Team Organization, Running Practice and Coaching at Swim Meets

Team Organization

In Parts 3 and 4 we will talk in detail about how to teach the strokes and how to write workouts to create the fastest swimmers you can. It isn’t so much a step by step guaranteed way to coaching, but more of a thought exercise to help you understand how to THINK like a coach so you can come up with your own methods. But, all of that is going to be worthless if you don’t have an organized team that is first geared towards building the individual in a team culture.

The first step is to organize all these different kids you recruited into separate workout groups. We want kids to be in groups that are relatively equivalent in their abilities, but also groups that foster a team culture where kids can be with their friends. That’s why we think 90% of a kid’s placement should be age based, and 10% ability based. In essence, unless you have some crazy outlier stud swimmer on your team, everyone should be in an age-based group.

Remember that kids want to be where their friends are. If you split up all the kids who are in the same school grade in order to make ability-based training groups, no one will stick it out in the long run. Keep friends together, and you will keep your team together.

Secondly, keep the total number of training groups small, around 3-4 for the whole team from 6-18 years old. Each group will have a set of training and technical goals that it is trying to achieve (more in Part 4). Each group will have their own main coach that acts like a mini-head coach for that group. It sounds crazy to only have a few groups like this because inevitably you will have a very large number of kids per group and a large range of abilities, making it very difficult to coach and we will address it in Part 4 as well, but the payout is worth it.

As stated before, it fosters a team culture. It also makes it simple for parents to know what group their kid is in, when their practices are and who their main coach is. All communication going up (from the swimmer) or down (from head coach or parent) should go through the group’s main coach. Each group’s main coach should know their swimmers in and out. Each parent who has concerns or questions should reach out to that main coach. If problems arise, then things move up to the head coach.

Swimmers should not bounce around the deck looking for the advice they want to hear from other coaches (an old tactic of asking the other “parent”). In the same way, parents and other coaches should not skip over a group’s main coach and give advice directly to a swimmer not in their group unless asked to. This chain of command takes pressure off the head coach to deal with every little detail that arises. It builds trust and ownership in assistant coaches and most importantly, it gives kids someone to turn to and work with directly. This set-up also gives the most coach to swimmer engagement, allowing coaches to know their swimmer’s ability, weaknesses and strengths so they can create the best possible workouts, racing strategies and character-building training they can.

Are your assistant coaches ready for this kind of responsibility? Maybe, maybe not, but it should be the end goal. Educating your assistant coaches is the head coach’s job and we have a section just for that later. For now, let’s put some real numbers and names to these new training groups we made as well as recommendations for workouts and kid density (kids per lane):

Novice Group: 8 years old and under

• Early elementary school
• 3-4 workouts per week
• 45-60min long practices
• 12 kids per lane

Age Group: 9-10/11 years old

• Late elementary school
• 5-6 workouts per week
• 5 hours long practices
• 10 kids per lane

Pre-senior Group: 11-13 years old

• Middle school
• 6-8 workouts per week
• 2 hours long practices
• 8 kids per lane

Senior Group: 14+ years old

• High school
• 7-9 workouts per week
• 2 hours long practices
• 6 kids per lane

A couple things to notice about these groups: Their names are not based on ability. There is no “gold, diamond, national” groups. Secondly, the smaller the kid, the more you fit in a lane. Thirdly, as they grow older, the more workouts they do and the longer the practice session lasts.

There are also no “test set” requirements. Remember, we want to get away from ability-based groups and focus on age/team-based groups. It’s not the swimmer’s responsibility to swim fast, just to be a good teammate. On our team, we also don’t have practice or meet attendance requirements. This won’t work for everyone, but we put it on ourselves to create an environment kids WANT to come to, not something they have to come to.

For each group, their main coach will clarify the desired technical and conditioning goals, develop a systematic plan (template and season plan) to work on those goals and write workouts that target those goals. Most importantly, it will be that coach’s job to explain all this on a regular basis to the kids and their parents. Nothing builds a team and trust in a coach like consistent and clear communication. You may not be the best coach in the world yet, but you can always act like one and people will trust you like one (and that’s really most important).

We also strongly encourage/require our older swimmers to participate in high school swimming under a different coach. This is a very hot topic in swimming because many coaches (including ourselves to some degree) think we have the better program. By necessity, we have to believe we are doing what’s best for our swimmer’s training, otherwise how can we convince them to train so hard? Handing off “our” hard work is a tough pill to swallow, but there are some good reasons to do it.

