This is the Judo blog of Lance Wicks. In this blog I cover mainly Judo and related topics. My Personal blog is over at LanceWicks.com where I cover more geeky topics. Please do leave comments on what you read or use the Contact Me form to send me an email with your thoughts and ideas.
Paying the bills
JudoCoach.com Blog by Lance Wicks
In summary, my 2012 up to July has been... "whew!".
This year has been hectic and tough and rewarding all rolled up into a pile of awesome. Outside of Judo I have been really busy, mainly earning a living writing code in Perl (see http://www.lancewicks.com/blog ) for boring nerdy details there.
On the Judo side I continue to coach my little kids club and the University club (almost) every week. The Alresford Club (kids) has been a challenge with our move almost a year ago to a new venue. The dynamic is very different in the hall but we are still growing slowly.
The club is more stable than ever, thanks in no small part to the amazingly reliable second coach there. Cherie is a fantastic coaching student at Winchester University and she gets there early every week, has taken on the challenge of planning terms and sessions and done a great job. The kids are very lucky to have her and I am even more lucky to have a second coach to rely on. Reliability is a much undervalued virtue!
The Uni club has taken some twists and turns but continues to be very rewarding. Thanks in part to the continued support of our local development officer and the staff of the university.
One of the initiatives I/we have started for the Uni is a league competition for them to compete in. As the majority are novices, existing competitions are all but useless to us. People their age are generally experienced players, so not much fun to fight against.
So we have held 3 test events and have a 6 month schedule planned from October for a team based Hampshire competition. This has been well received and we are very lucky that the university, BJA Hampshire and Hampshire County Council have all been supportive.
On the younger side of things, I again helped organise the the Judo side of the Hampshire Games. This is the largest sporting event in Hampshire, with about 3000 kids involved across a wide variety of sports.
As in 2011, we held local participation events that made players eligible for the main event on June 16th. This means more work (including myself and another great reliable person Steve Lansley) running 6 or so local competitions. Then the two mat event in Aldershot. Just like last year we were lucky to have great volunteers helping and I can't thank them enough.
So thats 10 events I've run this year; before we get to my amazing role as part of the EJU and IJF computer teams.
As my last blog post said, I got to go to the Senior European championships and amazingly was trusted to run the live internet video streams for the biggest event the EJU put on. I am still rather in shock by the trust that people put in me. I have just returned from Montenegro where I was part of the team that delivered the Cadet European Championships. I was head of IT for the Commonwealth champs in January and spent two weeks working in Hyderabad, India (not Judo).
I travelled with fellow EJU Coach Danny Murphy to the Malta Open with a small Hampshire team and later this year I'll be going to Croatia for the Junior European Championships and probably the Rome World Cup too.
So thats another 6 weekends gone (two more at least planned). So thats if I work it out anywhere near accurately 16 out of 27 weeks so far I have been away. Phew!!! No wonder I am struggling to balance things and to find a window to do things like a BJA revalidation event. WHich I need to get done ASAP.
I do strongly believe that you need to give to receive, meaning that I don't believe I'd be as lucky and get to work at the bug events if I didn't pay it back (or pay it forward) with grass roots coaching and grass roots events. I guess it's a "karma" type of thing.
One of the things that being part of multiple levels of Judo teaches me is perpective. I see the highest level of my sport and the lowest level. In a week I might introduce a small kid to Judo, coach a talented university student and work at an elite level sporting event and watch in detail the very very best in Judo.
I am very very fortunate to have this perspective and I think it makes me a better coach for sure. I have the perspective to know that my kids class has to be fun, but that it has a place in the path to the elite level. I know that the grass root competition has to be run professionally and that it's important and serious to those players in it. But I also know that really it's a low level event for low level players and that it needs to be treated as such.
If I can be negative for a moment, I get very stressed and worried when I see coaches that don't see the the bigger picture. I've seen some shocking behaviours. Be it coaches turning blind eyes to teenage athletes starving and dehydrating themselves to make weight at local and even lower level international events. Or parents thinking that little johny/janey is an athlete when they are 8 years old. Or coaches who shout and holler and get worked up over a novice referee making mistakes at a kids tournament. Perspective is a wonderful thing and I am hugely lucky to have it forced upon me by my involvement in a wide variety of levels of the sport I love.
