AN INDIVIDUAL APPROACH

Swimming World Magazine, Jun 2005 by Whitten, Phillip

THE "HOW-TO" FOR BETTER SWIMMING

Coach Bob Groseth's coaching philosophy is developmental. He doesn't look at his swimmers as "superstars." Instead, he approaches them as individuals and looks for ways to make them better.

In 2005, his 16th season as head coach of the Northwestern University Wildcats, Bob Groseth guided his star-studded team to an eighth-place finish at the men's NCAA Championships, NU's best placing since 1958. His achievement resulted in his being voted the NCAA Coach of the Year for 2005.

His success did not come overnight. Before Groseth took the reins at Northwestern, two decades had passed since the school had produced a Big-10 Conference champion, and for his first 10 years, that skein continued. In the past six years, however, Coach Groseth has produced seven Big-10 champions as well as a number of athletes who have represented the United States internationally.

Groseth has also been an outspoken and effective leader in the fight against the misapplication of Title IX, which has resulted in the loss of scores of men's intercollegiate swimming programs.

Swimming World Magazine sat down with Coach Groseth at the USA Swimming World Championship Trials in April to discuss the role of technique in his program.

Q: Swimming World Magazine:

Bob, congratulations on having a fantastic NCAAs and on being named Men's NCAA Coach of the Year.

A: Coach Bob Groseth:

Thank you very much. It was a humbling experience. You really don't expect the coach of an eighth-place team to get Coach of the Year, but I think our team's success was a "man bites dog" kind of story.

Essentially, you have three superstars on your team, two of them sophomores and one a freshman...and they all swim different strokes. Is that right?

Yes.

So how do you go about coaching them?

You have to approach each kid as an individual. Taking the three guys that we're talking about: Michael Alexandrov has a lot of natural endurance and he can do some high-volume training. Both Matt Grevers and KyIe (Bubolz) are sprinters, although Matt can do a fairly high volume of training without too much intensity. On the other hand, Kyle breaks down if the volume or the intensity is too high.

So what we do is set up a program that's well-rounded, and then we make adjustments at each workout with each kid.

Now, when these guys came to Northwestern, they were already quite good, but they've improved significantly since then. On what kinds of things do you concentrate in your technique training?

I think one of the things that's helped me with those guys is that I've treated them just as I do any other athlete who comes into our program.

Like a lot of coaches, I started out a high school and age group coach, so my coaching philosophy is developmental. I'm not looking at those guys as "superstars." Instead, I'm looking at them as athletes whom I can make better.

My job is to figure out what they need-whether it's more strength, more stroke technique, whatever. So I just concentrate on picking out things that I hope will make them get better.

I've heard from other coaches that technique is an important component of their program. Would you agree?

Technique is very important, and I think that even though many coaches pay lip service to it, it's generally underrated and underappreciated. We work on technique every day

There are some parts of our workout that some people would call "recovery" because they are done at a slow rate in between sets. We do very specific drills between sets to reinforce the technique work that we've been working on.

And how do you then transition from the drill to incorporating those skills into the actual stroke?

I think that's a very important question because one of the things that you have to keep in mind when you're changing somebody's technique is to realize that the change has to take place over a relatively long period of time. And really, it's your brain more than anything else that needs the time to accommodate the new technique.

So you have to go through a period in which you're using the new technique in drills, and they can do it when they're swimming slowly or under controlled circumstances. Then we work on it every day-eventually incorporating it into a set.

At first, it's when we're working into the set. That's the first part of the set, when the intensity isn't that strong That's where we'll emphasize technique.

And then when they get to more intensity, we tell them not to think about technique at all. We tell them that their body will accept what works when they get to the more high intensity stuff and that the new technique is not going to transfer right away It just takes time.

How much time?

It's different with each kid. Oftentimes, you'll find that as you go from season to season, you'll work on a kid's technique and nothing seems to happen. It just doesn't seem to take. Then there'll be a break, and when you come back, all of a sudden everything suddenly kicks in.

If you're asking somebody to try a new thing and they're swimming fast every day, it's very difficult for their body to accept a new way of doing things. If we're doing a lot of technique work for a specific stroke, we'll train an entirely different stroke for three to four days to give their brain and neuromuscular system a chance to take that new information and integrate it-take it from soft wiring to hard wiring, so to speak.