Most important is that high schools in general have a way of bringing a team culture to the pool deck much more powerfully than a year-round club. It is very difficult to replicate that kind of energy without the greater high school brand in the background. So, kids who participate in high school swimming get a little booster shot of “team spirit” during the swim season. In addition, sending your stud swimmers to a high school team with other non-year-round swimmers can help recruit more kids to your team. Some kids on the team will never have heard about your club or how good they can be if they put in the work. Seeing a stud swimmer break records can convince them to join your team, building your club and business as well.

Last point of discussion on team organization is individual private lessons. Private lessons are for spending a little extra time with a couple of swimmers or one on one to help teach a skill (dives, back-to- breast turns…). Lessons are NOT a replacement for practice! Do not let someone who doesn’t come to practice on a regular basis do swim lessons with you. That sends the wrong message. In addition, a swimmer should ideally do their lessons with their own group coach so that they can understand and work on weaknesses together and come up with a long-term strategy to overcome them. But, if you have to hand your swimmer off to another coach for a lesson, make sure you communicate exactly what skills you want worked on and how. Coaches all over the world never fully agree on anything, and that’s what makes the sport fun. But it also means your message and plan need to be consistent across the board, so a little communication goes a long way.

Running Practice

We have built the numbers, organized the team structure, now it’s time for a real practice… finally! Before we go into outlining how to run the perfect practice, maybe we should think about what we DON’T want our practices to look like. Disorganized structure, kids doing their own thing, people in and out of the pool, coaches sitting down or on their phones during workout, parents directly on deck and sets being performed poorly are all things we want to avoid.

The first step in running a great practice is for you (the coach) to show up before everyone, at least 30 minutes before practice starts. Sometimes kids will be hanging around the pool long before practice starts since they get off school early or they could only get an early ride and an adult should be around to keep the peace. More importantly, you need to get there early and write up all your sets on multiple whiteboards and to help set up any specialized equipment to be as prepared for practice as possible. If that means putting in the lane lines, then help there too. The goal is to be done with this process and free to chat and teach as the kids trickle in. Remember, this is where the swimmers build friendships and where you build the team culture. What you have actually prepared in advance will be the topic of Part 4.

Next is warmup. But first, what is the purpose of warmup? Many biological and nervous system elements in the Swimming Machine need a few minutes to ramp up and we won’t get into the details. Another major part of warmup is to focus on a couple of weaknesses the group has so that everyone gets a chance to improve those techniques at least a little bit every day. Lastly, warmup gives the kids a mental signal that real work is about to go down. Since none of these goals change on a daily basis, neither should your warmup. Have a standard warmup that the kids do every day the same way and only change it every few weeks or months to focus on another weakness. You may think the kids will find it boring and repetitive, but after a few days they come to appreciate not having to spend the first 5 minutes of practice memorizing a new warmup each day and they get to feel exactly the same at the end of warmup and feel prepared for workout. A standard warmup will also save you as a coach. Now, we have one less set to write and explain giving you time and energy to focus on your job. Secondly, if you or a swimmer are running late, everyone knows the warmup so it is easy to get things started or for a late swimmer to jump into the warmup without much explanation.

Lastly, this is the same warmup we want to use at swim meets. That means less headaches at meets, but it also means that equipment use should be minimal since you won’t get equipment at busy warmup pool. No pull buoy, no kickboards, no paddles… And this makes sense because you don't want to warmup a different way every day and you don't want your warmup to be different than the one you use at a meet. We want consistency.

Remember, each group has different goals, so the warm ups look a little different. Also, warm up can be a sort of progression throughout the season, building techniques and conditioning over the long term. Finally, we tend to avoid warm up with the very little guys (Novice 8 and unders) because they don’t really need it and we would rather spend our limited time on something else. Here are a few examples of warm ups for our middle and older kids:

We only run two… maybe three sets a day. Each set should have a limited focus which contains three elements: One stroke, one race and one technical focus. We will dive in deep in Part 4, but for now let’s focus on how to run these sets.

