Newbury Park Track 5,000m: AMAZING!

Insane amount of talent but I do worry that he is overtrainibg them.

Doesn't hurt to have two sets of brothers on the team. Talented twins is pretty much cheating, but then add on they are the younger siblings of the Ind Natl Champ and it's just absurd how lucky their coach got. He's doing a great job, but so could a lot of coaches with talent like that.

No, it doesn’t hurt, but very few coaches train at the volume and intensity these guys do. The kid from Wantaugh is doing a heck of a job.

Funny thing is, the coach doesn’t care whether you congratulate him or not. You’re irrelevant. You know him, but he doesn’t even know you exist

Those middle school times are good but not nearly as good as those high school times. We always have 8th graders run similar times but they don't run 14:30 in high school.

My school has two middle schools that feed in and they both have track programs, the school records are 5:12 and 5:11 I think, 5:11 wrestled and ran outdoor track after running in the low 2s as a soph and was a 1:00 flat hurdle guy.

5:12 is my current teammate who's been doing well and I think he'll be low 4:10s by the time he's done, these programs don't do more than 10 miles a week and only practice 5 days a week

So a kid actually training like decently could defiantly run some of those middle school times these guys had, but to take them to the next level is the mileage and workouts they do compared to everyone else

I have never seen a kid go from 5:12 in 8th grade to 4:12 in high school and I have been at this a very long time.

Astro posts here wrote:

I have never seen a kid go from 5:12 in 8th grade to 4:12 in high school and I have been at this a very long time.

Seth Eliason from MN was in pretty much the same situation as this. Went from 5:11 in 8th grade (based on what I saw on Milesplit) to 4:12 senior year.

Drew Hunter went from not running competitively at all before high school to going sub-4 in 12th grade.

Astro posts here wrote:

I have never seen a kid go from 5:12 in 8th grade to 4:12 in high school and I have been at this a very long time.

Lots of bad posts to reply to in this thread, but this takes the cake. At my high school alone, I saw:

A 5:15 8th grader run 4:11

A 5:18 8th grader run 4:12

A 5:28 8th grader run 4:16 (me)

A 5:22 8th grader run 4:15

If you're running 50 mpw in middle school, yeah maybe you won't improve that much, but most middle school teams are running almost nothing. I ran more for soccer in middle school than track. Not to mention, plenty of higher level athletes than 4:15 guys have done the same. I have a kid on my college team who's run sub-4:00 who didn't break 5:00 until his sophomore year of high school.

Which high school? Didn't think so. You would have had about the best 4xmile in the country.

Two factors based on interviews done on youtube:

1. They started training young (Nico started at 6)

2. At least one member of their family was into running.

My third observation is that the feeder youth track program is good specifically with mid distance races. Check out their website This is before 6th grade. My suspicion is the coach at the youth level is doing a great job at training them to succeed later.

More than 1/2 of the states don't have those performances but you want us to believe you had them all at your high school? Oh, and of course none of them were great in JH either. And you happen to know the precise 8th grade times of all of them.

Newbury is taking the very best middle school club runners from all over the LA/Ventura County area and recruiting them all to come to one high school. It's a unique set-up.

Well, before the coach got there, Newbury Park did nothing, so you can't just say that it is the feeder system, unless he built that too.

xzcvzvcx wrote:

Well, before the coach got there, Newbury Park did nothing, so you can't just say that it is the feeder system, unless he built that too.

Newbury Park had a kid finish 6th at Footlocker Nationals in the 1980's. They have a history of XC talent.

But remember, the boys they have now are not part of their feeder schools for the most part. Those boys would have to go to other high schools if not for open enrollment in the area. Nico Young and his brothers did not even live in Newbury Park.

Brosnan is a great coach no doubt, but what secret does he have that we are supposed to believe has alluded every other high school coach in US history.

Pretty clear. Kids and families like him so they move there or open enroll. Nothing wrong with that.

Nice to see what 4:45 8th-graders can do with real coaching.

Background: 5 or 6 years ago, I was a volunteer assistant coach at the local HS. I'm no Lydiard, but I have some knowledge and experience, and was still fit enough to push most of the guys in workouts. The head coach was a good guy, clueless about running but smart enough to see that I knew was I was doing... BUT he had to answer to the Modified coach, who had the ear of the AD. This guy (also the school counselor, go figure) was also clueless, thought he knew everything, and was the king of the "Participation Trophy" mindset. I actually heard him tell the team before a race, "Don't try too hard. That way, you won't be disappointed when you lose." Had no business coaching anybody.

Anyway, we had an 8th-grader run 4:45 in the Spring. He was enthusiastic and wanted a good summer training plan to get ready for XC. I put together something modest - building to 35-40 mpw for the last couple weeks of August. "Bruce" put the kibosh on it; told the kid to only run 3 miles once a week in order to "avoid overtraining". I told him he was an idiot; he got me "suspended" from my volunteer position for the first month of XC season. So I quit. To make a long story shorter, under Bruce's fine tutelage, the kid got all the way down to 4:42 as a Senior. I'm sure he treasures his participation medals.

/rant

Don’t be so sure it’s as simple as kids and parents liking him.. I don’t know anything about him, but never underestimate what parents will go through or put up with for their kids to be part of a winner for their Facebook image. They seem to have a very small team with few seniors on both the boy’s and girl’s teams, which might be a clue.

But that is liking him. You just define liking in a different way. If nobody liked him, he never would have developed a wining team.

One dude from my school ran 5:14 in middle school, 4:18 as a junior and got hurt senior year so lost his momentum

4:05 as a college junior indoors