Neil Harvey · Swim Coach
One of the initial inspirations for The High Performance Sport Guild, Neil was the first person I interviewed, way back in 2016. At the time of our chat, he had just finished up as the swimming coach for the triathlon programme at the Hong Kong Sports Institute, and was making arrangements to retire back to Canada. Neil embodies the wise master craftsman; his ideas and observations are always insightful and well-considered and he is incredibly generous with his time. It was an absolute honour to have Neil Harvey as the foremost contributor to The High Performance Sport Guild.
You have officially been retired for 4 months from a coaching career spanning 40 years; have you had much time or inclination for reflection?
I love coaching, and it doesn’t really matter what, but my passion is pool coaching – 4 strokes, distance and sprint. That’s what I really do. I started coaching only triathlon in 2011, so I’ve been out of pool coaching almost five years now. So it’s a slightly different reflection, if you will, now that I’ve stopped doing anything. I really miss pool coaching a lot. Triathlon is a different beast for me, given my skill set and the skill set of a swim coach at the international level. Frankly, triathlon - it’s distance freestyle, with some speed work. So I’ve been missing pool coaching for five years and reflecting on it. Would I want to go back to it – yes.
The second part of the answer to that question is that I haven’t taken the time to reflect. So this is tweaking those parts of my brain that actually say, “Maybe I need to do a little bit of reflection here…” And so the short answer is: I miss it.
But I get the feeling that it’s not over forever – you could still go back to pool coaching, even if it’s not necessarily at the highest level?
Yep. One of my ideas for wherever we end up is to do some open-water coaching. I really enjoy that too, whether it’s for triathlon or ironman or 10,000 metre open-water racing. I so much enjoyed the people; you’re dealing with a human, right? And it’s fascinating, and every day is interesting, whether they’re having trouble, or the workout’s not going the way you want it to – or it is, or you get that “a-ha” moment, or that “wow, they’ve just got it,” or they achieved. I love that. I get pretty excited about success and climbing another rung of the ladder that you have in your head. You’ve got that vision of where you want to go with that athlete or that group. Every time there’s another step up – I love that feeling. When the athlete touches the wall, looks at the clock, turns around and makes eye-contact with you and they’re like, “Yes!” I remember thousands of those moments and that’s a high that people who don’t coach… Well, they’ll get it some other way. Sport is just a context for how high we climb the mountain. It’s productive only in the human development aspect of it – winning an Olympic gold medal doesn’t produce anything. I mean, I’m not being cynical, I’m just saying, then, there’s the other intrinsics of it: those moments, they’re fantastic. That’s my payback. So, I’m missing that.
I don’t miss getting up really early in the morning, which is what swimming coaches do. It’s not hard for me to set the alarm for 4:30am, but I don’t miss that. I enjoy sleeping in until 9 o’clock, having a leisurely coffee and reading the news - on the upside of being retired – and then not having an agenda on the day.
Is there any glaringly obvious thing that you would change? Or do you have any regrets?
I don’t like to live life with regrets – should I have gone this way or that way or made a different choice in my coaching career? I did stick to high school/university age – 14-25 years olds – for most of my career. Postgrad swimming has just occurred in the last two Olympic cycles, really – coaching 30-year-olds, 28-year-olds. I would have liked to try that, because coaching an adult athlete is a different kettle of fish than coaching a 14-year-old. You have to have a completely different approach. I started my coaching career at university age level, and I really, really enjoyed engaging because they’re smart kids and they throw stuff back at you, and then you’ve got to really, really think and it’s really an enjoyable thing. And I coached 14–18-year-olds for a long, long time.
I think that the one regret, and it’s not really a regret, is that I needed to have gotten to know myself better, earlier. Really gotten to know myself. Because I’m opinionated… not a hot-head, but I call a spade a spade, and there was times in my career when that wasn’t the right thing to do. And, so I caused some splits and I had to leave the job, or things like that. If I had known myself better inside the context of what I was doing, if I could go back, and not change that particular moment, but just take the time to really get to know myself. And how do you do that in the middle of a hectic busy schedule, and everything’s flying everywhere and you’re getting ready for championships and da-da-da? What you need to do is go on a 3-week hike or something, or kayaking around a big island, you know… go and get away, either by yourself or with somebody who’s on a similar wavelength. But I never had that opportunity and I think that would have been really useful… even though it’s not working – it’s self-reflection. So, if I could have inserted one of those every two years or something, a 3-week getaway, and time to just really get to know myself – what are my real questions and what are the aspects that aren’t so productive? And I would recommend young coaches to do that, and not just to go and drink beer and party and not think about things, but to go and do kayaking or hiking, outside, away from the concrete, and the pool, and the chlorine. Swimming coaching – you know the drill – [there’s] the national champs… and then you’ve got athletes going to the international games or an event that they’re selecting from, then [there’s] that, and if it’s an Olympics… and then you come back and you’ve got club admin and emails and it just never stops and so you just keep walking, right? It’s like your head’s inside the box of what you’re doing and it takes a particular decision to step back outside the box and walk around it or walk the other way for a bit and come back. Manufacturing a space, a quiet space for yourself, is difficult, and I never did it, but I think that’s the one thing I would do. It would have made me, I think, a better coach.