I wonder if we can teach perspective? I suppose it is possible. But I don't see it in the coaching courses and mindsets of my sport. I wonder if it's a likely project to try and put a workshop together that had as it;s "learning objective" the goal to give perspective to coaches.
I am immensely proud to be a coach of a small village Judo club. I think It;s a wonderful thing to provide that opportunity to children. I do not see it as anything but a healthy positive activity for the kids. Some will come to love Judo, most will leave Judo. My hope is that all of them gain something positive from the experience at least. I hope that some will come to love the sport of Judo too. And of course it would be amazing to one day attend an Olympic games and see an athlete on the mat that I introduced to the sport.
But as much as elite level Judo is my fascination and passion, I do not confuse what I do every week at the clubs I coach at with elite Judo. It is not and can't be. So I do not fool myself or those around me into thinking that the Judo we have in our area is anything but area level Judo.
One day that will I hope change and we will have elite level Judo in Hampshire, but currently the only elite level Judo near us is living in Camberley. Thats the fact of the matter.
My hope is that things like the Hampshire Team Championships and the great support of Sport Solent will progressively raise the level in Hampshire and that we will have elite Judo in our county, but for now it's not there.
I have faith it will happen as I know JudoBob, and I am watching the level of Judo in Cambridge increase due to his vision and effort. I also see the wider world and countries the size of HAmpshire producing elite Judo and know that that too is proof that it is possible. Not easy, but possible.
As a coach, perspective is vital. I use it everytime I go on the mat to coach. I need to look at who I have to coach and treat them appropriately. When I have heavyweight novices doing Judo in the "off season" from their main sport. I need to coach differently to when I have a mat full of 8 year olds or as I have had through the fighting chance programme a bunch of beginner kids referred to me by the police.
When I watch the people I coach compete, I need to balance what my perspective of the level is and theirs. As a coach I need to be aware that the level may be super low, but that to the player it is perhaps the biggest competition they have ever fought in. I need to build it up to the right level for them, and not belittle it. Equally, I can't build it up too much. Players must have perspective too and know that winning a medal at a local event does not mean they are ready for "the big time".
As a coach, I need to try and understand where a player is in the spectrum of ability and help them find the place they should be on that spectrum today, tomorrow and at the end of their career.
I want to help them achieve everything they can, but I must be careful not to misled them and causing them to fail when the goal was unrealistic. I want them to find a place in that spectrum where they feel that they achieved what the should have achieved and are happy. That may be an Olympic Gold medal, a national tracksuit, a county badge, an local medal, a black belt, a yellow belt or just a fun experience one evening at a Judo club.
This for me is where perspective is vital and where we as real-life coaches need to be most aware. I don't think our current coach education does well at teaching coaches that day to day coaching is not all about periodised performance plans, technique and skill development, progression and all the rest. It fails to teach us and prepare us for the daily grind, of teaching the novice syllabus over and over. It does not teach us that this needs to be something we enjoy doing over and over or we are not going to stay sane.
If we lose perspective on what we do, we will create false ideas around what we do as coaches and start coaching in ways that are not right for our situations.
I actually think that coaching is a bit like anything, over time the calibration gets a bit wrong. We all start to veer from the correct path, I do it all the time. I know I do. But, we must not beat ourselves up about it or worse pretend that we don't. We must have courage and do something to get the calibration corrected, to set ourselves on a better path.
A personal example is my kids coaching I think has been a bit stale. I felt it vaguely and the second coach at the club felt it too. I think she actually felt it more but is too polite perhaps to take me to task over it. So I invited Chris Doherty to take a session. I was honest with him and said I thought the kids were bored. I didn't enjoy facing up to the fact I had been doing a poor job of coaching, but I take heart in the fact that I did eventually acknowledge it and took action to correct errors in myself.
So anyway... thats the rambling diatribe done. A bit of a splurge of ideas and ideas straight from my page to keyboard and website. Not overly coherent, but I hope interesting to you dear reader. I am a firm believer in the idea that I need to reflect as a coach and I find blogging a great way to do so. Perhaps the reaosn my coaching has been a bit stale as I described above and it took so long to find it out is because I have not been reflecting via this blog enough? Naughty me! I can do better!
If you have thoughts on any of what I have written please do leave a comment below and or drop me an email to lw@judocoach.com
Lance
This year has been hectic and tough and rewarding all rolled up into a pile of awesome. Outside of Judo I have been really busy, mainly earning a living writing code in Perl (see http://www.lancewicks.com/blog ) for boring nerdy details there.
