Hello and welcome to the swim brief. I'm Chris DeSantis, and today I am joined by the director of Gain Swim. He's also an assistant high performance coach at the Sarasota Sharks. And he's on the podcast for the second time live from Disney World. Hello. Chris Webb, how are you?
SPEAKER_00I'm well, thank you. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's an honor.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm excited to do this again, and I'm excited for what we're going to talk about. You listen to the end of this, you're going to talk about, we're going to talk very specifically about something that we're doing in cooperation. I'm getting involved in some game stuff. I'm really excited about it. We're going to give specific details on that. But where I want to start this is I just want to talk about some stuff. I guess, you know, if I could like, Chris's podcast outlines are always like, hey, here's me observing from afar, and then I have more questions. I always want to contextualize stuff. I think that was the that was the origin of our first podcast. But in this case, in terms of what we're going to be doing together, I actually really appreciate you took some time, like pretty much an hour with me to give me some background on some gain stuff. And I saw so many parallels with what I'm trying to create. And I thought they'd be worth discussing here. I'll cheat by asking you questions about gain, and then it'll allow me to explain maybe to my audience a little bit better some of what I'm trying to do. So let me just ask you some questions about one of the themes that I saw coming through. You're talking about the origins of Gain and Burn Gambetta and, you know, even the sort of the pre-gain era of everything. And one of the things that I noticed that I want to talk about a bit is the way that I describe this is I think that one of the things that's really important about Gain is that it's a it's a training model. And I want to distinguish that from a rehabilitative model. Something I talk a lot about in terms of positive psychology is that we have a lot of psychology, a lot of knowledge out there that is built off a rehabilitative model. And there's absolutely a role to play for rehabilitation, right? You're gonna like if I get in a car accident, I want a rehabilitation. If I suffer like an injury, I want a rehabilitation. If I'm struggling with serious mental illness, I want a rehabilitation, but it's not applicable to all situations, right? In an athletic context, you have a lot of athletes who are just trying to, I guess for lack of a better term, they're trying to build capacity. From wherever they are right now, they're trying to build something greater. Talk a little bit about how you see that through the lens of what gain is doing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'll first I'll comment a little bit on your on your opening statement there about being um a little bit more of a teaching and proactive piece. I think about this uh in two very specific ways, a comment and things that people will understand. The first one would be a quote from Louis Simmons, which is weak things break. Uh, I think that people can understand that. Uh so if you're strong to begin with, look, strong things break too, but a lot less often. So if you take care to build strong kids emotionally, mentally, and because I believe heavily in what's called the biopsychosocial model in medicine, in training, in pretty much everything, which is a uh, for lack of a better term, it is a holistic version of how you should be training athletes and building strong people. Uh, the other quote that I like to use, it's from the Bible. I'm I'm no strong Christian, but I remember reading this. It was it's a lot easier to build strong children than it is to fix broken men. And I think that that is just you know a little good uh tidbit of wisdom. And I think that we're trying to do that at Gain, which stands for the Gambetta Athletic Improvement Network, which is founded by Vern Gambetta, who is our patron saint and our chief curiosity officer, self-proclaimed, which is he doesn't want to be CEO, he wants to be founder and chief curiosity officer. And I think that he discovered years ago when he began his journey when he first left the Mets in professional sports in the late 80s, early 90s. I believe that he started his weekly clin uh his weekly worldwide clinics, and they were called Building and Rebuilding. And they are about building a healthy athlete. And then also the parallels, like you said, sometimes you have to rebuild someone. And those are two worlds that are interlocked. They are not, you cannot separate the two, but you're a lot better off, just like in proactive health, you're a lot better off staying healthy than you are relying on modern medicine to fix you when you're broken. You're much better off, and you can avoid a lot more problems if you're highly educated and proactive, and your ability to stay healthy and be healthy, then rely on a medicalized system which specializes in treating disease. And then because then you end up on a uh you end up on the treatment hamster wheel, so to speak, which is very prevalent, and a lot of people draw parallels to that in the wellness community. You can end up on this injury to rehabilitation treadmill, whether it's physically, socially, emotionally, whatever it is, and then you end up feeling like you're not making any progress, and that's because a lot of that, those systems are set up to treat symptoms and they don't go to root causes. They like to shove towels in a leaky ceiling rather than going on the roof and being like, hey, here's how you make a strong roof so it never leaks inside your house.
