Greg McMullen

Alain Bernard and coach Denis Auguin

I recently received a series of text messages from a former swimmer. I had only coached this athlete for two high school seasons and not only did he have an impact on my life, but these messages clearly showed that I had an impact on his as well.

Hey Coach Greg! I just wanted to shoot you a quick text here. I just wanted to let you know how grateful I was to have had you as my head coach senior year. I know this might be a little late, but my family and I were discussing swim season and I was describing my senior season to them and out of all the sports and coaches I have had you were the most inspiring to me. You inspired a goof of a kid with some talent to put his mind and will to a sport and team and I will always appreciate that. You taught me valuable life lessons that I will carry for the rest of my life…senior year was such a blast and seeing you behind us not only as a coach but as friends too meant a lot to me. Seeing you get emotional at conference truly I feel was the moment that defined you as a coach. Emotional, yet reserved and fully supportive of everybody on the team. Not just varsity, but also JV. Even if you may have some things you would’ve changed or done differently if you had a second chance, just know that I wouldn’t have changed a single thing. That season, that team was the best of my high school career. You believed in me when other coaches didn’t, and sometimes that’s all someone really needs is someones belief in them. The only thing I might have changed is to have you as my coach for my whole high school career (haha). I just thought I should give a long deserved thanks from me to you Coach Greg. I hope that you have luck in coaching because you’re one damn good coach.

Comments like this help solidify my place on a pool deck and make the time and sacrifices worth while. Who have you heard from and what have they said to make what you do mean even more?

For the last three weeks, I’ve been working towards finding my own way. The people at Rose-Hulman have made my transition extremely easy and incredibly fun.

I’ve been introduced to a large group of people and have already been given a large project that will change the way this school looks at social media. I’m looking forward to getting it off the ground.

This new position I’m in has been a very large change compared to where I was previously, they are embracing technology and putting the latest and greatest tools in front of me. Giving me the best opportunity to succeed. Heck, I’m typing this post on a brand new iPad.

I am so grateful for my past experiences, but I am looking forward to all of the new challenges that lie ahead of me.

It’s simple, Coaches and athletes have to have goals. However, you have to make sure that the athletes and coaching staff buy into those goals and are all on the same page too. How do you do that? How does it work? What does it look like before/during/after? Well, this season was all about that.

This season was a different monster; it was something I wasn’t quite ready for. I was responsible for practice development, discipline and general team maintenance. It was new and I was afraid of it, but I know that it helped me grow further than I thought possible in 5 months.

Meeting Challenges with Open Arms

Ask anyone around me, I was nervous (looking back on it, I still am). However, I knew that with hard work, dedication, research and a little luck our season would be a success.

The very first challenge I had to overcome was the fear of practice development and drafting meet lineups. This wasn’t an easy task by any means. For me, practice development takes a very long time. I’ve taken some advice from Glenn Mills from GoSwim.TV and GoSwimTV.com in regards to “write practices you would want to swim” and integrated that into my practice writing. My goal was to create challenging sets mentally and physically – mix it up and make them think about what they were swimming, instead of just doing it.

Gaining Respect and Faith in Leadership

While I say that practice development was the biggest challenge, I also knew that gaining respect would be difficult. Luckily, I worked with most of these athletes in the previous year. Consistency in a coaching staff created a very solid foundation with the athletes in our program. (It also helps to come from the former head coaches “tree”)

For some, it took weeks to buy into the program direction. However by mid December, after the Marion County Championship Meet, it seemed like people had bought in. This was clear by the success we had at Conference and Sectionals, but we had some great times at a variety of other meets along the path.

Respect is earned and cannot be expected nor forced. It’s hard gaining respect and I believe that a person’s character can lead to the success or failure of gaining that respect.

Finally….

The season ended with a bang. The girls finished strong. We had many athletes finish within the top 16 at sectionals and we ended up finishing 4th overall, what impressed me more was the poise at which they swam. We didn’t have nearly as much fear as we have in the past. The girls were confident and calm; they swam like it too.

The boys finished the season strong as well, including having at least one swimmer in every event. The meet started and finished the strongest, with our 200 medley and 400 free relay setting new school records.

I’m extremely proud I was a part of these teams and look forward to continuing my coaching career.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I actually wanted to make a New Year’s resolution. However, I am wanting to better my life and others around me so here it is; making it 100% public for the first time.

First: Eat out less and stop buying microwaveable/prepackaged frozen foods.
Second: Work out more. (The typical New Year’s Resolution, right?)
Third: Take care of myself and things I care about first and make more time for these things.
Fourth: Take more pictures! It’s something I enjoy, and I need to take advantage of it.

I know it’s well after the new year, but I still want these publicly known so that friends and family can hold me accountable.

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There are two Michael Jordan quotes that truly are amazing. Actually, he has quite a few quotes on this topic; the two I am going to focus on are some of my favorites.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.- Michael Jordan

Failure leads to Success

I recently wrote Taking Risks; Meeting Opportunities because of my own life experiences. I’ve been too afraid at times to move on; mainly because I’m afraid of failure myself. However, should you be afraid to fail? Or simply learn from those around you and the mistakes that you’ve made in your life.

The best example I can currently think of involves Steve Jobs. We all know of the risks he took in the computer and entertainment industries, but amidst his success there was also failure.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails. Celebrating Steve Jobs’ Failures

The moral of this post is to accept failure. Own up to your failures and most importantly never stop learning. As soon as you give up on learning; you are abandoning success too.

And just because I can, I’ll leave you with one more MJ quote:

I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.