"Fascination for the process"

Back in 2007, Bill Endicott gave this talk to a group of athletes and sports officials in China.  I recommend that every reader of this blog go and read it.

Bill Endicott coached the U.S. whitewater slalom team from the late 70s through the early 90s.  Athletes he coached won 57 world, world cup, and Olympic medals, 27 of them gold, and that makes Endicott look like an awfully good coach.  And as a matter of fact, he was.  But he claims that the most important thing he ever did was encourage his athletes to get to the point where they no longer needed him--to be their own coaches, in other words.

In every great athlete I have ever paid attention to, I have seen a remarkable independence.  Paddlers like the Lugbills and the Hearns, whom Endicott coached, designed their own training regimes to a large extent, relying on Endicott more for guidance and support than as a not-to-be-questioned authority figure.  In his book Every Crushing Stroke, Scott Shipley says that throughout his career he was largely coachless, occasionally making use of coaches and training camps primarily to learn new ideas that he would then incorporate into his own plan.  In the flatwater/open-water racing world, Greg Barton was deeply involved in boat and paddle design, and the top surf ski racers are known for coaching themselves and each other rather than relying on the traditional coach.  And the independent trait is found in other sports, too: Adam Wainwright is the ace pitcher for my favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals, and even though he led the National League in wins and finished second in the Cy Young voting last season, he spent this past winter obsessed with making himself better in several areas.

I have always been my own coach mostly out of necessity: even though we have this great event each year, my hometown has never been a hotbed of canoe and kayak racing expertise.  Though staying in my isolated outpost has probably slowed my progress over the years--I certainly could have benefitted from a coach or at least another paddler to correct technical problems as soon as they cropped up--I get a lot of satisfaction from figuring things out for myself.  And that's what a hobby is for, right?  You find something you love and learn as much about it as you possibly can.