SPEAKER_02Right. At best, it's gonna get you back to zero, but it's not gonna get you into the positive, right? And I I think you know, when I hear you lead off, you're talking about weak things break. I actually one of the models that I think is really applicable to this. And um, I was looking through your bio and I was I was remembering Dan McCarthy, who had a chance to talk to in his role a bit at USA Swimming. Um and I know Dan, uh Dan, if you're listening to this podcast, I want to shout out to a fellow Nassim uh Nicholas Taleb reader. He's got an awesome book that I recommend to so many people. It's called Anti-Fragile. And the concept of it, right, is exactly what you said fragile things when they're exposed to unforeseen adversity, they break. And we tend to think of the opposite of fragile, right, as like durable, like resistant to harm when they're exposed to those stress. But that's not the opposite of fragile. The opposite of being fragile is actually being exposed to those unforeseen stresses and getting stronger in the process. And that's what we're trying to do basically from a training perspective with anything. We're trying to set people up so that, yeah, when they do face adversity, when they do face stressful moments in whatever they're doing, that they grow from those, that they're able to get stronger, get a bigger capacity, return to the next time they face those things with more in the tank, rather than have those events be debilitating, right? And and make them even more fragile than they were in the future. And I think that that's a model that applies to what you guys are doing, and a model that I try to apply to what I'm doing as well. In that respect. So when I follow you guys on social media, one of the things I notice is like I have this visceral reaction. You'll often share, you know, just videos of people doing things with their body, like cool stuff, like I don't know how else to describe it, right? Like unconventional stuff. And one of the things that I find myself just noticing broaderly, like in a broader way culturally, but it is also coming to sport, is that there's almost become a feticization of safety, right? And so when I'm watching some of these, I can picture somebody being like, Well, you shouldn't do that because like that'll mess up your shoulder and you shouldn't do that. That that'll like that'll ruin your knees. How do you think about that stuff filtering in and affecting what kinds of programming you guys recommend?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot to unpack in there. I'll I'll I'm just gonna go directly with this question, but I I would tell you that first thing is, and this isn't a correction, the stuff that I post traditionally, well, one, let me, I'm just a coach. We don't have a social media person, so I'm sure that there's, you know, hey, why don't you guys follow a plan? And like sometimes we do, but in general, what I'm trying to do when I see those things and I post them, it's not just something that I see that I'm like, oh, look how fun. What I'm doing with what I would consider to be a skilled eye at this point in my 26th year of full-time coaching is I'm seeing something that fits what's needed. And I'm saying, hey, look at this. This is the functional pathway. This is more functional, this is the functional pathway. Now, because I would also tell you a lot of the stuff that I post, those are traditional training methods. And when I mean tradition, I mean original training methods.
SPEAKER_02Stuff we've gotten away from.
SPEAKER_00Correct, because what you're looking at now in general is a physical model that's based on the medicalized model and the scientific model, which they have hijacked movement because they're good at it and they have money behind them, and they're more professional than coaches and movement experts tended to be. And I don't want to get and you know, with physical education as the basis of all sport and athletic development, you can see that we've kind of gone far, far from those particular models. Um, and I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. That's that's a seven-part podcast. You can have, and you can have Vernon or Jeremy Frisch or some other people that are experts in some of those things who would passionately talk about them. But um I post that because the social media landscape is, for lack of a better term, it is a toilet bowl of sensationalized movements and people. And what I would tell your listeners, and especially young coaches or people who are becoming involved in this or who are interested, is to understand that social media is the is is going to be the place where we find the new experts, which in my opinion is influence, influencers are next generation's experts. And it's not because they're experts, it's because of what I would term as packaging and positioning. So in marketing, you would talk about how is the product packaged? Well, they package it very well, they understand the landscape of social media and positioning is they know how to get into your stream, they know how the snippets, they know these things. So they've done business industry standards, but it would be like walking into a Roost Chris steakhouse, sitting down, and you're like, oh my god, everything is good. They got me in the door, I'm sitting down, I have white tablecloth, I have service, and they bring you out a piece of beef jerky. And that's what, unfortunately, if you dig deep enough, that's what you find. If anybody takes offense to it, I've told people, go ahead, come to Sarah, fly to Sarasota, or fly to San Francisco, sit with me and Vern, and we'll we'll give you a lesson. Or we'll tell you whether or not your product is any good, because there has to be somebody out there who gives truth tellers. Very often I'll comment on people's stuff and they'll just say, Well, there's always a hater. And I said, Look, I'm not hating on you, but you have to understand if you have 250,000 followers and you're saying this is red and it's blue, like, say sorry, man, like I'm here to tell you it's not.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. You know, uh, you're pointing to something like so two weeks before this podcast came out, um, I had Jake Gibbons, who works at Bowls, on here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he's a nice kid. