Joe Newton dealing with parents

No man! You've got to yell and scream! They need to take a blood oath placing the XC team above all else, god, country & family included! This is Cross F^CKING Country! Missing my prescribed tempo run- you might as well just personally kick me in the Jimmy!

Miss it and I'll teach you, you wont run here, you wont run there you wont run any where! I'll have you off this team so fast and snatch up your equipment and pull the spikes off your darn ungrateful feet.

If I dont kick them off the team how will they ever learn discipline or develop any self worth?

texasHeat wrote:

We were not allowed to play other sports, have a job, or do anything that could take away from our 2 a day practices. Ice baths were mandatory. The parents knew coaches rules. If u didn't like it, u quit the team and did not associate with anyone still on the team.

The Woodlands is in a very affluent neighborhood, and these rules seem to reinforce this. "No Job" seems to say, "If you are too poor where you need a job to make ends meet, don't bother joining our team".

You can't associate with people who are not on the team? That is over the top, and again reinforces the insular nature of well-to-do Texas.

You can get kids to do just about anything, esp if they are competing with each other. The coaching staff gets results, but this is an approach that would develop automatons who obey any and all orders.

I went to a talk by Jacques Steinberg, an NY Times columnist who wrote a book on admissions policies at top universities. He said that what colleges want is that students show leadership/national caliber performance at two very different activities (e.g. track and violin or football and senior class president), plus 4 years of one language, taking all the hardest classes offered at your school, and obviously top test scores. What they did not want at all, what threw up a red flag, was a dilettantish record like mine. So, coaches should tell their kids that they need to concentrate all their extracurricular time on two activities, rather than trying to be all things to all people. Focus on xc/track and one other thing and never miss a practice.

I have to disagree with you. My first year where I'm at we increased our number of sub 5:00 boys from 5 to 25 and 6 boys were sub 4:30. Things were looking up. The next year this policy hit where kids can come and go as they want and I cannot PUNISH them by not letting run in races. Two years later as of now, I've only got 4 boys under 5:00. You be careful though. Wait until you get a super stud whom is also a super trumpet player or asks to miss often for debate club. Are you not going to race him? Are you going to disrespect everyone else on the team by giving the stud more attention than the ones that are there everyday?

Bump. Best thread I've seen in a while.

Atheist wrote:

My name is Luke wrote:

Thank you for speaking the truth.

Kenya and Ethiopia have the best runners in the world because they're mostly Christian countries. Christians accept that there's something greater than themselves, they respect the people around them and they devote their life to do good, both in sport and in life in general. This fits very well with the commitment that's needed to become a great runner.

It comes as no surprise that our best marathoners, Meb and Ryan, are Christian.

Yes there are a few good runners who are not Christian, but they mostly come from rats' nests of drugs and cheatery.

You are absolutely ignorant for making this comment. That is a terribly small sample. There is not even the slightest bit of evidence for the existence of God. If you have imaginary friends, keep them to yourself.

Sorry Luke, John, and now Paul agree.

Cutz wrote:

The answer is to have try outs and cuts so that you end up with a team of no more than 25. The kids that make the team won't skip practice.

LOL- good luck with that.

I didn't read the whole thread, but I like the discussion. I just have a policy that you must be at practice everyday that you are in school. If you need tutoring, club, etc you still have to show up. I'll have kids show up 45 mins late, but they are there. They must also see me during the school day to show up late, if not it counts against them. I have a system of penalties that go into effect for unexcused absences. The 3rd one in a season and you are off the team.

It has worked out ok. It's frustrating to see your sport lower on the kids priority list sometimes.

I think attendance is really a case by case situation. Is one kid missing because he's lazy and doesn't want to do the prescribed workout that day, or is he missing because he has to get special tutoring for a class, is he missing because he takes his mother to dialysis ever Wed... a blanket attendance policy, while tempting, is actually kind of a lazy way around the issue.

I think I would do everything I could to keep any kid who is actually trying, on the team. Now I might limit their events to open events, but I would try to be accommodating; not many of these kids are going to run a step after HS and the positive influences they can have while on the team outweigh the negatives they can certainly pick up when off the team.

The penalty of missing meets is usually enough to get many people to show up.

There are some kids who do it just for the athletic credit, etc. You don't have to put a ton of effort into coaching them, but come on, it's not hard to write workouts for 21min guys running 25 MPW.

The one policy I liked was that you had to run within 2 min of your PR in the first meet of the season.

It made people at least stay somewhat active over the summer.