Learning to Coach at the Institute for Rowing Leadership

WORDS KATIE LANE

The Institute for Rowing Leadership based at the CRI boathouse in Boston, USA offers the only fully accredited, one year coaching education program in rowing. Katie Lane graduated in the inaugural class of 2012.

Who are you as a coach?” A difficult question for anyone — it was posed to me in my first assignment at the Institute for Rowing Leadership (IRL) in 2011. I had begun coaching only a few months before and struggled to come up with an answer. Eventually I came to two words – effective communication. These two words laid the foundation of my coaching philosophy: an individual cannot force another individual to change, but rather they can provide the necessary resources needed to improve.

According to Matt Lehrer, former Director of Coaching Education at IRL, “most coaches don’t invest their energy in to learning the basic principles of communication or physiological development, so they become ‘capped’ at one point or another in their career. It’s all too common for a coach to base everything they do simply on their own experiences as an athlete rather than developing the practical knowledge and skills to communicate simple movement principles.”

The vision behind the IRL was simple – to provide a pathway for candidates to improve and shape themselves into the coach they ultimately want to become. The year-long program, based at the Community Rowing Inc (CRI) boathouse in Boston, allows developing coaches to access the best knowledge as they develop their coaching skills. Creating access to information lies at the heart of the IRL.