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he's a great guy. He's got a great social media following. And I, you know, I find myself also like listen with with he's got 54,000 on Instagram, I'm at 750. And so it's easy for me to be like, oh, well, social media sucks and and right, but I also force myself to think about the fact that, like, okay, if what you've just said is correct, how can I better, if I think I have the knowledge that really will help people, that's legit, that's not, you know, just like uh the equivalent of beef jerky out of roots cris. I love that analogy, right? If I think I'm serving real prime beef in terms of my advice, how do I uh what is what is copiable, I guess, for me and what is replicable from what those guys are doing to get their message out there, right? Where I can get my message to more people without compromising on the stuff that I think is important, which is the actual valuable information. And I have a hard time with that because I I think like if you're honest on social media, it doesn't really work, right? You know, you have to offer all sorts of qualifications and you you you know you can't be as definitive. So to what extent do you, you know, think like do you think, okay, like I'm gonna play the game, I'm going to, you know, do what it takes to get this information out there and to to expose more people to the right stuff. And to what extent you go, like, listen, if that's a line I have to cross, I'm fine with reaching less people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. First thing I'll start off with is someone like Jake. Uh it's that, and this isn't this isn't this is a benign statement. There is no question that Jake has much less experience than you and myself. And that's just the fact of age. It's just he just hasn't done this long enough to have a lot of experience. Now, having said that, he is he is at a place that is a place of excellence. And he is around and someone who is helping administer and facilitate excellence on a daily basis. It won't be long before his expertise catches up to his following. Right? So maybe it's outpacing that right now. And Jake, if you take if uh hopefully there's no offense taken there because it's not meant to be any. Uh I think he he recognizes that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But he's around Peter Vierhoff, and Peter started his first year coaching at Team Elite when I was uh the director of senior performance at Swim Mat Carolina. And so I was at Peter at the beginning of his coaching career, and I can tell you that Peter has become better and better. He has Alexis Keddo, who's been around all over the place. Uh Alexis understands a lot of these pieces of sport, so there is a difference. There is a difference, and what some of our beef jerky peddlers are doing. One is that Jake is adjacent to some high-level excellence, and his content, and some of the reason you have 54,000 followers is because people want to watch it because it's relevant and it's good. His content is good and relevant, and it's not like Peter Vierhoff's gonna go out there and do it. Peter is running a giant he's running. Peter doesn't have time for that. He doesn't have time for that. It's something that Jake loves, it's his passion point. So go ahead and go for it. He understands packaging and positioning, and he is adjacent and involved in an excellent product. So from a business standpoint, which I am no giant businessman, but it's not hard to see why Jake is able to do that. Great content, adjacent to greatness, he's good at what he does, and he's gaining experience daily. And he you add that to packaging and positioning, that's what you're doing. He and he set out to do that. I d I I would never know that by talking to you or following your podcast that you ever set out to become that, to grab a great follower. Now, I'll tell you this is what a people that I've been involved with in the gang community over the years have always said, which is um there's a very big difference between proselytizing, you know, and then just getting fought gaining followers through word of mouth. Uh and one thing is, you know, it used to be you could stand outside your church or your brand and be like, hey, come on in, come on in. Like, hey, you come in, come in through our doors. This is where you want to be. I'm telling you, come inside, listen to our message, you know, and you can spend time doing that. But if you really want to have a great message, you have to stay focused on what you're doing. And look, the doors to your church, so to speak, they're open. And when people walk by, if they like what they hear, they'll walk in the door. And that's what Vern has done for years. And we've tried to add a little bit of marketing to it because a man's got to eat, but exactly. You cannot live on words alone. You can't live on good ideas alone. So you do have to have a little balance in it, but you have to be careful because you can get out of balance. And having a healthy struggle between sales, marketing, and then messages. But I can tell you the small steakhouse that makes great stakes that never that never strays away from their message and stays connected to their ethos, they don't go out of business very often.
SPEAKER_02No. And and I think one of the things I really like about the podcast is, yeah, maybe it does have a smaller, like, reach, raw reach in terms of number of people than some of these other things. But I know I've got about 2,000 subscribers. Podcast gets about 10,000 downloads a month. Makes sense because I, you know, put about one out every week. Those 2,000 people are hardcore. Like when I run into somebody who consistently listens to the podcast, it's a much more, it's much, I think, much more of a devoted following than like, you know, somebody you follow on Instagram, right? Because you're listening, you're not listening to short form content. You're sitting down for an hour and listening to me have a conversation with another person. And that's a different level of commitment than scrolling on your phone, you know, and like lingering over a reel for for 30 seconds, 45 seconds a minute for whatever. So, you know, that is one thing that I take into account. And let me ask you something, uh switch bases a little bit. One of the things that I was talking to Jake about was envy, and I have to confess something that I am envious about with regards to you, and that is that you have one foot in this, let's say, this coaching education world through gain, and then you also continue to have an on-deck, like day-to-day coaching presence at Sarasota. I think that's really, really super cool. So, talk to me a little bit about how that came to be, how you balance all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'll go dark first, but we're and then we'll get off it. I'm a forty I'm a 47-year-old single man. So I have no kids, I have no wife. It's lonely existence. So we'll let's just stop that part there and then we'll move on.