On the Judo side I continue to coach my little kids club and the University club (almost) every week. The Alresford Club (kids) has been a challenge with our move almost a year ago to a new venue. The dynamic is very different in the hall but we are still growing slowly.
The club is more stable than ever, thanks in no small part to the amazingly reliable second coach there. Cherie is a fantastic coaching student at Winchester University and she gets there early every week, has taken on the challenge of planning terms and sessions and done a great job. The kids are very lucky to have her and I am even more lucky to have a second coach to rely on. Reliability is a much undervalued virtue!
The Uni club has taken some twists and turns but continues to be very rewarding. Thanks in part to the continued support of our local development officer and the staff of the university.
One of the initiatives I/we have started for the Uni is a league competition for them to compete in. As the majority are novices, existing competitions are all but useless to us. People their age are generally experienced players, so not much fun to fight against.
So we have held 3 test events and have a 6 month schedule planned from October for a team based Hampshire competition. This has been well received and we are very lucky that the university, BJA Hampshire and Hampshire County Council have all been supportive.
On the younger side of things, I again helped organise the the Judo side of the Hampshire Games. This is the largest sporting event in Hampshire, with about 3000 kids involved across a wide variety of sports.
As in 2011, we held local participation events that made players eligible for the main event on June 16th. This means more work (including myself and another great reliable person Steve Lansley) running 6 or so local competitions. Then the two mat event in Aldershot. Just like last year we were lucky to have great volunteers helping and I can't thank them enough.
So thats 10 events I've run this year; before we get to my amazing role as part of the EJU and IJF computer teams.
As my last blog post said, I got to go to the Senior European championships and amazingly was trusted to run the live internet video streams for the biggest event the EJU put on. I am still rather in shock by the trust that people put in me. I have just returned from Montenegro where I was part of the team that delivered the Cadet European Championships. I was head of IT for the Commonwealth champs in January and spent two weeks working in Hyderabad, India (not Judo).
I travelled with fellow EJU Coach Danny Murphy to the Malta Open with a small Hampshire team and later this year I'll be going to Croatia for the Junior European Championships and probably the Rome World Cup too.
So thats another 6 weekends gone (two more at least planned). So thats if I work it out anywhere near accurately 16 out of 27 weeks so far I have been away. Phew!!! No wonder I am struggling to balance things and to find a window to do things like a BJA revalidation event. WHich I need to get done ASAP.
I do strongly believe that you need to give to receive, meaning that I don't believe I'd be as lucky and get to work at the bug events if I didn't pay it back (or pay it forward) with grass roots coaching and grass roots events. I guess it's a "karma" type of thing.
One of the things that being part of multiple levels of Judo teaches me is perpective. I see the highest level of my sport and the lowest level. In a week I might introduce a small kid to Judo, coach a talented university student and work at an elite level sporting event and watch in detail the very very best in Judo.
I am very very fortunate to have this perspective and I think it makes me a better coach for sure. I have the perspective to know that my kids class has to be fun, but that it has a place in the path to the elite level. I know that the grass root competition has to be run professionally and that it's important and serious to those players in it. But I also know that really it's a low level event for low level players and that it needs to be treated as such.
If I can be negative for a moment, I get very stressed and worried when I see coaches that don't see the the bigger picture. I've seen some shocking behaviours. Be it coaches turning blind eyes to teenage athletes starving and dehydrating themselves to make weight at local and even lower level international events. Or parents thinking that little johny/janey is an athlete when they are 8 years old. Or coaches who shout and holler and get worked up over a novice referee making mistakes at a kids tournament. Perspective is a wonderful thing and I am hugely lucky to have it forced upon me by my involvement in a wide variety of levels of the sport I love.
I wonder if we can teach perspective? I suppose it is possible. But I don't see it in the coaching courses and mindsets of my sport. I wonder if it's a likely project to try and put a workshop together that had as it;s "learning objective" the goal to give perspective to coaches.
I am immensely proud to be a coach of a small village Judo club. I think It;s a wonderful thing to provide that opportunity to children. I do not see it as anything but a healthy positive activity for the kids. Some will come to love Judo, most will leave Judo. My hope is that all of them gain something positive from the experience at least. I hope that some will come to love the sport of Judo too. And of course it would be amazing to one day attend an Olympic games and see an athlete on the mat that I introduced to the sport.