Tangent: “Simplify and apply” – Glenn Mills of GoSwim.tv

When warmup is done, the kids should physically all get out of the water and gather around the whiteboard to hear the explanation of the next set. This moment is the most important part of your daily practice. As the coach, you have to sell the workout to your swimmers as the bestest and greatest thing they can do for themselves right now. By relating the workout to a systemic problem we are trying to solve (dolphin kicking in the 100 fly), relating to the race we are training for and relating the biology we are trying to affect and adapt the kids will be more and more bought into the workout. In this way, the swimmers will give 100% of their effort no matter what is written on the whiteboard. We truly believe there is no one best way to train and that it is much more important that the swimmers believe in their training rather than what is actually on the board. Whether it is 3x1000 for time or 10x25s all out… the best workout is the one the kids believe in. This is your chance to help them believe. This is why so many swimmers can be successful doing “different” types of training. It’s not really different, they are all workouts the swimmers believe in.

A second part of getting them around the whiteboard is to explain the set in detail. Because you built a set with your purpose, every inch written on the board should have a goal and this is where you share that goal with the team. By giving everyone a heads up on how the set should feel, it makes it more likely everyone will push through the tough parts because the pain and discomfort is within expectations. People don’t quit when life gets hard, they quit when it is hard unexpectedly.

Next, the team starts the set. This means the WHOLE team, everyone, no stragglers. Every set should be an expression of everyone doing the work together to constantly reinforce that team culture. If you have a couple swimmers who always drag their feet and make excuses without getting in with the team, hold everyone accountable the first time. Stop the set, explain the team culture again, restart the set from the top and ask the stragglers to get in on time AND ask the other team members to make sure no one is left behind next time. Remember, everyone on the team is at fault for one’s failure… up to a point. If the straggler doesn’t comply and listen, time to kick them out of practice. If it happens again and again, we need to dig deeper into why that swimmer is dragging their feet by talking to them and their parents. If a kid really wants to be there, they will do the work with their team. If they chronically drag, it is likely they don’t want to be there and are being forced. That’s not always bad and can teach some discipline, but behaving badly is not going to be acceptable either.

As the set is being performed, your job as a coach is NOT to call out intervals, drills and distances. The kids should run the set themselves without your assistance. This applies all the way down to the nine-year-olds. Your job as a coach is to coach. Give technical feedback (your right arm is crossing over, your head position is too high…), strategize the attack of the set on an individual basis (4 dolphins instead of 2, increase tempo of your arms…) and cheer the kids on. You have to bring the energy because if you wrote a scary set, the kids will be scared and you have to help them through it.

Don’t sit down, don’t surf on your phone, don’t talk to parents or other coaches (for too long). Focus on the team and help. Even something as simple as filling up a water bottle shows you are willing to do anything to help them succeed and interacting with the swimmers as they do their set shows you care.

What happens when the set isn’t going as planned? The kids are slacking, failing on technique or too tired to make the interval. Many coaches get upset, loud and angry. Some give up and just let the set go on with half the kids failing the set. Others immediately change the set to accommodate the swimmers. So, what’s the right thing to do? Sometimes, we coaches really were over-zealous and wrote a workout beyond the swimmer’s capability. Many times however, swimmers are just not pushing outside their comfort zone and choosing to fail comfortably rather than succeed uncomfortably. We have to push them, and using anger or guilt in the proper context, with a planned-out sequence, and using these tools sparingly can help us get the results. Here is how we do it:

1. Premeditate your “outburst.” Never get angry at the kids out of real emotion. Your emotions should always be in check. Instead, we want to almost schedule using our anger/guilt tools in order to improve performance.
2. Stop the set. Stop everyone, not just the kids who are slacking.
3. Let them have it! Get a little emotional and loud. Get a little scary. Give a speech about chasing dreams and pushing through pain. Get their adrenaline pumping because our goal here is to make them more afraid of failure than of pain or discomfort. The trick here is not to get upset at an individual, but at the whole group. The team is doing the set. They are either all succeeding or all failing together. Hold them to it.
4. Restart a portion or the entire set and (now comes the hard part) go back to being yourself. Don’t go off and sulk or get all quiet. Go back to being a normal coach by giving feedback, cheering on, helping with calling out pace times… etc.
5. This is the most important step; you have to bring the kids full circle. After the set is over, gather your swimmers around and re-affirm your trust in them. “I got mad and upset because I knew you had more in you… it’s my job to push you… I want you to understand your body CAN do it even when your mind tries to fail…” You HAVE to do this step, otherwise don’t get mad at all. If the kids leave the deck thinking you hate them or don’t believe in them, they won’t come back. People can handle tough coaches who believe in them. They cannot handle touch coaches who don’t… those people are called assholes.

