Coaching is not about training. It is not about methods. It is about observing, knowing, believing, and convincing. A coach is excited by the vision of what the student will become. A coach infuses the student with excitement over this vision and the journey begins.
In my early teens I had the honor of coaching Special Olympics gymnastics with my dad and sister. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my time: interacting with kids (sometimes young adults) with disabilities, getting to know them and to discover how funny, optimistic and eager to live life they all were. Bonus, I got to teach them how to do somersaults, use the springboard, swing from the uneven parallel bars and jump into the foam pit! We weren’t just training for fun, we were also aiming for the goal of winning gold at the Minnesota Special Olympics Gymnastics Meet – and, believe me, this was a goal many of the kids shared with us coaches!
I remember the day that Casey walked into the gym, flashing a million dollar smile and flexing some serious biceps. He was our gold medal winning student for sure – any human being with two working eyes could have called that one. Then, there was Adam, the non-verbal autistic boy who relied upon a deflated latex rubber balloon (the kind you make balloon animals out of) and a deck of playing cards to calm him when his inner world and the outer world would meet like two weather systems colliding to form a massive storm. I saw potential in Adam. He was a difficult kid to interact with – he’d often run away and nearly collide with someone at top speed heading toward the springboard. He sometimes seemed so tortured inside, that voices from the outside world were more like hailstones than soothing, helpful tones. Despite the challenges presented by Adam’s autism, I saw a young, athletic kid with the ability to hear and understand me (sometimes), and I saw that he enjoyed activities like running, jumping and spinning. I knew he could grow and change and experience some joy along the way. So, as much as I wanted to pump up Casey’s already stellar skills, I found myself with Adam, hoping that I was right about this boy I believed was hiding an ace up his sleeve (not the literal ace from his deck of cards, he preferred the cards with faces).
Casey and Adam were just two of the kids who walked into the gym each week. While I confidently declared Casey a winner and Adam a dark horse, there were other kids I needed more time to get to know, to begin to believe in, and to convince of their own potential. Pat King had Down’s Syndrome (a common disability among Special Olympians), and, at the time, he seemed like a 20 year old to me, but I really couldn’t guess his age. Pat reminded me of an amalgamation of Ed Sullivan, Cid Cesar and Jimmy Durante. His voice had a showman-like quality to it and he had a signature phrase, “Pat King, King Tut”, which he would say while doing the Egyptian move from the Bangles song, “Walk Like an Egyptian”. To cap it off, he’d implore whoever was close to him to squeeze his bicep while still in the “Egyptian walk” pose. I loved Pat’s vibrant, larger-than-life personality, but I confess, I didn’t see him as an athlete from the start, nor did I see how we’d get there. He had us rolling in laughter more often than we could get him rolling somersaults across the spring floor. Still, we all welcomed the Pat King show each week and began to build trust in him, believing that the few times he stepped away from center stage onto the training floor, he would develop his skills. Sure enough, he did. Pat King put in some of the most unexpected, medal-earning performances of the State Gymnastics meet, making his comedic presence even sweeter.
Brian was a teenage kid with Muscular Dystrophy mainly affecting the lower half of his body, giving him the pieced together look of a stick figure made of toothpicks for legs and baseball bats for arms. I remember being in awe of him because he seemed close to my age, but had a distinct mustache (a goatee, sure, but a mustache!). Watching Brian wheel himself around the gym in a wheelchair and hoist his rag doll legs into plastic braces, I wasn’t sure where to go with his training, or how to get there. Those questions turned out to be of little importance; what mattered most was Brian’s passion for pushing himself to the limits of his physical ability.
With half as much muscle as most everyone else, he squeezed out twice as much performance. I had a feeling Brian could do amazing things – some of which he already knew he was capable of – and I had a feeling all Brian needed to soar was some enthusiastic supporters in his corner. I focused on the muscles Brian had, not the ones he had lost to the disease of MD. I prodded Brian to find out what he could do with such a strong upper body coupled with a diminished, relatively light lower body. First, we were treated to his ability to raise his body above his wheelchair seat and hold it there, or repeatedly dip up and down. Next he demonstrated a similar ability on the parallel bars, effortlessly traversing the length of the bars with his arms fully extended.
When I challenged him to a pull up contest on the uneven parallel bars, something amazing happened.
I was no slouch athletically, and I enjoyed competition, so I set out to win this contest, thinking I could beat Brian by doing 15 or 20 pull ups. Brian did 25. And, he didn’t even struggle or break a sweat. I don’t like to lose, but I could see I wasn’t going to win. I asked Brian how many pull ups he thought he could do. Surprisingly, he wasn’t too sure. Man, I thought, if I had his upper body strength and stick-like legs, I’d have looked up the Guiness Book record for most pull ups and got to work on smashing that record. Brian popped out of his wheelchair, grabbing onto the frame of the uneven parallel bars to steady his lower half and get ready for round two. Like a piston in a Hemi engine running at 7,000 rpms, Brian knocked out 30 pull ups as easily as the first 25. At this point, everyone in the gym was aware something special was happening. “Go, Go, Go, Go!” we all chanted as we clapped in unison with the raising and lowering of Brian’s chin to the bar. 35 pull ups. 40 pull ups. 45… and finally, 50 pull ups!
