How to get female high school runners to pack up

I can understand if there are gaps in talent. If someone goes out faster than she knows she can sustain just to be in the pack then her race will suck and that won't help the team.

What is the reason that they give that they don't want to run as a pack or workout together? Is it the slower girls that are fighting it?

Is this only with workouts? Do they run together on easy runs? How about discipline in general? If the girls don't put in the work, don't waste your time on them.

You've gotta think about this more positively man. Do you know what's the best thing about these high school girls?

If it is a good idea to make some runners train at a slower than optimal pace, and other runners train faster than is best for their development, why don't training books like Daniels have adjustments to the tables and workouts and say things like, "run the paces for your vdot, except for sometimes help somebody slower than you".

I suppose the answer is that you are not trying to help each runner improve as much as possible- instead, you are trying to get them to finish near each other.

But wouldn't you get the lowest xc team score by optimizing their fitness as individuals and teaching them to race as fast as they are each capable?

The difference is the difference between the boys and the girls.

I have coached several high school and club sports at this level, and my guess would be that there are issues between the runners.

Boys don't care if they like each other or hate each other when they are in competition. The goal is to win.

Girls, however, allow for their feeling about their teammates to influence their performance.

They won't pass the ball to someone they don't like. They won't run with them. They won't work with them.

The winning and losing part is secondary.

Over a 5k the difference is only 20 seconds per mile. Make your fast girls run 10 secs slower on mile repeats, and your slow girls run 10 seconds faster. Do the same for any other distance. Remind your fast girls this is practice, not a race. Eventually the slow girls will think they can run with the fast girls and the gap will close. You do not need to be their friends, you just have to be their coach, and get them to respect you as a coach. If they are competitive they will see you as that and what they can learn from you. If the fast girls start racing, as another poster said, stop them and have them restart. Remind them cross country is a team sport, and a team is only as strong as its weakest link, the weakest link be it the faster runner or the slowest runner. There is no "I (can beat you in practice") in TEAM.

Thank you for this! Very good advice.

Yes, they have some confidence issues. I told them all season they were the favorites to win conference. They beat rivals all season. I pointed out the stats. But they still laughed about winning until the week before and we beat the defending champs at an invitational. We won by 20 points.

Hopefully this season instilled some confidence but the culture is an underdog one and they even pride themselves on it. I don't want that attitude, I want us to believe we can do from the time we start pre-season in July all the way to the state meet in November.

I'm not sure this extreme an approach would work on these girls. I see where you're coming from on forcing them away from individual focus to a team focus. I think it became obvious that I'm more focused on the team than I am on individuals once I ditched the old head coach's extreme focus on the top runners. The program has a history of having one or two very good runners who were state quality but then performance would fall off in such a way that our third boy runner would never even break 18 for 5k. There's no excuse for that! I still pay more attention to the paces of varsity than the say, the 13th runner but I'm hyper focused on runners 1-10 and even 11-12 if I can see they might be moving up in the next couple of meets. I know at least one of our top runners was a bit resentful of my lack of individual focus on her but honestly, I think the team as a whole benefited and it's not like I was ignoring her or anything.

moanswers wrote:

I can understand if there are gaps in talent. If someone goes out faster than she knows she can sustain just to be in the pack then her race will suck and that won't help the team.

What is the reason that they give that they don't want to run as a pack or workout together? Is it the slower girls that are fighting it?

Actually it is our faster girls. Specifically our upperclassmen varsity who were used to that style when they were in junior high and early days of high school. The attitude is go out in a workout faster than is sustainable, leave the slower girls crying in their dust and then slow down to their normal pace as the workout progresses. By the end of the season one girl was doing workouts completely alone because she couldn't handle the pressure of an underclassman working her way up to her level. She offered legitimate reasons for arriving to practice late (pt) but I'm pretty sure it's because she didn't want to pace with her teammate.

Uriel. wrote:

Is this only with workouts? Do they run together on easy runs? How about discipline in general? If the girls don't put in the work, don't waste your time on them.

Their work ethic is pretty solid. I don't have complaints on that. On easy runs they clique up according their friends. A couple of loners run by themselves. Their pace is fine on these days. Around 8:30-9:30 on grass.

The new math? wrote:

If it is a good idea to make some runners train at a slower than optimal pace, and other runners train faster than is best for their development, why don't training books like Daniels have adjustments to the tables and workouts and say things like, "run the paces for your vdot, except for sometimes help somebody slower than you".

I suppose the answer is that you are not trying to help each runner improve as much as possible- instead, you are trying to get them to finish near each other.

But wouldn't you get the lowest xc team score by optimizing their fitness as individuals and teaching them to race as fast as they are each capable?

It is absolutely essential that I reduce our "spread" (the time between first finisher and 7th finisher) in order to be competitive in our state. It is the common denominator of every successful cross country team in the state. It is also the only reason that our boys team did as well as they did. There was so little talent available and they overcame this by training together and racing together, pushing each other in every workout and race.

The girls have a similar lack of talent. Not a ton of natural speed but the potential to have a tight spread if they could just train that way. It would have made the difference in our season to have our 5th runner within 30 seconds of our top runner, even a minute would have done the trick and we would have advanced.

I've definitely noticed this. I think we can rise above it if I can convince them to carry out the workouts as a pack and have them see the results.

You're the second poster that has suggested I stop the workout and restart them if they refuse to pack up. I may try this. My instinct is telling me it will be disastrous at the outset but it would enforce that I mean business and won't accept anything other than the pack strategy.

