The Coaching Ladder

We spend a lot of time talking about what it makes for someone to be a top level performer, but there’s one key aspect we all too often leave out. The coach. You can toil away on your own, putting in more reps than anybody before you, but without that outside eye it’s going to be incredibly difficult to make that big splash you’ve been picturing in your head all these years. As is often said, every top athlete has a coach. You don’t make it to the NBA and then just do your thing. No, they give you a coach not just for the team overall, but for each individual aspect of the game. Same goes for solo sports. Venus and Serena likely would have been top level competitors on their own, but they wouldn’t have been the GOATS of tennis without constant and meticulous coaching from the best in the game.

Coaching on its own is an immensely large topic with tons of scientific literature. What I’m proposing here is just a simple tool to help make sense of what that process can look like to help you track your progress. It’s a lens, not the picture itself.

Level 1 Coaching

Level one coaches, like with any skill, are beginners. Sometimes they’re top level performers who have just begun to give back to the community everything they’ve learned, sometimes they’re folks who have only been playing for a few months. Everyone has to start somewhere. Honestly, the important thing at this phase isn’t even getting the lesson across, it’s developing your skills as a coach so that you can do it better next time. Unless it’s resulting in people getting hurt, it’s actually just fine if folks at this level give the “wrong” answer. No one gets it all right on their first try. If you’re a more experienced coach, don’t feel the need to interject and break up the lesson of someone who’s at their first level of it. You can check in with them after the lesson is over, but barging in and taking over won’t actually make the lesson come across any easier. Instead it’ll confuse the student who is now receiving multiple answers all at once, will make it look like that level one coach isn’t someone who should be listened to, and will make you come across as an asshole. Let people fail at things, it’s the only way they will ever get better.

Level 2 Coaching

Again, like with any other skill, this is the intermediate phase. Folks at this level are no longer stumbling over their own words and instead have a few exercises in their back pocket they can pull out at any time. They haven’t reached the stage yet where they’re inventing new exercises on the fly to address people’s needs, but they’ll get there in time. We all start off by imitating those who came before us and only later will ever make something truly of our own. Particularly when it comes to coaching the important thing isn’t that you’re inventing new ideas and leading the vanguard of progress into the new age, the important thing is that you’re able to give a student the lesson they just asked you for.

Another thing that marks people at this stage is the fact that they are starting to become the go to person on a particular subject or two. Maybe they work great in the bind, maybe they have a really helpful way of explaining footwork, or maybe they specialize in forming a tight counter-guard. They’re no longer just a new person trying to give back. Instead they’re not only capable of teaching the 101 classes, but also have something meaningful to contribute to some of the mid level folk. Sure, they might not be the best at their specialty, but they have a piece of the puzzle that other people don’t and that on its own can be incredibly valuable.

Level 3 Coaching

These are your specialists. They took the thing they were starting to excel at while they were at level two and now they’re winning all of their fights with it. The big thing that differentiates level three coaches is that they now have what they need to turn someone into a top performer. The caveat is that they can only do so if that person wants to fight just like them. This doesn’t mean that if they’re a lefty they can only teach lefties or if they’re tall then they only have successful students who are also tall (although that can easily be the case), instead it’s a little more abstracted than that. A level three coach might be someone who only uses a particular guard and if you want to learn from them, you’re going to end up using the exact same one. It could also be that they’re a counterpuncher who only knows how to train people to successfully be counterpunchers. As well it could be someone with a lot of upper body strength who’s plan doesn’t work for folks with a different build.

A lot of top performers peter out at level three and the reason is pretty simple. To win, particularly in a tournament setting, you really only need to have a couple techniques/concepts you can execute on incredibly well. Having a broader base is definitely helpful, particularly when having to deal with edge cases, but when it really comes down to it your top level competitors are really only going to a small handful of actions. Each person might have something different they bring out to the fight, but each person is only going to have a couple of aces in their hand. As a result, they end up teaching other people the only road to victory they’re familiar with, whether that jives with the person they’re teaching or not.

Level 4 Coaching

Bringing us to a wrap, this is the coach who can help with anything. They might not necessarily be versed in every system, but they have something valuable to give you regardless of what you’re working at. This is the kind of coach who may by a counterpunching tempo fighter themselves, but who has produced high level students who’s A game is fighting aggressively and winning via structure. Level four coaches also aren’t limited to what weapon they can help coach. Sure, a fencing coach isn’t going to be the person you ask for help with your judo, but someone who primarily does sidesword should be able to help out someone doing saber.

Depending on what someone is looking for as a student, a level three coach might actually be a better fit. If they find someone who is on the exact same journey they are but are five steps ahead, that might actually be the perfect fit. At the same time, I think that being a level four coach is something we should all strive toward. It’s something I encourage both in my own group as well as when I’m evaluating fighters in the broader community.

My question for you is where do you think you are at and what would you need to do in order to reach that next rung?

In other news, I have just finished the first draft of my second book, “The Annotated Giganti”. The aim is for it to be a complete commentary on Giganti’s rapier system, filling in what might be missing and highlighting the parts that a modern reader could benefit from being said louder. Stay tuned for further updates.

In the meantime, please feel free to pick up a copy of my debut book, “Bolognese Longsword For The Modern Practitioner” available at FoolOfSwords.com.

Finally, while I’m not officially signed up to teach anything, for those of you attending Pennsic please feel free to find me for a coaching session. I love getting the chance to work with folks I don’t see all that often and to hear perspectives I wouldn’t otherwise get exposure to.