Describe Coach McKeever's Unorthodox Swimming Culture (Case Study Sample)

Coach McKeever’s Unorthodox Swimming Culture
Name
Institution
Coach McKeever’s Unorthodox Swimming Culture
The context of an organization has a close relation to the structure adopted by much of the variation being explained by contextual factors such as social function and size. (Pugh, Hickson, Hinings, & Turner, 1969) Sports presents a fascinating field in which the organizational phenomenon can be illustrated. With a group of people working together for an expressed purpose with organized rules and structure, leadership is essential to determine the direction of a sports team. Therefore, the role of coaches cannot be undermined. Their purpose is not limited only to perfecting an individual’s skill but also developing the talent of the whole team.
The case study, Coach McKeever: Unorthodox Leadership Lessons from the Pool brings into perspective the role of coaching, the challenges faced, and how the coach managed to maneuver through the obstacles ensuring success. Many factors come to play through the entire process with variations emerging depending on various individuals. Herein, the organizational context in which coach McKeever operated in will be presented together with an analysis of the challenges faced to establish a culture as a new coach.
Teri McKeever has been the women’s head swim coach at the University of California, Berkeley, since August 1992. She has bagged quite an amount of accolades in the swimming world as a coach leading to a formidable reputation that deserves the honor. . She has had notable achievements in her career such as being the first woman coach for the U.S. Olympic team and the women’s national team.
In her coaching efforts and experience, McKeever has made a name in utilizing leadership and coaching philosophies that are nonconventional. Her efforts to soar the clouds of success are driven by different leadership and motivational efforts of focusing on growth and improvement of the swimmers she coaches instead of only winning. She tends to insist that the consequence of growth and self-improvement among the swimmers will easily lead to a culture of winning. It is important to note that McKeever has been able to conquer her fear of exploration to find better techniques for improving swimming methods rather than just focusing on the same old tricks in the book.
On arriving at Berkley as the head coach of the women’s swimming team, McKeever had great difficulties settling down in her early years. She introduced a new swimming program that faced a lot of resistance from the swimmers. With the old coach still lingering around, swimmers would occasionally refuse to participate in McKeever’s programs and take complaints to the former coach.
When training to swim as a child, McKeever was used to the nontraditional techniques her mother used as the coach. Her swim training sessions would incorporate a lot of openness and new ideas. Coach McKeever managed to shun the usual tradition of focusing on volume instead, she lays emphasis on high-intensity that involves training at race speed in shorter distances. Activities on dry land such as Pilates, spinning, and cross training have also been added. The mentioned techniques might be what she tagged along to her coaching techniques that the swimmers at Berkeley were not ready to embrace. The pressure was intense in addition to being notified that she was selected as a coach only due to affirmative action since she was a woman. McKeever was further frustrated with poor performance at the NCAA championships leading to the team remaining unranked.
Changing the culture of a particular organization ranks as one of the most difficult challenges to accomplish. The reason is that culture constitutes of sets of goals, roles, values, attitudes, and communication practices that are interlinked (Denning, 2011). The elements provided tend to correspond with each other preventing most attempts of changing them. With this in mind, it is evident why it was hard for McKeever comfortably to comfortably introduce her unconventional swimming practice methods at the University of California, Berkeley, as a new coach. The women’s swimming team already had a culture that they had followed that greatly explains the hostility to adopting to change that McKeever was so keen to tagging along in her new program.
If culture cannot be altered or the cost of administering change is impossible, the remaining options are either to learn to live with it or opt out (Lundin, Lundin, & Dobson, 2009). However, Mc Keever chose to remain resilient and decided that she was going to incorporate a swimming program that she was comfortable with, ensuring that swimmers did not complain to the old coach. Her courage developed even further enabling her stick to her terms and free of fear of being fired.
The challenges were not only limited to the swimmers and the old coach. McKeever faced opposition from an assistant coach she had hired. The latter also questioned the unconventional swimming policies imposed by McKeever and undermined her decisions on most occasions. McKeever felt that his intentions were to take over the team due to his toxicity of divide and conquer (Schroth, 2013). When the team had started being successful, the assistant coach pressured to be made a co-head coach by McKeever. She did this in an effort to conciliate him, but things did not get better. Everything became even more stressing, but with the help from her friend, Kathie Wickstrand, she was able to gather back her courage and fire the co-coach.
McKeever needed her unorthodox techniques of coaching implemented with minimum resistance. Therefore, she sought to choose someone who would quickly adopt to her style. She asked her graduate assistant coach she had worked with for two years, Kristen Cunnane, to take up the assistant coach position. It was a breakthrough decision. Their personalities complemented each other resulting in an all-round management team. An additional characteristic that would make implementation of McKeever’s program easy is the fact that Cunnane had not coached before. Due to this, Cunnane would have been open to adopting the new techniques. (Schroth, 2013)
Cunnane was active in her role as the assistant coach. She supported the head coach’s philosophy program on the focus of personal development. With her extroverted and outgoing personality, she was easily liked by the swimmers. She took on recruiting swimmers who would fit well within the program. It was another big plus for the team.
The team culture promoted by McKeever revolved around honesty, respect, and personal accountability (Schroth, 2013). In as much as the team would be composed of people from different backgrounds with varying perceptions, compliance with each other was paramount with honesty encouraged even in uncomfortable situations. It was bound to be challenging at first, but the end result would ensure unity and teamwork is fostered among the t...