Thanks Coach! Petria Thomas thanks her coaches
Issue: Volume 27 Number 1
When asked to name the coaches that influenced their careers, most athletes will name one or two. Olympian and butterfly specialist, Petria Thomas, names five.
‘I’ve had different coaches come into my life at different phases of my career and they’ve all influenced me in one way or another,’ the 28-year-old says. ‘I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t had any one of them working with me.’
Thomas’s rise through Australia’s swimming ranks from rural schoolgirl to one of Australia’s most successful athletes has been well documented. Raised in Mullumbimby, New South Wales (population 2900), Thomas was a talented junior swimmer, winning just about every swimming competition there was to win in the area. Yet Thomas says that she was frustrated by not seeing an obvious competition pathway to continue her swimming and came close to quitting the sport. That is, until a friend recommended she meet Stan Tilley at the Ballina Indoor Swim Club, 30 minutes drive from Mullumbimby.
‘It was an important time for me,’ Thomas recalls. ‘I was 14 and it was make or break time for me as it is for most swimmers at that age.
‘I can’t recall my first meeting with Stan but as we started training I remember thinking that he was a grumpy old guy and a tough coach, but he took me under his wing and things started from there.’
Tilley coached Thomas for more than three years before realising that he could not take her to the international level that she was obviously capable of reaching. ‘Stan started bugging the coaches at the AIS [Australian Institute of Sport] about me and around that time Jim Fowlie came to the Institute as a coach and he started looking around the country for swimmers and crossed paths with Stan.’ That was in 1993 and the 17-year-old Thomas was about to make one of the biggest decisions of her life and leave her small pond in Mullumbimby to go to much bigger arena of the AIS.
‘It was a shock,’ Thomas says. ‘I had never had the chance to train twice a day and here I was doing two sessions a day, and weights and sports science. It was a pretty big step and it took a lot of adjusting. Jim and his family were great. They became like my second family, in fact that was one of the beauties of the AIS — that everyone around me took on that sort of role.’
Thomas says Fowlie initially came across as ‘this sort of gruff character’ (‘most coaches appear to be big grumps at some point,’ she says) but as she came to know him she recognised him as an ‘ideas man’.
‘He is always looking for new ideas about something. He likes to mix things up and challenge things.’ That even extended to introducing some light-hearted sessions in the AIS swimming pool involving a surfboard and a tow rope. ‘We have a towing machine at the AIS, which has a harness that fits around your waist and a pulley system up into the roof,’ Thomas says. ‘It tows you through the water as you swim to give you a feeling for faster movement. Anyway Jim had this idea that he would hook up a surfboard to the tow rope and we spent a session trying to balance on this surfboard. It was great. You have to have a bit of fun and have some fun things in training. Most coaches try to include fun things.’
Under Fowlie’s guidance, Thomas won Commonwealth gold in the 4 x100-metre medley relay and gold in the 100-metre butterfly at the 1994 Games (she would go on to become only the second swimmer to win the same event at three consecutive Commonwealth Games). But after three years with Fowlie, Thomas sought to rejuvenate her enthusiasm for competition and turned to innovative coach Gennadi Touretski.
At that time Touretski had been with the AIS for three years with a stable of swimmers including Michael Klim and Alexander Popov. She worked with him for less than a year, but says she came to think differently about being in the water.
‘Gennadi is a really smart man. He reads a lot about how fish swim and works a lot on the hydrodynamics of water and how we move through it. He makes training very interesting.’ Still, Thomas was unsettled and shortly before the 1996 Olympic Games she attended a high-altitude camp in the United States without Touretski and trained under senior AIS coach Mark Regan. ‘I enjoyed my time with Mark over there and although we never really talked about me changing for any particular reason, I just changed squads to work with him. It wasn’t an issue.’
Thomas had some of her most outstanding successes with Regan, winning almost 30 medals at World Championships, Olympic Games, Short Course Championships, Pan Pacific Championships and the Commonwealth Games. The highlight was three gold medals at the 2001 World Championships in Fukuoka in the 200-metre butterfly, 100-metre butterfly and the 4 x 100-metre medley relay.
The swimmer also had some of her most traumatic moments with Regan, going through two shoulder reconstructions and ankle surgery. It is at those times, says Thomas, that some of the greatest pressure falls on the athlete–coach relationship.
‘Communication becomes a big deal. You spend a lot of time trying to work out what you can and can’t do, going through really low times and training in a different way and not pushing as hard,’ Thomas says. ‘I found it hard, but Mark found it hard too and it was also a learning experience for him, thinking of new and better ways to do things. That’s really something he does well.’
Thomas says Regan’s passion for swimming was infectious and helped carry her through the hard times. ‘He just loves swimming. He puts his whole life into it and that reflects in his coaching. He loves what he does and he takes great pride in the way we swim and when we’re swimming well.’
Regan suddenly resigned from his AIS post in 2002 while Thomas was out of the pool, recovering from abdominal and ankle surgery. The move shocked Thomas and the Australian swimming fraternity, but with hindsight, Thomas says both she and Regan were ‘ready for a change’.
‘I really grew up working with Reg [Regan]. We were together six or seven years and I think he was struggling with understanding that I was a grown woman with interests outside swimming. Reg came through as an age group coach and I think you often see with coaches who come from that sort of background that it’s harder for them to realise that their swimmers are older and like to have a say in what they’re doing in the pool.’
Ironically, Thomas says she recently caught up with Regan at the World Cup in Europe and spent most of their time together talking about what was going on in their lives outside swimming. ‘He did say a few things about my swimming … it’s hard for coaches who have coached you not to do that, but we really enjoyed having a chat about other things, what’s going on in our lives.’
In 2003, Thomas started working at the AIS with Glenn Beringen, a 1984 Olympic silver medallist in breaststroke and former Head Coach of the South Australian Institute of Sport swimming program.
‘I’d known Glenn for a number of years and he’s someone who’s been there [to competition] and done that and really understands what I’m feeling and what I’m doing,’ Thomas says.
‘The change in working with Glenn has really refreshed me. I’m getting older and I spend less time in the water and I don’t recover as well as I did when I was younger and Glenn knows what I can and can’t do.
‘I rely a lot now on the training I did in my younger years, the big blocks I’ve done in the pool. The kilometres I put in the bank then are what helps me now.’
Alongside Thomas in Beringen’s squad are six other swimmers, of which Thomas is the oldest. ‘The younger ones are just really enthusiastic and they do look to the older ones in our squad who have the experience,’ Thomas says, but dismisses thoughts of one day coaching herself.
‘Coaching is a very particular job. At the moment when I finish swimming I want a normal lifestyle. I want to be able to work a nine-to-five job and go away on weekends without having to ask the coach,’ she pauses, ‘but I suppose you can never say never’.
‘I think it does help if you’ve been there [at competition] as an athlete. It helps you understand,’ Thomas says. ‘I think coaches also need to have a small mean streak, to be stern when it’s needed and I don’t think I’ve got that quality. I’m basically a shy person and I don’t like confrontation, but I suppose there are skills you can learn [to overcome this].
‘It’s a tough job. Coaches are very special people and I’ve been lucky to work with some of them.’
