Moira Marshall is a speed skating coach on staff at Calgary's Olympic Oval. She is the former national development coach and was a member of the coaching staff for the Canadian speed skating team at the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. She is a former U.S. Olympic speed skater, who competed at the 1988 Games in short track and 1992 and 1998 Games in long track. She attended the National Coaching Institute - Calgary from 1998 to 2000.

"I took Joan's class on Decision Training in my second year at the NCI. The nice thing about the class was it reinforced what I already believed was the best way to coach - I was already doing some of it.

One of the ways that Joan's work helped me was in how I wrote my training programs. Of course all training programs need to be physiologically sound, but they also need to include the technological and tactical aspects, and this is really where Decision Training came in. I needed to design the training program so that the athletes really had to think about their skating. For example, tactically, one of the many things a speed skater needs to be knowledgeable about is how he or she enters and exits a corner. I would build a different aspect of the skill for each interval, so that was "random practice." Equally importantly, I would ask each of the athletes, as we discussed a technical aspect, to tell me what that means, how they would go about doing that. It began the process of getting them to think about their own training and not to rely solely on me.

One of the biggest aspects of this Decision Training model is giving feedback, trying to get the athletes to think and take responsibility, asking them, How did that feel? Why did it happen that way? In the beginning, I gave lots of feedback so the athletes would know that I knew what I was talking about. I didn't really like doing that, so when I took Joan's course it reinforced what I thought was better - vary the feedback so they think for themselves, take control of their own training, don't always look to you, the coach, for the answer. Certainly some athletes take time to learn how to do this - to be able to effectively analyse their racing and training - but it is so important.

Video feedback is also really useful. It's so important for athletes to see their performance and think about what they are doing well and what they need to correct. I can tell an athlete that they need to get lower, but often, until they actually "see" that they are quite high, they don't believe it. Video feedback is so effective in helping them see it for themselves. Again, when I use video feedback after an interval in training or a race performance, I don't tell them what I think. Rather, I ask them, What do you see? What do you think? Some athletes are just better learners with the visual cues, so that is another reason video feedback works so well.

Finally, Joan's tool of "hard-first" is huge. Even with young athletes, I get them racing fast, doing the whole thing, without breaking the race down too soon. Technique is so very different at a slow speed than it is at racing speed. So we start with the speed, and then we may go back and work on an early part of the push or a later part of the push, but not at the beginning."

Melody Davidson is head coach of Cornell University's women's ice hockey team at Ithaca, N.Y. She was assistant national coach of the Canadian women's hockey team at the 2002 Olympic Winter Games and 2002 world championships and head coach at the 2000 world championships. She was also head coach of the 1998-1999 women's under-22 team. She graduated from the National Coaching Institute - Calgary in 1997.

"When I first learned about Decision Training from Joan while studying at the NCI, I wasn't really sold. I had some doubts. But I began to see it as the course progressed, and it is now quite natural in my coaching. It really did two things for me as a coach.
First, it widened my viewpoint on how to teach skills. Random practice, integrating different skills into a single practice setting, as opposed to the steady progression of skills, has been very useful. Certainly for this to be effective, the athletes have to have some basic skills and some playing experience. With random practice, you don't see a lot of success at the beginning, particularly with younger, less skilled athletes, so it does take some patience. With my players now, at the university level, I do basic skill development on Monday and Tuesday, and on Wednesday and Thursday we do more random practice, with lots of questions from me on what they are seeing, and how they will execute a particular strategy. Working with the national team, we did a lot of random practice so that we were continually creating situations where the women had to think about how to play effectively together in new situations.

The second way that Decision Training really helps me is in my practice planning. It taught me how to create a lot of different situations where the athletes need to think about how they would execute a certain strategy. It taught me to ask a lot of questions of my athletes, rather than always telling them what to do and how to do it. It is so natural for me to do this now. Decision Training has given me a lot of confidence as a coach."