SPEAKER_02You have you have more time than me. That's that's for sure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And that's that those are those are some facts. I've made some huge sacrifices in my life and made some choices that allow me to do that. And now I'll look back and maybe I think, oh, geez, I wish I couldn't do that, but I'm gonna go ahead and make as much lemonade out of the lemons that I have. And one of those things is uh I'm able to do that. Now, there is a little bit of a reason why I'm doing it, and that's explainable uh such. I took a break for mental health in 2007, uh, 18. I stopped coaching, I was the head coach at T2 Aquatics after leaving Fort Collins, building a gold medal swim club there, going to Naples, working there. It was supposed to be kind of like a sunset in easy street, high money, high value situation. And it really just turned out that when I was 40 years old, I was like, I just ended up in a crisis situation and quit, moved back to Fort Collins, took off for a year, traveled around, didn't work, pulled myself together. Uh, I started helping Vern out with gain, which is kind of my genesis of helping Vern with gain, was just with the swim teams as he was getting older and gathering more and more teams and such. I was just helping him with that, editing some stuff. I went back to my home club at Fort Collins, which I consider my home club, and Mike Nivell, who was my head edge group coach, became the head coach. And I said, Look, man, I'm I'm looking to coach just a little bit, whatever. I went back and helped. And let me tell you something, Chris. Coaching is a perishable skill, and I was rusty and I was bad at it, and I was only off the deck for 18 months. So one of the reasons that I'm coaching full as full time as you can is because I believe that if you're not coaching, I have a hard time, and I mean almost every day. If you're not coaching real, and I mean you don't have real skin in this game, like you're gonna have to look in someone's eye at the end of a season, at the end of a career, and say, Man, I messed up or whatever it is. Uh I don't think you should really be giving that many people advice on coaching because the profession will pass you by. And I've found that you will not know how to relate to kids. Now, principles are few, methods are plenty, but one of the things we need to be able to do is I can identify and tell people, if I'm not coaching, hey, you should find your principles, you know, hey, move towards your value system, go to first principles. But one of your useful, one of your useful functions as a coach advisor is to tell people, hey, here's a method you should try. And if the last time you coached was 1971, whacking the kid upside of the head with a kickboard is not a useful method. Now, metaphorically, it might be a useful method, but you have to know what that that method actually is. And the only way to know that is to be someone who's using what's called practice knowledge versus written knowledge. Practice knowledge lasts forever. Written knowledge, which would be the last thing you could do, is tell people about what you did, that only lasts for like a generation. So you're only useful for your shelf life is short if you're not coaching. So that's my long-winded way of saying I found it that it was essential if I was going to give people advice. And some of the people who come to us for advice, this isn't a two to horn, they're the best swim coaches and operators in the world. If I'm gonna give Chris Plum a piece of advice who has high school age Olympians, and I'm not working with Summer Macintosh or national junior teamers or junior world medalists on a daily basis, who do I think I am? Who do I really think I am? Oh, I built a gold medal swim club. That's cool. What have you done for me lately? And unfortunately, in team sports and youth sports and swimming, that's one of the two things that people, it's one of our dark sides. One is what have you done for me lately, which we all hold against people. I think that has to do with insecurity. On coach's points. You know, and the second thing, which I I always think is hilarious in coaching, which is if you have a light bulb in a room and you have a coach changing the light bulb, what do you have? Well, you have one guy changing the light bulb and a whole room full of people who say, I could change that light bulb better. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's like I could have done that better than him. So I think there's always this, you have to stay current, you have to stay relevant. And the best way for me to stay current and relevant when I speak to coaches like this, whether it's coaching dry land or whether we're just doing dry land programming or trying to do coaches' education through the master path, which is what you'll be involved in, is I'm trying to get as many master practitioners mixed with application of practicing your craft. And that's my number one goal inside the master path is being the here's how you actually apply this craft to your day-to-day coaching.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I I what you're saying there really speaks to me because I mean, just given the situation that I'm in married, I got two kids at home. I I have not found a way to do what I'm doing now and really like have a day-to-day presence coaching at the same time. So it's interesting. I I think about this a lot. Like, how am I going to balance that things? Because I do think maybe I don't have quite as pessimistic a view as you in terms of the perishability of coaching skills, but I but I think that I think it's definitely valid. I I well it came back to me, Chris. It came back, but it took a while. Yeah. I think it I think it comes back. I also think sometimes uh, you know, it's maybe this is just an innovation for because I've been solely in one. But what I noticed is I had a period where I I started working for myself. I went out, I was uh, you know, doing positive psychology work in teams. And I think for the first time ever, uh I had a little bit of time to actually reflect on how I coached. You know, like when you're coaching full-time day-to-day, you just don't naturally spend a lot of time reflecting. It's always on to the next thing. So I do think that that helps me kind of recharge when I'm in one of these periods when I'm working as a coach consultant. I do a lot of reflection on coaching and it gives me a lot of ideas to come back with that I probably wouldn't have come up with, and vice versa. When I'm coaching day to day, that's where I kind of refuel for a period of being a coach consultant because I'm exposed to new situations that I wasn't the last time, or I get to new places that I wasn't the last time, and I'm like, okay, I I know what I'm gonna say to somebody when I'm in that situation down the line in some other scenario. So I think I think there's that value to it, but I think I'm really happy you said it first because people get confused all the time. They look at what I'm doing right now and I've I've gotten more successful, I've gotten more busy, and they're like, oh, you've gotten things taking off. Like you're just gonna ride this forever. And I keep on going, like, yeah, I'll probably be back coaching in a couple years or they're like, Why would you do that? I go, Because again, I know at some point I'm going to have a really, really hard time empathizing with coaches. And by empathizing, I think really understanding what it is they're dealing with on a daily basis. And when I when I lose that, then I can't really do what I'm doing right now. I just uh I can't I can't do it honestly. I mean, I could still present information, but yeah, as you said, like it that information too has its uh shelf life in terms of uh relevancy.
