Big invitationals are great venues to go fast and to gain exposure. A proud athlete wants to measure themselves against the best, not defeat local scrubs so that old Coach Krusty can celebrate another league title and pretend that he’s still relevant. My take is that the kid wants to be good and to see where he stands but his coach is controlling and lazy. Invites happen on Saturdays plus take some planning. Coach just wants to sit on his rump all weekend watching sports on his couch because he isn’t getting paid extra.
We don't know if the OP is talking about athlete who should measure himself against the best or not. Only one guy wins a dual meet so unless this kid beats all of those scrubs while barely breaking a sweat he'll get plenty of competition in most dual meets. And he'll have opportunities to measure himself against the best at the end of the season. But whatever, there's nothing in the original post indicating whether or not the OP has discussed this with anyone else. What if almost everyone else connected to the team isn't all that fired up to run invitational meets?
Other than one parent who requested to have his kid to be registered, the rest don’t care, or their kids are not ready for these invitationals.
i didn’t speak to the coach personally, in the past he lied to me that the reason he doesn’t go to invitationals is that because they don’t have JV races, and he wouldn’t go to any unless they do. I found out that all the invitationals he refused to go to in fact they do have JV races. So I lost trust in anything he says.
What bothers me is the fact that he doesn’t do anything the entire summer, when we have a basketball team that their season starts in January, yet the coach works the entire summer with the team. How come that I work with my kid for 2 months, make sure he does his training, yet when the school starts, I have no say, because someone who doesn’t even know what Milesplit is (I swear it’s true) gets to decide how he trains or where he should race!
Other than one parent who requested to have his kid to be registered, the rest don’t care, or their kids are not ready for these invitationals.
i didn’t speak to the coach personally, in the past he lied to me that the reason he doesn’t go to invitationals is that because they don’t have JV races, and he wouldn’t go to any unless they do. I found out that all the invitationals he refused to go to in fact they do have JV races. So I lost trust in anything he says.
What bothers me is the fact that he doesn’t do anything the entire summer, when we have a basketball team that their season starts in January, yet the coach works the entire summer with the team. How come that I work with my kid for 2 months, make sure he does his training, yet when the school starts, I have no say, because someone who doesn’t even know what Milesplit is (I swear it’s true) gets to decide how he trains or where he should race!
Sign your kid up for collegiate XC meets in the open category.
For a kid to train alone, all summer long, enduring heat and humidity, hit 60 miles a week plus lifting, that tells you that he wants to be good, he wants to improve. XC invitationals are just a motivation, something to look forward to, to get excited and keep working. It doesn’t matter if he’s crushing it in the dual meets or not.
For a coach to sit home the entire summer, we don’t hear a single word from him, we don’t need training plans, plenty are available already, just show that you care. For him to come and decide what kids should do when he’s absent all summer, for me that’s not a coach, that’s not even a person I should trust to be around my kid. unfortunately as I said, the school won’t do anything, because I’m the only one who is voicing his dissatisfaction.
Assuming that your story is true, then quit. If you have the support of the other athletes, then encourage them to quit. Everyone writes a letter of resignation for both the coach and the AD. Leave him without a team to enter at dual meets. No one comes back until a new coach with updated notions of training, athlete development, and that understands the new recruiting environment is found.
Hit up local 5K road races or point towards running indoor events unattached. Get private coaching if needed.
College recruiting is an arms race now and kids only get one shot at making an impression. Don’t waste it on old farts stuck in the 1990s.
I'm a current college runner that dealt with a similar situation in high school. People downvoting this post don't understand how ridiculous recruiting has gotten post-House settlement. There are power 4 schools with WALK ON standards of 4:02/8:45 now. A 4 minute mile will get you a textbook, congratulations. The 28 year old 3:36 Kenyan has been doping since you were in diapers and will gladly take your scholarship.
