Notre Dame has its new distance coach - Chris Neal from Furman

Polk at Lipscomb turned it down

Sparks will run the women and the men. Most people thought the position would be like Carlson's position where they have control of the men!

Actually Neal wrote the workouts at Furman. Until 2019, he did all the coaching. Gary was focused on his “professional” team and didn’t give a *** about the college athletes. He literally got all the credit, but Neal was happy because he got paid at the end of the day, and just enjoyed working with the athletes, however poorly. Gary even used to give him the “best coach award” plaques that furman and the SoCon would give to him, because he knew Neal deserved the credit. One of the few good things Gary did (though obviously it would’ve been better to just recognize him publicly, but we can’t expect too much from Scumbag Gary, let’s be real here)

But anyways, that all said, Neal wrote all the workouts and he is the reason Furman is so underachieving. They always took some of the best high school runners in the nation (Josh Brickell, Aaron Templeton, Brock Baker, Quintin Mckinish, etc) and overtrain them and turn them into underachievers no one ever heard from again. He also had plenty of talented high school runners that, at any other program, would’ve become pretty outstanding college athletes, but, like the high school studs, become wash outs that never reached their full potential. People focus so much on Gary’s reputation that they forget that, while Gary may be the worse person overall, it’s Neal who does the coaching, and Neal who deserves the blame for all the poor performances.

Funny how it’s supposed to being staying healthy when all his best athletes stayed injured their entire career, sometimes even to the point where some of them (Brock Baker) literally was in a wheelchair….

furman did nothing but threshold work, never developed anyone’s best, and killed every athletes legs with non stop grinding in the weight room and pool. There was zero belief in recovery at that school.

Funny since Neal once has an athlete who tore his Achilles and was in a wheelchair and couldn’t walk, and many of the athletes he coached got stress fractures from all his “becoming a better athlete” workouts

If you look at their recruiting classes and their resources, as well as their performances in every race until the national meet, yes. Guy clearly doesn’t know how to peak his athletes, or keep them healthy

Dude, get a life. It’s obvious you have an axe to grind. We get that. Robert and Chris do a solid job.

Hilarious to blame Chris for their problems

Do I think he should be running the program at Notre Dame? No

Is he the issue with Furman? Definitely not

If Robert only took over the workouts a couple years ago that's a positive for chris because they've gotten worse recently

Furman has three main issues

A) they attract kids who are more interested in social media then running. So they're soft. They just had a 3 hour media day

B) Rita is allowed to have too much freedom and it drives down the culture.

C) they don't have high enough standards they accept socon and possibly making nats they don't seem to expect to be a upper tier level nationally.

It's ironic every thread on Rita and Furmans under performance is deleted yet "former alumni" get to take shots at the 3rd highest coach on the totem pole