Thought this would make for an interesting thread topic. Personally, I agree with the coach resting his athletes. They had to run the meet because they have to run a certain number of meets to qualify for the postseason.
i feel terrible for all his runners. horrible coach
Of course that coach is an idiot for having his kids not run hard. If he was worried about injuries, why would he have them running hard on monday?
I ran 18 xc races each season when I was in high school. Of course we didn't rest and run all out every one of them, but each time we raced, we did the best we could on that day. We always improved throughout the season and ran our best at the end.
This is a trickle down from the top universities that have their stars only run 2 or 3 times before nationals.
High school coaches forget the difference between the two levels.
If the pros can use races as workouts and dropout, then whats the problem here?
race is a learning experience wrote:
This is a trickle down from the top universities that have their stars only run 2 or 3 times before nationals.
High school coaches forget the difference between the two levels.
The difference between the two levels is that successful college teams use intelligent training while the vast majority of high school teams engage in utterly stupid training. Do you really think that running 18 races was ideal? I'd sure as heck rather run an early season rust buster, a mid season fitness check, use districts as a tune up, then go try to win states. Dual meets are completely pointless and there is no reason to run more than a handful of invitationals for XC.
Smart coach. As an athlete I would respect a coach who is willing to take a fall if he knows the athletes will benefit. Anyone who really knows the sport knows how it works. People might get upset but I doubt they are the ones who will be winning when it counts. Look at what Rupp did at Oxy. Ran part of a race as a workout then dropped out. He knows what he has to do to improve and so does this coach.
Coach says:
Senor Senior wrote:“In all honesty, the way the season works, none of the meets matter over the course of the season,” Phillips said. “You can lose all the meets and win the conference meet and be conference champions. We ran Saturday, didn’t run Sunday, worked out Monday and it would have been detrimental to tell them to run their hardest on Tuesday. Over-training can lead to an injury. It’s not something that hasn’t ever happened before. It was a decision based on training and nothing else. It’s not off the wall to tell your kids to run easy.”
Which is 100% correct. How often do we see coaches on letsrun complain about the worthless dual meets their conferences require them to run? Plenty of coaches will sandbag these races in favor of the important races. I would too.
Why run them hard 2 days after a meet? Give them another day and then run hard at the meet? Seems like very poor planning.
If they run the meet all out, they are getting two race efforts within 4 days. I'm assuming the workout that they did Monday was very specific. It's difficult to get high school runners to half-run. It's all or nothing most of the time.
I coach a high school team, we do jamborees so it's not as obvious, but we use our "dual" meets as tempo runs. We pick a kid on another team to run with or align groups to run together. Our state mandates that we race every team in the conference at least once, so we put on the uniforms and show up. We train very hard and need to keep the legs as fresh as possible.
I'm not saying this is the only right way, but this is our way.
The only problem I have with this story is that those kids are jerks. How did the coach allow them to have such poor sportsmanship? Might as well cancel the rest of the season because they don't deserve to race.
I think the biggest problem is that the coach didn't explicitly tell the kids not to goof around. I made that mistake once thinking they would just do as I said and light tempo, but kids are kids and if they're told not to go all-out, they think it's just a grab-ass day.
The coach also should not have worked them out on Monday when he could have very easily rested Monday and used Tuesday as a quality (maybe not full race, but some workout) day.
Bad decisions all around. I understand the motives, but the execution was poor. Which makes sense, because I think the article said this was only the second year coaching. Many HS coaches are overly sensitive d-bags so the response is not surprising.
Rather not run 18 races wrote:
Dual meets are completely pointless and there is no reason to run more than a handful of invitationals for XC.
Thanks for proving my point countless times more than I could have.
Only 7 kids are going to run varsity. What about all the other kids on the team?
I don't agree with racing so little, but if that is the way you want to coach, then hold out the varsity and let the rest of the team compete as hard as they can. That's what high school sports is all about. Only a very very small amount of kids are capable of challenging for a state title. Those are the kids that will go on to run at the universities.