Thursday, December 4, 2008

LTAD and its Impact

Last Saturday I spoke to the water polo community about the LTAD (Long Term Athlete Development) model that has been adopted by sport across Canada. This is a nice package that has charts and tables to give a broad audience a taste of what it covers. It also includes a complete package of data for coaches that helps pinpoint developmental stages of athletes and appropriate activities for those stages. It's great to have that all in one place and available for sport to use as a guide.

This is important to me as a coach because I have been a lone voice in Manitoba for many years, pushing for a distinction between participation based sport (Active for Life) and competitive sport. I have also been incorporating cross sport training for a long, long time. In fact, in the 1980's when Bushido was first starting, we once had a program called the "Summit Series" that had 3 levels of aquatic skills that came from Synchro, Water Polo and Speed Swimming. This was taught in camp settings with coaches from all 3 sports and developed aquatic physical literacy. Then, in the 90's I delivered a land based strength and flexibility program that combined Pilates and Yoga with various body weight exercises. People thought I was a bit nuts. I also used to drill into players minds that doing multiple sports at once had to be coordinated, missing one to attend another was not complimentary but harmful. Now I just smile when I read that multi sport activities should be coordinated by sports and land work for water sports is required.

But, that is not what I wanted to touch on. The LTAD is important to Manitoba Water Polo because it shows them what I was talking about the past 3 years as I have fought against having pool time taken away that I fought very hard for. This training time was awarded to water polo through my efforts for High Performance sport and it was being taken away from me by Manitoba Water Polo for "Active for Life" sport. Nobody understood why I said that the other club, practicing 2-3x week was not High Performance. Now we have a document that illustrates that very clearly and can be used to help distinguish what HP is and who has programs at that level. This 3rd party document will help take the political decision away from a provincial organization that is polarized by 2 clubs with different vision and program goals.

Maybe I am naive to think that a national sport change should be accepted by the province or that the MWPA board would see it as valuable to overlay the LTAD program variables on our clubs to see who fits where and what role they should have in our future. We'll see.

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