Mission: Poolside with a Queen, coaching the Coach

By Billy Harris

I was asked by Geoff Seaborn to come down to Queens University to do a pool session for him and the Club. The thing that he wanted was kind of tough. I normally like to teach 4 or 5 people for an hour fixing minor problems and teaching new tricks. Its kind of fun thing to do for people especially when you factor in the amount of time it takes to learn something new. I can come in and instead of learning how electricity works I just show people how to flip the switch and get the light saving a whole winters worth of work in 30 seconds of conversation and 30 min of accurate drills. So I trundled on down to Queens and ran a course and got to do just that.

What a wicked group of people I found when I got there. I found something that I had forgotten as a single paddler learning on his own for so long. The core of what we do as paddlers is teach and all these people kept doing was feeding off one another in a fantastic learning environment. I kept looking around at what I would describe as one of the best clubs for learning I have ever been too. Well sponsored with H20 Paddles to use, Jackson boats were everwhere and what was the coolest thing was everyone helped everyone. I heard one girl say, “We teach ourselves and then we teach each other.” On arrival, I found that about 90 % of the paddlers there all had a great roll and wanted to work skills and balance something of a shocker for me. I ended up spending 45 minutes in 5 groups of 5 people detecting and correcting little things that bar future process. I got to help with little daily tricks that will help in all things kayaking for the future but the question they kept asking was how do I teach that. I loved the queens group, and found myself teaching them to teach each other. The ability to teach what you learn is another way of keeping the new ideas in your head. By encouraging people to detect the imbalance or articulate the correction helps in two ways. It puts the person on the receiving end of the info well coached and the teacher learning the lesson he or she needed to learn the most. I have spent such a long time learning in a singular environment that I forgot what it was like to be apart of a group of people learning the same thing. I find that when we stretch ourselves as people and try new things we grow as people. Finding failure in what we try shouldn’t be considered a failure but more of a little step in a path that needs many to complete. I have a bunch of photos of the Queens group and hope that they continue as an example of what all community of paddlers are doing its one of the best ways to grow the sport as well as have a good time.

Billy Harris