Coaching vs. Managing Practice

In my experience, there are a variety of ways that coaches go about running their practices. We all have our funny ways of doing things, and we each have our own style. What seems to me to be a common thread among successful coaches is that they don't just manage the practice, they coach it.
It may seem like semantics, but let me explain. Truly coaching practice means teaching, encouraging, correcting, disciplining, instructing, and demonstrating. In short, interacting with your athletes in a way that makes practice productive, fun, and successful. Sometimes I see coaches fail to coach practice and instead they manage it. Often, this coach is working with more athletes than he or she can handle, is under-prepared for practice, or is coaching athletes who swim at a level beyond the coaches' skills or maturity. This coach spends his or her entire time just making sure the athletes are doing practice. But in my view it's not just the "doing" that makes the athletes successful. It is the doing, the learning, the motivating, and the interaction that makes a coach-athlete relationship at practice successful.