MEET MICHAEL BROOKS!
Coach Brooks is one of four featured Swimposium speakers who will be conducting clinics at the NCS Swimposium on April 23 at the Greensboro Coliseum. Coach Brooks has scheduled clinic sessions with both parents and coaches. We hope to see you there. Please submit the following registration form no later than April 15 if you plan to attend. And please forward this to other coaches and parents who you think might be interested in learning from one of the top coaches in the country.
2016 Swimposium Registration Form
Michael Brooks has been the Head Coach of the York YMCA swimming team in York, PA, since October of 2006. In that time, in addition to scoring at the major domestic meets, York Y swimmers have represented the USA internationally at meets ranging from Junior Worlds, Youth Olympics, Junior PanPacs, PanAms, and various World Cup meets. Four of his swimmers have been named to USA Swimming’s National Junior Team and two to the National Team. The York Y was named a Gold Medal Club in both 2013 and 2015.
A featured speaker at several major coaches’ clinics across the country and Canada, he has spoken on wide-ranging topics, such as creating a culture of excellence, teaching technique, coaching effective practices, age group coaching for long-term success, coaching swim parents, creating talent in a small town, coaching IM’ers, and engineering success for age groupers at meets. In addition, he has taught the ASCA Stroke Technique School three times and the Physiology School once. In 2011, his book Developing Swimmers, a guide for age group swim training, was published by Human Kinetics.
Coach Brooks is a veteran of twenty-odd years of year-round club, high school, summer league, and country club swimming coaching. He has worked with all levels of swimmers, and routinely coaches ages ten to eighteen in his program, so that he has the beginning, the middle, and the end in sight and in mind all the while.
Before coming to the York YMCA, he spent two years as the Head Age Group Coach of the Brophy East Swimming Team in Phoenix, AZ., working closely with Dennis Pursley. And before that, he spent five years as Head Coach of the York site of the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, where he had the good fortune to work with and learn from Murray Stephens and Bob Bowman.
He has been named the Coach of the Meet at the YMCA National Championships four times, Middle Atlantic Senior Coach of the Year twice, and Maryland Age Group Coach of the Year twice. His swimmers have raced to well over two hundred national Top 16 and Top 10 rankings, thirty-plus YMCA national titles, scores of Far Western and Zone championships, and hundreds of state and LSC championships.
Finding coaching kids endlessly fascinating and thought-provoking, he is continually searching for the very best ways to do things and to order the parts of a program; to find and develop talent, and to create an environment where that talent will flourish; to explore the interplay between biological and athletic development, and between technique and fitness; and to find ways of making very complicated ideas understandable and interesting to nine-year olds.
He studies excellence of all sorts and is a voracious reader about people and organizations who are the best at what they do, whether in sports, business, art, academia, etc. He is continually “borrowing” ideas from other disciplines to improve his program.
He aims to develop swimmers who are beautiful to watch, superhumanly fast and fit, and who think like champions.
