Listening to Coxswain Recordings: An Example

Todays Coxmate guest post is from CoachingTheCox. They have provided us with a great article on how to listen to coxswain recordings and be able to provide good feedback to your cox. After reading this post, head over to CoachingTheCox for more great articles and imformation on how to coach a coxswain. 

Today, in honor of our presence as a guest post on Coxmate’s blog, we’re going to try some new things. Normally at CoachingTheCox, we talk about frameworks and scripts to become super-effective at coaching your coxswains. Today I’ll give you a framework, but you’ll also listen to a coxswain recording and (I hope) help me do an experiment to learn exactly how coaches listen to recordings. So thank you in advance for helping me with my experiment! To help, just follow the instructions interspersed in this blog post. I promise it will all make sense at the end.

This is the second post in a series about coxswain recordings: last week, we discussed how and when to record your coxswains so you can have high-quality audio samples. This week, we dive into what to do with those samples. We’ll use an example recording from the Head of the Charles to test different listening strategies.

Imagine that you have a sample recording from your coxswain at the Head of the Charles, and you want to listen to that recording and provide feedback for your coxswain. How do you prepare? Do you get out a pencil and paper to make note of things you hear? Do you reduce the distractions around you? Whatever it is you do, I want you to stop reading and do it now. We’re going to listen to a recording and then decide how to coach the coxswain who made the recording.

Ready? Good. Now do one more thing. Pull out your iPhone or your watch, or click on this link. I want you to time the listening process for yourself. You’re not supposed to do this in some set amount of time, so don’t worry. I just want you to get a gauge on how long it takes you to listen to a tape.

Now, here are the links to the recording (it’s in three parts). I want you to listen to this recording. Feel free to pause it, rewind it, et cetera, but don’t ever touch your stopwatch until you are satisfied that you have heard everything you need to hear of this tape.

The links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM0G-Bne8zQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH-hinktoK0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj-zdY0kLJo&feature=related

Listen to the recording, make any notes you want to make, and scroll down when you are finished.

Done? OK. Everyone has their preferences for listening to coxswain tapes, but the majority of coaches seem to fall into one of the following two camps:

1. The Play-by-Plays: You are in the Play-by-Play camp if you have a sheet of paper with a time-stamped list of the particular words the coxswain used that you liked or disliked. When giving your coxswain feedback, you might play the tape, pausing at each time stamp to give your critique. Alternatively, you might just read off the list you wrote down without playing the tape at all, instead letting your coxswain refer to the tape on her own.

2. The Washovers: You’re in this camp if you eschew the note-taking and prefer instead to let the tape “wash over” you as you close your eyes and place yourself in the race. At the end of the tape, you might jot down a few general impressions, or you might just commit them to memory to mention to the coxswain later.

These two methods predominate because most rowing coaches start out as rowers, and these methods mimic the way that rowers listen to coxswains. Rowers listen to what coxswains say and they judge it, rather than analyze it. They also remember their feedback for the coxswain in time order from the start of the piece to the finish of the piece.

For rowers, these listening methods are just fine; rowers are sort of busy pulling really hard while the coxswain is talking, and I’d take rowers who pull over rowers who analyze any day. So when rowers get done pulling and they didn’t analyze – that is, they didn’t take apart what the coxswain said and evaluate what worked and what didn’t and weight their feedback by importance – the best they can do is judge, which is a binary response: I liked this or I didn’t like that.

That’s OK for rowers, but coaches can do better than that. First of all, as a coach, you’re not pulling while you listen to the recording. So you’re not under the physical duress to justify a simplistic approach to giving feedback. Second, as a coach, you’re not the one being asked to pull while listening to this coxswain. The thing about judgment is that it’s highly subjective: you like to hear certain things when you row, but your preferences probably differ from those of your rowers. Your coxswain needs to make your rowers go faster, and that means learning their preferences, not yours. Third, as a coach, you want to teach this coxswain. So, when you listen, you want to evaluate your coxswain based on whether or not she can do the things you taught her to do.

The first two methods also produce some problems for communicating useful information to your coxswain. First of all, as a general rule, your judgments about the tape will sound like a critique; critiques makes coxswains dread recordings and shut down during feedback sessions. The play-by-play approach, in particular, inundates your coxswain with too much information and makes her feel like you’re grilling her. There’s no way she can absorb and process your reactions to twenty different calls. So, when she comes out of her meeting with you, she will simplify it to the most memorable things you said. These will either be the things you said most frequently (which is useful for changing her habits, so that’s OK) or they will be the most negative or hurtful things you said (considerably less productive). The washover approach avoids information overload, but it tends to emphasize less important parts of the tape. For example, you’ll definitely remember a particularly creative call that the coxswain made, but you might forget whether the coxswain called the settle clearly and unambiguously; that settle makes a much bigger difference in the outcome of the race, but on a tape it’s less memorable because it happens a)earlier, but not at the beginning (psych buffs, check out primacy and recency effects), and b) out of context – a settle sounds a lot less crucial when you personally are not settling at that exact moment.

