TOO SOFT

What is needed to get to the top?

In Holland there is a lot of fuss about turn coaches who have been extremely hard on their young pupils, you should never hit our athletes  and you should not spit on them but you can be very hard on them. A couple of years ago there was a trend of “positive coaching”  ,the coach should only focus on the good things that athletes were doing. I don’t believe in that at all and there is a very good reason for that, top sport is a very very very hard World and if you have not been hardened  by your training you are not going to make it as a top sport athlete. Mental and physical strength is a must in the environment, one of the biggest problems I have seen with players in our academy is the leak of discipline in almost everything. Players are not willing to put in the things that are needed to make it to the top, they are only willing to talk about it. 

I believe you need to have a navy seal training before you start thinking about getting to the Olympics, and when you think about Navy Seal  training you right away think about long running and extreme hard training where instructors will do everything to make you drop out. But that is not the start, the real start is to make your bed in the morning and not just make your bed but make it into perfection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sK3wJAxGfs

I would love to have a couple of players who would want to follow our academy the hard way, start with making your bed in the morning. One way or the other we seem to get players who are living as pigs in their houses, there was no discipline in anything they did. The house was stinking, there was garbage everywhere and even rotten food in the kitchen. You will not become a top athlete if you can not even take care of yourself and the way you live your life.

The society in Europe is getting more and more soft, I call it the I hold your hand society. It is from the news items on the TV news, to the thing they learn (or better said did not learn) in school. If you are hard on the players you will get parents who complain about the fact that you are too hard on their baby’s. The turn coaches know how the coaches and athletes work in the former Eastblock countries and China, and that is a lot wurths than what they do in Europe. That makes the behaviour not good or OK, but there is the expectation from everyone around you. And when you don’t perform as a coach you're out. There are no rules on how to get a gold medal, and when the KNGU (Turn federation in Holland) and the NOC*NSF are telling in so sharp words that this is unexceptable and the coaches should never work again. Well then they should also look at the butter on their own heads, they are the ones who tell you to get the medals and if you don’t get them you don’t get money. Federations don’t give a damn about the athletes, they are only worried about the medals.

I’m a strong believer is hard work and great discipline for the athletes, and you don’t do that with a soft approach to training and discipline, so make sure that you can pass a Navy Seal training and that you are the one that make a perfect bed in the morning and not drop out of the training even if all instructors try to make you do that. Maybe just maybe you can make it to the top.