After only a few short days visiting Carmel Swim Club, I headed over to Louisville, KY, to check another perennial USA-Swimming Gold Medal program, the Lakeside SeaHawks. While setting up this visit, I was always impressed and surprised by how quickly Head Coach Mike DeBoor replied to my e-mails. After seeing how the program runs and how many deck hours he puts in every day, I wonder if his day simply has 30 hours!
Mike is the first Head Coach of a large team I’ve seen that goes straight for their top Senior group, to coaching their 11-12 program, and is on deck close to whenever any one of their groups is running. As I mentioned, that means he’s got quite a few hours on deck, but also means he gets to know the kids in his program way before they reach the upper groups. In fact, it seemed he somehow knew all 400+ kids in the program!
Lakeside has a few very interesting things on its set-up. From Fall through Spring they train out of the Mary T. Meagher Aquatic Center, an 11-lane 50m city-owned facility. During the winter, it is set it up as 25-meters on one end and 25-yards on the other. I’ve had quite a few discussions with a few coaches about the advantages of training yards over meters and vice-versa, and here they get the best of both worlds! They take advantage of that set-up and have all their groups rotate from one end to the other, meaning through the week they all get the longer distance to swim between walls, and the extra speed and turn work that usually comes with the shorter pool.
In all workouts I observed, groups had a relatively short swim, and then a skill session as part of their warm-ups – often starts when they were on the deeper end (which is the only one with starting blocks) and turns on the shallower side. There was also usually some form of stroke work every day, done in repetitions with tons of feedback. Talking about feedback, I was impressed with how good coaches were about providing it, mostly thanks to how engaged they all were with each of their practices (and all coaches on staff work with more than one group).
They’ve also invested in technology to make communication with swimmers a little easier: they own over 30 headsets of MySwimEars. I had never seen those in use, and was unsure about them, but after this stop I’m sold. Those were particularly great when used by the younger kids (“sure Jimmy, you can keep bobbing up and down and you’ll still be hearing me“), but really awesome in so many different cases: coaches calling splits during longer swims, immediate feedback during sets without having to wait for the next break, etc. And just as important: coaches keep their voices (and swimmers don’t feel like they are getting yelled at when the coach is just yelling because he/she has to).
While this was another short stop on my journey, I once again was amazed by how much I could learn in just a few days. That was thanks to both how well set-up they are, and how open and welcoming they were to having me stop by. In fact, Mike went as far as sharing all his workouts up to this point in the season!
At the end of my stop, I was also able to interview one of their full time coaches, Tony Carroll. It was another great chat, in which he emphasized the impact working at Lakeside and with Mike DeBoor has had in his career so far. He also helped offer a more in-depth look at what makes their program so good at consistently developing talent, and shared a few great personal stories. I know I keep teasing the podcast (which really should starting coming out in November), but this is another one I’m looking forward to sharing!
0 Comments