Barry Alldrick shares some recent coaching reflections and experiences

Barry Alldrick, head of swimming at Poole Swimming Club, recently took the opportunity to discuss and reflect on his coaching with his colleagues.

This process prompted him to type out those reflections so that he could firstly, clarify his thoughts and secondly, share them with other coaches.

Barry has been head coach at Poole since 2014 and is a previous winner of the Swim England Coach of the Year Award. Here, he has shared some recent reflections and learnings.

My first thought after the sessions was that I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion and found the whole process stimulating for me personally and professionally. This left me thinking how I can prioritise discussions like these more often.

For any diving, artistic swimming or water polo coaches reading this, I appreciate the content may be different to your sport, but there may be some ideas in the process that you can relate to.

The session

The session I delivered had four objectives with the main session priority (P) being the technical practicing of turns under simulated race pressure. The four objectives were:

Physical – race paced efforts.

Technical (P) – turn technique and effectiveness under simulated race pressure.

Tactical – pacing control through the set.

Social – athletes to observe and feedback to each other.

Session design

The session design involved athletes coaching each other in groups of three.

Athlete one would swim 3/4 race distance, the second athlete would observe the (turn) intentions of the swimming athlete, whilst the third would time turns (feet on wall to head passing 15m, for freestyle and backstroke, or hands at wall for breaststroke or butterfly) as a metric to help the athletes work out which technical aspects were working best for them.

Swimmers could perform up to four repeats, depending on what quality they could give and what events they were racing.

Reflections with Jan Hutchings

Our main reflections immediately post-session were:

• Initially, the session caused some confusion and it took some time for us to explain and the athletes to understand what was being asked. We didn’t expect or prepare for this.
• Once in the swing of things, most athletes thrived from the discussion and problem solving approach rather than being told what to do. This resulted in a high level of engagement and an improved awareness the technical aspects of the turn.
• Some athletes were better at giving feedback than others and we needed to intervene a number of times to coach the athletes how to give feedback effectively.
• With the swimmers engaged in their learning, we had more time to coach rather than taking times and running the session.

Reflections with John Smith

Following the session, we revisited Bob Muir’s Coaching Practice and Reflection Framework (CPPRF) to aid our discussion. First and foremost, this helped me clarify and deepen my own intensions and reasons for the session.

Admittedly, my original session plan didn’t look like the above and perhaps unsurprisingly, I had only written a physical goal – despite verbalising a technical goal! I needed to further reflect on why this was the case but I suspect habit and the traditions of the sport has something to do with it.

The CPPRF didn’t give me the answers but through the discussions, I was able to achieve the specific purposeful and holistic outcomes you see above.

Our second reflection led me to question how much we (the coaching team) are driving the programme compared to the athletes driving their own routes to success and owning the process.

There was some very good knowledge shared by the athletes in the training session, so why wouldn’t we want to use this insight to shape future training sessions?

My third reflection and discussion was a bit broader and around the importance of social science in coaching and not relying completely on sports science. What I mean by this is honing our interactions and ability to observe, listen and discuss with our athletes. To be curious around how athletes are responding mentally and socially to the coaching experience.

Sure times, heart rates, lactic measurements, HRV measurements are useful – but so is building integrity, honesty and trust. These are not add ons if we have time, they are fundamental to coaching.