SPEAKER_00I'll go to another dark, I'll another dark piece because which is I'm an addict. I'm addicted to coaching. I'm addicted to this. I'm addicted to the rise and fall roller coaster ride of from season to season, from best swim to injury to rising out of the ashes like a phoenix to doing something that someone said you couldn't do to building a program from scratch. Oh, no one can win in Colorado. You'll never win there. They're coach killers, okay? Watch me. Oh, yeah, watch me. Oh, you can't, you you could never do that. High school's too powerful there. We'll win a high school championship. Well, you can't win junior, we'll win juniors. You can't be gold medal, we'll be gold medal. I love those things are addicting. And you know, I was on the deck with Carol Capitani, and she asked me, she said, Will you ever go back to head coaching? And I said, Well, right now I'm very happy with what I'm doing because it allows me to get a taste. You know, you're just getting a taste. But yeah, exactly. There's a there is something that happens when you're in charge and you're in charge of every rise and fall, and you are literally, you know, on edge of seat every swim, every lap of every race at a championship meet with these kids, and there's a toll that comes with it. And I paid the tolls, and I'm not sure that I'm ready for that. So right now I'm feeling very blessed. And Mike Nivell, who's now at USA Swimming, he told me, he said, Well, the game thing is great because you were affecting 300 kids, you know, 200, 300 kids at a time. But now, if you can impart your passion to other young coaches who are interested in what would I call not elite, that would be the wrong way to do it. That would be the wrong way to call it. But I would say coaches interested in personal excellence and coaching excellence is that you know I can I can help thousands of kids, tens of thousands of kids, if I can just pass my flame, my my little match stick, as you know, we only get one life, and our matchstick is going down like this, and it'll be out. But if we can touch that match stick to other matches, we're touching more and then touch it to as many piles of wood as we can. You know, our our idea, we live on through our ideas. So it's like if you can impart great ideas, you'll live on in some in some crazy way. And if your ideas are good and they're and they're and they're true and they're they're um you know, altruistic and they make the world better, then like that's a good thing. And that gets me up every day. And my what's my personal mission as an adult, you know, when I was down in my deepest doldrums was I have very specific knowledge about a specific subject, and it's worth me, it's there are ideas worth knowing, and I exist to spread those ideas to people who can make the world a better place. And and it's swimming, you know, it's it's swimming, it's athletic development, it's coaching education. I have a very specific skill set. I'm not Liam Neeson, but I have a very specific set of skills. It's like I I kind of give myself that talk when I'm down in the dumps and my ideas are worth spreading.
SPEAKER_02That make me a nightmare for people like you, right? Just to complete it. It's funny you use the addiction metaphor because um I tell people all the time when I introduce myself when I'm out doing a speaking engagement. Um Chris, can I stop you can I stop you real quick?
SPEAKER_00And as a professional, do you do you really think that it's a metaphor? No, I'm about to tell you, right?