“It’s like your head’s inside the box of what you’re doing and it takes a particular decision to step back outside the box and walk around it or walk the other way for a bit and come back. Manufacturing a space, a quiet space for yourself, is difficult...”
This is not intended to be a website that necessarily seeks to be supported by scientific literature, however there is a whole academic area that addresses high performance coaching. Cliff Mallet, an authority in the area and an Olympic coach himself, described high performance coaching as "a complex, social, and dynamic activity that is not easily represented as a set of tangible and predictable processes... And might be considered within a broader set of relations: the interdependence between a) the coaching tasks undertaken by coaches, b) coaches' relations with other people (e.g., athletes, other coaches, parents), and c) the coaching situation and context in which they operate." It's "fluid" and highly “idiosyncratic", and coaches must "attempt to control as many variables as possible" yet "still... be responsive to a dynamic environment in which there is, at times, limited control" (Mallet, 2008). Cushion and his colleagues (2003) called it "structured improvisation". What is high performance coaching to you?
I can’t remember where I read it, but I read it early in my career, when you start out anything – and coaching is the anything – there’s so much going on all at the same time and you haven’t got a grasp of it and it’s just bewildering, with all of that interpersonal stuff – “should I be working harder?” And so the first half of your career, things get more and more complex and there’s more and more detail that you’ve got to pay attention to: strength training, psychology, budget and it goes out. And the second half of your career, if you’re good and you can synthesise your experience into all of that, then it starts to simplify. And then as you reach the peak of your career, all of that complexity – it’s intuition, it’s inside you. But it takes a long time to get a grasp of all of that stuff, and then you turn the corner, whether it’s a failure or a success or a succession of things that happen to you, and then all of a sudden you go, “Ah! Okay!” And its starts to become simpler and simpler and simpler.
I do like “structured improvisation” – not all coaches coach like that. Some coaches need to have all tiny little details all written down. My style is structured improvisation, because I’m on the second half of my career, I’ve been coaching for 40 years. But also, the best coaches – and what I try to do – you get to know your athletes really, really well. You get to know their emotional ranges, what pisses them off, what makes them happy, you don’t pander to that, but you need to take the time to get to know. It’s not just “do as I say, shut up and work”. I don’t think you get the highest performance when it’s done like that. The first 8 years of my career were at university level and so you’ve got really smart people in front of you and they’re happy to engage. That’s what I learned at the beginning of my career is that I need to know who this person is. You don’t take them out to dinner all the time, but you just watch their reaction, and you listen. You treat them as a real live human being, not just a little worker bee in front of you. You’re not trying to wholly control everything; you’re trying to teach the athlete to do that. You’re trying to give them the tools to be able to control the things that they have some control over and leave the other stuff around. If the coach needs to control everything every day, I don’t think that’s where you get the highest levels of performance.
Going back to the first 8 years of my career: university. And in year 1, they’re freshman, they’re away from home for the first time and they haven’t got a clue, whether it’s books, exams, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, so I exercised a high degree of control. Then in second year, you see how they managed first year and then you adjust a little bit and back off. Then you start the process of giving them the tools to control their brain and their image. And then in third year it progresses, and then by the fourth year, it’s almost like it’s a collaboration. It’s not really me saying, “All right, you’re going to race 400 IM [individual medley] and 200 [butter]Fly this year.” It’s more like, “You’ve had 3 years, what do you think you want to do next year? And how do you think you want to do it? Is there anything you want to change?” In other words, it becomes a back and a forth, and I thoroughly enjoyed that. When you’re coaching 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds, it doesn’t operate on exactly that, ‘cause they’re confused, they’re in adolescence and so they’re not really sure what they’re doing. But you still try to give them understanding and give them the control. That said, I think all coaches are control freaks!
Then, the golden question, how would you describe your coaching philosophy?
