Francis Eberhard
On how she prepared for competition as an athlete and a coach
“Well, I think it’s almost, a lot of it’s innate. I really believe you have an innate ability to analyze sport. And some people are better at it than others. And I could see that over all the years I, you know, 33 years I was teaching teachers. You could see the student who had that innate ability to look at a student perform and analyze her performance. They didn’t say to an athlete, “You got to run faster!” They would say, “This is what you have to do to improve your time.” Right. Or, “This is what you
have to do to help a kid jump higher.” You don’t just say, “Jump higher.” And so, you have to learn, you can learn, if you learn to analyze a sport correctly, and to look, and to know what to look for as they perform that sport, rather than just look at how fast they’re running or how high they jump. Look at, analyzing, and I guess that’s where kinesiology comes in right? But some people can do that better than others. And so, but you can work at it. Uh, and I’m sorry, but some of my teachers never got that. They might be better at one sport than another, but uh, that was what I put my emphasis on when I was doing my methodology with them. And
we, and that’s why I thought it was really important for us to be in the gym and talk about teaching an activity or teaching a skill. It had to have that practice at doing that, it just wasn’t looking at the theory.