Parents are CRAZY now

If you are a college parent-you do nothing....your athlete is an adult and can make a decision to stay or transfer.....

HS parent-a lot of times majority of HS coaches are just not knowledgeable or very good but your involvement will probably make matters worse. Sometimes HS athletes have to manage their own training outside of practice times a little bit in addition to whatever is happening at practice....

These crazy parents are driving the good coaches out of the sport. My daughter is a state record 800m runner and we’ve had to change schools 3 times because the other crazy parents run off all the good coaches.

Nobody knows this better than me.. Im just saying there are parents out there that might actually know more about distance running than the person hired to know about distance running.

What passes for HS XC coaching at some schools can be really really really bad. And because of the low pay these teachers put in the lowest effort and meet the bare minimum in efforts (bare minimum number of races, maybe meet only 3 days a week) stuff like that.

My daughter has a pretty good coach, and he's a great guy. I was worried that he would suck, since a majority of coaches don't have a clue and can't be bothered to learn. And when my daughter started, I didn't know if she would like the sport so I just let her go to practice the first season and see what happened. If he had been a bad coach I'd probably have just advised her to try a different sport.

On our team were two phenomenal guys (think 4:15/1:52 level in 10th grade), but they had developed via a private coach. Just to get off main topic for a second, you have to remember that just a few years ago school running was cancelled due to COVID. So during that time these guys ran for a club and got really good; obviously they trusted their private coach and wanted to follow his program (a lot of people in the city did this, so outside coaching became pretty common). Our school coach was tolerant of the situation and flexible, but still expected them to come to practice and do his workouts, which they did, although sometimes they would work out on their own with his permission. In the off season our coach isn't available for daily practice because he lives too far from the school and has young kids, so our kids do their own thing. Those guys went to their club, so at the time my daughter joined the school team there was already some precedent of mixing an off season private program into the in season school program. In our case no private program, just my daughter and I working together on the long term plan.

Returning to my daughter's story, while I didn't interfere at all with my daughter's training or nag the coach about anything, I did notice a lot of bad habits my daughter had which were not really addressed, such as starting waaaay too fast in races, and trying to keep up with people way above her level in practice in ways that were counterproductive (e.g. running shakeout run the day before a race with an average HR of 190). I didn't fault the coach for this since she was just starting out and JV level at that time, but he doesn't really cover that side of things very well for any of the runners. So this is where I stepped in as a parent. Rather than say anything to the coach or be annoying, I just worked with my daughter directly via conversation at home, giving her some strategic advice for races (when she was still not sub 6:00 for the mile: "let everyone run the first 200m in 35 and then take your time reeling them in over next lap when they're gassed", etc). I took meticulous splits for my daughter and taught her how to adjust her pacing to get the best results. This led to very rapid huge improvements for her. She was still running too fast on easy days but the mileage was low so I just ignored that but continued to teach her why you want to run easy on your easy days and told her if she put in a good block of training over the summer, she'd likely close the gap on the friends she liked to run with and would soon be able to do so without it being a tempo run every day.

So I made my role to be teaching my daughter how to run and how to train, and let her coach run the actual training in season. In the off season I trained her and taught her not to set artificial limits, but to learn to test her limits while not overdoing it. She probably averaged 35 a week that summer but had a few weeks close to 50 and came back in XC to be #2 on the team and top 20 in the state. We've slowly increased mileage each off season, and now she's doing quite a lot, but I taught her not to be afraid of it while also not being stupid and doing any more than necessary.

As time has passed my daughter has continued to improve dramatically.. I continue to discuss things like strategy with her, keep her log for her which allows me to monitor patterns in her training that would be way too time consuming for her coach to do for any athlete, let alone the whole team. If I think she's getting overcooked, I advise her to run extra easy on the easy days, etc. She advocates for herself with her coach and I never get directly involved with the training during the season. My daughter and I work together in the off season to return to the next season with a vastly improved base and ready to train. My daughter now knows so much about training that she could coach herself, so I'm now just a second opinion. And she understands exactly how her coach's workouts are structured so she always goes to practice and runs the workout the way her coach designed it. In short I made her a student of the sport.