I used to say that I’m in the ‘people development’ business, rather than the ‘swimming faster’ business. Because if you develop the person, and they’re confident, and they’re aware, and they have the tools to control things in the environment – whatever it is, whether it’s the Olympics or the training session or whatever, you’re going to have a better athlete. To corroborate that, I’ve read a lot of books by John Wooden [the late American basketball coach] and that’s the core of his coaching philosophy, and I, where possible, try to adopt that. Again, look at who is this person sitting in front of you or swimming in front of you, not just that they went faster today. So it’s a real humanist approach to sport. Sport is just a context, it’s... this person is under stress, their parents are giving them grief or not, or girlfriend/boyfriend, there’s a whole. And so you can’t control that on race day, but what you can do is prepare them and understand them, and there’s a trust that comes. Once they can trust you, then you can take the whole game a lot further. In a short couple of paragraphs, my philosophy is a humanist approach, to get to know them, teach them how to manage, because if they’ve never been to the Olympics before, they have got no clue, so you’ve got to help them get there, you can’t just throw them into the wolves and hope that it all works out. You guide them. That’s why I like the word ‘guild’, because I believe that you can’t get a PhD in coaching, it’s like the old guilds, going back 500-1000 years, how people learned the trade, right, to be a carpenter, or a stone mason, or whatever it was. You went and stood behind the master and he would say, “Hand me this tool or hand me that tool.” And gradually you would get to work on the stone, and gradually you would get to decide what the design’s going to be, but after a period of 5-10-15 years. And then the master finally will say, “Get outta here, you’re good. You’re ready to go. I can’t teach you anymore.” You need to go to a coach who’s had more success than you, more consistently, and go and watch and ask and just get a feel for what they’re doing and then go to another one and then go to another one and that’s what you need to do. Part of that’s reflected in coaches who worked with the triathlon programme; every minute they were on the deck with me, I was trying to teach them stuff. And not by saying, “Look what I’m doing,” and, “Do it my way.” But just open up a conversation with them. But in the back of my mind, I’m trying to teach them all of the things and simplify them… Or, sometimes it’s complex and I use the whiteboard and I’ve got diagrams on there. So that’s what I mean by ‘they’re my apprentices’, even though they didn’t ask to be so, because that’s part of my coaching philosophy – my job is to, in doing the job, in coaching, I don’t want to just write 10 x 100m on 2 minutes on the board and have them go ,“Oh wow, 10 x 100m must be the right answer.” I want them to ask, “What did we do yesterday? What did we do last week? What’s coming up next week? Why?”
The next thing is you can’t stop learning. You can’t believe that you’ve got it all figured out, because the next crop of athletes is a completely new batch and there might be something new. I read all the time. You can’t think that just because you’re the master or you’ve mastered your craft, that you can stop paying attention to new things or integrating, or attempting to integrate new, or what appear to be good ideas, into your approach; or stop visiting other coaches; or even disregarding the opinion of somebody who’s just starting out, because “what would they know” – an ego-arrogance that stops you from learning new things.
“You can’t believe that you’ve got it all figured out, because the next crop of athletes is a completely new batch and there might be something new... You can’t think that just because you’re the master or you’ve mastered your craft, that you can stop paying attention to new things... or stop visiting other coaches; or even disregarding the opinion of somebody who’s just starting out...”
Are there parallels to your personal philosophies or the way you live your life?
There certainly are parallels. I don’t think you can escape yourself. Just because you’re now in the context of a competitive high performance sport doesn't mean you’re not who you are. Your personal philosophies will be reflected in your behaviours as a coach.
I’m probably overly self-critical… but trying to figure myself out has helped me be a better coach. Really. Because then I see some little aspect and I’m like, “Oh yeah, I know what’s going on there.” Because I’ve thought about it and I see it in an athlete and I know what to do or I know how to approach it. I think way back to the beginning of the interview, I said you need to get to know yourself in order to be the best coach you can be. You can’t just read a book, read a textbook and then have success, and then assume that you’re going to be a great coach.
Things that I don’t like in the world, not in my job or in sport [but rather, in general]? I don’t like people who are overtly egotistical. It really turns me off. However, I met athletes who were egotistical to the point where that got them an Olympic gold medal… but it doesn’t mean I liked them. And so that’s reflected in how I coach. I don’t want athletes swaggering onto the pool deck 5 minutes late for the session and thinking I’m already good, or other coaches that think they’re super-smart. [I’d prefer] they engage, instead of being that way. I think it ties into my whole approach that, where possible, it’s a collaboration between you and the athlete who has asked you for your assistance in climbing that mountain. And it’s a collaboration, it’s not “shut up and work”. Whereas I believe someone with a massive ego, first of all, doesn’t listen very well, and assumes that they know more than they actually know. And so I don’t think those qualities are effective in the highest levels, you know, once you’re up into the stratosphere of performance. There are coaches out there with good success, but you look at the broken bodies in their wake and the broken brains of the athletes that they got success out of, but they’re not complete people. They’re not complete people, because they’ve been broken, and yes you’ve got the physical performance in the context of what you’re doing, but you’ve broken a person, and that’s another thing that I really don’t like. The parameter that they use is how many Olympic medals or how many whatever success, and that's the only parameter that they use, and I use more than that. I evaluate success, I believe, in a deeper way, in a more humanist way. What is then high performance, and how do you measure it – what’s the marker? Is it getting to the world championships, or…? And I don’t have an answer today, but I’m hinting at the fact that it’s not the only marker, there are other markers of greatness. John Wooden won, I think, 12 or 14 NCAA basketball championships in an era when it was very difficult to do so, and so that’s a pretty good marker… but you’ve got to look underneath that and say, “well how did he do it?” Did he have a better tactic for basketball – he may have. But what I believe he had is… he got inside the people who were playing in his gym and made them better people and then they followed the format and then they made good decisions under stress, and all of those things. And that approach is more my style. Don’t get me wrong, I love winning. I love to win.
