I'm always (always) on the hunt for what I consider to be good coaches. Last year at the Golden Gate Sea Kayak Symposium (jeez that's long. Just think GGSKS) I got to spend an hour or so with Ben. That's insufficient of course to decide if we (he and I) could work effectively together, but I really got some useful stuff out of that hour so I jumped at the chance to spend some quality time with Ben. Not like, you know, quality time. We didn't have dinner or anything...
The way this Kamp thing works is pretty interesting and, I suspect, pretty difficult to get right. First off there is no syllabus for the class. When you get there you're asked what 3 things you want to work on (e.g. navigation, forward stroke, rough water skills, etc) and that is written on a white board (NB: I believe it was 3. I might be wrong in the count, but it is a bounded list). This list ends up being what's taught in the class. Secondly, at least in this Kamp, the students are not interviewed to determine their skill level. There can be people who've paddled for years along side folks who've been paddling less than a year and struggle a bit with a T rescue in the calm. And there was. Finally, Ben is not a local. He's been to the San Francisco I don't know how many times, but he very clearly is not yet intimately familiar with the area. For that he relies on knowledge provided by the person from the local joint he works with which in this case was Sean, as I mentioned.
All of those combined challenges made me really curious as to how it was going to work out. I'm just a beginning coach but I have an inkling of how hard this stuff really is and this sounded damned difficult. But it all seemed to work out. I, at least, was satisfied. Of the, what, 9 or 10 things in the syllabus the only one not covered at all was navigation. But we did cover topics as wide ranging as surf landings to reverse sweeps in flat calm, to rolling. It was pretty impressive I thought.
I do like Bens style. He does a fair bit of this-then-thating. An example. First day and we're still not in our boats. He has everyone hold their paddle up in the air, blades high. Everyone close their eyes. Point at your blade. Open your eyes. Who got it wrong? So we don't need to look at our blades to know where we are, do we? I really liked that.
He also blurbs out some really intriguing stuff using this style. Everyone sit on the ground like you were in your kayak. Ok, have your partner try to knock you over by pushing on your shoulder. Ok, now put your knees together. Have your partner try to knock you over again. Which is more stable? Knees together right? So you're more stable with your knees together...any questions?
Despite the fact that there is no before-you-get-there syllabus for the class, it's really obvious that Ben has one set up in his head once everyone get's their preferences on the white board. I've been in classes, sometimes with the very best of coaches, where they've pretty obviously run out of things to teach or don't quite know where to go from here. This didn't happen much at all here. I mean there were a few bumps. We went looking for an eddy line that wasn't there for example. But the recovery was really good I thought and continuity was well preserved.
I guess out of pure necessity Ben has to individualize quite a bit. I'm not really at the new paddler end of things any more but I very rarely found myself doing something I would consider myself reasonably skilled in. For example instead of doing T rescues in the calm me and Matt spent time with a scoop variation in which the victim is able to minimally assist. Ben checked in every now and again as one would expect and require. Really well done I thought. I did get a glimpse of the potential difficulties in this format of class though. At one point a portion of the class was identified as been more skilled than the others. They were taken aside and asked if they wanted to move into more challenging conditions. In the event the answer was no, but I could see how it would have been a touch less than optimal to have to have to split the class. Note that I'm talking from the coaches perspective here. I don't think the students would have suffered at all.
There was a bit of a mistake made during the class I thought. As I suggested there was a wide range of skills represented in the class and we ended up getting into conditions that were too uncomfortable for some folks. So instead of spending effort moving forward they were spending effort staying up right. Pretty classic issue. Ben had myself and a couple of others do some towing to help out. From a purely mercenary perspective it was a good thing since I got to do my first real life tow, so that was cool. The cause of the (I say) error was, I think, Sean being too optimistic about everyone's skill level and/or fitness and, I think, Ben perhaps not being conservative enough with respect to Sean's choice of venue at that moment. (Side note: I have a little more to say about this below).
Lawry is, I think, a pretty good coach which is really just a way for me to say I was able to learn from him and in my estimation others could as well. Umm...let me put it this way. I was talking to someone a little while ago and I said I can tell anyone how to do a forward stroke but, at this point, I can teach only a select few. One of my criteria for the good coach label, if you will, is that they don't need the "select few" qualification. So Lawry, I think, falls into that camp.
Hopefully they'll run this Kamp again next year. Or at least one on this coast. My impression was that there's a fair bit of depth that I haven't gotten into with Ben yet. You know, the subtleties of the sport that lead you towards elegantly effective simplicity on the water. So, yah, I hope he runs a Kamp out here again. I'll go.
Circling back to the paragraph above about the mistake. I wrestled a bit with putting that in. Despite the fact that there are, maybe, 3 people who read this drivel I write, I still don't want say stuff that's hurtful or whatever. The internet never forgets. But I decided to include it and here's why. First I do conclude that the need to tow was caused by an error. Second I'm frankly sick to death of "best coach ever", "learned so much", "had a great time and learned a lot" type of comments (reviews if you prefer) when it comes to classes, symposiums, coaches, etc. There's another, third, reason also but it's a really big topic on which revelation of my perspectives will be offensive to one, insulting to another and redundant to the third of my 3 readers here. So that's for another post.
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