Don’t over use this valuable tool. Getting upset and emotional every day is going to have diminishing returns. Save it, even schedule it in your weekly workout plan! And once again, never get upset out of anger, use it as a tool to push your team further than they are comfortable.

Before moving on, just a few more pro-practice tips:

Don’t be afraid of failure. I know… we just talked about how to get the kids to push through failure, but in reality, your sets should be challenging enough that the kids “fail” to some degree about 20% of the time. They could fail to make an interval, fail to hold a pace or fail to apply a technique properly.

This does two things: Firstly, it makes sure you guys are training on the very edge and getting as much adaptation as possible. Secondly and more importantly, it teaches the kids that failure is not a result, it is a stumble forward on the path to progress. If kids regularly see themselves fail today and succeed tomorrow, they will be less likely to quit or give up when they have a bad race. They will understand bad races, bad meets and even bad seasons happen to the best and most hardworking swimmers. It’s just part of life.

Tangent: “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill.

Remember our bell curve? Just as you have swimmers at the very top of the performance curve, you will also have swimmers at the bottom. Don’t be too hard on these guys. I know I know we just talked about pushing these kids to their limits using anger and hard sets, but you have to make a judgement call with some kids. Personally, we have noticed that about 10% of kids either don’t have the genetic machinery to keep up with the group or they are just “happy” being involved on the team to begin with and don’t really have a desire to be a great swimmer. Our advice is to mostly leave these kids alone. Give them the attention they need and deserve, but don’t try to pour into them and bring them “up to scratch” with the rest of the team. You will only find this is a bottomless well that eats your energy and doesn’t come back. Be content to have a few good swimmers who don’t happen to swim that fast.

Playing games at practice is equivalent to vacation for an adult. It has to be earned over months of hard work. We have seen many young coaches try to keep their swimmers “happy” by offering to play games on a frequent basis and even giving into the kids’ demands to play. Games are like a drug or alcohol. They are fun for a while, but done too often and their “fun” gives a negative return and becomes an addiction. Games should be a reward, not a purpose. Your kids should show up to practice because they love being on a team and working hard. They should learn to find joy and fulfillment in that. If all they come for is games, then we are no better than a Sunday afternoon in the lazy river.

Tangent: A personal story of mine (Karl). When I started with my new group of 9-10 year-olds, they bugged me every single day to play games. We would only play about once a month and only after they succeeded at finishing a tough progression set that we build every week. By the end of the six-month season, I thought I’d be nice and we would play games all day. About half the kids were pissed and came up to me and said “No! We don’t want to play, give us a set so we can get better.” That’s when I realized I created monsters!

Coaching at Swim Meets

We have been training for a few weeks and months, and now the first swim meet of the season is upon us! Time to put all that hard work to good use and have some fun fast swimming. How can you as a coach maximize kids at the meet, organize parents and coaches and find new weaknesses to work on for the next round of workouts? Keep reading.

The first thing to deal with is signing kids up for swim meets and choosing their events. This will be highly dependent on your style, the kids’ ages and their/parents’ goals and desires. Some coaches prefer to choose the swimmer’s events for them. Others like the kids to choose all their events, or have some sort of mixture of the two. No matter how you do it, be clear and up front with the swimmers AND parents on how swimmers are being signed up for a swim meet. Most swim meets charge per event and it’s bad form to hit a parent with a bill they didn’t expect because you signed their kid up for 18 events that cost $10 each over three days.

With our older kids, we tell the parents that if there are specific days or events their kids want to swim, please let us know, otherwise we like to choose the races kids do. We plan the events performed in each meet on a seasonal scale which is specific to each swimmer. Our goal is to be a little pushy and get kids to do events they aren’t always comfortable doing while also not over-racing their primary events. Doing the same races over and over gets boring and constantly going less than life-time bests can be demoralizing. Having a variety ensures kids are staying engaged and always have something to work on.

