Romeo & Juliet - an examination
Let me take you back to the age of sixteen. It’s your English exam. You turn over the paper and see this “To what extent are the deaths of Romeo and Juliet pre-determined? And what relevance does that have for swim coaching?” You have one hour. “Discuss”
Let me see if I can help you a bit
The other week I was watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet. It was a great little production and rocked along quite nicely. Romeo duly gatecrashed the Capulet’s party in disguise where he saw this girl he fancied. He didn’t get to chat her up, but, nevertheless they immediately became besotted with eachother. All could have been set fair but sadly, after a quick bit of gang violence, an attempt at an arrageed marriage, some delays in delivering a letter interspersed with some famous mooning around under a balcony, two hours later they had both committed suicide.
Along the way Romeo managed to murder Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt, his mate, Mercutio, died uttering, with suitable venom, the best line in all Shakespeare (“a plague on both your houses”) and the authorities and parents were little in evidence, largely oblivious to the actions of the younger generation.
It would have been nice for the characters (although less entertaining for the audience), had the Bard intervened so that Romeo could have invited Juliet back to his place for a nice cup of tea and the custard cream. (“What a charming house you have Mrs Montague”). Or if the boys had all been able to go down to the Duck and Feathers for a couple of pints and a game of darts to settle their differences. R & J might have had a conventional courtship and both ended up qualifying as accountants, saving up to buy a little semi-detached on the new estate on the outskirts of Verona next to the pizza place.
Sadly it wasn’t to be. Romeo did, at one point, attempt half-heartedly to make peace with Tybalt (“I love thee better than thou cans’t devise”) but, unfortunately, as I said, he rather spoiled that by stabbing him to death five minutes later.
In fact, tracing the plot backwards one could argue that the root cause of the tragic destiny of the title characters lies before the play even begins. Shakespeare refers to an “ancient grudge” between the two families in the very first lines of the play. All the other misfortunes that befall them seem to stem from this disagreement.
So that’s Romeo and Juliet sorted out for you, what about the swim coaching bit?
Well, perhaps not on quite such an epic scale, Swim Mastery coaches are often faced with similar detective work to find the cause of a problem. And, just like the play, the answer may not be a simple one or the most obvious. There is a connection between the scenes of the play where Shakespeare’s plot rumbles on like a juggernaut to the inevitable conclusion; the results of one scene affecting the course of the subsequent action. Likewise a swimmers’ stroke cannot be seen in isolation but more as a series of interlinking events, each one affecting the next.
In order to correct a particular fault it maybe necessary to trace the previous actions back some way before the true source of the problem can be found. Failure by a swim coach to understand these connections may well lead to an ineffectual or incorrect diagnosis. Thus, for example, an inefficient catch might be traced back to a failure to hit Streamline which in turn might be caused by a poor arm recovery which is due to an incorrect head position. And the head might be wrong due to unnecassry tension held in the neck or poor air exchange or lack of connection with the torso etc.
Only by taking a holistic view of the swimmer, can the coach decide what aspect of the stroke really needs to be improved. Does the issue really rest with the head or does one need to look further back still to identify the reason for the lack of connection? This is why the Swim Mastery coach training concentrates so much on understanding the way the human body connects and reacts to its own actions, movements and positions. Without that knowledge it may take much longer or, indeed be completely impossible to correct a fault in a swimmers’ stroke,
And that would be a real tragedy
