The Swimming Coach's Eye.

By Wayne Goldsmith Three Key Learning Points: * Coach’s Eye is a learnable skill, not a talent some coaches were born with. * Look, scan fingers to feet and feet to fingers, then stand back and look again. * Swimming is a technique-driven sport - yet technique is the thing coaches talk about least. Coach’s Eye. And no, not coach’s eye strain from twenty years of squinting at sunlight bouncing off water. (Although that’s real too and it’s a hazard of the job nobody warns you about.) I mean Coach’s Eye.. What you see as a coach when you’re coaching. Here’s the scene. You’re standing on deck next to an experienced coach. They glance at a swimmer and go “yeah, the butterfly’s not quite right”. “It’s a timing thing.” “Their feet are too high.” “Their arms are too low.” Three seconds. Done. Straight to it. And you’re standing there thinking “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at. How did they pick that up so fast?” Whether you’re a new coach, a Learn to Swim teacher, a stroke school teacher or a triathlon coach who’s found themselves on a pool deck - that gap feels enormous. It isn’t magic, my friends. That’s a highly developed Coach’s Eye. It’s a skill. And skills can be taught. Position: stop coaching from the end of the pool: Before we talk about the Coach’s Eye process, here’s one thing to consider. Most coaches coach from the end of the pool. I don’t like it. Bottom line - if your swimmers are swimming three kilometres, you should be walking five. You should be giving more than you’re asking of them. (That’s a video for another day.) But for technique specifically, here’s the problem. From end-on or front-on, with no underwater vision, relying purely on your eye - you see almost nothing. You cannot analyse what you cannot see. Let’s work through the Coach’s Eye process. Coach’s Eye Step One: stand back and just look: Go to the side of the pool. Look. Don’t diagnose yet. Don’t start hunting for the fault. Just see what you see and get a feel for it. You’ll notice a lot of good coaches “mimic” while they watch, i.e.standing on deck mirroring the swimmer’s stroke with their own arms, getting the feel of it in their own body. Try that. Copy the swimmer. Imagine it. Feel their stroke. And then - usually just by observing and mimicking - you'll have a hunch, e.g. “Okay - I think it’s a hip issue.” That’s enough for Coach’s Eye step one. A hunch is exactly what you’re after. Coach’s Eye Step Two: fingers to feet, feet to fingers: Now walk up and down the pool with the swimmer and take a good look at each of their body parts directly involved in swimming: * Fingers to feet: fingers, wrists, forearms, shoulders, head, body, hips, thighs, knees, shins, feet, toes. * Feet to fingers: toes, feet, shin, knee, thigh, hip, body, head, shoulder, forearm, wrist, fingers. Top to bottom. Bottom to top. Every piece in isolation. At first this part of the Coach’s Eye process feels slow. It is slow. That’s the point: you’re building the stroke dynamics library that the experienced coach is drawing on when they do it in three seconds. Coach’s Eye Step Three: stand back and look again: Back to the side of the pool. Look at the whole swimmer again. And now - now - you go “okay, I’ve got a pretty good idea what’s happening here”. Look. Scan. Look again. As you get better, the full body scan becomes less necessary, because you’ll glance and go “that’s a hip issue”. But that takes a while and for most of us mortals it takes a loooong while. We’re all a bit in awe of the high performance coach who calls it instantly. Don’t be. They’ve just done this ten thousand times. You can develop the same skill. Very Useful Technology: the phone in your pocket: You’ve got a phone in your pocket. (Even though of course none of us are ever on our phones on deck, are we!) Pull it out. Video the technical issue you’ve just identified. Then show the swimmer as soon as you possibly can. The reason matters. You want the smallest possible gap between what they felt in the water and what they see on the screen. That gap is where the learning happens - and it closes fast. One serious note. Rules about videoing swimmers are tight in a lot of pools and getting tighter and rightly so. * Follow your local safeguarding policy. * Get proper parental and facility management permission. * If videos need to go to parents rather than to kids, send them to parents. Do the right thing on safeguarding first, always. Then use the tool. Summary: Here’s what bothers me colleagues. So many coaches want to talk training sets. Lots want to talk sports science. Everyone wants to talk technology and AI. Very few coaches want to talk technique. And I don’t think that’s laziness. I think it’s because we never taught them how to develop a Coach’s Eye - so they never got comfortable with technique and as a result they default to what they can talk about confidently. “Let’s do hundreds.” “Let’s do more backstroke.” Sets and workouts and programs, instead of technique. But this is a technique-driven sport. We are moving human bodies through a medium roughly 800 times denser than air. Technique is what it’s all about. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Run the three steps on one swimmer at every session this month. One swimmer. Look, scan both ways, look again. Twenty sessions in you’ll notice the scan getting shorter on its own. * Mimic what you’re watching. Stand there and do the stroke with your own arms while the swimmer does it in the water. It feels ridiculous, it looks silly but it works. * Check your safeguarding policy before you film anything. Know your club’s rules, your pool’s rules and where the video is allowed to go. Sort that out properly and then the phone becomes a genuinely useful coaching tool. If you’ve got a different way - a better way - of developing Coach’s Eye, I’d love to hear it. Share it with our learning community. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with swimming coaches, swimming clubs and Learn to Swim groups all over the world and offers a unique mentoring and coaching program for aquatic professionals. Contact him at [email protected] or WhatsApp +61 414 712 074 for more details. Also available - The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now. Seven modules, built for real coaches with real time pressures.https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow And for swimming parents - Raising Athletes (includes The Talent Myth book).https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit swimminggold.substack.com/subscribe