But one of the things that I talk about all the time [with other coaches] is drugs in sport, and it just drives me nuts! Cheating is just like wrong, wrong, wrong. I absolutely hate it, because that’s not what I’m in sport for. But then there’s a slippery slope, right, caffeine, sodium bicarbonate, oxygen tents, and so on and so on. But I think we all know the boundaries of what is defined by cheating and what isn’t. The druggos usually say, “Well someone does this, or someone does that!” That’s just excuses to justify it to themselves, when deep down they know that what they’re doing is not the same. What no one ever talks about and what surprises me is how athletes don’t point out and go, “Wait a minute, fuck this!” And really go on a big platform about it, and get other ex-athletes to do it, and go, “Wait a minute, this is a sliding door effect! You haven’t just taken a medal from that person, you’ve affected their whole life, and where’s the compensation for that?” And that affects other people, which affects other people and other people. You take a medal away from one person, that alters not just them it could alter… I’m surprised no one’s really harped on that.
You know the movie that’s coming out about 1976 Olympics this summer [The Last Gold, 2016]? The East German women and the US women, and the Canadian women for crying out loud – about that era. They’re talking about the lives that were affected by that East German women’s team cheating, Shirley Babashoff and so on. Their lives. And I know a handful of Canadian women that would have moved up onto the podium, or further up the podium or onto the top of the podium. And I’ve talked to them over the years, because they’re my cohort, it’s my age. You know, it truly, deeply affected them. Because they look back and they go, “Well I tried really hard, it’s not that I deserve that medal, but that actually was my medal, and the satisfaction of that was completely taken away from me.” And maybe some of them beat themselves up over it, or didn’t… It’s terrible. And we could go down that discussion for a while, but that’s the kind of thinking that I don’t like and I don’t act that way in my personal life, getting back to the parallels to my personal philosophy. I don’t like those kinds of things in sport and I don’t like [them] in my personal life. I like integrity, honesty, I like willingness to do work. I’m okay to do work, whatever work’s required, get the job done. Don’t go quit because you’re tired. You stop when the job’s done if you agreed to do the job in the first place.
What don’t you compromise on?
Integrity. Things that I mentioned earlier, like honesty, integrity, willingness to do the work. Trust is such a critical factor in high performance – trust between the athlete, the coach, the physiotherapist, the anybody involved in the team, right, there’s a trust that gets built. And if somebody is below the standard on integrity, or they lie, or they’re doing something that they shouldn’t, then it blows the whole thing.
How did you get into coaching?
Um… I fell into it, really. My mum wouldn’t pay for the gas for my car, so I had to get a job.
You were a swimmer, as well, before?
Yeah, I swam for 12 years, and then in the last year, I needed to put gas in the car, so I got a little job coaching 10–12-year-olds at the local round-the-corner pool. And I can’t remember how much it paid, but I had gas in my car, and I knew that I could do that job. It was like, “How hard can it be? …Little did I know!
And then I had some success early on, in the university environment. I had some good athletes, and I was in charge of them and then I had some success. The university environment, you know, it’s a fun environment and the work – I didn’t find it to be work. Varsity swimming is a lot of fun. Then I started getting into the coaching education. I started walking myself down that path and taking courses in physiology and just actually becoming a coach and not just assuming that, “Oh I was a pretty good swimmer, so I can coach.”
Then when I left the university, I had an opportunity to, at that point, to continue on the road of coaching swimming, or I could have gone back to school and tried something else. So I briefly did that – I went down to one of the local Toronto television stations and asked for some volunteer work, you know, “Can I stand behind one of the cameras and watch you do some productions?” And so then this friend of mine, she got a little grant for doing a little commercial, and so we shot some footage and then we got into the editing room, put some music to it… and I briefly went there, but for whatever reason, I didn’t continue. A job came up, a coaching job, and I took it. It was another opportunity where I could have taken what I call a ‘left turn’, you know, like change direction (I’m left-handed). [But] there’s enough success, the enjoyment of the coaching was still strong, and I was passionate about it. And I just never stopped until 4 months ago.
Looking back, what do you consider your 3 greatest achievements as a high performance coach, and what made them so great?