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay, it's real, right? Okay. I'm about to tell you I totally agree. I people think it's a joke, but I introduce myself when I'm out at those places, I go, I'm a recovering coach. You know, in the same way somebody would say recovering alcoholic. Like I I think once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, once a coach, always a coach. And it is an addiction. And I think I had a friend uh who phrased it to me that way once, and I thought about it for a second and I said, Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. Because, you know, I think one of the things that characterizes addiction is you look at it and you go, uh, you know, uh you have this compulsion uh to do something and you just hope uh it doesn't uh uh you know it's not destructive uh to you, it's not destructive to the people you care about. And like that to me describes to a T my relationship to coaching. Like I I am so passionate about coaching, I want to do it. The reason why I'm not on the deck day to day is because I'm afraid of the how destructive it would be to my family. That's why. Yeah, I'm a junkie. I agree. Yeah, yeah, and I'm just gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_00How many divorced coaches are there because they're junkies?
SPEAKER_02I love my wife very much and I want to stay married to her for a very long time. And I'm not sure that if I were head coach of a team somewhere, that that would be the case. So as much as I go, like, yeah, I would love to be back coaching, I always have to balance that piece of it on the other end and say, Yeah, there's other things I want to. I want to have a good relationship with my kids.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I agree. I mean, Mavericks walk a lonely path and uh it's lonely at the top, you can't lead from the crowd. Those are all little silly metaphor, you know, little little silly things that people say, but they're true. Um, I gave a talk on coach wellness at the national select camp maybe six or seven years ago. I wasn't supposed to be on that, but I chose to like move the subject to that. I don't know, I am not actually sure. I gave a similar talk after that. After that, hijacking when I was supposed to speak at the National Select Camp, uh Frank Bush had me speak, and Dan McCarthy and Matt Barbini had me speak with Ian Murray at the National Team Coaches Convention on a very similar subject, but I talked a little bit about some of the hypocrisy and some of the things that I saw as a lonely road, a lonely tough road ahead of us in coaching. And I had an almost completely bifurcated room of coaches who'd coached less than 10 years and coaches who had coached more than 10 years, talking about like, hey man, you better be careful about this profession. You better be careful, you better know what you're getting yourself into, all this other stuff. And the people who were under 10 years of coaching were like, You guys are weak. I can handle it, I'll put this on my shoulders. And almost everybody, I mean there was a guy in here who'd coached for 50 years. He was like 85 years old, and he said, after my third wife and my second heart attack, like the story of the people who had coached over 10 years kept telling the same stories, and it was almost like the people who coached under 10 years, they just didn't listen. They're like, Well, you know, I had a heart attack on deck, or blah, blah, blah. And you're like, oh, it's like addiction to the point that you will allow all your normal, um you will allow all the normal normal human behaviors to literally fall to the wayside to get the next hit, whether it's dopamine, like it's a your professional, I don't know whether it's dopamine or what it is, but like you are literally, you'll sacrifice anything to get that next hit.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, how many coaches, not to keep going down this dark road, but like even as I'm saying that, you talk about an 85-year-old coach. How many coaches do you know that basically died on deck? Now, they didn't literally die on deck, but they they were coaching the day before they died or the two weeks before they died. Like, and uh the one factor in it is certainly the economics. You know, there's a lot of coaches who maybe can't afford to retire, but I don't think that explains everything. I think that there's there's a certain they just can't stop. They just can't stop.
SPEAKER_00I hope to die on deck, to be honest. And I I love coaching. I mean, yeah, I mean I and what I mean by that is not literally, I don't want to traumatize by the way.
SPEAKER_02But you want to be cook still actively coaching when you die.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I can't imagine doing anything else. Like I can only imagine wilting away in some wheelchair somewhere, like with nothing. I'd be like writing swim practices or something, you know, in my in Braille or something. I I don't know, but um that's really what I'm hoping to be able to do. Because I I I but if I can uh have a much healthier relationship with the sport, which is what I've done, and shout out to Brent Arkey, the head coach of the Sarasota Sharks, who I've been friends with for a long time. When I chose to do this, he said, look, the only way we're gonna do this is if you can have a healthy relationship with the sport and not an unhealthy one like you used to have.
SPEAKER_02Right. So he put some guardrails on you from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. He's meany.
