How did your team do in XC this year? What did you learn?

Eastern High School, ky

went in ranked 2nd based on 3200 times from that track season. One of our top seven was unable to run for a month due to... I really shouldn't say. But then our 3rd guy got injured. Still ranked 3rd, but the juniors on the team really are not motivated enough. also our previous #4 guy (3rd after #3 got injured) ran a poor race.

Ended up 5th at state, just 4 points behind 4th and 12 points behind 3rd.

you could say we went home devastated. Especially our #2 guy, who developed into our #1 guy the last two races of the season, who worked his a s s off to try to get us on that podium. But the other members of the team didn't follow up with it. He managed a #13 performance. Our previously #1 guy, ranked top 5 in the state for most of the season, barely cracked the top 25.

16:40 3/4th man ran 17:20.

yeah it was a bad season and now with the lazy juniors leading the team next year, our team culture is going down.

on the other hand, our girls team ran fantastic taking 6th place after not qualifying for 4 years. We return our top 10 runners. All of them.

What’s your plan for the dud juniors? Team building exercises? Kick them off to send a message to the next batch of kids, and focus on the girls?

OH I'm not the coach. I'm a slow (18:40) untalented sophmore who works hard and then gets injured. Coach is also a teacher, lives 45 minutes away and has young kids. It's hard for him to do much with team culture. It's up to the current seniors and my fellow hard working sophomores to turn things around. However, team culture is dying. Only one male freshmen has been accepted into the culture, and the team is full of cliques( the strongest clique being some of the sophomores, unfortunately I'm not a part of that group). It's very interesting to see how team culture directly relates with performance. It was a culture change on the girls side that helped them improve, and it was brought about by one very ambitious junior who has led the girls team to improve.

We accomplished every single one of our goals amazingly.

epicTCK wrote:

OH I'm not the coach. I'm a slow (18:40) untalented sophmore who works hard and then gets injured. Coach is also a teacher, lives 45 minutes away and has young kids. It's hard for him to do much with team culture. It's up to the current seniors and my fellow hard working sophomores to turn things around. However, team culture is dying. Only one male freshmen has been accepted into the culture, and the team is full of cliques( the strongest clique being some of the sophomores, unfortunately I'm not a part of that group). It's very interesting to see how team culture directly relates with performance. It was a culture change on the girls side that helped them improve, and it was brought about by one very ambitious junior who has led the girls team to improve.

18:40 is not untalented. We had kids running 16 flat this year that were running 21-22 four years ago.

You can be the "one very ambitious junior" next year for the guys, ya know...