The wonderful thing about coaching is that you get the same student for up to 5, 6, 7 years, whereas if you’re a grade 3 teacher, you get them for one year. And I’m not saying anything bad about teaching, it’s just a completely different thing. There’s a boy that I coached, and I coached him from 10 all the way through high school, until he was 17. So I coached him for a long time, and he was a little shit – he used to drive me nuts, and I’d call his parents… And I worked with him and I worked with him, but I didn’t beat him up, and beat him over the head. I always attempted to just steer him over here. And he won the NCAA two years ago. And it was in a record time. That’s an achievement: I took a kid who I could’ve easily dismissed at many points in the timeframe, and just said, “You’re not listening. You’re not doing what I asked you to do, you’re always hiding under the blame of…” You know? But he was a very super-talented kid, and I knew it. And I had the patience, and I played my games, and I’d blow up theatrically every once in a while, just for effect! And then he got through, and he had success. I saw him at a Summer Nationals or something a couple of years ago when he was in Canada – he went to [the University of California]. He said when he graduated senior year, the coach asked them to reflect on, ‘who got you here, how did you get here.’ And he spoke of me. In his final year at Cal. And he told me that, and he sent me a little email about what he said, and I had thanked him. So it came full circle. So that for me, is a high performance success, for me.
“I took a kid who I could’ve easily dismissed at many points in the timeframe... he was a very super-talented kid, and I knew it. And I had the patience, and I played my games, and I’d blow up theatrically every once in a while, just for effect! And then he got through, and he had success.”
The other one… no I shouldn’t… I coached a guy who won the Olympics in Sydney in triathlon. But that was as much being in the right place at the right time, than something I did. And I did a good job of coaching, it was only one year, and out of the blue, or out of the red, he won the Olympics. So that was pretty satisfying, but it doesn’t qualify anywhere near the previous story… You know, as a coach, winning a gold medal at the Olympics is kind of the Mount Everest of what we do and what we dream and what we want. And uh… so I hesitate to put that on the list, but I’ll say it anyway.
Well, the next one, and it’s not exactly high performance, but I started a little swimming club in Victoria in 1998. And it grew, and we fed kids onto the national team and that taught me many big lessons, [to] put together a club and have it grow and have it be successful and move kids into the high performance flow on a regular basis. In other words, I found out that I knew what I was doing and that I could get, not just one talented kid, but the next one and the next one and then the next one… And so, it’s not a true world championships or Olympic-level performance, but it’s more of a reflection on what I thought I could do and I did it. And so I feel pretty good about that.
Well… I coached at 3 Olympics. It’s hard to stay away from the performance evaluation or the victory. My approach to coaching is so wrapped up in the humanistic approaches, that if I can take a kid, or I can assist where they would have gone into a life of crime, or they would have fallen off the rails or disappeared… My job was to keep them on the pathway and help them grow and become a successful person and, as a by-product, become a successful athlete, too. I have many, many examples of that – that’s what I’m particularly proud of.
For 20 years, I coached high school. As we know, high school-age athletes don’t tend to go to the Olympics – they’re not old enough, they’re not strong enough or they’re not mature enough – sure there’re the crazy Katies [Ledecky] of the world… So I was in a support role, or I was developing the layer below the performance. The first 8 years of my career, I was coaching at University, so I had people go to the Commonwealth Games, go to World Championships – that was early on and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I thought I knew what I was doing, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently. And then I got into triathlon. Well, 1999, I think I got into triathlon, and I had tons of success/successful athletes in triathlon. However, as the swimming specialist, I’m not really in charge of the whole programme, I’m in charge of getting into their heads… and there was a lot of success. What I will say, maybe don’t tell Patrick [Kelly, Olympic triathlon coach, with whom Neil worked in Canada & HK] this, but success in triathlon is a lot easier than success in swimming. And you and I talked about that, just because there’s so many thousands and thousands of people trying to get to the pinnacle of 100 Freestyle or 200 Freestyle, or whatever, and in triathlon it’s a completely different beast… not to take anything away… as I said earlier, my passion is pool swimming, and I love it.
But it’s bloody hard… not for me as a coach, but to get success. To actually keep them on the track, and maybe there’s an injury and you’ve got to coach them through an injury. Or the girls are going through, or finished, puberty and they gained a bit of weight or grew boobs or something, and you know if they can just get through the next two years and regain their strength-to-weight ratio or whatever it is, they’re gonna take off. And so that’s the art of coaching and I love that.
Is there a time when you almost achieved something, maybe it was a victory, but it didn’t happen? What went wrong do you think? Why did it not work?
Well, usually that kind of a story is, you know, they tried out for the Olympics and didn’t make it.
But were there times when they were good enough, but something else went wrong?
Yeah, but the example that comes to mind is myself. I tried out for the ’76 Olympics. I was fourth, but they only took 3. You can’t beat yourself up, but there were many things I could have done better. I mean, I missed by not very much, but I missed, and so I look back and, “Aaayy, if you had have done this, this and this…” So, the first example is me.
And then athletes: There was one guy [who performed well at one Olympics and who] I was coaching [to the Olympics] four years later, and he was starting to go off the rails in January or February and I knew it. I just knew it. And the Olympics weren’t until the Summer – again, it’s not a regret – but I could have intervened. I would have had to go in hard, [but] I didn’t. And then after he failed [at the Olympics], I went, “I should have just bit the bullet and just done it”, you know. My intuitions were correct. Six months out to the Olympics and I was going, “Something’s not right here”. And I was saying to the other coaches, “Do you notice this and this and this? He’s not paying attention.” And so… I don’t know if that makes me feel good that my intuition was good.
