Well we are just two weeks away from the beginning of a new season. I should say the official beginning of a new season. Our season really began in early June. I am really excited about the year getting started because as a whole the team has put in the time and effort that was needed. I am a bit bummed because it looks like we will not have a full girl's team. I will keep my fingers crossed that something will change as the season nears. The boys, on the other hand have had 9 different boys at practice this summer. This is the most participation that I have had from either team in my 12 years as a coach. I believe that every athlete on the team has the potential to finish this year with their best performances. Where that takes us once the tournament starts, only time will tell. We began this journey last year and hoped the destination at the end of this year would be the regionals for girls and the state meet for the boys. Obviously the girls will have a tough time arriving at their destination without a complete team. The boys, however, seem to be headed in th right direction. It will be fun to watch the team members work toward the future.
Practice has started and we are only 12 days away from our first meet. We began the season knowing we needed to have more base mileage and improve our overall strength. We began just over a month ago addressing both. Our biggest change this summer was the addition of weight lifting. We began official practice trying to address a team weakness of hill running. This year we will run a hill work out each week until the beginning of the season alternating each week between 300's and 600's. We also needed to step up our mileage a bit. Many on the team will have their biggest mileage week ever at the conclusion of this week. I really love the commitment that I have seen thus far.
Many, many years ago in my early twenties, I wondered what life would be like if I couldn't compete any longer. I even wondered, "What will life without running be like?" It didn't seem like a place I wanted to be. I know that things do end and life continues on. In this case running's influence on my life only changed its role. In 1988, I began coaching with Coach Maddox at Anderson University. This new experience started to fill a void that my own diminishing running life was leaving. As time passed and a family was started, I began coaching many different sports as my sons began to grow. I was able to influence young people and strangely I began to feel that old familiar feeling that competition brings. I began my first head coaching job at Frankton High School in 2000. The last 10 years has been a wonderful experience. Ups and downs, successes and failures, building of new and old relationsips were present just like they were during my competitive running years. My life was never going to be void of running because it had become a part of who I was. There is no life after running there is just life. What a gift running has been and now I am not the only one receiving the gift God so graciously granted me. I am now sharing this thing that I once was a afraid of being without.
There are many sports that I enjoy being a part of simply for the competition. I love running because it provides a person an opportunity to compete on a daily basis without any other runners present. Also during races, you have an opportunity to compete against others while at the same time competing against yourself. Success is measured by most in how we competed against the field first. Many people do not take the time to first compare their outcome to their own performance(s). I believe first and foremost we should consider how we competed against our own expectations and prior performances before we begin to look at how we competed against other competitors. As a coach, it is easy to miss individual growth in runners when we are continually comparing our own runners to runners on other teams. This year I have seen many runners on our team make great strides in their growth as runners. This could have been easily missed if I first didn't evaluate each runner as if they were the only one that ran the race. Were their splits even? How did the time compare to previous races on the sam course? DId their outcome match the work they have been doing in practice? Now we can begin to evaluate against the field. Did they meet challenges? Did they beat runners that had previously beaten them? Did they improve their position on the team? The tough thing to do is to help young athletes to learn to compete against themselves first and then the field.
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AuthorI have been coaching Cross Country and Track at both the college level and high school level for nearly 22 years. Archives
July 2012
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