Water Polo Canada Leadership Summit

This past weekend I was in Montreal to attend the 2009 Leadership Summit put on by Water Polo Canada. I was pleasantly surprised. There were interesting presentations by both national head coaches, Dragan and Pat and a very appropriate strength session by Alain Delorme. These sessions were very different but offered direction and purpose in their domain. I will write about some of the things we discussed over the weekend in this blog.

The place I will start is with Dragan and his primary message to coaches, "think about what you are asking athletes to do and how it is connected to the game they will play". That is not a quote, it was an underlying theme in each presentation he was leading. The reason I start with this area is because Dragan was asking coaches to change practice structure, alter what they had been taught, use new research to guide drills. That is EXACTLY what Mike Reid and I have been saying and doing (and writing about) for well over a decade so I loved to hear that come from the top of the coaching food-chain.

Of course, most coaches probably think they design practices like that but that is just not true. For example, at the Leadership Summit there were still coaches talking about doing an "aerobic base" at the beginning of a season, as if that were sound physiological practice. Dragan acknowledged that he does not do "aerobic training" on it's own ie swim-sets, only as part of games and drills. The "base" for water polo is not aerobic as that would imply that the energy system used in a game is primarily aerobic. It is NOT! I have had this discussion with athletes so many times over the years it was nice to have somebody else standing in front of people taking the blank stares when that information was presented. The primary focus of all training must be anaerobic endurance and if done properly that will also improve aerobic capacity. But, Mike Reid writes about this on the Water Polo Planet website and his Water Polo Strength blog so I won't dwell on it here.

Another thing Dragan talked about was the type of swimming being done ie head up vs head down. He stressed the role of head up swimming in the training centre workouts and how he is changing how the young men there are swimming on a daily basis. This was great to hear as club coaches need to send players to the National Team with the skills they will use when they arrive. There is one caution I wish he had given coaches though and will mention it here as it is a vital piece of the LTAD framework we have embraced.

Not all players can be developed as the men at the National Team level are. Skills must be taught in clubs but there is not too much complex tactical information given to youth. Rather, in clubs we focus on developing physical literacy in athletes as they grow. That means some age groups will do aerobic drills because that is what their developmental physiology is able to accept. We also need to develop many swim strokes, even if they are not used in a game the way head up front crawl is. So, while we emphasize swimming head up we also teach efficient movement with breaststroke, head down free, butterfly etc. These are the building blocks of physical literacy and help with muscular balance and flexibility by not developing a body that is too specialized too early.

I will watch with interest this season as some coaches try to follow the challenge that Dragan presented. Some will nail it, others will stumble.

Frank Dialogue

Someone observed today that my blog lately has been quite blunt. There is a frank dialogue that openly states differences in the Manitoba clubs in a way that is usually danced around carefully. They wanted to know why.

Well, it is pretty simple really. We have tried long enough to get clubs to work together on common goals and it is not going to happen (for reasons I touched on yesterday). I have also tried to work with the MWPA on this, hosted an open meeting with the community to talk about how LTAD was going to impact us. It didn't make any difference, we still have one club that does not have an identity, won't embrace it's strengths and won't move out of the way of progress.

That last point is why I am being a bit more open in the recent comments about working in partnership. I am hoping that enough people have now seen that there is no partnership in long term development; we are on our own to go down this path. That is a big, big point to make as it means decisions have to start being directed at what we need, not how do we find a common program with someone else. And, importantly, when someone else is obstructing our efforts with chaos or nonsense we need to be quite blunt and say "get out of the way".

I have known for quite awhile this point had been reached but the LTAD is helping others see it much more quickly. Now parents can put their 10 year old in water polo in the fall and see by the spring how our programs go in a specific direction and that we are alone in Manitoba. They can see why I am trying to be in an Atom and Bantam league with 3 Saskatchewan clubs and why we have monthly games with 16&U and 18&U Team Sask squads. Next year when I am trying to get our satellite pools going they will see that we should not wait to see if the Neptunes want to play along or be part of the growth. Everyone will know we have to do it ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. We just have to start talking about our sport and it's programs in the right context. We have to see that if we are not following the Water Polo Canada LTAD much more closely as an organization that we will be lost forever. If the rest of Canada is running local leagues for 12&U and 14&U teams and having hundreds of kids playing in tiers, and the top ones practicing 6x week, we are behind already. In 1 short generation, no more than 4 years, the 14&U playing level will be where many 18&U Canadian clubs are now. The problem is that this level will only be in BC, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. That will fit the short term plans of Dragan and Pat, both want more hours spent on standard skill at a younger age, but it won't help any of the clubs outside 6 or 7 of our biggest cities.

That is our challenge now, figure out what we want and set local programs toward those goals.