Working for the future of Weightlifting

by Leo Isaac

leoisaac@powerup.com.au

Sport can be many different things to many people. For some it is a way of keeping fit while for others it is a weekly fix of adrenaline. Sport is also about meeting people, learning new skills, overcoming challenges, travel, a chance to break the monotony of working life and the list goes on and on. As a person who has been deeply involved in the sport of Weightlifting for 23 years, as an athlete, coach, coach educator and administrator, in the United Kingdom and Australia, my experiences are close to being religious. It has been, and still is, a wonderful journey of DISCOVERY and LEARNING.

When I left school aged 16 and went to technical college for two years my vision was that by my present age, 42, I would be a fully qualified accountant with a well paid position, a house paid off and a car and boat on the driveway. At 16, I showed some abilities with school work and with some sports such as athletics and tennis but, even though I wanted to go to the Olympics, in all my dreams I could never have imagined what would happen next.

In my final year as a business studies student at technical school, armed with only a book on "modern weight-training" as my guide, I began training with weights to improve my abilities in sprinting and jumping and continued on a once per week basis. At the tennis club one evening I mentioned to a friend that I was training with weights and not long after we started training together in his garage with some weights he had been given. We learned split snatch and split cleans from my outdated book and we would all now laugh at the amazingly useless "stick figure" illustrations which were used to describe the complex technique of Weightlifting. But if there was one useful part of the book, it was the appendix of Weightlifting clubs in the United Kingdom (UK).

I contacted the nearest club, some 30km away in the city of Bristol. The club coach, thinking that I was too far away, suggested I form a Weightlifting club in my home town of Cheddar. But the club coach, Den Welch, did suggest that I watch the next Weightlifting competition which was the South West Counties Weightlifting Championships. My garage training partner and I travelled to watch the competition and from that moment on, I never looked back. This was the sport for me.

And so began a journey which has taken me to Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Australia, New Zealand and Tonga - so far. But Weightlifting has meant a great deal more to me than a passport for travel. At 42, I do not have a house paid off and there is no boat on the driveway. Instead there is a memory, one that I can hardly believe myself, that in September 1982, I lifted the heaviest weight in my life, a clean & jerk of 180.5Kg. This, and other similar experiences, have had a profound effect on the person that is me. It is a little too deep to go into here, but suffice to say that these experiences are my motivation for continuing to devote time and energy to the sport long after the heady days of being a globe-trotting athlete have finished.

After 23 years in the sport of Weightlifting, I have seen it from all sides. Here in Australia I have worked in a professional capacity for the state associations of three states (NSW, Tasmania and Queensland). I have also worked for the Australian Weightlifting Association. In all these positions, there has been one task that has been required of me - to build participation. In my early days as a worker for Weightlifting in Sydney my approach was to coach, and coach, and coach! At one time in 1985 I was coaching at St.George, Belmore, Bankstown, Parramatta and Blacktown and it was usual to travel 100km per day and be involved with 50 lifters. Competitions were a nightmare. I would spin on a sixpence to coach a dozen lifters at any one time. However, those clubs have gone now. The bars are probably getting rusty in a store room.

In later positions in Weightlifting, my approach to building participation shifted to finding, educating and mentoring other persons to assume a coaching role (and also refereeing and administration). I believe this a more successful approach for two reasons. Firstly, leading others into coaching has enabled me to share the load and secondly, and more importantly, this approach has enabled the sport to continue when I have moved on. More recently my attention has once again turned to developing resources for coaches because as we all know there are extremely few texts or videos on the sport of Weightlifting.

Within the ranks of the QWA, and for that matter any other state Weightlifting association in Australia, are a number of people we can readily identify as people who put enormous time and energy into our sport in the hope that it will grow and flourish. And yet despite all our cumulative energies, our sport, challenged by the myriad of other sports and leisure activities, hangs precipitously on the edge of oblivion. This causes me to think, again and again, on what is missing from the equation. What are we NOT doing that we could be doing? It is my assessment of the situation that the missing ingredient is TRAINING but not of the physical sort.

