Coaches
This is Coach Banister’s 7th year coaching Ramona Aquatics. In that time, the team has grown immensely and has managed to earn 4 league titles: 3 in Boys Water Polo and the first in school history in boys swim . Both the swim title and the most recent Boys Polo title were undefeated. Coach Banister is also a Ramona grad, and an alumnus of Ramona Aquatics.
Banister’s main focus for his athletes is on a mind frame of self reflection and analysis. He teaches that even at the highest of levels, there is always room for improvement and that realizing one’s maximum potential is the driving goal of the Ramona Aquatic Athlete.
A long time participant of aquatic sports, most notably having played 4 years of Women’s Varsity Water Polo for Redlands University, Coach Woodward brings experience, enthusiasm, and a love of the water to her coaching. This is Coach Woodward’s 4th year as Head Coach of Ramona’s Girls Water Polo. Additionally, her interest in the development of healthy young people goes with Coach Woodward into the classroom as she continues as a Ramona math teacher.
Coach Woodward’s push for excellence, along with her well of experience has helped develop some of the most talented aquatics girls in the history of the school; several of them going on to play college water polo along with having set a handful of the Ramona’s Girls swimming records.
Garrett has been coaching age group swimmers for 5 years and coaching Ramona athletes since he graduated from Ramona in 2009. As a Ramona athlete, he was an 8-time individual league champ in swim, set 4 school records, and topped it all off by becoming the first ever Ramona swimmer to qualify for the CIF SS Masters meet his senior year. Garrett was also involved in water polo for 3 years, scoring a total of 250 goals for the Rams in that time . Continuing in college, Garrett earned All-American status as a swimmer at Riverside Community College.
As a coach, Garrett expects this same striving for excellence from today’s Ramona Aquatics’ athletes. He works with his athletes to get them to realize their full physical and academic potential, and expects the same level of commitment in the classroom as he does poolside.
Short Term vs Long Term
There is something that is endlessly fascinating about people and how they find motivation to do things.
Dealing with students on a daily basis, I get to see young people in a constant life-experiment, where they are forever testing new ideas to see what works and what doesn’t, what makes them happy and what doesn’t, what gets them what they want and what doesn’t, etc. What is also fascinating to me is watching these young people define and re-define for themselves, over and over again what it is they want. Freshmen are pumped when they get to the lunch-line first, and seniors are pumped when they get accepted to a choice college.
What I’ve learned from the experiment that is day-to-day high school seems common sense enough: as we get older, we are more able to connect long term goals to short term practices. Grades and the classes that aren’t our favorites are the easy example. We do our daily work to get the better grade at the quarter and semester, so we can get the higher GPA, so we can get to a better school, so we can have a more comfortable adult life.
How does this play into high school sports? How does this play into Aquatics?
With both Water Polo and Swim, @ both the high school teams I’ve coached and the club polo teams, it is clear that every kid has some kind of goal in mind in regards to why they do it. “I wanna get chicks,” “I wanna try something new,” “I wanna be Varsity,” “I wanna be league champion,” “I wanna take CIF,” “I wanna play/swim in college.” I have even heard, “I wanna be in the Olympics!”
I have seen MANY of these kids reach their goals, and I have seen just as many not even come close. The main difference I have observed between the (label time) successful athlete, and the failed athlete is their ability to break the long term goals into short term practices. Any kind of successful person can tell us that their victory was not a one-time shot, but millions of little choices along the way.
Dan Ariely gives a very insightful talk about Self Control and why people make decisions that lead them AWAY from their long-term desires. In Water Polo, there are a million passes that happen in practice before that game winning assist takes you and your team to the top; in swimming, there are millions of swim strokes in your career that lead you to that record breaking race in which you surprise even yourself at what you are capable of.
With each pass at practice, do we think about that moment where we’re going to need to flawlessly move the ball without thought or effort, in what seems almost a reflex or even a product of our sheer willpower to the hand of our team-mate, just at the perfect moment where they are poised to SLAM the ball in the unprotected square foot of the cage?
With each arm recovery in our swim sets, do we think about the BIG RACE, in that last 25yds where we are less than an an arms-length out from the head of the race and we just dig into that reserve of guts and fire deep inside to tear up that last 10yds and take sweet victory from our worthy opponent?
Process over Product
Where did that reserve come from? How did that pass happen? These moments of glory are products of COUNTLESS daily decisions these athletes made in their practice. The decision to enjoy practicing well, not to reach glory, but just to practice the best they could, and with all they could at that moment. This everyday decision is what builds ALL greatness.
When this is realized, the great high-school experiment is successful. What keeps me coming back season after season to coaching is those young people who come to this realization and get to reap the amazing benefits of their work in their time at Ramona, along with the belief that any given day, at any time, any one of our athletes can decide to adopt this mindset and become something amazing.
