Shannon Rollason: Turbo-charged coach careers to the top
Issue: Volume 28 Number 2
Talking to Shannon Rollason, you get the feeling that if he was not coaching Olympic gold medallists and world record holders, he would love to be behind the wheel of a Formula One car.
Rollason speaks with reverence about the professionalism of the sport, the teamwork required to get a precision car over the finish line in the first place and the sense at both micro and macro levels that the sport is constantly moving forward. It is his biggest passion outside his family and swimming.
At just 33 years of age, Rollason himself is not short on horsepower, nor is he the one-horse wonder that some thought he may have been way back when he started coaching in his early 20s.
Rollason started his coaching career with 12 students at a school in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs. They trained in an 18.3 metre pool, which had no gutters or blocks. In his first season there, Rollason put one of his female swimmers on a Brisbane team. These days, he coaches swimmers to Olympic gold medals and to world records.
In May 2005, Rollason was named Australian Swimming Coaches and Teachers Association Coach of the Year for his efforts with Jodie Henry and Alice Mills at the Athens 2004 Olympics.
It was in Athens that Henry, in her Olympic debut, won three gold medals, broke the 100-metre freestyle world record and broke two other world records as part of relay teams. Meanwhile Mills, also on her Olympic debut, was the youngest member of the world record-breaking 4 x 100-metre freestyle relay quartet and won a gold medal for her work in getting the team to the medley relay finals.
Many will recall Mills’s and Henry’s successes. Few would be able to identify Rollason as their coach. Yet, Rollason has been coaching both women since they were youngsters swimming at the Chandler Swimming Club in Brisbane.
Such is their trust in their coach that, in 2005, when Rollason relocated to Canberra and the Australian Institute of Sport, Mills and Henry followed.
Rollason has variously been described as radical and strong-willed. He believes that much of his success can be attributed to an unshakable thirst for knowledge and having a questioning mind from an early age.
In fact, it was that questioning nature that eventually saw him abandon his goal of being an Australian representative swimmer.
‘I was fascinated with training … the physiological processes, the sets, the different ways of training,’ Rollason says. ‘At 13 and 14 I was just reading anything to do with swimming, sports science, anything. If you went back to my old school you’d find that all of the library books on these subjects would have my name in them.’
This thirst for knowledge did not always sit well with his swim coaches. ‘I was always asking technical questions on why they had done one thing or another. My coaches thought I was challenging them, but I wasn’t. I genuinely had an interest in why they had decided to use one technique on me over another.’
Rollason went as far as the national open breaststroke finals, behind swimming champion Phil Rogers, but soon realised that what he really wanted was to spend his time on the pool deck, not in the water.
However, a school careers counsellor soon scotched the notion of him ever turning his passion into a career. ‘I was 15 and I said that I wanted to be a coach and I was told that I wouldn’t be able to do that because it was more of a hobby,’ Rollason recalls.
Instead, he turned his attention to art and eventually became a graphic designer. To this day Rollason wonders if he would be even further ahead in coaching if he had been encouraged to follow a science stream rather than the arts stream through school.
Rollason’s peer and Ian Thorpe’s coach, Tracey Menzies, herself an art teacher, once said that coming from an artistic background allowed her to ‘see the finer detail in swimmers … their stroke, the way they move in the water’.
Rollason says he does not consciously make the same connection, but can see how his artistic background helps him think ‘outside the square’ when it comes to coaching.
‘I do make a conscious effort to design training sessions,’ he says. ‘I try to build [training] sets that have flair and don’t allow swimmers to get bored. It’s the stimulation that’s the important thing.’
Nor does he believe that the emphasis should be on how many kilometres his swimmers put into their training. Rather, he prefers that they focus on the quality of their work … training to race, not training for the sake of training. It is certainly not unheard of for Rollason’s swimmers to miss whole training sessions.
He once told an ABC reporter that he wanted to empower athletes with responsibility for their own future and to foster an honest relationship between him and his athletes.
‘I’m a hard task master,’ Rollason said. ‘I don’t think there are many people around who are as committed and as particular and precise. It’s not all fun and games and blowing bubbles.