So today I’m going to recommend a new framework for listening to coxswain recordings, and I call it the Rubric Method. In the rubric method, we decide what to listen forbefore we ever turn on the tape. This offers three advantages: 1. You know exactly what you’re listening for before you listen, so you only have to listen once and you rarely have to pause or rewind – which is important because your time is valuable. 2. You automatically have a good outline for your feedback meeting with the coxswain that highlights the things that are most important to you, so you don’t get hung up on trivial stuff. 3. Your coxswain knows exactly what you want her to do during races because you outlined it perfectly clearly in a neat little rubric.

You can make your own rubric, but feel free to use the one I made below.

WARNING: The example rubric below is designed for a pretty advanced coxswain. We have much more basic expectations appropriate for a coxswain’s first fall and spring races.Please do not keelhaul your beginner coxswain for failing to recognize weak catch impulses mid-race. By expecting too much of her too soon, you encourage her to make stuff up when she doesn’t know what’s going on – and that can lead to all kinds of problems. So, a rule of thumb:only put on your rubric things that you have explicitly taught your coxswain to do in practice. That kind of clarity of expectations is a hallmark of excellent coaching.

You’ll notice that my rubric does not order feedback from race start to race finish, but rather from most important to least important element of the race tape.

1. Execution:
This is the most important thing because it is the most critical of the three vital coxswain roles - steering, execution, and technique – that you can judge from an audio-only race tape. I realize the tape above gives us video, but I’m going to make a guess here that most of us don’t have that capability with our own coxswains too often. So you’d have to correct the most fundamental vital role – steering – on the water during practice.

In judging the coxswain’s execution, I ask the following three questions:

a. Did the coxswain follow the plan for this piece?
Obviously, you have to know what the race plan was for this to be a useful question, so it makes a case for good communication between you and your coxswain before the piece even happens.

b. If the coxswain deviated from the plan for this piece, did the change in the race plan make more sense than the original race plan?
Sometimes race plans have to change; a ten has to happen earlier or later to take advantage of another crew’s moves, or a sprint has to start earlier to preserve the hope that the boat could win the race. It does not make sense to expect beginner coxswains to be able to do this, so I would only really utilize this question for more advanced coxswains.

c. Was the coxswain clear in executing the race plan?
This one gets overlooked a lot, but it’s of utmost importance. To go fast, a crew has to row together. To row together, the whole crew needs to be on the same page about what they’re supposed to be doing at any given point. The recording above actually provides some good examples of why this is so important. Did you spot them?

2. Technique
So, here’s the thing about technique. You can’t really use this part of the rubric unless you saw the boat doing the piece from this recording, and you can’t be really specific either because you don’t know exactly who did what when. However, you certainly notice broad trends when you glance at a boat racing down the river, don’t you? You notice “Wow, their catches are really together!” or “Oh my gosh, 6 seat, I’m pretty sure your blade hasn’t touched the water once in the past five strokes” and so on.

For pieces in practice, this section takes on huge importance because the point of practice is to perfect rowers’ habits and make them more effective. For a practice tape, use the following question:

a. Does the coxswain reinforce the technical themes that I was coaching on this day?
She doesn’t have to parrot you, but rather to help me make the boat faster by reinforcing the general technical changes you’re talking about.

Now, the HOTC tape aove is not a practice tape; it’s a race tape. Races are inopportune times for technical lessons; rowers care more about intensity (as they should). So, for races, I change the question to this:

a. Does the coxswain mention technical corrections that are measurably limiting the speed of the boat?
Here’s how I define “measurably”: when the technical correction is fixed, the boat’s speed increases relative to the speed of boats it within five strokes and stays at the increased level for more than five strokes. If you have a split-calculating device, then “measurably” is a consistent improvement in the split that lasts more than five strokes. If you don’t have that, then “measurably” is a consistent, noticeable improvement in the run of the boat that lasts more than five strokes, given that the stroke rate remains the same.

Obviously, you can’t figure out what “measurably” is from an audio tape. So I’m just going to give you a sneak preview of some future material here and tell you what empirical evidence has told me about technical corrections.

The technical changes that most consistently produce the most noticeable change in boatspeed (we’ll get to methodology some other time): 1) Blade coverage (i.e. it’s all the way in the water at the catch and stays all the way in the water until the finish). 2) Timing. 3) Impulse in the first 4 inches of the drive. 4) Ratio during the middle part of the recovery.

No, we’re not fighting about this now. That’s what I have based on empirical evidence. If you don’t like those four, pick your own and I won’t be offended; it ain’t my crew. In any event, your top technical concerns are important enough that a coxswain sufficiently advanced to spot them should check for them on race day.

