They kill you. They save your life. They can tear you down, or pick you up. And they can be scary as hell, or the best person you know. Coaches are a mysterious breed. After doing gymnastics in three different gyms, I've experienced a plethora of coaches. As a little one I had a fun-loving, energetic coach at first. I remember wanting to remain at the same level for the purpose of having him coach me. When I moved up, my new coach scared me out of the sport. When I got back into the sport three years later my new coach was amazing. He could make you feel inferior just by looking at you, but he was probably the single most important coach I have had, because he encouraged me to get back into the sport while building up my passion for it. My next coach, my most recent coach, was the coach that pushed my basic development past its limitations. Every coach had his special purpose in my development and had different styles, but all of them instilled discipline within me.
Respect comes through many different mediums. You can develop it through admiration, fear, or just acceptance. Admiration allows you to develop your own feeling of respect towards the other person personally. Fear is a way others instill respect for themselves in you, and acceptance is the way of being taught you should respect those above you. Any way you cut it, respect is something of importance in our culture. Most of the time if you do not respect your elders it ends up in some sort of punishment. But if you do respect them, they typically return the action, and you may find a mutual ground and great relationship.
Repercussions of not respecting your elders include negative feelings toward you, loss of interest in you, and punishment after punishment. This is true in many situations. At home your parents ground you, in the gym, your coach makes you do extra strength or flat out kicks you out of the gym. Advantages of respecting your elders include a your elder enjoying your presence, being more willing to help you, and an eventual relationship that has mutual respect and little negativity, if any. In the end it is always better to respect your elders than not, especially when planning for the future. It's always good to have a good relationship with someone who could help you out later down the line, whether it's giving you a job, or teaching you something, or something else.
Gymnastics Background: The scoring system in gymnastics is now quite elaborate. We no longer use a 10.0 system, which many people understood. Now the system takes into account skill difficulty and the execution of those skills. It's fairer for the athletes, but much more confusing for spectators. Skills are sorted by difficulty using letters. Points for skills start at 0.1 points and go up by tenth (ie an A skill is worth 0.1, a B is worth a 0.2, and so on). On top of that we also have element groups which each add 0.5 points to your starting score of a 10.0. That's the general aspects of our now, unreasonably complex, scoring system.
Question of the Day: How much can you bench? I don't know. All our strength is body weight so we don't know anything about strength involving weights over 20 pounds(:
You developed your central idea very well. The repeated segments at the bottom seemed to be placed a little awkwardly, with no real transition. The video was, of course, connected, but, maybe, you could move the other to to the beginning of the post. Also, I thought that in the paragraph in which you described your coaches was a little unclear about which coach was which, though I understand you were providing them with anonymity. Despite this quibbles, I think this may be your best blog post. Good job!
ReplyDeleteI love this post. I love the idea of respecting your elders because in ROTC it is the same way. It is all about the respect; they break you down; they build you up; they make you stronger. They have the power and therefore you respect them. For me, initially respect came with fear and now my respect comes with the teaching of tradition and technique.
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