Given another similar opportunity, would you have done things differently, if you’d noticed, if you’d realised something was wrong?
Well, if it happened again, knowing now… in that reflection, I’d be stronger. I did trust my instincts, [but] I didn’t create the solution. I wasn’t strong, or I wasn’t in a position… a bunch of factors. Now I think I would. And then, if they say, “I don’t want to hear this, get out of my life!” Okay, great, I’m just saying, that’s my job as a coach, to give you my insights, my intuition from my wisdom.”
Okay, Olympic Trials is the best place to go for [examples to do things differently]. Usually, and in my case, it’s over-coaching. You over-coach. You think, you try too hard, and you don’t trust the programme that you put them on. You know, it’s Olympic Trials, and you’ve got a chance, and you know you can make finals, and then you just try too hard. If I could take those moments back… And you think, if you don’t try very hard, you come across as, “I don’t care.” But paradoxically, that’s what you should, in some cases, what you should be doing. I have a few examples of that, especially in the middle of my career, where I just tried too hard. And it confused them or made them anxious, or it made them try too hard. Or, you know, they weren’t relaxed. And that’s just the coaching education process.
“You over-coach... you try too hard, and you don’t trust the programme that you put them on. You know, it’s Olympic Trials, and you’ve got a chance, and you know you can make finals, and then you just try too hard. ...if you don’t try very hard, you come across as, “I don’t care.” But paradoxically, that’s... in some cases, what you should be doing.”
Do you find that you “fixed” yourself, so that later on in those situations you weren’t over-coaching?
I have to actually process, “Don’t over-coach Neil, just calm down.” Because I’m passionate and I can get pretty emotional. So, I actually have to talk to myself – and I’m talking in weeks, not in “the moment” of time, I’m talking in the lead up frame to those things – and I then know myself better, and can say, “Under-coach, all right?” And I had to learn to do this too. You re-frame. It’s not, ‘don’t over-coach’ – it’s not what you don’t want to do, it’s ‘under-coach,’ – or it’s what you do want to do. And I’d write it in my logbook, and I always had notes at the bottom of the page, you know, “Now’s the time for under-coaching. Have some fun. Chill!” – meaning me have some fun [and] let them have some fun. And you’re in there and you want one more millimetre out of this session. But they’re done, right. You’re not going to get it. But you try to get it. And that’s one of the processes that I learned in my coaching is that extra millimetre in that session has no value going forward. You just think it does.
I remember talking to Charlie Francis, because I was at York University when he was training Ben [Johnson], and he came into the pool. Ben had an injury so he was water-running, and that was the first time I’d ever seen water-running. So, I went up to the coach, “What are you doing?” And he says “Oh, we can’t actually run, we’re just keeping the mechanics.” And he gave me the story. So, I saw him for a few weeks, and I’d ask him questions. He said that in a sprint session, where they’re doing 40m runs or whatever it was, he’d listen for the footfall, and as soon as it got too loud, the session was over. No matter how many repeats they’d done. He’d pull the session. As soon as Ben started hitting the ground too hard, it means he was tired, his mechanics were falling apart, and it was just over. We’re going to be doing maybe five repeats, but after number three, the footfall was too loud – over! And I remembered that little lesson all through my coaching career, because that was the art of listening to things. It’s not in the book. It’s in the ‘pay attention to the situation that’s in front of you and really be sensitive to what’s going on.’ I kept that as a story for myself… but it maybe took me another 12 years to learn the lesson… When the coach learns that lesson, whatever the context of what they’re doing, and don’t go that extra repeat, the plus side, the upside, is huge. But if you go for the extra repeat, you can get an injury, or… the downside is also huge if you go for the extra millimetre.
So, what is it – if you look back on your whole career – what has coaching given you? Because there has to be a reason that you stay in it; how many athletes can you take to championships? How many club medals/state medals/national medals can you be associated with? Winning major championship medals? There has to be more than that that sustains coaches, right? What is it that coaching’s given you?
Well, that’s a good question. That’s a big question. Because, staying close to my coaching philosophy, what it’s given me is the opportunity to help people, and help them achieve, move ahead, understand themselves, in a context that I’m good at.
It’s given me the opportunity to travel around the world many times and I like travelling. It’s given me the opportunity to rub shoulders with highly successful people, whether it’s coaches or athletes. And being in an environment that is truly exciting, it’s truly a special place. It’s given me a broad, broad perspective on life and different people. It’s given me a much deeper understanding of human nature, of the kind of things that make people happy – “Why do you climb that mountain? How far are you willing to go up, and slide back down, and keep going up?” That whole interplay is interesting and I love it. I mean, I have an undergrad degree in psychology. I’m interested in the psyche – “Why do you do things?” The opportunity to help… ‘help’ is probably the wrong word, but to me, a good coach is a mentor to the athlete as well. You’re a mentor about a lot of things, because they come to you and they go, “Aaw, my boyfriend left me.” Or, “I failed my course,” or… It’s not just about swimming, it’s about that person. So, it’s given me thousands of examples of being in that environment, and I really, really like it.
