Back To Current Topics"Revised" Long Range Plan Part 2
Here is a quote from page vi. "Education requirements should be implemented in a way that avoids pushing coaches out of the sport". Further it says the requirements are intended to serve as a help not a hindrance….. especially to grass roots coaches. That seems to apply to me for I am a grass roots coach and have been one way down here for a lot of years. US Diving says I can't coach divers anymore because I refuse to be educated (indoctrinated) by them.
Page 3 "US Diving should establish a 10 step ladder for coaches". There is this committee (theirs) giving them this recommendation. It's not the whole committee; it's that handful of people who's names we always see everywhere in US Diving. Why do we need 10 levels of coaching? Why not 25 or just 1? Under the system being proposed, I could be classified as a level V and VIII since over the years I have had kids qualify to those meets. Today I classify myself as a level IV because that's as far as some of my recent divers have gone.
I am a very basic grass root that has been driven out of the sport by the implementation of their idea of education
(See "Education versus Certification") . I am like most grass roots coaches. I do it part time during the summers and have been doing that before US Diving ever existed. I find my own pool, beg for pool time and equipment upgrades and then try to recruit kids from the community to dive in my program. I have done all of this with absolutely no help from US Diving for years. When I urge my kids to join US Diving to be in meets then my problems begin. I have to be educated to coach the kids I just recruited for US Diving. To do this is going to take longer than the summer season I planned to coach. They are happy to educate me by taking my money and my kids' money. All of this cuts into my cost of doing business. If I want a life, a wife and raise a family, where do they fit in? If all of that is not a hindrance, then I don't know what is. It is not an opportunity as they keep saying, it has gotten to be a gauntlet.This part of the LRP is a glorification of the "Chinese Way"! Why does there have to be a Leveling of coaches? What was wrong with the system before this idea came up? If you look at the proposal, there are already penalties for not meeting the requirements in a certain amount of time and the proposal hasn't even been established yet.
Why did the LRP drop the JO focus in the proposal? To me the excuse that it wasn't broken was a joke. The reason was that the JO coaches raised holy hell and forced them to back off. Plus the fact that the JO section is not as high a priority as the Senior level and beyond. Looking up the ladder, if the proposals go through, the LRP will effectively kill diving as we have known it. This is not a plan for Competitive Excellence, it is a plan to gain control of the best divers. All the glory and perks would go to someone else. If that were your diver, how would you feel? Further more, they are telling all of us that we are the reason the US can not win a Gold Medal in the Olympics. A committee (theirs again) has identified that as a problem. If they want to place blame, then they should look in a mirror. They are handicapping all of us with all of these requirements. I was never allowed to coach an Olympian. How can it be my fault that we are not winning medals? The way the LRP is set up, they don't want me (or you) to ever coach an Olympian.
I applaud the Olympic coaches and divers for not succumbing to the Technical Director's wishes. I do wish them every success. Now that they have broken away from the status quo, maybe it's time for the rest of us follow their lead at the convention.
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