See you at the pool,
Coach Sean Banister
Readiness
I had a conversation at the end of the fall polo season with a coach I hold a lot of respect for, and what seemed to be an old adage at the time has stuck with me: “Luck is when readiness meets opportunity.” This “luck” had helped him lead 5 different teams to C.I.F. Championships during his time as coach. Luck? I don’t think so. It was clear that this coach had put in the time and was in fact simply ready to take advantage of opportunities as they arose with his team and their games.
In Water Polo and in life, the idea of readiness is a fascinating one. How do we become ready? How do we know what we need to be ready for? How do we know when we ARE ready? Let’s pin it down a little bit though
From an athlete’s perspective:
[Novice] “I want to try Water Polo, but I don’t think I’m ready.”- While actually a thought of new players year after year, the response comes easily: if you are willing to work hard and improve yourself, then you are ready to jump in and start. The sooner the better!
[Returning Player] “I want to be on the varsity team, but Coach doesn’t think I’m ready.”- Coaches have a million different ways of telling if an athlete is ready for a situation or a level of play. As an athlete, how do you know when you are being assessed? It’s not like a math test where you sit down and you have 20 questions to answer. Every time you show up to practice, it is a test of readiness. EVERY coach looks for that readiness in their athletes, but each coach has their own ways of assessing. What are they looking for? Some coaches can break it down nicely, others can’t. The easiest way to figure it out is look at varsity players. What do they exhibit that the coach finds them to be ready? As an athlete, you can take matters into your own hands by making sure that every possible moment your coach could be assessing your readiness for that higher level, you are showing yourself at all times to be on-par or above -par with the varsity players on your team.
[New Varsity Player] “I was good at the JV level, but I don’t know if I’m ready for this higher level.” A lot of players get nervous when they get moved up. You were comfortable being successful at the lower level and were good at what you did, but then lost confidence and lowered performance when you got moved up, thinking you are not ready for that level. You need to remember what it was like to start water polo in the beginning, when you didn’t know anything. Remembering how you moved from where you used to be to where you are can help inform how you can move from where you are to where you want to be. At some point you made yourself ready, and your coach saw it. If for some reason you don’t FEEL ready, then revisit that process that made you ready before and apply it to your new situation. Getting excited about growth is a large part of being ready for that next level.
[Varsity Player] “We’re coming up against the most challenging team we are going to meet all season, and I don’t know if we are ready.” This is the thought that plagues players and coaches alike. “What if” questions abound and often serve to break us down in these moments of doubt. There are an infinite number of moments in a water polo game that will test your readiness and decide the victor. The key is this: game-time is not the time to worry about how ready you are. Nothing about your game is going to change for the positive by your last-minute reflection. You are only going to get nervous and mess up things you would otherwise have downpat.
PRACTICE is when you need to worry about you readiness for the big game, whoever it may be against. Practice is where you need to be exploring the game, your game, your team’s game to find out all the ways you are ready and not-ready for that heightened competition. Everytime you pass the ball in a lax way, every shot you take that is not being summoned up from your entire being, every time you don’t swim counter like your life depends on it you are ROBBING yourself of that true readiness that allows you to go into a game confident and READY. Practice for readiness and you will turn those situations from a team testing you, to you testing yourselves on another team; this is the ideal mentality.
Truly we are just exploring the tip of the iceberg in this discussion, as the idea of readiness flows out from players and coaches, to family and schools as well. When we ask ourselves if we are “ready,” we need to be able to make a list of the things we have done to prepare, so that we can celebrate our accomplishments but also so that we can sort out what we have done already and what we can still do to step up to that next level of readiness.
See you at the Pool,
Coach Sean Banister
The Growth Mindset
Having been both an English Teacher and an Aquatics Coach for over 7 years now, I have had the privilege to witness the growth of many student-athletes, some in very subtle ways, others in ways so dramatic that had I not been there to witness the change, I might not have believed them to be the same person.
One of the most interesting things that I get to study in my position as teacher/coach is what these students do to undertake such growth and, while there are many more factors that lead to this awesome development, one factor stands out as the element that can take a seemingly average, or even below average young person and cause them to stand out among the crowd.
The attribute that makes these students stand out is that they embrace a growth mindset. These students, regardless of the athletic abilities or academic habits they may come to HS equipped with, consistently excel in the things they undertake. They look at what they know how to do, look at their ability and performance level, look at where they want to be and take steps to get there.
There are some students who come equipped with a lot more natural ability. These students shine early on, but without the growth mindset find themselves one or two years into high-school being passed up by the others. Their biggest hold-back is that old idea that as soon as we start patting our own back for knowing so much, we stop looking for new information, we stop looking for models of success to emulate and adopt strategies from, and slowly over time become less adaptable to change and ultimately stop growing altogether.
How do we cultivate this mindset then? How do we maintain growth for a long period of time so that we can reach our potential best? The answer seems to present itself as the need to remind ourselves daily that we don’t know everything and to approach each day, each practice and each game/meet as an opportunity to understand and explore what we missed in the last round. Everyone’s got slumps and plateaus, but let’s be the one’s who embrace a growth mindset and get excited about finding out how much more there is beyond those slumps.
See you at the pool,
Coach Sean Banister
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