SPEAKER_02He's a meanie. To an extent.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Only to an extent, because he has the same problem that we have, unfortunately. Absolutely. Let's let's conclude. I want to talk about this master path stuff. Uh again, you can tell I'm not a master marketer. I should have said more about it up front. Maybe I'll like record a topper or something for people to that they know um what we're talking about and they don't have to listen all the way to the end of the podcast to get into it. This is uh, as I understand it, a relatively it's not brand new, but it's a relatively new thing that Gain is doing. Give my audience an idea of what you guys have tried to set up because you know, you have all sorts of different levels of gain, right? You have people that are, you know, like for lack of a better term, your client clubs. You have this annual clinic, you have this ongoing education master path stuff. So talk to a little bit about where this sits in the framework of what you guys are doing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the first thing I would say is what we're trying to be is the global leaders in coaches education in sports performance, athletic development, and swim coaching. So that's kind of you know, how do you do that? Well, we have three pillars through which, or three levers through which we pull. Our first lever, which is what we're known for the unfortunately we're known for the most, which is doing strength and conditioning for people. And that and that's probably where this first bug or this little burr in our saddle came, which is, you know, Vern was a coach educator, he was a teacher, he was a head coach. It just so happened, he knew so much, he ended up as the strength guy in all these different sports with the Chicago Bulls, with the White Sox, with the Mets in professional soccer, with the World Cup team, blah, blah, blah. Um, sometimes you get typecasted into a role, and the whole time Vern would just say, Look, I'm a coach, I'm an educator. Hey guys, I'm a coach, I'm an educator. Um they're like, Okay, strength guy, barbell guy. And they're like, dang it. Um so this is kind of an outcrop of that, but we're we're our first pillar is doing high performance consulting, typically for USA swimming clubs, colleges, and NGBs around the world, as an educational institution, teaching people about athletic development, what athletic development is, what it isn't, and giving, yeah, giving sets and reps based on individual programs' needs, and then basically backing off over a three-year span so that we teach them to be masters. The whole premise of our program is yes, we do feed a man a fish at first, and then we, while we're in parallel teaching you how to fish, so by the third year, for you it's your program, it's you, and we're stepping as far away. Now, where did the master path? Where did our second lever come from? Our second lever came from the idea of once someone has become a legacy program from us, where do they go? How do we congregate? And it was actually Mark Bennett at Clovis who said, Well, how do I tap into the end, our enduring advantage of game, the network? N is our enduring advantage. We have our we have our creative inspiration, which is the G in game, Vern, but N is our enduring advantage. Where do I find the head coaches list? And it's like it kind of happened organically. All of our coaches, usually all our teams sit in the same places at major meets, all that type of stuff. And then, you know, we kind of got this kind of off-color thing, which I consider to be good and bad, which is people started calling us the game mafia, which because we sit in the corner, we talk to ourselves, we train all of our, you know, all of our kids. It's like, you know, you all see us doing our silly stuff. But that's our second piece, that's our second lever, you know, is this masterclass piece, which is what do we do for ongoing education. We saw some faults early on with the the end of John Leonard and the beginning of Jen Lamont's time at ASCA, which we've reconciled and and and have been more synergistic with, but we still feel there's a missing network intimate uh coaching uh gap in education, all levels of education, but specifically for newer coaches who want to be involved in high performance coaching as a lifestyle. And so we've put together an extremely durable curriculum based on the teachings and writings of Verne and some of the best educators in sport, including Wade Gilbert, who wrote probably the best preeminent text called Coaching Better Every Season. And he'll be on, he will be on to plug Wade Gilbert, he will be on this upcoming Wednesday talking about effective program evaluation. So we have created this online network to continually, first it was just something for our customers, our current and our previous customers to continually be involved with each other, and then we just found a niche place like look, think about ASCA on steroids for high performance, where in all in one place in an application hosted by Mighty Networks, where you can ask Chris Plum any question you want, and he'll get back to you on your phone or on your desktop, all in one place. And then all of our legacy programs have their own private spaces inside of this. So now they have their own little ecosystems where they can share. And when coaches are sharing, kids are winning. I actually stole that from Brendan Hansen, but when two coaches talk, an athlete wins. And we want that. And our big promise is that we can take a first-year coach, we can give them five to seven years of experience if they follow our master path curriculum. That's our bold promise, and we believe it. We believe it because we have only the best practitioners in the world speaking in their monthly themes, talking with each other, uh, having discussions, reading articles, and doing it in the palm of your hand, which is easy for today's generation. Desktop, which kind of is a bridge between the old fuddy duddies that we still have kind of. Standard desktop band. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like, and I'm a straddle. I mean, we're I guess we're probably straddling both of those things, you know. Um so that's our second pillar, and then our third pillar is our in-person clinics, which we've done for a long time. Our flagship event is our annual coaches clinic in Carmel, Indiana, which we host typically at the end of August, beginning of September. And that is where people come together and we spend most of our time talking about education, how do you coach coaches, how do you become a better swim coach, but we do it through the lens of athletic development. So we do a lot of it based on our dry land consulting. How do you coach kids better? How do you actually learn the basics of physical education, so on and so forth? So our three pillars in gain are our mighty network, which is our coaches' education platform, uh, our in-person clinics, and our private consulting, which is typically based on coaches, once again, coaches' education, not just here's some workouts, but hey, we want to educate you, how can we make your program better and turn it into your own?
SPEAKER_02And that online network, you know, where am I following Wade Gilbert, by the way? That sounds very intimidating.
SPEAKER_00You are are you next Wednesday?
SPEAKER_02No, no, no.