But as much as elite level Judo is my fascination and passion, I do not confuse what I do every week at the clubs I coach at with elite Judo. It is not and can't be. So I do not fool myself or those around me into thinking that the Judo we have in our area is anything but area level Judo.
One day that will I hope change and we will have elite level Judo in Hampshire, but currently the only elite level Judo near us is living in Camberley. Thats the fact of the matter.
My hope is that things like the Hampshire Team Championships and the great support of Sport Solent will progressively raise the level in Hampshire and that we will have elite Judo in our county, but for now it's not there.
I have faith it will happen as I know JudoBob, and I am watching the level of Judo in Cambridge increase due to his vision and effort. I also see the wider world and countries the size of HAmpshire producing elite Judo and know that that too is proof that it is possible. Not easy, but possible.
As a coach, perspective is vital. I use it everytime I go on the mat to coach. I need to look at who I have to coach and treat them appropriately. When I have heavyweight novices doing Judo in the "off season" from their main sport. I need to coach differently to when I have a mat full of 8 year olds or as I have had through the fighting chance programme a bunch of beginner kids referred to me by the police.
When I watch the people I coach compete, I need to balance what my perspective of the level is and theirs. As a coach I need to be aware that the level may be super low, but that to the player it is perhaps the biggest competition they have ever fought in. I need to build it up to the right level for them, and not belittle it. Equally, I can't build it up too much. Players must have perspective too and know that winning a medal at a local event does not mean they are ready for "the big time".
As a coach, I need to try and understand where a player is in the spectrum of ability and help them find the place they should be on that spectrum today, tomorrow and at the end of their career.
I want to help them achieve everything they can, but I must be careful not to misled them and causing them to fail when the goal was unrealistic. I want them to find a place in that spectrum where they feel that they achieved what the should have achieved and are happy. That may be an Olympic Gold medal, a national tracksuit, a county badge, an local medal, a black belt, a yellow belt or just a fun experience one evening at a Judo club.
This for me is where perspective is vital and where we as real-life coaches need to be most aware. I don't think our current coach education does well at teaching coaches that day to day coaching is not all about periodised performance plans, technique and skill development, progression and all the rest. It fails to teach us and prepare us for the daily grind, of teaching the novice syllabus over and over. It does not teach us that this needs to be something we enjoy doing over and over or we are not going to stay sane.
If we lose perspective on what we do, we will create false ideas around what we do as coaches and start coaching in ways that are not right for our situations.
I actually think that coaching is a bit like anything, over time the calibration gets a bit wrong. We all start to veer from the correct path, I do it all the time. I know I do. But, we must not beat ourselves up about it or worse pretend that we don't. We must have courage and do something to get the calibration corrected, to set ourselves on a better path.
A personal example is my kids coaching I think has been a bit stale. I felt it vaguely and the second coach at the club felt it too. I think she actually felt it more but is too polite perhaps to take me to task over it. So I invited Chris Doherty to take a session. I was honest with him and said I thought the kids were bored. I didn't enjoy facing up to the fact I had been doing a poor job of coaching, but I take heart in the fact that I did eventually acknowledge it and took action to correct errors in myself.
So anyway... thats the rambling diatribe done. A bit of a splurge of ideas and ideas straight from my page to keyboard and website. Not overly coherent, but I hope interesting to you dear reader. I am a firm believer in the idea that I need to reflect as a coach and I find blogging a great way to do so. Perhaps the reaosn my coaching has been a bit stale as I described above and it took so long to find it out is because I have not been reflecting via this blog enough? Naughty me! I can do better!
If you have thoughts on any of what I have written please do leave a comment below and or drop me an email to lw@judocoach.com
Lance
Later this week I depart for Chelyabinsk for the 2012 European Senior Judo Championships. I have the great privilege of attending as part of the European Judo Union's Internet TV team. We shall be streaming all four mats live on the web as well as a commentated stream covering all the action live, for free!
This is the third event I've been streaming live this year. It started with the 2012 Commonwealth Judo Championships, where to be honest I was doing more of the general IT for the event. The second event was the 2012 Oxford v Cambridge match. This was just me, a camera, a microphone, and a laptop. Very different to the size and quality of the EJU and IJF level events like Chelyabinsk will be.
Whilst I am away, I will be emailing madly trying to get details for the second Hampshire Team Championships test event arranged (I did not stream it, but did record and put a youtube video up for the first one). I'll also be trying to get local Hampshire clubs working together to put on small local competitions as part of the Hampshire Games project.
