As first an athlete and now a coach, sometimes both at the same time, problem-solving is a constant NCCP core competency required in many aspects of my badminton. For the past 4 years of my competitive career, it has been difficult to find a regular coach to work with. Often times I am left to fend for myself and my partner at international tournaments. Looking at the 2016 Olympic qualification period, out of 22 international tournaments and the Canadian National Championships, I spent only 4 tournaments with coaches. I don’t regularly work with these coaches and none of them specialize in my event (Mixed Doubles).
With this problem, the two extreme choices were to either give up or find a way to deal with it. Despite the outcome of failing to qualify for Rio, I am glad I chose the latter. If I was the most experienced mixed player in Canada at the time, then I need to take the initiative to teach my partner the most important skills. If I did not have a coach with me on court, then I will record the match to analyze later. If I could have the opportunity to ask for feedback, I would ask, although I did not receive much in the end. The coaches were not able to give the quality feedback that I wanted. From Kouzes & Posner’s “The Leadership Challenge”, they found that no feedback is just as bad as criticism. Without feedback, there is no learning. Without learning, it becomes difficult to improve. It then becomes difficult to win.
After finishing “The Leadership Challenge”, it has led me to read additional books, including “Mindset” by Carol Dweck, “Grit” by Angel Duckworth, and “Peak” by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. I have not yet started “Peak”, but I have finished “Mindset” and I am almost through “Grit”. Interestingly, “Grit” also mentions the work of both Dweck and Ericsson. The importance of these books is because they have helped me learn more about problem solving. It is not so much about how to directly solve my problem, but rather how I can direct my effort, mindset, and approach toward finding solutions.
Dweck’s book is about the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset. If I had a fixed mindset, I would believe that my talents would help me overcome my situation. I would also put in less effort because those with a fixed mindset believes that things should come easy to those who have talent. On the contrary, a growth mindset involves learning from failure and finding new solutions to overcome problems. Duckworth’s book speaks of grit, which includes a combination of passion and perseverance. Developing “grittiness” is a way of seeing something through to the end, and not quitting at the first sign of a problem. Finally, Ericsson is the famous researcher known for developing the “10 000 hour” rule, in which 10 000 hours of practice is the average time it takes to become an expert. Although I have not read the book yet, I am sure the insights into deliberate practice will give me additional problem solving tools in the future. I will return to this in the 2nd reflection.
Having to play the role of coach and athlete at times is incredibly difficult. I am also aware of the expression, “He who is his own coach has a fool for a client.” I think it is a derivative from, “He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client”, but both expressions have a similar meaning. However, I would much rather be a fool than a quitter. After the residential component, I was very intrigued about sport analytics from Dr. Van Neutegem’s course. For the past 2 years, Badminton Canada required the tracking of certain metrics for the national team, mostly consisting of physiological measures that the exercise physiologist looks after. However, I personally feel that these measures are incredibly subjective and based on the knowledge of the athlete. For example, to measure how well I think I am eating, I need to know how to eat well first. I think the same goes toward sleep, hydration, and other recovery strategies. In fitness, many people believe that they need to feel tired and sore for a good workout. The scientific literature has indicated otherwise, but many athletes (and even some coaches) may not understand this principle. To make matters worse, we have STILL not received any feedback about our daily athlete monitoring since the beginning of the program.
As we are forced to continue daily athlete monitoring (or else we risk losing funding), I have taken additional measurements which I feel are important. I currently input data into an Excel spreadsheet, and I hope to figure out how to graph the data once I have enough data points. Instead of considering how well I thought I slept, I would track the number of hours that I sleep per night. Instead of rating how I felt about nutrition and hydration, I would track how much water I drank, how much protein I ate, and how often I had vegetables with meals. Now the data is more meaningful, because it is not just based on my “feeling”. I have asked fellow teammates about their thoughts on the daily monitoring and they have similar feelings: why bother measuring things if we are not going to receive any feedback?
Relating this to KIN 515: Gap Analysis, there clearly is a gap in athlete monitoring of Canadian national team badminton players. If I were to simply port this system to monitor BC’s targeted badminton players, I would not have meaningful data to make meaningful changes. From the course, I learned that it is important to track data, but it is more important to track data that is relevant for future interventions. Instead of simply tracking what athletes are doing in training, I hope to add an additional question: why? I feel it is important for athletes to understand why they are doing things in training, because it should increase the amount of deliberate practice and reduce the amount of “going through the motions”. By tracking the purpose of various exercises in each training session, the athlete can see how much practice is allotted to various aspects of their game and it may help explain strengths and weaknesses a bit better. For example, if an athlete is only doing multi-shuttle training (i.e. coach feeds multiple shuttles in the drill), shot quality may be compromised if the athlete is too focused on hitting the shuttles. Since multiple shuttles are used, there is no feedback on shot quality as the player can hit a bad shot or make an unforced error, but the coach will continue to feed another shuttle in play as if the athlete’s shot was still in play.
To illustrate this concept, consider the following video from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmQV8oD7ZXc
Within 12 shuttles, the player has already made 4 mistakes (interestingly, all on the player’s left side of the court). There are always strengths and weaknesses to different exercises, and when the purpose of the exercise is constantly identified and recognized by the athletes, better interventions can be made to adjust the drill to benefit the athlete.
I have attached a copy of my own log which I started after the residential component of the graduate certificate program. I hope to review the data after about 3 months, and I am considering adding some additional metrics to track, including fiber intake, omega-3 intake, and heart rate data during training sessions, once I get a better wrist-based HR device (I CANNOT use the chest strap because it negatively affects my performance on court). Despite trying to pilot changes on myself first, I still try to gather feedback from other athletes and coaches by asking them what they think is important. There are times when people have said, “Badminton is 90% mental”, which is frustrating because I know they don’t have a way to measure it. I personally do not agree with their statement, because I believe every athlete has their own unique profile. But that’s another problem to solve…
KIN 598 – Journal 1 Example (please do not share this file)