I've been puttering around with the idea of a workbook-style journal for rowing coaches. It would be the infamous "coach's notebook" where all the line ups, workouts, notes are recorded. The current vision seems to combine a computer application with a paper product in an ideal world, but the main focus is the paper notebook.
I've been thinking about this since I first started coaching rowing, back in 2003. I came to coaching after graduate school. I was in a PhD program in microbiology, so I'd kept A LOT of laboratory notebooks in my previous life. The team turned into my next great "science experiment", and I eagerly set about taking notes on everything that was going on. When I was promoted from assistant coach to coach of my own team in the spring of 2004 I started my first collection of notes. I received an Excel spreadsheet from the previous coach which had all sorts of data on the athletes as well as a workout planning section. My first collection of notes consisted of many printed pages from that spreadsheet. By the end of the season it was clear that this wasn't the way to go... I was constantly loosing pages. Many of the pages that weren't lost were illegible after they got wet in the launch. So, version 2.0 was a composition notebook. You can imagine the issues I had with those... a composition notebook just can't deal with the digital age. I had to print sheets from the spread sheet, trim them (a comp notebook isn't 8.5x11!), and then paste them into the notebook. Same thing for race info and course maps. This was only mildly annoying when I set a notebook up for the first season. As I continued coaching I realized that I had to recreate the "blank" notebook at the beginning of each season, which meant A LOT of printing, trimming, and pasting. Once I had my first child I determined that this was not a good long-term plan. And then I got a catalog from Levenger in the mail.
Levenger has a very interesting notebook system called Circa. It combines the best features of a spiral notebook and a three ring binder. You can open the notebook and fold it back like a spiral, but you can take pages out and rearrange them and/or punch your own paper to put into the notebook like a three ring. For notebook 3.0 I decided to upgrade to the Circa system. I decided that I would have a "working" notebook that I carried around with me everyday, then archive notebooks once a season was complete. Only the working notebook would need to have my daily reference info for things like rigging numbers and drill & workout selection guides. Finally I wouldn't have to recreate the "blank" for each season!