All this rah-rah run for your high crap might have flown in 1985, or hell even 2015. It's a different world. Coaches want times on paper. If your kids HS coach is unable to get that through his head, take him off the team yesterday and try to get in some good meets unattached. If you have to run college meets, do that. This is how most other Olympic sports (swimming, gymnastics, ect.) have always worked.
The current situation is unfortunate, but it doesn't seem to be getting better anytime soon. You gotta adapt, or your kid is gonna be on the run club instead of a college team where he obviously belongs.
at least where i live coaches cannot coach you during the summer until a date when the season officially begins and practice is allowed. they would get in trouble for even telling you a plan to follow in their absence. all they can do is point you to a book that has a plan and say figure it out yourself. a prominent HS soccer coach where i grew up had a kid my age who played select for our rival. their select coach got a red during select season before HS and was ejected. HS coach steps up as one of the parents to finish the game. some of his kids go to his HS and play for him. state suspends HS coach for multiple games to start the next season, saying he coached his team in a game before the season legally started.
the coach's scheduling and workout decisions, or general behavior, unless inhumanely cruel, inappropriately sexual, or criminal, will not get him fired. a light workload likely will not get anyone hurt where a principal or AD might discuss changing training.
since you're downvoting the part you can control -- you can supplement the workouts, and you can add prestige into the postseason to replace the invitationals -- i'll just go ahead and get further downvoting for honestly and accurately telling you your lame beerhall coup attempt will fail, and probably be a distraction from getting your kid fit, competitive, and recruited, which should be the real focus.
i was asked to take part in one of these witchhunts my senior year. i passed. who cares, you're about to go to college. to me you want to maximize athletic success and get him coaches at the school who speak well of him to recruiters. you try to burn this down and you're on your own and don't expect positive feedback to college recruiters if they call the coach instead of you.
For a kid to train alone, all summer long, enduring heat and humidity, hit 60 miles a week plus lifting, that tells you that he wants to be good, he wants to improve. XC invitationals are just a motivation, something to look forward to, to get excited and keep working. It doesn’t matter if he’s crushing it in the dual meets or not.
For a coach to sit home the entire summer, we don’t hear a single word from him, we don’t need training plans, plenty are available already, just show that you care. For him to come and decide what kids should do when he’s absent all summer, for me that’s not a coach, that’s not even a person I should trust to be around my kid. unfortunately as I said, the school won’t do anything, because I’m the only one who is voicing his dissatisfaction.
What did your kid do the first two years of high school that you didn’t know that this was what the coach was like? Also, I think you have an extremely unrealistic expectation of a high school coach.
Assuming that your story is true, then quit. If you have the support of the other athletes, then encourage them to quit. Everyone writes a letter of resignation for both the coach and the AD. Leave him without a team to enter at dual meets. No one comes back until a new coach with updated notions of training, athlete development, and that understands the new recruiting environment is found.
Hit up local 5K road races or point towards running indoor events unattached. Get private coaching if needed.
College recruiting is an arms race now and kids only get one shot at making an impression. Don’t waste it on old farts stuck in the 1990s.
I'm a current college runner that dealt with a similar situation in high school. People downvoting this post don't understand how ridiculous recruiting has gotten post-House settlement. There are power 4 schools with WALK ON standards of 4:02/8:45 now. A 4 minute mile will get you a textbook, congratulations. The 28 year old 3:36 Kenyan has been doping since you were in diapers and will gladly take your scholarship.
All this rah-rah run for your high crap might have flown in 1985, or hell even 2015. It's a different world. Coaches want times on paper. If your kids HS coach is unable to get that through his head, take him off the team yesterday and try to get in some good meets unattached. If you have to run college meets, do that. This is how most other Olympic sports (swimming, gymnastics, ect.) have always worked.
