Mark Hesse

Leading and learning through service

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

As coaches, your job isn’t to give athletes the answer, it’s to put them in a place to figure it out.

[Greg Berge @GregBerge]

Most parents think they’re helping their child.

Their coach sees it differently.

Here are 9 things coaches want parents to understand.

1. We care about your child.
Even when playing time is limited, nothing is personal. Every player has a role. Every role matters. Help us celebrate theirs.

2. The time commitment is real.
Only two people truly understand a coach’s schedule: the coach and their spouse. We are always on. We sacrifice family time to invest in your child. We don’t need a pat on the back. Just respect that fact.

3. We love this job.
But it is a hard job. Don’t steal our joy. Our passion. Our commitment. We are losing too many coaches.

4. We want to win more than you do.
We are competitive. We put our heart and soul into this. Strategy matters less than you think. We are at every practice. Trust what we see.

5. Everything is earned.
Don’t blame the coach. Encourage your child to do the work. The weight room. The driveway. The gym. You get what you earn.

6. Trust the process.
Team sports are the ultimate lab for life. There will be bumps. That is guaranteed. Accept it. The life lessons will last long after the final score.

7. Winning is hard.
Other teams want it too. Learning to win and lose is part of it.

8. Your child gets it.
They are at every practice. They know their role. Don’t feed their insecurities by questioning the coach. It hurts them and the team.

9. This is your child’s experience, not yours.
Let them enjoy it. Don’t judge. Don’t be critical. Just be there. Tell them you love watching them play. Be a fan of the team.

Share this with a parent who needs it.

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[Alan Couzens @Alan_Couzens]

Race results are often just a reflection of life priorities made visible.

[USA Swimming @USASwimming]

The future looks bright. 🤩

Check out the rosters for the Zone Select Camps. 👀

https://t.co/0DoJdQflPY

[Andrew Sheaff @AndrewKSheaff]

In races, there’s often a steady loss of stroke length which is accompanied by a steady loss of speed.

One of the most valuable benefits of using stroke counts is that it helps swimmers learn how to sustain their stroke length.

It’s simple.

Have swimmers perform a set and tell them whatever stroke count they start with is the stroke count they have to end with.

If they do it, they’re learning how to better sustain their stroke length.

Over time, it’s just a matter of doing the same during more and more difficult sets, as well as with lower stroke counts.

The best part is that swimmers can take accountability for their swimming, and the numbers tell the story objectively.

That feedback helps swimmers learn and adjust each and every lap.

That engagement is what drives progress.

[Louis Gleeson @aigleeson]

A 47-year-old writer walked into an aikido dojo, got humiliated by men half his age, and spent the next 40 years watching almost every ambitious person who came in quit one week before the breakthrough.

His name was George Leonard.

He was a writer and a magazine editor in his late 40s when he walked into an aikido dojo for the first time and got humiliated by men half his age. He kept going back. He earned a fifth-degree black belt.

He then spent the next 40 years on the mat watching hundreds of students walk in with enthusiasm, train hard for a few months, and then disappear forever right at the moment their bodies were about to absorb the technique they had been chasing.

In 1991 he wrote a small book trying to explain what he had seen. It was called Mastery. Tim Ferriss recommends it. Josh Waitzkin recommends it. The book has stayed in print for almost 35 years because Leonard had isolated something nobody else was naming clearly.

The lie he wanted to kill was the shape of the learning curve itself.

Almost every motivational speech, every productivity course, every self-help diagram draws progress as a steady line that goes up and to the right. You put in the work, you get the result, the line climbs. Leonard had spent four decades watching the actual shape of skill acquisition, and the actual shape looks nothing like that.

The real shape is a staircase.

You train for weeks and nothing visible happens. You feel exactly the same on day 40 as you did on day 10. Then one afternoon, with no warning, something clicks and you jump to a new level. You stay there for an hour or a day, feeling brilliant. Then the new level becomes the new normal, and you flatten out again. Another long stretch of nothing. Then another sudden jump.

The flat sections are called plateaus. They are not a bug in the learning process. They are the learning process.

The plateau is the period where your brain is quietly rewiring the neural circuits that will produce the next jump. The jump itself is just the visible moment when the rewiring finishes. Without the plateau, the jump cannot exist.

This is the part almost everybody misreads.

You feel stuck. You assume something is wrong with you. You assume the method has stopped working, or that you have hit your ceiling, or that you were never going to get there in the first place.

So you quit, or you switch methods, or you start chasing the next shiny technique, exactly at the moment when the rewiring was about to complete. The plateau looks like failure. It is actually the engine.

Leonard identified three personality types who lose this game.

The dabbler chases the high of starting something new. The first few weeks of any new skill are full of fast improvement because the easy gains come first. The dabbler rides that wave, hits the first plateau, decides the activity was not for them, and quits to go feel like a beginner somewhere else.

The obsessive cannot tolerate the plateau either. They double down. They train harder. They demand results from a process that does not run on demand. They burn out and crash, often spectacularly, and never come back.

The hacker is the most subtle. They reach a comfortable level and stop pushing. They live on a permanent plateau, never quitting and never growing.

All three are quitting the plateau in different ways. The master is the one who learns to stay on it without forcing anything. Show up. Train. Accept that today looks identical to yesterday. Accept that tomorrow will too. Trust that the staircase is still under your feet even when you cannot see the next step.

The line from the book that has been quoted for 30 years is four words long. Love the plateau. Not tolerate it. Not survive it. Love it. Because the plateau is not the place where nothing is happening. It is the only place where anything real is happening.

You are not stuck. You are exactly where the work gets done.

The people you envy are not on a different staircase. They just stopped flinching at the flat parts.

[Andrew Sheaff @AndrewKSheaff]

Developing great kickers isn’t just about doing a lot of work on a board.

While that can help, swimmers need to be able to use their legs to go fast.

If they can’t what’s the point.

Here’s a set that builds the kick and helps swimmers learn how to use it.

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@AndrewKSheaff AMEN brother
If you want your summers to get faster, build a solid distance per stroke, and then add tempo. Then provide variations on stroke, count and tempo to find their best racing combination.

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@VinnysCorner1 Dave Cowens

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@AndrewKSheaff ‘Kick in both directions’ and awareness on the back of our legs helps counteract this

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@AndrewKSheaff The up kick may not provide much propulsion however it sets up the forward propulsive kick.
Our brains mistakenly focus primarily on the ‘power’ felt unaware that the feeling is a result of us slowing down.

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@HawkEmDownChris Yes

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@AndrewKSheaff Love this! Teaching and training the range empowers the athlete to change gears in a race

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@swimswamnews You all should make temporary tats like that and pass them out to all the competitors and fans next week at the Men’s meet

[SwimSwam @swimswamnews]

No context Friday night finals:

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@VinnysCorner1 Hard to believe I can answer! Go BoSox!

[FOX College Hoops @CBBonFOX]

Repost if your team has ever been a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament 🔥

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

@kylesockwell Phelps?

[Mark Hesse @CoachHesse]

Coaches if you are interested in using race and practice data to impact team-wide development and performance (and you should be!), check out this awesome free learning opportunity next week!

https://t.co/DoRylYvQ4A