It hasn’t given me riches! Hasn’t given me a whole lot of money.
If there had been one time in your career when you could have had access to certain training or education or resources or personnel, when would it have been and what would you have liked?
The first eight years I was at a university environment, and so there’s physiotherapy, and there’s a nice gym, and we’ve got lots of stuff, right? And it’s almost too much stuff. It’s confusing: I’m just starting out in my coaching career and I’ve got all this stuff. So, in that context, I probably should have had a little bit less access. Then later on, I was at the National Institute in Victoria, and we had hyperbaric chambers, we had oxygen tents, we had oxygen rooms, we had nutritionists, we had stuff… And this was at the end of my career. And so, I’m answering the question backwards; it’s when you’re in a club coaching situation, where you don’t have the budget or the athlete’s parents won’t pay – the kid needs a massage, but I haven’t got any money, we haven’t got a budget for it. There’s access to that kind of thing in a club situation where the budget just isn’t there that you wish it would be.
I would have loved to be taking some kind of an online coaching course… not coaching, but, I don’t know, the opportunity to just sit down and shoot the shit about sport – whether it’s sport politics, or about technical stuff, or what’s going on at the cutting edge, what are they doing over in whatever British Cycling or Australian Cycling. What is somebody else doing and they’re having good success, and how could that apply over in what I’m doing? But having access to sitting down at lunch with that person is very rarely an opportunity. I sat with Patrick [Kelly] with the Japanese marathon coach [for the Hong Kong Olympic team, Shinetsu Murao]. It was a great conversation. It was outstanding, because Patrick and I were going, “So how do you do it? How many marathons do you run a year?” I don’t know, dumb questions, but they’re not dumb to him… We were there for an hour-and-a-half talking to the guy and he was happy to talk. And he’s a marathon coach, and I’m a swimming coach – yes, there’s lots to talk about. When Martin Gabrowski [German high performance swimming coach, former HK Head Swimming Coach] first got here, I was the first guy in his office, “Hi Martin, I’m Neil. How are you? Who are you?” And then he disappeared and I was pissed, because he was willing to talk, he was happy to throw open his logbook. So that’s what I think I would want access to – to talk to people about coaching, about the technical, about the cutting edge, and then let it percolate inside of my brain and then decide… That, I think, would have been a resource that would have been very valuable in certain periods.
Then, on the other hand, there’s time when you’ve got too much. I mean you can never have too much knowledge, too much stimulation, too much kinda conversations like that. Access to the cutting edge hardwares, video and stuff like that, for a swim coach? I mean, I’d love to have a moving camera on a rail on both sides of the pool, and then I’ve got a real-time kinda view and then you just sit there and go… I’m looking at the underwater shot while I’m watching them swim. That would be cool, right? And the thing is, they’ve got a little Garmin on and the camera calls the Garmin, as they go up and down – like, just going crazy imagination, I’m sure somebody’s got that. So, video feedback – feedback for both me and for the athlete, I think, is one of those things that… we [might] have that technology, [but] you don’t have enough staff. The difficult part is if your eyes are there, they’re not there. and I’m always conscious of when my eyes aren’t on the pool, they’re on a screen, and I don’t like to sit there and look at the screen and then you miss the session. You don’t actually see as much as you need to see. But in my sport, in technology, I would like, and I say it facetiously, but not really, I’d like an implant and so I have telemetry and I have a real time running heart rate. I know exactly what their heart rate is and lactate, blood pressure or whatever important things are, but it’s implanted right here [points to his chest] and I know that’s unethical, but… I want it anyway!
So, the short answer is, I was blessed with a lot of resources, for a lot of the time in my coaching career. Too much sometimes, and early in my career, it was a bit confusing. You know, going to the gym, but I didn’t really know what to do in the gym, but there was a beautiful huge university gym. I had to learn, you know. So there’s sometimes a bit too much.
What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned as a high performance coach?
I think the most surprising thing I’ve learned is how much work people can do. The human body is capable of huge, massive amounts that sedentary people that just walk to work every day have no idea… It’s astonishing, and we get to watch it and it’s pretty cool. It’s super-cool. And cool meaning it’s really interesting, and we get to see the current limits of physical ability and mental ability to manage mental stress. The limits of human determination: “I will.” Somebody says, “I’m going to do that”, and you’re surprised, it’s like, really? Wow. But then they keep working at it and they keep working at it and they do it. One of the things that I remember Randy Bennett [Olympic swimming coach] telling me about Ryan Cochrane [Olympic swimming medallist] is that Ryan’s imagination was regularly ahead of Randy’s imagination about what he could do, what kind of training he was willing to do. Randy was saying, “Oh okay, we’re going to ratchet it up a little bit and we’re going to do this.” And Ryan, in his mind, he’s past that. And he’s like, “Yeah, sure, but I was thinking that we could…” The power of the imagination is such an incredible thing. Like when an athlete says, “Well, I want to win the Olympics!” In the correct context, that’s a big statement. Not a 12-year-old just starting out, it’s not the right context. But somebody who’s at this level and says, “I think that can…” You know, eighth/tenth in the world last year and says, “Yeah, I think we can… I want to win next year.” And it’s a big step… But, go wherever you want with what layer – “I want to win the Nationals,” or “I want to do this,” or “I want to…” And sport is such a wonderful opportunity to see that – to see somebody’s imagination, and then they do it. And we’re along for the ride. Sort of. We get to help.