This leads me onto the subject of software.
Earlier in the year I attended the BUCS Judo Championships and was to be frank shocked that it was basically running on excel and paper, with clunky electronic scoreboards. In this day and age where there is great software scoreboards (more than one) and draw software it is a shame that this low/no cost technology is not filtering down to BUCS level and down to clubs.
I think this year I will be making a push to spread the high standards that software solutions provide. So please contact me if you would like to talk about me helping you run a Judo competition (anywhere, I'll travel!).
I'm happy to come to events large or small and setup the computerized scoreboards, the computerized draw, the video streaming and cameras. I'll even give you a CARE video refereeing system too if you want it.
Just let me know.
And to the future....
I'd love to work on a solution that provides a tournament "in a box". Maybe thats a CD-ROM which you run on all the laptops you have that temporarily sets each one up as a scoreboard, or a fight order display, or a CARE system, or a draw server.
I'm also looking at building a club management system, in part for my own poor paperwork habits. And in part to help some friends who want something that does not exist out there. It may or may not link to my http://dojolist.org project.
Lastly, come September the research project I've been running since 2010 ( http://rwjl.net ) will come to a close and I'll be pouring many many hours into writing up the project as an academic report and hoping to have it published in a journal somewhere.
So my future is a busy one, please drop me an email and make it busier!
Lance
This is the third event I've been streaming live this year. It started with the 2012 Commonwealth Judo Championships, where to be honest I was doing more of the general IT for the event. The second event was the 2012 Oxford v Cambridge match. This was just me, a camera, a microphone, and a laptop. Very different to the size and quality of the EJU and IJF level events like Chelyabinsk will be.
Whilst I am away, I will be emailing madly trying to get details for the second Hampshire Team Championships test event arranged (I did not stream it, but did record and put a youtube video up for the first one). I'll also be trying to get local Hampshire clubs working together to put on small local competitions as part of the Hampshire Games project.
This leads me onto the subject of software.
Earlier in the year I attended the BUCS Judo Championships and was to be frank shocked that it was basically running on excel and paper, with clunky electronic scoreboards. In this day and age where there is great software scoreboards (more than one) and draw software it is a shame that this low/no cost technology is not filtering down to BUCS level and down to clubs.
I think this year I will be making a push to spread the high standards that software solutions provide. So please contact me if you would like to talk about me helping you run a Judo competition (anywhere, I'll travel!).
I'm happy to come to events large or small and setup the computerized scoreboards, the computerized draw, the video streaming and cameras. I'll even give you a CARE video refereeing system too if you want it.
Just let me know.
And to the future....
I'd love to work on a solution that provides a tournament "in a box". Maybe thats a CD-ROM which you run on all the laptops you have that temporarily sets each one up as a scoreboard, or a fight order display, or a CARE system, or a draw server.
I'm also looking at building a club management system, in part for my own poor paperwork habits. And in part to help some friends who want something that does not exist out there. It may or may not link to my http://dojolist.org project.
Lastly, come September the research project I've been running since 2010 ( http://rwjl.net ) will come to a close and I'll be pouring many many hours into writing up the project as an academic report and hoping to have it published in a journal somewhere.
So my future is a busy one, please drop me an email and make it busier!
Lance
I have been offered the honour of being able to attend one of the oldest Judo competitions in the world; the Oxford versus Cambridge match. This event has been held annually since the 1930s and like the annual boat race is a grand tradition.
As well as watching the event, I shall also be streaming video from the event live over the internet via ustream.
Live broadcast by Ustream
The competition runs from 2pm till 4pm UK time and I invite you all to join me via the video stream if you can't attend in person at the Oxford Town Hall on March 11th 2012.
Please note, we will be using the free ustream service on the day. So yes there will be adverts in the stream and I have no control over the timing of these. Please be patient and appreciate that we are doing this for free with no budget. :-)
As well as watching the event, I shall also be streaming video from the event live over the internet via ustream.
Live broadcast by Ustream
The competition runs from 2pm till 4pm UK time and I invite you all to join me via the video stream if you can't attend in person at the Oxford Town Hall on March 11th 2012.
Please note, we will be using the free ustream service on the day. So yes there will be adverts in the stream and I have no control over the timing of these. Please be patient and appreciate that we are doing this for free with no budget. :-)
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