Can You Perfectly Realize Each and every Schedule?

Planning a training season for a skydiving team is rather complex. It is not only about ’Do you have time on that weekend?’… We, Skynamite, as an FS4-team have just set up the final plan for 2020. We started discussing and adjusting in September. Training started and we would like to give you some insights into our training planning and realization during the season. We hope you enjoy it! 🙂

EXPECTATIONS AND GOALS

Before starting, there is one essential step, in our opinion… Make sure that you have the same goals and expectations. Do you have specific targets or is it all about fun, which also needs a training plan but maybe not that ambitious. If you want to go beyond ’just fun’ – what average do you aim for, do you have specific nominations/qualifications to achieve? When the goal setting is done, the next question has to be asked: What are you willing to do and give to achieve those goals? What do you expect from your team members (e.g. respect, reliability)?

How many:

• tunnel hours and jumps?
• training days to achieve those numbers?

How much:

• money can you and do you want to spend?
• holidays are you willing to take?

At the end of our first indoor training we sat together and swapped ideas on those aspects. We developed a document summarizing what we agreed on (e.g. tunnel hours, number of jumps, average, individual commitment, competitions, aspects on communication) to make sure that we are on the same page and shared it with our coach Roy Janssen.

MERGING AGENDAS

Defining our (common) goals and agreeing on terms how to achieve them – check. Next step: find dates to schedule the training.
It can be a (to quote Jacky) “A pain in the ass…”

This can be a back and forth and requires patience. You do not want to  see yourself rolling on the floor squabbling because you canceled an important family event for training and your team member is not available due to the lunar calendar. 😉

During October 2019 we set up a list of training days up to September 2020. We agreed on 15-20 tunnel hours and 250 jumps… So it was clear: seeing each other once a month won’t work out!

In addition to training weekends we scheduled two outdoor camps. We also wanted to make sure to get an idea of how it feels/getting used to jump out of a Let (which will be the aircraft at the World Championships in Tanay). So one of the camps will be in Prostejov (CZE). But let’s go one step back and talk about THE…

COACH

Depending on what you agreed on (coach(es) yes/no) the next would be to align your availabilities with your coaches agenda…and try to be an early bird.
We hoped to continue going with the team coach, and he was in. As we knew that we won’t be the only team asking, we made sure to send him all information asap. The final set up of the camps, again, took some time and we finalized our plan by beginning of 2020.
What if you don’t find many common dates with your coach? We think that it might also be a good (if inevitable) strategy to train with more than one coach. In that case we would make sure to openly communicate and try to find a second coach in agreement with your first one to make sure they do not follow complete different approaches.

FINAL PLAN…WEATHER AND INJURIES

Yeah, the season is planned and we are ready to go…but…what if the weather sucks for half of the training days (damn lunar calendar…) or other unpredictable things happen. Define how to deal with drop outs and try to be prepared as best as possible for those scenarios, i.e. by planning reserve training weekends.
Training can start…but planning will be ongoing during the whole season. To keep track and the team mood up, we try to keep a fair workload among the team members – everybody should have his/her specific tasks.

So Can You Perfectly Realize Each and every Schedule? No! But you can plan it precisely and timely to come as close as possible.

Shall season 2020 begin – let’s all try to be prepared not only agendawise but also mentally. Winter might have brought some rust into routines. Make sure that you and your CYPRES are ready!

To be continued…

Have a safe and great season 2020 – we are looking forward to it! 🙂
Sandra, Sylvia, Verena & Yaz