I always use the metaphor: the mountain. “What are we doing here? What do you want?” And then I tell them the story of the mountain, right, “Well, this is kinda like a mountain, and it’s dangerous at certain parts, and the oxygen gets thin, and la la la.” And I stretch the metaphor just to get them... “But it’s not my mountain, it’s your mountain, and you’re asking me to help you climb that mountain?” And then what I really want them to understand is what they’re actually asking me to do. Going back to the earlier statement about imagination: I’ve had many opportunities to see an athlete or have an athlete say, “I wanna do this.” And I go, “Ooooh, that’s a stretch.” But then they take a big step year one, and you’re like, “Whoa!” And they work harder, and, “Whoa, yeah!” And the skills get better. It’s just such a wonderful thing to watch. It is amazing, both mentally, that the imagination is so powerful, and that physically, the human body is capable of a lot. A lot.
You talked about going out into the world, into nature to have time out and time to think and contemplate. Are there other things that you would give as advice, to other coaches, young ones especially, but even middle-career, or end-career?
Yeah, there’s some of that advice sprinkled through the answers [already], you know, get to know yourself. Who are you? What are your reasons for being in sport? What can you give? Not what can you take. Understand that fairly early, and I believe that that’ll be helpful.
Keep a journal. Separate from the logbook of the sessions and what’s going on and the planning. It’s a journal of what are you learning, what are frustrated about, or what’s going on in your head. It takes 15 minutes a day, half an hour before you go to bed; you turn off the tv, close your phone, get out your thing and you write 10-15 minutes/one sentence/one word about something… a reflection. And I think that would be a really useful tool for coaches to get to know themselves. Right, because remember I started out saying I wish I had have known myself better earlier in my career – I never really kept a journal. I would’ve been a better coach, I think, or at least I would have developed another set of skills, or sooner, or been able to help people - more people.
Listen to some masters. Go and be respectful of what they’ve done. Don’t just choose the master based on how many gold medals they have on their chest. You should choose the master based on who they are too, who they really are, not just success on the resume, and go and listen to them. Just stand on the pool deck. I have rarely met a coach who doesn’t like to talk. So you go up and you go, “Hi, I’m Neil. Mind if I watch?” The answers always going to be, “No, no problem, come on. Hey, you want a coffee - I’m just going for one.” And then the conversation starts. So young coaches need… you have to do that, because otherwise you’re not in the guild. You get kicked out of the guild.
The ability to learn requires that you obviously admit that you don’t know everything, or that he or she has something that I could learn from. So, that would be my advice – just be a learner. What’s the zen term? “Beginner’s mind.” Stay in beginner’s mind, because when you’re a beginner, your mind is completely open. As soon as you start closing down, then you’ve lost beginner’s mind. And it’s hard because your ego wants to strut.
Keep an open mind. Keep a beginner’s mind. Talk to the masters as much as you can, buy them a coffee. Get out there. Get your education, you know, you’ve got to learn physiology, you’ve got to learn all that stuff. You know, get a master’s degree in sport psychology.
“Listen to some masters. Go and be respectful of what they’ve done. Don’t just choose the master based on how many gold medals they have on their chest; you should choose the master based on who they really are, not just success on the resume, and go and listen to them... I have rarely met a coach who doesn’t like to talk.
The ability to learn requires that you obviously admit that you don’t know everything, or that he or she has something that I could learn from – just be a learner.”
What’s next?
We’re off on another adventure and we’ll see… Like I said earlier, I could coach again - high performance? Like full-on, 365 days a year high performance? I don’t know if I could do that. You know, I could be the assistant, or I could coach a small group of 3, 4 or 5. It’d depend on the circumstance and where we end up…Well, I haven’t moved on, because I still have the passion. I still believe I could do it. And even if I took three years out and then came back into it, I don’t think the skill set disappears. You know, some of your chops… you stop playing an instrument for three years, well you’re not going to be able to play Puccini, but you’re going to be able to at least get started and it all comes back to you, like a language. And that hasn’t gone anywhere. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere, even if it lies dormant, or we open a restaurant or I take a cooking school or, I, you know, do something else…
That’s awesome Neil, thank you so much and I wish you the very best.