I tried to increase my pull up count beyond 20-25 for weeks after this, and I couldn’t do it. Brian had done hundreds of pull ups cumulatively on the way to 50 in a row. As time went on, he was able to do even more than 50 pull ups in a row. What’s more, the feeling of infinite possibility he experienced at the pull up bar gave him more confidence to work on his lower half. No matter how little progress he made on his feet, he always knew he could kick it into gear with his upper body at the pull up bar.
Pat King and Brian were great mentors to me in the art of coaching. It’s not what you can tell someone to do that makes you a valuable coach, it’s what you can help someone to tell themselves. To do that, you need to come to the training floor with an open mind, listening ears, and a whole lot of heart.
Coaching The Gymnasts Of Odor
I’ve been coaching scent work teams since 2009, and I can confidently say that synthesizing human and canine into a partnership under complex searching conditions is a bit more challenging than coaching Pat King to do a pike jump off the springboard and stick his landing!
Dogs are wired to enjoy searching for a target odor (even the ones that some people claim have no scenting ability), so they pick up the game quickly and naturally. Many people can introduce a dog to a target odor, develop an indication at source, and build a reliable searching behavior without ever consulting a coach.
Most humans need coaching to broaden their understanding of the patterns of behavior dogs use to communicate such things as presence or absence of odor, collecting odor or source, close hides or overlapping edges, and impediments to progressing toward source. And most humans need help relaxing into the experience of problem-solving under uncertainty.
Coaching can also help the dog and human develop a conversational search style where the dog drives the direction of the search and the human acts in service of the dog’s needs, sometimes subtly seeking confirmation or additional information to understand what the dog needs and how to meet the need; such as providing a supportive presence to overcome a physical barrier, showing agreement to move on from an unproductive space, providing positive feedback when the dog is struggling with split focus, and pausing or ending a search based on a repeated pattern of behavior.
In the arena of the scent work search, I’ve come across so many dog and handler teams who have mentored me in the art of coaching. Years ago, I vowed to come up with a completely unique way of interacting with each dog that I coached – a game, a reward, a search exercise – something that fit that dog perfectly and would be wholeheartedly received by the dog and reciprocated through the act of searching for odor with maximum joy. Reggie the black lab was one of my favorites.
I was fishing for some ideas for Reggie, a chill dude for a lab – very aware of his environment and sensitive to it – and I asked his human, Maureen, what he’d like more than anything. She said he’d love praise from everyone in the room after his search. So, we gave him what I call the social circle or the rockstar treatment after he finished his search. Watching Reggie wiggle his whole body and dance from person to person as we all cheered for him in a circle made all of so happy for him. Right after the social circle, I sent Reggie the Rockstar outside to do a vehicle search. This dog was so enthusiastic he nearly pulled the bumper off of my truck indicating a hide! Reggie wanted another standing ovation and he suspected odor would be his ticket to the party. We cheered him on again for that encore performance.
For humans, I’ve tried to come up with a variety of scent work games that help people problem solve both within the constraints of the sport of scent work and beyond the constructs of the sport or activity. Without a very willing group of students over the years I’d have no one to help me develop and refine these games. One of my favorite games is called “what if”. This game introduces a constraint on the search just before the team begins working. Once, I told a human with a golden, “what if you had to load one hand with treats and hold it flat/parallel to the ground like a server carrying a drink tray and keep it in that position the whole search, including to reward your dog?” She looked at me for 20 seconds, then lit up, ran off to her cabin and returned with peanut butter smeared all over her hand. She and her dog searched for 3 hides and she dipped to the ground and let him lick her hand after each find. Both dog and human experienced an energy in that search that neither had experienced before. It was inspiring!
What I learned from Reggie and others is that if we really truly have a goal of seeing our dogs have fun, we have to meet them where they think fun lives – which might not always be in the same zip code as the sport of scent work. I also learned that if you ask questions to the humans you’re coaching or if you put them in open-ended challenges, you’ll often find they have the best answers and problem-solving skills to help their canine partners and themselves to experience maximum joy.
One last thought from my time spent as a coach: many people are coaches without ever realizing it! In the past couple of years I have tried to role swap with the humans I coach (I’ve had people role swap with dogs and become searchers of a hidden twenty dollar bill!), having them place hides, having me run their dogs blind, removing the barrier between coach and student so each of us is free to drive change throughout the searching experience. Happily, this very thing happened in a recent workshop. A student began to wonder what might happen if we altered the search space for some of the remaining dogs working a very complex grouping of hides. Supporting her curiosity became the most important goal. The more we awaken the coach in each student, the better our ideas will be for dogs and the humans who search behind them.
Walk like an Egyptian. Search like a Rockstar. Turn your hand into a slice of bread and slather it with peanut butter. Let someone see something in you and infuse you with excitement over that vision. Be the person who gives someone a vision of what is possible. Share in the excitement of the journey.
Happy Sniffing!
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