I have been playing badminton with my family since I was 3, training since I was 7. I have years of experience in this sport. I have coached before as I was helping the U12s and U14s when I was in 9th and 10th grade. My friends were part of coaching and I have decided to help out when I don’t have production rehearsals (I was in JCS and Odyssey). Though I have limited experience in coaching I know the basics of coaching through observing how my coach coaches me. The only difference between coaching school teams and clients from Special Olympics is that the athletes need more attention and more guidance/reminders on how to play the sport. With students, we can just tell them and they will do it in most part correctly. However, after my first session of coaching, I noticed that I actually had to work a lot harder in gaining their attention and teaching them proper skills in this sport.
Through past experiences, I know that I am at least decent at playing badminton. I am also decent at communicating and teaching/coaching the skills to them. I was buddied up with a girl named Gayatri who has little to no badminton experience. She is also kind of slow athletically and reacts a bit slower than the rest. At the very end, I was able to teach her how to hit the shuttle and the basics of badminton footwork.
I would like to improve my self-control and patience: not that I was rude to the athletes but I do find myself moaning about how they aren’t putting what I have taught to practice or how they are not picking up what I just showed them. I try my best to now show my frustration but I do sometimes feel like there was a barrier and they aren’t understanding what I explained or demonstrated.
This service has made me aware of my strengths and weaknesses in executing what I have learned over the past 9 years. Not really through performance but through delivering it to others – like an output. I have definitely learned that in coaching you need be constantly in your trainee’s perspective – a change as I’m used to being the trainee, not the trainer.
Throughout the session, I began to improve communicating with the athletes. Perhaps it was because I used less jargon or that she began to pick up my accent. At the beginning of the session, I was struggling to communicate to her as I constantly felt like she wasn’t quite paying attention but she ended up listening to me towards the end and essentially learned how to play badminton.
