Almighty Coach

Jianguo Chen walked a student’s mother out of the office. This was the fifth parent who had come here today to sign up for the PE exam training class.

Where did Dai Li come from out of the blue? Why are all the parents coming here for him? Jianguo Chen thought to himself, scratching his head. He had been running training education for a long time and it was the first time he had experienced something like this.

How could an undergraduate student could attract so many students? Jianguo Chen doubted that Dai Li asked his relatives to make up the numbers.

The five students who had enrolled that night were just the beginning, however. The next day there were three more new students and seven or eight phone calls from interested parents. Then came the weekend. Parents now had more free time, and the enrollment number skyrocketed. There were sixteen new students in two days.

Twenty new students in four days. They couldn’t all be Dai Li’s relatives. Normal people didn’t even have that many family members. Jianguo Chen couldn’t figure it out, so he asked everyone he knew to collect information. Finally, he found out what had happened.

Four days ago, Dai Li won in a competition with Shouliang Zhao! Jianguo Chen was so surprised at the information. One was the professional coach from the municipal sports team, which almost represented the highest training level of Yuzhou City. The other was just some undergraduate college student. There was no way to compare the two people. How could a student compete with a professional coach who had more than ten years of experience?

However, Dai Li had had the best results. Professional coach Shouliang Zhao only had one word prefacing his name now—"loser." Jianguo Chen would never have believed it if he hadn’t gotten the same information from everyone else. He doubted that Shouliang Zhao was Dai Li’s swindler who had lost on purpose in front of the others just to help him. However, the damage to Shouliang Zhao’s reputation was too great. There was no chance he would’ve done it for Dai Li.

A professional couldn’t even compete with a young college student. This made people think that Shouliang Zhao didn’t deserve his title since he had no actual skills. And because of that, the students had left one by one, like a domino effect.

If it was like the other kinds of normal training classes, like Chinese, math, or English, they wouldn’t have turned to another teacher immediately just because the teacher was not as good as others. But training classes for high school entrance exams were different. Middle school had primary education that didn’t allow students to repeat the courses. Even if some places did, the key high schools didn’t accept repeat students.

For students who were going to take the exam, the PE exam was their only opportunity in their entire life. Of course parents would choose the best of the best class with the best teacher. For students whose targets were key high schools, even one point meant weeding out a lot of competitors.

Dai Li now had 36 students in total. Jianguo Chen didn’t continue enrolling new students because he thought it would be hard enough for Dai Li to train 36 students by himself at the same time. It was also because there was no more room on the training field. In addition, there was only one week left until the PE exam, so it would be too late to start now for any students just joining the program.

...

On the training field, Dai Li frowned with a look full of worry.

The progress is coming slower than before! Dai Li thought to himself.

The high school PE entrance exam was around the corner, but the students were improving slower than they had been. You could easily tell from the numbers in the detecting system. The same students who had been gaining a lot of points each day in the beginning could now only gain one point after a whole day’s training. This worried Dai Li very much.

Has the training effect decreased? No way. There are still a few days left before the top-level coach card expires. There should be no difference between the training effects from before to today. Why are they improving so slowly now?

The voice of the System spoke while Dai Li was mulling over it. "It’s normal that progress comes slower. Think about normal sports training. The progress is very obvious in the beginning, but then it slows down, and even stops. When you reach the top level, even very slight progress will take you forever to develop. This has nothing to do with the system, it’s just the physical limitations of humans.

"Let’s take the 100m sprint as an example. It only takes a few weeks to improve from 13 seconds to 12 seconds. But it will take you a few months to improve from 12 seconds to 11 seconds. And from 11 seconds to 10 seconds, it might take you a few years. 99% of athletes have spent their entire life trying to break the wall of 10 seconds, but couldn’t. After breaking the 10 second barrier, an improvement of even 0.01 seconds is pushing it. The better you are, the slower you progress. Some of the top athletes might even get worse if they don’t continue a certain number of exercises. This is the rule of all sports."

Dai Li nodded. "Now I get it. My students have already reached their limitations, so the progress will come slower than before. But although the results are not as good as before, they will still be able to get full scores on the PE exam according to their abilities now."

"You can say that again." The System stopped for a second and continued, "I have good news for you. Your experience has met the requirement to level up one minute ago. You are no longer a newbie. You’re a real coach!"

"I levelled? I didn’t expect it to be this fast." This had come much faster than Li thought it would have, which made him draw a blank for a second.

But then he realized that it was because the number of the students had increased, meaning that the speed of upgrading had gotten faster. It had taken Dai Li a long time to reach 100 points of experience when he had only had 12 students to train. But now that he had 36 students, the speed had tripled as well. That was why he was able to get to the next level ahead of the schedule.

Name: Dai Li

Coach Level: Third-rate coach, preliminary phase(0/1000)

Others: Top-level coach trial card (4 days)

Training list: Xiaoming Huang, Xun Li, Congcong Wu, Zhenye Zhu...

"Third-rate coach at preliminary phase? How many phases are there?" Dai Li asked.

The System answered immediately, "Three. Preliminary, intermediate, and senior phases. After you reach the senior phase of the third-rate coach, you can get ready to move up to become the second-rate coach."

"So is this 0/1000 experience for the intermediate phase or the senior phase?" Dai Li continued asking.

"For the intermediate phase, of course," the System answered without any hesitation.

"But this means that I need even more experience to upgrade to the second-rate coach!" Dai Li complained.

"Stop complaining and check your rewards. You get a reward every time you level. You just got one since you upgraded from a newbie to a third-rate coach. Don’t you want to check what’s in the gift package?" the System asked.

Dai Li thought about the gift for a moment, and suddenly the gift package showed up in the System.

"Last time I got a 14-day top-level trial card. I wonder what I will get this time." Dai Li opened the gift, wondering what was inside.