The current situation is unfortunate, but it doesn't seem to be getting better anytime soon. You gotta adapt, or your kid is gonna be on the run club instead of a college team where he obviously belongs.
dude, he has to "play the game," period. they are not interested in your road race results. if you quit the HS team they will want something like nike nationals instead.
y'all also ignore that part of the recruiting calculus is coachability. if you come across like someone who flips out over coaching methods and quits teams and then runs on his own, that poses a risk you quit my college team too. if i have 2 kids similar times for 1 slot, and 1 kid quits teams when things don't go his way, hmmm, which one do i go with.
y'all's just do unattached theory also ignores that part of where athletic success comes from is team competition, pushing each other in practice, keeping each other honest, getting honest reps in. and then folks like you are usually making a high ante bet on a limited season of unattached meets, where you better show well.
the far better choices here are what i proposed. you work some more on the side. you sign your kid up for prestige meets after the season. and then meanwhile if you really think this is hurting your kid, you look at a transfer to a neighboring public school or a private, for the spring or next year.
last, to the extent you're pushing the idea only the invitationals trigger fast times, i think that's a rubbish argument. my personal experience my fastest meet times were usually some small early meet and then the area championship. my experience big tough field meets usually provoke an intense experience but not fast times. if your kid loafs through a dual meet and isn't hustling to max times and finish, that's a bigger problem than easy workouts.
Here is what college coaches are looking at for recruiting:
A. Track performances (marks)
B. XC performances in well known invitationals against other athletes that they are also targeting
C. Performances and placement at state championships and postseason championships like NXN, New Balance Nationals, Brooks PR, etc.
D. Demonstrated progression during their high school career
These, along with athlete interest from filling out recruiting forms, are what puts you on the radar. If you have what a team needs, then your grades, test scores, maturity, and personality become factors.
No one is scouring Athletic.net and Milesplit hoping to stumble upon greatness at the Tri-Rivers League Preview meet or Farmburg Central vs. Smallville Union dual meet. Agents are now contacting P4 schools offering talent to the highest bidder. Y’all need to stop believing in naive fantasies about some alumni Sunday driving and discovering some gazelle like child running effortlessly through cornfields and then busting off a call to his old coach with a hot tip.
I really think that this board is crawling with old men that haven’t been in the game for over 20 years plus hopeful kids and their parents with no real clue how things are done in 2025.
What are you trying to accomplish by posting all of this? No one here can get your school entered in invitationals. And honestly it's hard to say this coach is doing anything he should be fired for. Doesn't want to coach in the summer unless he's paid? Maybe not coach of the year material but do you work for free? And state rules mean he probably can't coach before a specific date anyway. Doesn't want to go to invitationals because he wants his Saturdays free? Again, most people don't want to work on their days off. Yes, a really motivated coach might want to go to those meets but he isn't doing anything firable by not doing it. If there was an AD who wanted the team running in those meets it could be a requirement of the job to go but if the AD doesn't want to do that it's not going to happen.
High school cross country is not really designed for motivated kids who are looking for a college running career. It's an extra curricular activity. Very few kids from a high school team are going to run in college and as you've noted, they and their parents don't really care that they don't run invitational meets.You're banging your head against a wall. All you and your son can do is what you're doing, do more than the coach has his kids do and maybe find some higher level meets he can run unattached.
unfortunately the invitationals we were interested in don’t accept unattached, the only option left is some community races, I was not aware that he can participate in open college races. as for the coach, there is no law that prevents him from working with the team over the summer. He has the right not to do it, it is not right that he comes in September and gets to make all the decisions. Coaching is a moral obligation, that you do what’s best for your athletes, not what fulfills your ego.
unfortunately the invitationals we were interested in don’t accept unattached, the only option left is some community races, I was not aware that he can participate in open college races. as for the coach, there is no law that prevents him from working with the team over the summer. He has the right not to do it, it is not right that he comes in September and gets to make all the decisions. Coaching is a moral obligation, that you do what’s best for your athletes, not what fulfills your ego.
