Connecting Academics and Athletics

A coach’s take on tutoring

I’m going to put on my “coach” hat for this post (hence the brilliant subtitle) and before I was a coach, I was just a swimmer.  Since I learned how to swim shortly after I mastered walking, I sort of fell into a coaching position in the sport.  I was thirteen and madly in need of service hour opportunities.  My summer team would host short practices for younger swimmers that weren’t quite ready to swim across the pool yet.  And so I started helping—teaching kids how to blow bubbles under water and showing them how to float on their backs without panicking that they’d suddenly sink.  It was by far the most frustrating learning experience of my life.  The learning curve lasted pretty much that whole summer, and when the next year rolled around, I volunteered again.  I’ve graduated into coaching the whole swim team as an official assistant coach for the past three years.  I’ve been a part of the West Springfield Writing Center (WSWC) for the past two- and I’ve noticed parallels between coaching and tutoring.

I am nowhere near presumptuous enough to think I can fully encompass all that mentoring involves— people write whole books on this for Pete’s sake— but through my experience as a swim coach and a writing tutor, I’ve tried and tested different mentoring methods with kids between the ages of four and eighteen (so I guess I’ve mentored legal adults if you want to get technical about it) and I can confirm basic similarities between mentoring athletics and academics (why, yes, that is in fact the title, I’m so very clever).  And in preparing to write this post, I did some digging through the aforementioned materials published on mentoring.  I found an excerpt about fundamental principles in developing a coaching philosophy. I must admit, the development of my coaching philosophy happened without much conscious thought and my tutoring philosophy has been heavily influence by the goals of the WSWC, but the list I found is pretty accurate- for mentoring as both a coach and a tutor.  The excerpt listed eight essential values and I will discuss a few as they have been applied (by me and others apparently) to coaching and how I have seen them also applied to tutoring.

Be Yourself

As a mentor, there can be pressure (from you or others) to behave in a certain manner.  I remember stressing as a first-year coach because I wanted the kids to like me and as a newbie tutor because I wanted the tutees to think I knew everything and could help with anything (and I wanted them to like me).  That was ridiculous because one, I am a person, not a cyborg, I clearly do not know everything, and two, my ego can survive if someone I mentor isn’t my biggest fan.  It’s important to establish respect and some level of trust in order for mentoring to work, but your listeners (this is the term I have selected to include swimmers and tutees, the subjects of my mentoring experiences) do not have to love you to pieces in order to learn from you.  As a coach, being tough and authoritative is actually acceptable; as a tutor, a somewhat transient friendship/acquaintanceship is really all that’s needed, if you happen to earn a new best friend out of it, super duper, but be yourself.  Be who you are, because only once you feel comfortable will you really be able to help your listeners.  (Quadrillionth side note- I feel like I’m talking about radio show listeners, but I don’t want to use the word subjects lest anyone think I fancy myself a freaking queen-mentor… Please bear with the title of “listeners” that I keep reverting back to in order to describe the audiences of my mentoring.)

Be Organized

If you are a mess you will get nothing done.  You will also undermine any progress being made and any respect your loyal listener/s might have established for you.  In coaching, we (the head and the assistants) plan practices, we outline goals for the day or the week depending on how recent meets have gone, we work to create a schedule for ourselves even to make sure we plan the meets and work individually with kids if needed.  In every session for tutoring, we (the tutors) do the exact same as we first read the assignment, read the paper, ask questions and offer our perspective and future steps for the assignment.  With coaching, you work with the kids for an extended period of time, but with tutoring, most high school sessions are generally not follow ups (although those that are allow for even more organization and planning- yay!).  Despite the length of time for mentoring, organization is paramount in both coaching and tutoring.

Focus on the Big Picture

In tutor training at the WSWC we familiarize ourselves with the seven priorities of tutoring writing and the priorities are ordered starting with big picture/general ideas and then moving down into specifics of writing.  This can be difficult when you’re going over a paper and all you want to do is point out every single grammatical error your tutee has made.  This is especially tough for me, considering my love for grammar is probably my nerdiest and most annoying trait.  But I remind myself, frequently, that a paper can be perfect grammatically and still make zero sense to a reader if the author has committed greater crimes like poor organization or being vague.  The big picture for the WSWC, any writing center, and any academic assistance program is for students to not only learn materials but also apply them later on their own so that they can further their education and themselves.  Coaching on the other hand, varies greatly in the kinds of big pictures.  Coaches want their teams to win competitions and to foster sportsmanship; they want individual players or participants to succeed and improve their technique and success.  As a swim coach, my mentoring goals are split between what I want for the team and then what I also want for individual swimmers.  This plays into being organized, both for coaching in that you have to plan for team success and for the improvement of individuals and for tutoring in that you have to plan how to help the tutee for this paper and for their writing in general.

Now that I’ve jabbered about three of the eight principles that one publisher claims are to be considered when creating a coaching philosophy, I again reiterate- mentoring in athletics and academics is really quite similar.  Not only that, but it can change (for the better!) your life and someone else’s (I know that sounds incredibly cheesy, but it’s also incredibly true).  If anyone has any questions/comments about anything I’ve said here (or about changes to school start times and new rule changes in the Northern Virginia Swimming League), feel free to contact me via email.