For our younger kids, we want them to be good and experience every event every season. We create a chart with every event on it, and give a prize at the end of the season to every swimmer who performs every race in their age group at least once. This keeps the youngins from being obsessed with the 50 free and challenges them to expand their horizons. However, we also don’t let them sign up for events we don’t think they are capable of. No one wants to watch a nine-year-old swim a 20min 500 or an 11-year choke on water during a four-minute 200 fly. Challenge, but be reasonable (and please consider the timeline of the swim meet host as well as the patience of watching coaches, parents and swimmers 😉).

In the “Growing Parents” section coming up, we will talk about how parents should act at swim meets, but for now, let’s focus on your job at the meet. When everyone shows up, they should know where to go because you emailed and talked beforehand about the expectations, right? Kids and coaches sit together, parents sit separately. Swim meets are fun if you are around your friends, they are boring if you are around your parents. We talked about this, so we won’t beat the horse again.

Either before or after warmup, there should be a team meeting… every meet, every session. What we want to do is outline the team’s goals and motivate everyone to reach them. Sound familiar? It’s your job on deck every day! Set the expectations, motivate to reach them. For different age groups and different parts of the season, those goals will change, and so should the team meeting accordingly. Here are some guidelines:

• Young kids early season: Technique focused
• Young kids late season: Pain focused
• Young kids late season: Times focused
• Older kids early season: Technique focused
• Older kids middle season: Race strategy focused
• Older kids late season: Times focused

As for motivating kids to perform at their best, a team cheer is never a bad idea! Other efforts include talking about all the work we have done, using every opportunity as a gift to do our best and how we are always trying to better ourselves through our sport. This is all about how you want to motivate kids, there is no right or wrong way, but you won’t get good at it unless you practice. Public speaking is something that takes practice, so take the opportunity for yourself. A favorite concept we had in high school was that every swim practice, dryland and stretching session was like putting money in the bank. And on race day, we get to go shopping!

Tangent: While in medical school at the University of Iowa, the men’s NCAA championships came to town. I went to watch a session and sitting in front of me was the University of Michigan group of parents. During warmup, head coach of Michigan Blue Mike Bottom showed up in the stands! He gathered the parents together and gave THEM a pre-session speech about goals and expectations. Then, they did a CHEER together! Talk about building a team!

Now, we can go off to the races! Every event is an opportunity for kids and coaches to learn from. A chance to try something, analyze its result and make a plan for next time. We can’t execute this plan if people don’t talk. So, before every race swimmers should talk to their specific coach. Their coach should give the kids something to focus on during the race. Early in the season, we like to focus on technique issues: not crossing over, head position, rotation… In the middle of the season, we like to focus on race strategy: pacing, number of dolphins, tempo… At the end of the season, it’s all about time! Giving the classic “go out fast and finish fast!” advice is never helpful!

More importantly, after every single race and before kids go off to their parents or cool-down, they should talk with their coach again about how the race went. You need to focus on two main things to say: what went well and what we need to work on. When talking about what went well, do your best to link what was done in practice to the effect it had on the race. “We worked on our underwaters and it shows.” Every race is a chance to find a weakness. Tell the swimmer what you think is the bottleneck point in their stroke, strategy or effort that kept them from going even faster. Tell them this won’t get better just because you know about it, it’s something we need to work on every day in practice. During a race environment, kids have a lot of extra focus. You may have told them a million times to fix their streamlines, but now they can see the real damage and they want to fix it. While you have their full, undivided attention, hit them with the changes you want them to make. If kids just get out of the water and go hang out with friends… we lose our chance.

Tangent: More story time. I once watched my boss explain to our fastest 12-year-old girl how he wanted this upcoming 400 IM swum. He spent 10 minutes explaining in exquisite detail every 50, every turn, every stroke. At the end of this glorious plan the swimmer turns to him, shrugs her shoulders and says “nah… I’ll just wing it” and walks off 😊!

On a coaching level, you should be making note of general weaknesses the group has during a meet. These weaknesses are what you are going to take back to the drawing board and design your sets around to fix and improve in the coming weeks and months. Again, this can be technique, strategy or effort related. This is beyond valuable. This is your “scientific method” where you make an observation, come up with a plan to fix it, execute the plan and test whether it helped. Worst case scenario you look like you know what you are doing and the kids and parents will believe in your logic and program. As long as they believe, you will be successful.

