My Coach, My Self
More people are probably aware of the prominent role coaches play in the outcome of athletic performance in the wake of Sven Kramer’s disqualification from the men’s 10,000 metre long track speed skating event. Kramer was on his way to a gold medal in world record time when his coach, Gerard Kemkers, believing his athlete had failed to switch to the proper lane, signalled for him to do so. Although he hesitated briefly, Kramer followed his coach’s instructions and was subsequently disqualified from the competition.
The word “coach” originally referred to a carriage vehicle. The use of “coach” to signify an instructor or trainer apparently comes from 1830s Oxford slang for a tutor whose job it is to help “carry” a student through an exam, and then to athletic competition as of the 1860s. We say a mother carries a child in her womb, pack mules carry burdens on their backs, we carry our hopes and dreams and other emotional baggage with us into future relationships.
“At the end of the day, it is my responsibility,” Kramer announced, regarding his performance. But the Dutch public is outraged, and is clearly putting the blame for the loss of a medal squarely on his coach’s shoulders.
On the other side of the coin, we watched Joannie Rochette courageously skate through the grief of her mother’s unexpected death of a heart attack to a bronze medal. As she sat in the kiss and cry awaiting her marks, her coach held and caressed her like the closest of friends or family members would.
I can think of many coaches I’ve had in my life. Some of them tried to change my life: I remember Mr. Crouch, for instance, who when I first left home at fifteen years of age and was going to high school fulltime and working fulltime at Pharma Plus, paid for new eyeglasses after mine were busted on the basketball court, because he knew I couldn‘t afford them. Sure, it was just a pair of eyeglasses, but I needed them for depth perception, and his gesture signalled to me that someone was paying attention to what was going on.
And then there was Miss V (I have purposefully forgotten her name), pear-shaped and mean-spirited, who at the annual athletic banquet actually got up in front of colleagues and parents and announced that no one would be receiving an MVP award for girls volleyball that year because we all had PMS and it was the worst coaching experience of her life. Of ours too. I had the hardest serve on the team—the boy’s team used to ask me to serve to them in practice as well—and I recall purposefully missing the net on several occasions so that I could hit Miss V in the back or leg or head. Our skills deteriorated over that year, our spirits defeated by her coolness and hostility.
Over the last two weeks I’ve met athletes who are married to their coaches, others who consider their coach like a piece of equipment rather than a human being—a machine that ought to be relegated immediately to the attic should a better model present itself. One person, who shall remain nameless, told me she can’t hear the Russian language without cringing, her East-European coaches terrified her so.
When elite athletes’ careers are over, many go into coaching. And many do so with very little training. I don’t mean athletic training here. I mean training in how to deal with other human beings, and how to communicate effectively to draw out the best performance in their student. It’s one of the reasons I’ve started an initiative to offer creative writing workshops to athletes (I gave one poetry workshop for athletes at the Bodyworks Symposium, and have been asked to give future workshops by various sports organizations upon my return from the games)—to help athletes express their specialized knowledge in creative and beneficial ways, to help them articulate their desires, experience, and expectations.
Workshops will not, of course, counteract our human capacity to err, and sometimes to err epically. But they might help us uncover what, exactly, we are carrying.
