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Mother Goose and Swimming

    Coach Bill Dorenkott of Penn State Men’s and Women’s Swimming has a great line he uses….its from Mother Goose and her famous Rhymes.

  “Good, Better, Best. Never Rest Till Good Is Better And Better Is Best.”

    Think of that as a perfect metaphor for swimming and coaching. Ideally, coaching is a continual search for ways to improve on good to better, to best.

Critically important, of course, as Peter Daland has often reminded us in various clinic talks, is to educate our athletes in such a way that we become less and less critical to their success, as they mature and make this Mother Goose maxim their own…..they internalize the message and we, as coaches, gradually become less prominent in their swimming careers, and they themselves are the quest….striving to make good better, and better, the best.

     The coach eventually becomes simply an advisor….a counselor…a reminder of certain key information….an informed observer.

      This advice of course is one of the things that makes our sport so irresistible…..the endless layers of complexity and mastery that are there for our exploration and exploitation.

      A thought that should be remembered in tandem with Mother Goose, however, is that the strongest enemy of Great, is Good.

       When we (our individual selves, our team, our sporting nation) are “GOOD”, then we tend to stop experimenting for fear of losing our “good” status. We tend to stop taking chances, to protect our station in the sport.

We tend to stop surging relentlessly forward with new ideas, because we fear that we will “make a mistake”. In contrast its easy for those at the bottom on the heap to make a “transitional leap”…..they have nothing to lose. 

       Africa, with arguably the worst land telephone service in the world, is the most advanced continent of all when it comes to wireless cell phones. They had no inertia to overcome…their own phone system did not work. So when the “new idea” of telephone communications came along, they were perfectly positioned to take advantage of it. And they did. So Africans with not enough food to eat….still have cell phones. Communications were awful, so it was relatively easy to move them to “great”.

    So it is with swimming and all of sport. Sporting nations have a hard time changing when they are “good”. When they hit “rock bottom” then its easy to change…”nowhere to go but up”.

    The challenge to the “good” individual, team or nation, is to change “on the fly” to take advantage of opportunities to be Great.

    We get one of those opportunities in 2003, when those at the USA-S Convention will get to vote for the changes recommended in the governance study, that will make us more nimble, more accountable, better educated, and better prepared to reach for America’s swimming potential.

    Lets not let “being good” get in the way of being Great.

    Mother Goose has it right.

                 John Leonard