Tapping the Power of Peers

PHOTO BY ED MORAN

Coaches of all sports can get too sequestered, too siloed in their own little fiefdoms. This is even easier for rowing coaches, who spend most of their time in far-flung boathouses, often without offices on the main campuses of their colleges or high schools. Nevertheless, there is knowledge, inspiration, and valuable perspective all around us, if only we take the time to look.

All coaches have far more in common than the outward differences of our sports might suggest. Whether your athletes are kicking a ball, swinging a bat, running a track, or rowing a boat, coaches all have many of the same joys and challenges. They must recruit, enforce team culture, choose captains, and build trust. As a college coach, I was surrounded by dozens of other coaching experts up and down the hallways of my athletic department and tried, with varying degrees of success, to mine that knowledge.

At Boston University, where I served as head coach for the openweight women for six years, nearly the entire athletic department shared one floor. That meant on every walk to the coffee maker or to pick up some pages from the printer, I was passing decades of coaching experience, and those coaches were more often than not happy to spend some time chatting about the latest topic of celebration or concern on my team. Though I regret not taking more advantage of that opportunity, I was very lucky to have made some valuable friendships, finding peers with whom I could commiserate and bounce around ideas, some of which I readily stole. Some of the best ideas for team activities, official visits, and even training, came directly from things other coaches at BU had tried already.

When I was trying to figure out how to maximize our interval training on Summit Avenue, a hill near campus infamous among Boston runners, I turned to Gabe Sanders, our director of cross-country and track & field. He was far more knowledgeable about running training than me, obviously, and his runners had been using that hill far more frequently, and effectively, than us.

After he called my current approach to the hill somehow both masochistic and ineffective, we developed a semester-long plan for building volume and intensity on the beast, and I left the conversation feeling much more confident that the work we were putting in would pay off on the water. And it did. Later that year, the team went on to win the conference championship. Was it because of Summit Avenue and the input from Coach Sanders? That certainly helped.

Once we get into the heart of spring training and racing, it can feel like a distraction or an unproductive use of time to have these conversations. (I’d argue it never really is!) Regardless, winter is the perfect time to knock on a colleague’s door or invite yourself to another coach’s practice. There’s so much to be gained by stepping off the launch or out of the erg room and into a different sport’s world and into another coach’s area of expertise. Get out of the bubble and you’ll see there’s so much out there to learn.

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