One more thing we tend to have to deal with at swim meets are swimmers’ (and sometimes parents’) emotions. The way we see it, a swimmer can come back to you after a race with one of four major emotions: happy, sad, angry or apathetic. No matter what emotion they are feeling the most, your job is to bring them back to center by feeding the opposite emotion. If they feel sad, be happy. If they are apathetic, be a little pissed.

Why do this? An excess of any of these emotions becomes a distraction and is evidence that we have failed to control ourselves. Instead, we have let our emotions take us for a ride. One single race is not enough to praise or condemn an entire swimming career, but swimmers will do their best to do so! We want them to focus on what matters: What did I well? What can I do better? Those are the only questions that matter no matter how the race went.

Ok… you are probably not convinced. Let’s take a couple examples. Most commonly we deal with sad kids who didn’t go a best time. If we let this emotion take over to an extreme, this kid won’t ever swim again, right? No one wants to do things that make them sad. By refocusing the attention on what went well and all the vast seas of opportunity for improvement, we can bring back a bit of happiness and get the kid to focus on what we can do better next time.

One of the more unrecognized and more serious emotions a swimmer can have after a race is apathy. They just don’t care. As a coach, this brings up some fire bubbles. We don’t like it when we spend all our days, evenings and weekends thinking about how to help someone improve and they don’t care enough to put in the effort on race day. Giving up and quitting is not an option, never ever EVER! Put some of that fire under those kids and get them out of their apathy!

Before we move on, here are a few pro-meet tips we have learned the hard way and by observing others:

Fifty percent of communication is unspoken… aka body language. How you conduct yourself at a swim meet also plays a big role in building that team culture. Don’t treat a swim meet like a vacation; treat it like work because that’s what it is. Show up early, get your heat sheets and relay cards organized beforehand so that when kids and parents start showing up, you are ready to work with them. Keep your phone in your bag unless you are taking a video for technique analysis later. If the kids are working or racing, stay on your feet and stay as active as you can. It’s not fair that one person on the team has to burn calories while the rest sit and chill. Lastly, avoid eating big meals in front of the kids while they are racing during the session. Get your own food on your own time. When you’re on deck, you are on company time and company time is important because it’s your company!

These may seem like little things no one cares about, but they do. Consciously or subconsciously the kids and their parents are getting your vibes. Those vibes can say “You’re on your own and I wish I was somewhere else” or they can say “I’m here for you and I’d rather be nowhere else.”

Relays can be so fun… and the bane of any swim coach. For a big team, relays can quickly become a disaster as kids accidently leave the meet early or parents get upset their kid isn’t on the “A” relay. The easiest solution is just not to do them unless you’re at a championship meet. At the very least, we recommend dealing with relays scarcely with the older swimmers because they are usually exhausted by the time the relays come around and just want to go home. For younger swimmers however, it is worth the effort to have them do relays because they often don’t care which relay they are on and they find them much more fun.

If you do decide to race relays at a meet, be very upfront and clear about the procedure. On our team, we email the parents beforehand and let them know that relay positions are up to the coach’s discretion only. We make it clear that we position kids on relays to benefit the team first, and the individual second (on occasion we will switch relays around to give kids a second shot at a lead off time for instance). We also don’t charge money directly for the relays. Instead, this cost is included in the coach’s fee when anyone signs up for a meet. This frees us coaches to make changes to the lineup without fear of parents complaining of paying for a race their kid never swam.

On the other side of this coin, it is important for you to realize the time commitment the parents and swimmers are making. Relays are often at the end of a swimming session which in most cases is 4 hours after the meet starts. Imagine you sat around all that time to help on a relay and then the relay never happened or you got booted from the relay for someone else. That can tick people off really quick. If changes are being made, make sure to notify people who are not needed so they can choose to go home if they want.

Speaking of going home, since we are a swim TEAM shouldn’t everyone on the team stick around the whole session to cheer their teammates on? Ideally, yes. But in reality, swim meets are so long and exhausting, it is better in most cases that when a swimmer is done with their races they go and rest. The exception to the rule is championship meets at the end of the season. Those meets are the big finale and we strongly encourage everyone to come to every session and help support a team atmosphere, even if you don’t make a finals swim. Bottom line, be upfront, be aware and be realistic.

In a few sections we will talk about how to run a good, successful, fun, money-making meet. But follow these simple guidelines and you will be well on your way to being a coaching boss!