Assuming that you know your top technical changes, the above question gets more meaningful when I state it like this:

a. If I noticed one of my top technical issues while I watched that boat race, do I hear on this tape that my coxswain mentioned it?
Like the question about changing the race plan, this one is highly dependent on the level of advancement of your coxswain. Let’s assume right now that you have had this coxswain long enough to explicitly teach her how to spot your big technical concerns.

3. Style
Now, I don’t exactly make a secret out of the fact that I hate it when coaches prematurely coach coxswains for motivation. However, this overall style question provides a great opportunity for you to make a note of overarching trends in your coxswain’s calls. You wait until the end of the tape to write anything down for “style” on the rubric. Then, once you’ve heard it all, write down just two or three adjectives that describe the tape as a whole.

That’s the end of my rubric! Here it is in its condensed form, adjusted for a race piece, not including explanations:

1. Execution:
   1. Did the coxswain follow the plan for this piece?
   2. If the coxswain deviated from the plan, did the new plan make more sense than the original plan?
   3. Was the coxswain clear in executing the plan?
2. Technique
         1.Did the coxswain mention any top technical issues that I noticed while watching this boat row?
3. Style

It’s not a very long rubric. That is OK: simple rubrics give the coxswain just a few concrete action steps to become better. This works better than a barrage of random comments that your coxswain won’t process anyway.

OK! Time for part two of the exercise. We’re going to try the rubric method with a tape. First, either commit to using the example rubric or make your own rubric of a similar level of complexity. Do that now. Scroll down when you finish.

Aren’t these pictures so much nicer as scrolling buffers than white space or asterisks?

Do you have your rubric? OK. Now print it out. Stick it in front of you. Now reset your iPhone, watch, or stopwatch link, and time your review process for this second attempt.

Feel free to use a tape of one of your own coxswains. If you don’t have that immediately available, then here are the tape links to the same tape we heard before:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM0G-Bne8zQ
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH-hinktoK0
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj-zdY0kLJo&feature=related

How did it go? I realize that the “execution” ones are tough to do if you used the youtube tape because you weren’t privy to the original race plan, but those would be straightforward to answer for a tape of one of your own coxswains.

I actually reviewed the youtube tape using the Rubric Method. I don’t know this coxswain, I haven’t done the Head of the Charles, and I try to keep my blog posts geared towards coaches, not coxswains. This example is meant mostly to illustrate use of the Rubric Method, not to coach this coxswain. That said, here’s what I came up with:

1. Execution:
   1. Did the coxswain follow the plan for this piece? I actually don’t know because I wasn’t the actual coach, so I don’t know what the plan was, but it sounded like two tens at the start, a 15 around the first turn, a 20 after Weeks Bridge, a “power mile,” and a final 10. In any event, that’s a recognizable race plan.
   2. If the coxswain deviated from the plan, did the new plan make more sense than the original plan? Er, skip for now.
   3. Was the coxswain clear in executing the plan? This one is interesting. It varied. For example, this coxswain made it very clear when he expected one side to power up around turns. By saying “3, 2, 1″ he ensured that everyone knew when the turn would start. Conversely, we see an example of poor clarity after the Weeks bridge turn. The coxswain asks the ports to go lighter, but he never recognizably calls for them to power up again. There’s a 20 several strokes later for which I assume everyone was supposed to be at full pressure, but after the call to go light and before the call for the 20 I would have been a very confused port.
2. Technique
   1. Did the coxswain mention any top technical issues that I noticed while watching this boat row? I have an unfair advantage here because there’s video available, so I can pretend I saw this boat row. I’ll also pretend that I know this coxswain to be familiar with my four critical technical concerns. The timing is questionable on both sides throughout. 4 seat is pretty consistently and noticeably rushing the mid-recovery for the whole race, and 3 seat washes out about 70% of the time (you can see the spray). That’s enough to add several seconds, but I didn’t hear anything about that stuff.
3. Style repetitive, competitive. I think those are both positive things. Whether rowers want a coxswain to be that repetitive may be a matter of personal preference which I, as the coach, am not in a place to judge. I would ask this coxswain to consult his rowersabout how much repetition they like to hear.

That is how I would use the Rubric Method on this tape. Feel free to let me know how your own rubric looked if you also used the Rubric Method on this tape.

Wait! We’re almost done. Now that you did those activities, will you please help me with my experiment? All you have to do is leave a comment answering these questions:

1. Before trying the Rubric Method, would you categorize yourself as a Play-by-Play coach, a Washover coach, or neither?
2. How long did your first tape review take?
3. Did you make your own rubric or did you use my example? If you used your own, I’d love to hear what you put on your rubric.
4. How long did your second tape review (using the Rubric Method) take? Please also give the length of the recording if you used one of your own coxswain recordings.

Thanks for sticking with me, y’all! That was a pretty long post. In the next post on CoachingTheCox, we’ll talk about how to conduct a face-to-face audio feedback meeting with your coxswain.

For Coxmate readers, we hope you’ll join us. I post an article each week (well, closer to every ten days lately, but I’ll be better soon). The article always covers a way to become super-effective at coaching your coxswains.