otter wrote:
Credentials are important because for instance a Level 5 IAAF certification would tell me that not only would the person have a vast knowledge of the energy systems and sprint mechanics but they would also have been evaluated by the best in the world working with an actual athlete.
There is a lot of politics in the top level of credentials. There are some great coaches with credentials but bad ones too. The bad ones got those credentials because they play the right game, which isn't necessarily what we think of as coaching.
I went to a university with a coach with excellent credentials in the jumps. As a result, his position at the university was secure and he was able to attract some great talent. Unfortunately, the majority of this talent failed to improve in college. While some athletes not improving in college is normal for a number of reasons, when 80% of your jumpers are doing worse than high school, something is wrong.
Since this jumps coach (also the head coach/director of tnf/xc) was selected as the head coach for USATF for two worlds teams, surely he was the issue?
A few years after college, my now wife and former teammate wanted to get back into jumping. She was not nearly his best talent, she jumped only 18-6 in high school and had failed to improve on that in college. I had been dabbling in coaching at that point with the local hs, so I agreed to coach her. Year 1 she jumped 19-4. Year two she went over 20 feet, and year 3 (our final year), she went 21-4.
Our college coach was great at the technical aspects of the long jump, dont get me wrong. He also had many other positive qualities, I genuinely learned from him about being a positive person in general, he absolutely earned my respect in that regard. But he was mediocrr at best at developing speed and explosiveness for the horizontal jumps.
I know this is just anecdotal, but my point is, credentials arent everything. If they were, his were pretty much as good as they get, so he should have had 80% of his athletes improve instead of the opposite. But the reality was that his career had been built around his excellent ability to forge relationships with important people in the ncaa and USATF community, not on his ability to coach. For that single athlete we both coached, me, a nobody with zero credentials and a background as a distance runner was able to apply what he had learned on forums, books, and talking to other high school coaches and completely transform one of his athletes and IMO, maximize what she could do with her talent.
Anyway, that is a long winded way of saying that I agree with AJ, the OP's coach's credentials are irrelevant. Also since the OP seems so open to ideas, I doubt that his coachability is the issue. Unless he is greatly misrepresenting the workouts given to him by his coach, his coach is dropping the ball in this case.