I still don't know what you're hoping to accomplish here. You have an opinion about what a coach's moral obligations are but that's an opinion, nothing mre, and what's best for most of a coach's athletes may not be best for an individual or three. That seems to be your situation so maybe you are getting some useful suggestions here about how to deal with that, with how to make the best of a bad situation. But if you're looking for a way to get this coach to coach differently...well, not bloody likely. By the way it might work for this kid to run in open college races but I wouldn't count on that. We once had it set up for my youngest son to do that when he was a high school junior but the school ended up not letting him because they thought it would be a violation of NCAA rules if they let him.
unfortunately the invitationals we were interested in don’t accept unattached, the only option left is some community races, I was not aware that he can participate in open college races. as for the coach, there is no law that prevents him from working with the team over the summer. He has the right not to do it, it is not right that he comes in September and gets to make all the decisions. Coaching is a moral obligation, that you do what’s best for your athletes, not what fulfills your ego.
Coaching is a job, not a moral obligation. Get over yourself
I have a high school junior who trained alone all summer long, he reached 60 miles per week, and was hoping to keep building up once the school year started. Unfortunately the coach, who by the way doesn’t work with the athletes over the summer because he wants to get paid by them, this coach, once the school started, imposes his will and drops the mileage to 25mpw, most of it low intensity. he refused to register the athletes in any invitationals except for one mediocre one. He is a dual meet warrior, and he thinks adding invitationals will cause burnout! As you know, running unattached is not an option for XC, so we are stuck, trying to figure out how to rescue the season, and do the best we can. We are adding extra workouts and long runs just to keep up the mileage, but it’s hard with the school year in full swing and days getting shorter. It is also hard to train all summer long alone, have dreams and goals, just to be crushed by someone who just care about winning some stupid dual meets and ending the season mid October. Talking to the athletic director and the principal won’t change anything, because he’s been there for 25 years.
let me know how to approach this situation? How can we rescue this season?
Dual meets are pretty much required by the school, bball team cant just not play league games. Most prodrams run far far too many invites....track more so yhan xc. To the point where between duals and 1 or 2 invulites per week you dont train a single workout. But yea 25m a week seems arbitrary. Weird. Do you guys run 800m for xc?
unfortunately the invitationals we were interested in don’t accept unattached, the only option left is some community races, I was not aware that he can participate in open college races. as for the coach, there is no law that prevents him from working with the team over the summer. He has the right not to do it, it is not right that he comes in September and gets to make all the decisions. Coaching is a moral obligation, that you do what’s best for your athletes, not what fulfills your ego.
Does your kid and the team have the opportunity to qualify for and run in the state championship? It sounds like this coach is not the best and you have some legitimate grievances, but I think you’re way too focused on mid season invites. It’s not the best, but also not a horrible strategy to run dual meets all season, get in some good long runs and tempo runs on your own on the weekend, and run great at the state meet and then Nike regionals.
Now, if the coach for some reason is not letting the team race at your state’s qualifying race for the state meet, I think that is something you absolutely should talk to the AD about.
unfortunately the invitationals we were interested in don’t accept unattached, the only option left is some community races, I was not aware that he can participate in open college races. as for the coach, there is no law that prevents him from working with the team over the summer. He has the right not to do it, it is not right that he comes in September and gets to make all the decisions. Coaching is a moral obligation, that you do what’s best for your athletes, not what fulfills your ego.
Okay I’ll say it again and probably get downvoted again, but you don’t understand the position or role of high school coach. It’s entirely possible that if this guy didn’t do it, the school might say, No team this year. Or, the role is assigned to the newest guy, who knows even less, and hates the job but has to do it to keep his teaching role. Or, maybe, there’s a young teacher waiting eagerly to take over who’s going to be awesome. Talk to the coach. Tell him your kid thrives on more miles. Ask if there’s an accreditation process that would allow you to be assistant coach. Volunteer to drive kids to weekend invitationals. Stop complaining about one person and do something constructive to improve the situation like step up and volunteer yourself.
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