‘But if someone doesn’t want to be there; if they’re not going to do a good job and they’re only there because they’ll get in trouble for not training, you have to question the value of putting them through a session.
‘I remember the first time Jodie didn’t come to training and I asked her why. She said “Because I didn’t feel like it,” and I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I’d asked a lot of athletes that question over the years and that was the first time I’d been given that answer. But I had to look beyond her answer and the fact that she felt she could say that to me. I saw it as a strength. I knew that if she was going to go on and be successful, that we had to have that honesty and that truth between us.
‘I don’t think that my way is the only way. I just think it’s a different way and it works for me and it works for my personality.’
When Rollason was 21 years old, he took the plunge, moved away from graphic design and threw himself into his first club swimming job, coaching at Camp Hill State School in Brisbane. He stayed there for two seasons, coaching seven swimmers and having a number of swimmers make the age nationals.
He says his biggest challenge when he first took up the job was setting boundaries with his swimmers. ‘I wasn’t much older than they were. I had to draw the line further away than I do now. I needed a different style and I always had to be wary that I didn’t automatically have the respect that’s often given to older coaches.’
A year later, never having been apprenticed as an assistant coach, Rollason was appointed head coach at Chandler Swimming Club, one of the country’s biggest swim clubs.
He stayed in the position for 11 years. In 2002, without an assistant coach on board, Rollason took responsibility for training the entire 120 swimmers on the clubs’ books.
By the time he left to go to the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), he had coached 18 swimmers who had made national teams; five men and 13 women, among them, Jodie Henry and Alice Mills.
Rollason says the number of women placed on national teams during his tenure was simply due to the volume of women joining the club.
‘When Alice and Jodie were coming through as juniors, I was coaching 35 swimmers and of them, 28 were girls. I couldn’t buy a boy. I had Level 1 coaches coming through to do their [accreditation] hours asking me don’t you coach boys?’
‘As an example, in Alice’s age group, we could put together three top relay teams and still have reserves.
‘I think it [the gender split] is cyclic.’
At the AIS, Rollason has responsibility for the training programs for Mills, Henry and five other women: Fran Adcock, Sally Foster, Tarnee White, Melanie Houghton and Felicity Galvez.
He says there are things to be mindful of when coaching women.
‘I truly believe that you can’t just throw anything at the girls and they’ll do it, and I think that’s why we [Australia] haven’t had success in the past. As a coach you need to be sensitive. But at the same time don’t think you have to pamper them; it’s a balance. The last thing you want is to end up with an unstable athlete who is dependent on everyone around them.
‘Ideally you want an athlete who can work independently of their coach, who has self-confidence and doesn’t need to rely on other people. You can’t tell them that. You need to nurture it.
‘I’ve seen girls working together in a group become much stronger, more confident and display their personalities. Whereas if you have a group with half girls and half guys, the guys tend to dominate.’
He says the move toward sprinters rather than distance swimmers is a similar cyclical trend. ‘When I started coaching, Australia was doing well in distances. So every text book, everything you got, every resource, focused on coaching for distance. That doesn’t work with sprinters, and I had to get around that very quickly. Now, of course, we’re seeing lots more material coming out about sprinters.’
Rollason’s success has been acknowledged with many awards in the recent past, but it does play on his mind that he has reached the peak of his career at a very young age.
‘The goals that I’ve achieved already are the goals that I thought might take ten, 20 or 30 years, but I’ve reached them early. I do think that there is a danger that I could come to the end of what I want to do.
‘I do need new challenges. My next goal is to have both Alice and Jodie each reach the final of the 100 free[style] at the World Championships.’
Few would be aware that in 2000 Rollason almost left Australia to take up a swim coach position in Scotland.
‘I went with Jodie to the Commonwealth Youth Games in Edinburgh in 2000 and started talking to some people, and they made me an offer. My wife’s father is from Scotland and it was very tempting, but in the end we decided that we would stick to Australia.’
And for that, Australian swimming and Australia, is very grateful.
