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Not only have I taught swim lessons but also coached different levels of soccer. During my senior year of high school I was asked to assist coaching a soccer team of 13 year old girls. They were still learning new skills and it was also the year they were transitioning to a full size field. This was the first time I had ever coached a soccer team, even though I had been playing soccer since I was five. Being a coach, I was in charge of helping watch for and correct techniques in their weekly practices.  As a soccer player myself, I made sure that when I gave augmented feedback, it was in a way that I would understand and respond too.  This included using the sandwich approach as well focusing on frequency and timing of feedback. When I am learning a skill and getting feedback about my performance, I think it is easiest to learn by being told both what you are doing right so you can continue that but also to be given constructive feedback about how to improve too. I personally learn the best through a combination of intrinsic and augmented feedback. I like being able to first decide how my performance was and try to decide for myself what I can improve on. Then if I cannot figure out what the intrinsic feedback means, I have a coach or teammate explain what they saw and what I can improve on.  Also as a player turned to coach, I understood how frustrating it could be to be constantly corrected for poor performance. This is why, as a coach, I did not constantly give the girls critical feedback but rather observed for a few runs to see if they were able to use their intrinsic feedback to correct themselves. At the point where I saw the same mistakes one after another, I would step in and offer my own advice on how to improve. This feedback was given immediately after the drill to the group as a whole and then also to individual players as necessary.

Here is one of the many pictures I have of myself and a soccer ball:

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I have also had the privilege of being a swim instructor with the Racine Family YMCA. While I loved my job, it was also extremely challenging to teach young children the complex task of swimming. In order to teach, I had to come up with some strategies that these young children would be able to follow and understand. One of the most important parts of teaching was not to overwhelm them with information and also to make it fun for them! One of the techniques that I used included imagery to try to help the kids remember what they were doing.  One that I used with all of the beginner classes was "scoops".  As you can imagine, every little kid loves ice cream which made it fun for them to learn how to use their arms when swimming.  By telling them to scoop the ice cream, representing the water,  using their spoons, representing closed fingers, it made it more enjoyable and easy for them to remember what they were doing. When I asked the kids what they wanted to do first they always said scoops becuase it was their favorite!

Below is a picture I found that shows an extremely cute child trying to learn some scoops

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Like many others I was put into soccer by my parents at a young age, my dad was even my coach for a couple years, and I am happy to say that I still play soccer today, 15 years later. While I truly love the sport, I cannot say that I was always thrilled to attend practice after practice but I knew it would make me better. Now, after this semester however, I have a better appreciation of how and and why practices were constructed the way they were. In our high school practices, I never understood why we would bounce around to so many different skill, drills, and position activities thinking that, if we spend more time on a specific skill or drill I will be better at it. Now I believe it was to have practice variability and help us be able to transfer what we learned to a game situation. Soccer is considered an open skill because of the changing environment which also makes it hard to predict what is going to happen at any given time.  Switching up the drills and creating many different situations was my coaches way of preparing us for different situations that could come up in a game. One of my high school coaches favorite phrase was, "practice is the time to learn from your mistakes". We were encouraged to try new things, make mistakes and just keep going. She understood that, when we were trying a new drill or skill not everyone was going to be perfect. This is the same idea as the research found about practice variability, generally people do not look as good during practice but look better in games becuase of the ability to retain information.

One of my favorite drills to do during practice was called the popcorn.  I would stand in front of my partner with a ball and they would call out how I must return the ball like head, foot, thigh, chest, etc and as the ball was coming toward me, I had to make a decision, adjust, and return the ball however she specified.  This is a great example of practice variability.  I got very good at thinking fast and being able to return the ball with any of the body parts she called out. This is only one example of the how practice variability helped me to become a better soccer player.

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I have been a lifeguard for close to five years now but it was never something that was supposed to be so important to me. Staring young I was always a fan of being in and around the water. I am from Racine Wisconsin and live less than a mile from Lake Michigan. Racine is also home to North Beach, one of USA Today's 2016 Readers Choice top 10 fresh water beaches which became my home 2 summers ago when I worked for the City of Racine as a lifeguard.

I was one of the many children put into swimming lessons at our local YMCA. Unknowing, this was the start of so many opportunities later in my life. While I have little memory of these swim lesson, when I went to high school I got dragged into joining the swim team by my older sister and it turned out that I was a natural.  Swimming was part of my procedural memory, when I got in the pool for that first practice, almost everything was easy after all the practice I had done in my young age.  Swimming is an example of a continuous skill.  When you are swimming laps, you perform the same motions over and over again depending on what stroke is being performed and it turned out that all the practice I put in when I was young stuck with me and helped.  When I took swim lessons as a child, I went through all the different classes.  Throughout these lessons I went through stages of learning in order for those skills to be come automatic when I needed to use them again.

These swim lessons and time on the swim team also helped me to secure a job in high school and now at UW-Madison as well. I was able to transfer the skills I had learned as a child to the high school swim team and then also to lifeguarding. Being a good swimmer is one of the requirements to become a lifeguard becuase of how important it is to be able to move quickly through the water but as a lifeguard you have other obstacles to deal with.  You don't just have to swim through an open lane, you use a tube, go over lane lines, through other swimmers, to get to the victim that needs you help.  And once you get to this victim you have to use your skills to get them to safety.  I think that all my years of swimming have really helped me to become a good lifeguard and save lives.

Below is a picture of when Bucky Badger pushed me in the SERF pool during one of my shifts.