced in the same paragraph was interesting.
I took a pretty different approach in responding to this prompt, but I find your connections interesting. You talked about how your coach wanted you to be more selfish for yourself and your excellence, which you connected to the last article. I know the author mentioned at the end of the article that we need to change our system and flip it around so that institutions are less selfish. I believe he said this because as humans we have natural tendencies to do good, like share and be fair, but the way corporate systems are set up make us strive to be selfish. I think that the authors overall message was to say that we should be striving to change our systems to be less selfish, and not to be more selfish like your coach pushed.
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