Is Brie Oakley Still Running For Cal?

Is the coach who recruited Brie the same that is now starting the Under Armour elite group in Flagstaff? If so it looks like the coach is excellent at selling her services versus delivering them.

When your sibling holds several American records, you automatically get some prestige.

East Coast Bias wrote:

Is the coach who recruited Brie the same that is now starting the Under Armour elite group in Flagstaff? If so it looks like the coach is excellent at selling her services versus delivering them.

The coach that recruited her is still at CAL. The coach that coached her is the one with the new group in Flag. In reality Houlihan had no control over Oakleys choices in high school and can only change so much in 2 years. And Sandoval was always the one in charge at CAL.

Sandoval recruited purely off of time, he took no consideration of training age, how the athlete was as a human being or any other factor. He would only let Houlihan and Chaz recruit athletes based on a fixed time which led to them getting a lot of athletes who were fast HS runners but didn't want to be good runners or just didn't have the chops for collegiate running. This also led to getting top notch athletes who were being trained a very high level in HS with little room to grow. Some athlete would have a lot of success under their program ie Corcoran, Peck, Zeiss and Takeshi. At the same time you have people who stagnate or burnout like Burkhardt, Benedict, Moore, Downs, Knights, Oakley and Jenks (possibly as she only shows one XC race for CAL, she was also a Triathlete so she might have gone that route). Just look at UC Berkeley on tfrrs and you'll see the turnover rate. Sandoval had a few one off amazingly successful athletes, but he killed a lot of talent too.

https://www.tfrrs.org/teams/xc/CA_college_f_California_CA.html

Sandoval was a hack, he retired a decade ago, he just didn’t know it.

^^

Brie ran XC for Cal at Pac 12 and regional. Question has been answered.

Cal recruited one of my athletes and my experience with Sandoval was exactly as you described. The athlete, a high school All- American, did not improve in college and quit the sport entirely after his junior year.

Why is Oakley an example of an overtrained, DOA high school athlete though? She seems pretty unique compared to other possibly burned out HS stars in that she only ran for two years of high school. Yes, she did get up to 60mpw in HS but that’s not unheard of. It’s difficult to look at Cal’s awful track record and say that the coaches are doing everything right, but I also don’t know that recruiting burnouts is necessarily their problem.

I wonder what the academic and social environment and team culture is like at Berkeley.

The culture is terrible at the college. Everyone is more interested in protesting than they are in teaching or learning. Athletes don't burn out. They become burnouts.

Birk Lee wrote:

The culture is terrible at the college. Everyone is more interested in protesting than they are in teaching or learning. Athletes don't burn out. They become burnouts.

Spoken like someone who's never even been there.

No but a girl from my school went on scholarship and quit running and lost interest in more than running.

Cal has a new coaching staff. Give then a chance.

Has Cal had a good female since Deborah Maier?

These posters know that the new staff is going to be a force to be reckoned with and it scares them. Cal is going to get a lot better with Bobby L and co.

Baby Bear wrote:

Cal has a new coaching staff. Give then a chance.

^Agreed, I believe that the new coach will resurrect the program. The program is by no means terrible, it was just in terrible shape compared to what it could be. Lets face it, as arguably the best public school in the world, they could have a better team. This might come down to something within the athletics department that I am unaware of, but they can do better. With the coaching change things will be better, but when Sandoval was coaching and driving the ship into the abyss, they lost out on a lot of good recruiting opportunities. They got good recruits, but there was tons of talent that would obviously turn away because of what they saw in terms of their success. With the right coach, we will see good athletes come back to the program, recruiting with the right things in mind, and honestly probably more of a talent pool. The fact that they don't have more international athletes boggles my mind.

Yles wrote:

The fact that they don't have more international athletes boggles my mind.

I don’t believe they’re fully funded? Internationals are expensive.

$63k for out of state so more expensive than most private schools. Sort of irrelevent that it gets some state funding. And ranked behind UCLA if you would like to know. Berkley is just loaded with nutcases which is why so many runners burn out.

If Cal is not fully funded, no team is.