To clarify, I'm mainly focused on packing up for the long grass tempos and long grass intervals. On the short track workouts towards the end of the season, groups tend to form a little differently as some kids have faster leg speed than others and it shows on the track more than on the grass. We do most of our workouts on grass anyway.

I also coach these kids for distance track and I don't have as many problems here but then I have many groups going at very specific paces (800, 1600, 3200) in order to mimic the event they're training for. I'm also not looking for 7 solid distance runners in track so that may be why it is easier.

gubyenletsrun wrote:

Uriel. wrote:

Is this only with workouts? Do they run together on easy runs? How about discipline in general? If the girls don't put in the work, don't waste your time on them.

Their work ethic is pretty solid. I don't have complaints on that. On easy runs they clique up according their friends. A couple of loners run by themselves. Their pace is fine on these days. Around 8:30-9:30 on grass.

You could designate a "run with the coach" day and have them all together, with you on the bike.

Uriel. wrote:

gubyenletsrun wrote:

Their work ethic is pretty solid. I don't have complaints on that. On easy runs they clique up according their friends. A couple of loners run by themselves. Their pace is fine on these days. Around 8:30-9:30 on grass.

You could designate a "run with the coach" day and have them all together, with you on the bike.

Well I would probably just run with them instead of bike. I don't even own a bike. But this would leave some girls out, particularly the jv girls who need to run 10:00 or so for their easy runs.

I'm leary to run with them for this reason: Last year I paced the top runner in her workouts (big gap in talent as she was two minutes ahead of the other girls in a 5k and the head coach asked me to) and had some jealousy issues trickling down, mainly brought on by parent complaints that I was offering special treatment. I spread out to pacing other runners on a sort of rotating cycle of what group needed it the most on a given day but I still got complaints. I decided that I was better off observing and monitoring the runs and workouts from a distance. The few times I ran with the team this year I just ran my own pace and ended up running with the boys varsity on a couple of our summer trail runs. I didn't have any issues with parents complaining about favorites.

I have less experience than you, but there is something I've noticed about girls teams. In general, I enjoy coaching girls more but I am befuddled by one aspect of coaching them:

Girls seem to get really weird about a teammate beating them. They can be best friends off the course, but it seems that many girls would rather run a so-so race and have their teammates race poorly, finishing as the teams number 1… than to run a great race but finish behind a few teammates.

Even among my best character girls I have noticed this trait. They judge their success based on how they rank against their peers, not against how they race against their personal PR's. I've seen girls at the same ability level on our team race back and forth against each other, wasting energy, rather than working together to go get people.

Your girls may not like packing up because to them, it would make it easier for people farther back in the pecking order to pick them off. To ensure their place in the front of the pack, they probably keep trying to race ahead. They may not even be aware of this.

I would love to tell you I have found a solution to this. I have not. Even my best, most team-oriented girl I coached had issues with this.

I don't think you can force a pack to form; you have to meet the runners at their current ability level, and it seems to me that "forcing" a pack would entail making some runners slow down to meet the pack (since you can't really FORCE anyone to run faster than their current ability level).

Our team is running at the State Championships this Saturday, and it will be a close meet between about 5 teams that all have a legitimate shot at the title (including us). Depending on how things go, it's possible we might finish 1st, but it's just as likely that we'll finish 5th. Considering this, I've emphasized the pack mentality, as I want to make sure that as few runners finish within our "spread" as possible... but it works with my current group of guys because we have one clear front-runner, but then a pack of two about 10 sec. behind him and a pack of three about 10 sec. behind them. The 4-5-6 pack's PRs are within 2 sec. of one another. This was a happy accident, but since its our team's strength, I'm trying to get them to rely on their pack and feel the pressure to stay with their pack.

If you have girls that are legitimately separated by 30 sec., I would personally just cater workouts to their current fitness level. If they have to run totally different splits, so be it. I'm not sure you're making your team better by forcing them into packs that don't match the team's makeup. I mean, by all means, have them run in groups for unstructured workouts, but it doesn't make sense to have an athlete slow down their optimum pace just to instill a pack mentality.

Just my .02.

No matter how hard I try (setting the clock ahead 15 minutes, lying about our expected arrival time, bribing with new carpet, etc.) I can't get my wife to be ready on time to go anywhere. We're always late. If she has to pack anything, forget it!

So I can't help with this one for sure.

gubyenletsrun wrote:

It is absolutely essential that I reduce our "spread" (the time between first finisher and 7th finisher) in order to be competitive in our state. It is the common denominator of every successful cross country team in the state. It is also the only reason that our boys team did as well as they did. There was so little talent available and they overcame this by training together and racing together, pushing each other in every workout and race.

The girls have a similar lack of talent. Not a ton of natural speed but the potential to have a tight spread if they could just train that way. It would have made the difference in our season to have our 5th runner within 30 seconds of our top runner, even a minute would have done the trick and we would have advanced.

Our boys team has a much tighter spread this year. Only about 20 seconds from 1st to 7th. For 3 miles they range from 15:14 to 15:37. Last year our spread was about 1:20 from 1st to 7th. Yet, our team last year was significantly better because our 1st guy was in the 14:20s and 7th guy in the 15:40s.

If they don't have the same fitness they can't train together very well. That's what I've found. Seems obvious, of course.

If you want them to run together as long as possible you can't let the fastest kids in the group lead the workout. Have the slower ones lead initially, say for the first 1200 of a 1600 repeat. Faster girls can close harder the last lap. Be creative. For instance if doing repeats on the track make the faster girls run in lanes 5-8 on the turns or something like that.