Letters to Chad: Building a Summer League Swim Team

By Jake Shellenberger

Liberty University Head Swimming Coach Jake Shellenberger recounts the events and experiences that propelled the Mount Joy Swim Team from the bottom to the top in the Lancaster County Summer Swim League. Focusing on sprint swimming, and applying 4 years of Division I college coaching experience, this book is packed with tips and tricks and is guaranteed to have kids swimming faster, and having more fun. From the recreational youth swimmer to the college elite or professional there is something for everyone in Letters to Chad, Building a Summer League Swim Team.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257559251

Book preview

2002-2006

The Beginning

It all started in late November, the year 2001. I was a freshman at Shippensburg University and was midway through my first year as a collegiate swimmer for the Red Raiders. My parents had been getting on me about finding a summer job and looking back I was certainly a bit lazy in getting my act together. Growing up I worked many manual labor jobs on the farm and figured I would do the same that summer. I love manual labor, I think it one of the many secrets to life, but at that point in my life I was ready for a change. As fate would have it that opportunity came and it was one that changed my life forever.

Enter Ned Yoskoski. Ned was the president of the Mount Joy Swim Team of the Lancaster County Summer Swim League at the time and was actively seeking a new head coach. Enter Betty Lou Windstein. Mrs. Windstein was the mother of my friend Jenn Windstein and was also an assistant coach at Lancaster Aquatic Club and the Hempfield High School swim teams. I should add that Ned was also the president of LAC at the time, and his connection to Mrs. Windstein and the LAC program would be the catalyst that launched my coaching career.

The first call Ned made was to Mrs. Windstein and asked her if she wanted to coach Mount Joy in the summer. She respectfully declined but dropped my name as a possible candidate to Ned and the rest was history. I jumped at the chance to be the head coach of a summer league team and was eager to put some of the crazy training philosophies I was developing to the test.

I read everything about sprinting and the physiology of sprinting I could get my hands on. I read and studied the work of many of the great sprint coaches of the day. My first real book on sprinting was entitled Sprinting: A Coaches Challenge by Sam Freas and it was where I borrowed the Hammer Down motto for Mount Joy. Another fantastic book that helped me a great deal was the Swimming Fast series by Ernie Maglischo. I was already well versed in dryland / lifting from my football days in high school but I had much to learn about coaching swimming and training and those early books were instrumental in helping me learn. By the time the season rolled around that summer at Mount Joy I was pretty well armed with a plan of what I wanted to try.

The Philosophy

I have always loved sprinting, and the Lancaster County Summer Swim League is perfect for a young sprint coach. I appreciate endurance events and I greatly admire endurance athletes, but my heart will forever be with those who push the limits of pure speed. I cannot explain it. I suppose it is a mix of the excitement, perfection, and attention to detail that sprinting demands. Perhaps it is wired into my mindset genetically. Physiologically I was a sprinter in my day and though not a very fast swimmer I absolutely loved to race the short stuff. I was a power athlete. In football I was a linebacker and wide receiver and baseball I roamed the outfield. I was quick, and I could run and jump fairly well, certainly above average for high school athletes. I loathed distance events both on land and in the pool and through my own hatred of anything longer than a 200 freestyle I developed my first coaching philosophy.

Never try to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig

- Robert Heinlein

American Science Fiction

Writer

1907-1988

If you can understand this quote young Chad you will understand far more about sprinting and how to train sprinters than 90% of the coaches out there. Think about it long and hard. Meditate upon it and wisdom will come to you. This quote is about training, it is about physiology, it is about the battle between aerobic vs. anaerobic, etc. I cannot say enough about this quote and the philosophy behind it. I HATED training like a mid distance / distance swimmer and I constantly went into shut down / tune out mode during practice.

Sprinters are a different breed, and need to be trained as such. I cannot imagine the sheer number of naturally gifted and talented sprinters that ignorant coaches have pushed out of the sport because they did not understand this quote. Think Sean McMullen… Now of course football was his sport, but how many other Sean McMullens out there were pushed out of swimming because coaches simply didn’t understand them? That kid was a sprinter in every sense of the term. He was a physical specimen for a fourteen year old and his strength and power was legendary. He stayed around