I think this kind of partnership between a parent and coach can work fantastically. The parent can pay attention to all the details specific to their own child (splits, mood, sleep, nutrition, attitude, overall fatigue level, etc) while the coach focuses on training them and building the team. I'd never be able to do all the things our coach does to keep the team going in the right direction, but I love my role as a parent and I'm super bummed that my daughter will eventually graduate and my role will end.

Just in case you didn’t know, chatgpt is getting its info…FROM DOCTORS.

Just in case you didn’t know, chatgpt is getting its info…FROM DOCTORS

Man, you don’t make 80k/yr in finance just because you went to your state school. Just wanted to put this out there for those who still believe it’s as black and white as it seems.

Going to a target school, being physically attractive, having connections, and grinding your ass off are the tried and true ways to get into NYC high finance. Not doing these things does not mean that you’re gonna be making 80k. I doubt boston U was a factor either with that guy as it’s definitely not a target school for NYC finance.

Same thing w/ CS and CMU, or any engineering and MIT. Yes it’s harder in almost every way if you don’t go to a top school, but you’re not relegated to making a slightly above average income if you do not attend a top school.

Is your child’s coach producing good runners who stay interested in the sport?

If you are desperate to coach your own kid and your kid ends up QUITTING THE TEAM, and QUITTING THE SPORT, you, Mom/Dad, have done a piss-poor coaching job.

Hey, coaching dad, 90% of the time your kid is trying to get out from under your thumb. Go the eff to the house and stay there during practice time. Come to the meets and cheer, and leave it at that.

Which half are you referring to? The one that forgot natural immunity is a thing and the one that believes men can give birth and should play women's sports? They certainly think they know better than doctors and scientists.

Welcome to Trump's America.

Oh skippy. The pandemic officially confirmed the typical liberal type to be the most brain dead manipulated pud.

This has always been happening, just more and more as time goes on. At the same point though, do the parents actually know about athletics? A lot of high school coaches didn't even do that sport in high school. Or they didn't do it at a very high level. It's a little different if the parent was an all-american or even olympian and not agreeing with what a high school coach is saying who never even competed in college at any level. I think it's important to have team unity and generally follow the high school program, but some coaches have a big ego and won't accept that they don't know anything.

This. The only person who will pay the most attention to your health is you. If the OP doesn’t like their job of helping people, then maybe they shouldn’t complain on an internet board about helping people.

“High school brats and their mommies”

”spoiled rotten turds”

that’s how you think of your runners?

maybe we should tell them what you think.

I have a friend who has daughters playing in youth league soccer. Besides being expensive, the competition level is fierce. Many of the parents are told by the coaches that their daughter could receive a scholarship, but so far, no one from the program has gone on to receive one.

Doctors/scientists do not say this is true. Caster Semenya is a great example of an outlier that is possible naturally.

Counterpoint—HS coaches have to tend to a whole team, and can't always specialize training for individual athletes. Plus, some coaches are toxic, over-run their athletes, burn them out, and get them injured. On top of that, there are many track and XC coaches who are really coaches for other sports, but got stuck doing XC or Track because the school had no one else—these coaches don't actually know how to train their athletes.

Add to that the coaches who act like little kings who cannot be questioned, or respond poorly to parental or student athlete interaction and questions, and maybe some coaches DESERVE to be questions and maybe there should be more involvement.

Even so, the behaviors you describe are not healthy, definitely. They harm the athlete as much as the toxic coaches do, or more so in some cases. Soccers moms, baseball dads, and theater parents exist in more than those sports/activities, and always have. (We had these parents back in the 1990s when I was running club track and xc, much less HS xc.)

It pisses me off when parents put too much pressure on their kids, and create toxic sports environments for their kids who should be learning how to have fun with sports and athletics. Instead, they learn to fear them and tense up.

It also pisses me off when coaches act like they're the ones with all the answers, because they aren't. They can't be. Even the best coach can maybe, *maybe*, give specific training to maybe 10 athletes . . . MAYBE. More likely we're talking 5 or less.

So, yes, parents can definitely be extra. However, so can coaches.

I think the best coaches know how to leverage folks who are interested in their kids' sports in healthy, productive ways.

Similarly, I think the best parents are the ones who help their kids get the best achievement mindsets, and focus on the fun and experience—the process—over the outcomes—the times/places.

I dunno. The more I see as a parent the more I appreciate how my folks insulated me from the worst nonsense. Even so, I remember my friends and competitors who were not so lucky from their folks, or their coaches . . .