Throughout my time in Weightlifting I have constantly sought the skills, experiences and qualifications that I presumed I needed to take the next step. It did not take me long to move from Cheddar to Bristol so that I could be involved in training with the very best. I left accountancy and took myself to Loughborough University to avail myself of training in sports science and recreation management. At the same time, while in the midst of my globe-trotting, I underwent my initial training in coaching in two ways. Firstly, I enrolled in to the formal coaching courses run by the British Amateur Weightlifting Association (BAWLA) and secondly, John Lear, the national coach of the UK, always took every opportunity to give members of national squad, while on training camps, lectures in technique, competition preparation, psychology, nutrition, etc.

In my time as State Administrator for the QWA, it was my daily struggle to divide my time between keeping the QWA financially afloat, event organisation, personnel training, promotion, coaching, communication, regional development, team selection and travel arrangements, reporting to the government and recruitment. Though the job was demanding it was also satisfying. There are a number of reasons why I would recommend others to follow into this profession. During my time as State Administrator, I enjoyed very much working with people who think as I do about the benefits of Weightlifting. The QWA is a very friendly place as we are all united by a common purpose. An despite the long hours I often worked, I enjoyed the sense of freedom of being able to leave my office and jump into my car to travel for several days to North Queensland for a coaching course, or interstate for a championship, or simply to go across town to a school to talk to students about Weightlifting. I also thoroughly enjoy seeing those whom I have helped gain pleasure from their performance on the platform or their involvement in an official capacity. Working in sport is a pleasurable and satisfying occupation.

However I would offer a warning to one and all. For the health and longevity of the sport we must all be engaged in TRAINING, whether this means we teach others or others teach us. Opportunities for training are being regularly lost. Here are some examples:

• QWA Management Committee meetings which on average last for 4 hours could be 1 hour in which only the most important committee matters are discussed and three hours of training.
• Of all the physical training sessions in the year that our athletes engage, I am sure that 2 or 3 could be devoted to the acquisition of knowledge about coaching, refereeing and administration of our sport.
• The annual awards evening of the QWA has room for a 30 minutes training video on some aspect of being involved in our sport.
• Sections of the QWA Coaching Education program of Level 1 and 2 courses should be delivered by distance education so that a much wider audience can be reached. This could be the whole course if video packages are developed.
• Similarly the QWA Referee Education program could be delivered through distance education packages using video.
• All QWA athletes on all squads should receive training about all aspects of running the sport as a condition of being included in a squad and receiving funding.
• There should be a Coaching Journal of the QWA, a two-sided document which all QWA registered coaches receive on a monthly basis.
• QWA teams travelling interstate should, at the end of each day’s competition, receive 30 - 60 mins training in some aspect of the sport. It is not often that all of the QWA’s best athletes gather in one location.
• There should be study courses, distance education packages or lectures, designed specifically for parents so that they can function as - fund-raisers, assistant coaches, club administrators, referees, announcers, etc.

Perhaps you can think of more.

Lastly, I must say that if you are looking for a reason why the above have not come about and feel a want to blame the professional administrators, I believe it is very largely because YOU expect your sports administrators to do OTHER things. If you rely on sports administrators to do the coaching, the refereeing, the competition organisation, keeping records and rankings, write up minutes of meetings, carry out talent identification, write media releases, carry out promotional activities in the market place, order your clothing, clean the gym, find sponsors, etc., then of course the above will never happen. The QWA will be stuck on its presently level of participation and quality of lifting.

If however you think as I do that the principal job of those professionally involved in sport is to TRAIN others to perform coaching, refereeing and administrative functions so that our sport can grow then consider the following:

Get the picture! By these processes we can multiply the effort tenfold.

I am no longer working at the QWA but I am still most definitely involved in "Working for the Future of Weightlifting". I am now at Southbank Institute of TAFE (SBIT) teaching the advanced diploma of recreation management. SBIT also offers full and part-time diploma courses in sports coaching and fitness. Why don’t you start your journey of DISCOVERY and LEARNING and see where it takes you!