SPEAKER_00No, two Wednesday. Okay. Yeah, you'll be following Wade. Don't worry, don't worry. We had Wayne Goldsmith, Wayne Gilbert, uh Rock, Dr. Rock King. I mean, you'll be following. So what we do this, and this is kind of, I guess you're you're a part of this, or someday you will be, we wanted uh small asks from big people. And when you're Vern Gambetta and you literally are a Titan in sports performance, and you are a Titan in the world of sports for with over 50 years of experience. If we want a list of professionals to talk that are vetted professionals, not from social media, we I can go to Vern and I just ask, I because of our relationship uh with regular gain, which I think our last one will be this year, uh probably sometime in June or July. We're gonna do our last all-sport, the entire world, which is what our clinics were based on, Vern's annual clinic, which it's gonna be called The Last Dance. I met all these people. I met the head of, we had Dean Benton yesterday, who's the head of Australian rugby. Yeah. You know, who's now back with back with the Brisbane Broncos, who just you know were just first and the Melbourne Storm, who were first and second in you know in rugby, in rugby union. So I can call them and ask, will you come on and speak about this? Which is why I think our system is so valuable. It's not based on fads, it's not based on the murky information smog that you can get caught up in. It's not based on shiny things. It's based on strong pedagogy and values and people who have been in the competitive arena in all of the adjacent fields which have been identified as the most important pieces for a coach to be successful. And we've done everything we can to get a big dog, people who are from our sport who understand it, and then practical coaching application so the coaches can be successful on a daily basis.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And for I feel for you. I know, I feel honored. I mean, you know, just listening to the list of people presenting, um I'm honored to be a part of it. I'm really excited. It's gonna be November 5th, noon. Okay. So I'm excited. For for for people who for my listeners, if you want to catch me there, right? People can join. You don't have to be a legacy member.
SPEAKER_00You can join the You don't have to be a legacy member. If you're a swim coach, we have two different ways to join now. You can join us as a single membership, which is $110 a month, or it's got a it's got a large discount, and which is really well large discount if you pay for the whole year up front. Or you can join, which which has just coaching privileges. Now we have a total team consulting, or we have a total team package, which is for a giant swim club. So all their coaches, let's you have 20 coaches, 20 coaches get access to all of this. It's just $376 a month, which is the entire coaching curriculum year-round. It's also access to video, our video log of all of our in-person clinics that we have. So you get access to all of our dry land clinics, our video libraries, all of our lecture talks, everything that we have, and you have access to all the coaches from David Marsh down to little old me, all in one hand. And when you do join as um a total team consult uh total team hub uh member, 376, you get your your team gets its own private space inside the network.
SPEAKER_02Wow. Okay, and uh we're getting to the end of the podcast. So where where should people go if they want to get more information about everything you just listed? Where do they go?
SPEAKER_00Oh my god, yeah. You could you can just go to gainswim.com, and that's our front facing page. What you're gonna see on top there is a way to enter the network, which will give you information on our actual network piece, which is hosted by Mighty Networks, which is a community-based application, which is where we do a lot of our which is where the master path is located. There's also links in there about doing consulting with us, whether you're just looking for a gap analysis, whether you're interested in dry land consulting, or you're just interested in us doing coaches education for you. Um, and then usually we put our annual clinic events also on there. That's where you can find us. You can always find us on social media. I think it's like Gain underscore swim. Just search it. Instagram, we're on there some of the times. Yeah, you'll find it, no problem. And we have links to all of our services inside of there as well. Uh, you can also just email me, Chris at thegaynetwork.com, if you have any questions. Feel free. I have a I have a calendar scheduler in there. If anybody just wants to know what we can do for you, I'll meet with anybody for free. You want to talk about your dry land program? Come on. I I love talking about swimming. I tell people, hey, I don't think this is for us. That's cool. Just uh schedule, let's talk about dry land. I want to talk to somebody.
SPEAKER_02So I think that's how you and I talked over the summer, is I just booked time and you called me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So for people who want to reach out to me, you got questions, you got comments about the podcast, you want to nominate somebody to be on here, you you know, you want to be an assistant producer and give me feedback. If you go to chrisdcoach.com, you can fill out a contact form there. Otherwise, go to Instagram, Chris D underscore coach. You can find clips of this podcast mainly. I'm trying to put a little bit more of myself out there than I did before. I'm taking some advice from from Jake Gibbons in that respect. Always incorporating something from I learn a lot from doing this podcast. You know, part of this is just me uh recording my own journey learning stuff. But Chris, thank you for joining us. I hope you have a great day at Epcot. I hope you eat some good food. Thank you to everybody for listening, and I'll be back with you guys again in a week.
SPEAKER_00Yep, thanks for the opportunity. Thank you, listeners. Yeah, keep following. Chris is gonna give you the good stuff.