CU investigation finds body composition testing negatively impacted a "significant number" of athletes but Wetmore keeps his job

As I said in a previous post, I'm glad Wetmore wasn't fired. I'm also not a fan of the woman who brought this complaint forward either. But to say what you said basically "He probably did some dumb stuff when it came to weight, but like whatever, don't we all make mistakes?" is dismissive. Wetmore, and other coaches can and should learn something from all this.

I have no problem in any "tough" coaching and hard truths being told if that's what they are: the truth. If the advisement actually benefits the athlete and allows them to improve. My question has always been, has a hyper focus on weight been the best way to coach an athlete? Based on multiple accounts and evidence, I do not think it is. It actually strikes me as lazy coaching and at best a way to very short term spurts of success.

So here are some things we can learn.

1. Losing weight is not the catch all answer to everything and all body types are different. We have seen more examples than we can count of runners who lose their careers to eating disorders, and we also have seen several examples of successful runners who are not sticks. Elle Purrier St Pierre never looked like a skeleton with a condom or whatever Wetmore said. There's also a certain NCAA runner who has been told on this site that she is "heavy" and needs to lose weight. Not going to name her since she's not a pro, but I'll say she's been doing just fine performance wise...

2. Weight should be a part of the conversation but not the whole conversation. If every answer to every performance issue is "you should lose weight" you're doing it wrong. If runners feel stressed and pressured into losing weight and the uncomfortable with the body composition scans, you need to change your approach to coaching your team. Don't force them to fit into your box. If that's the sort of atmosphere you are creating, it's unhealthy. You can still be a serious team and acknowledge things don't work for your program.

3. Weight is a charged and sensitive issue and it's never going to not be one because you want to be a tough coach. You need to educate yourself well, check in with your athletes, and not carelessly discuss weight thinking it won't affect them because "we're tough here". It will.

4. HIPAA is the law. Do not violate it.

The “woke boogeyman” has done nothing - it’s all in that head of yours.

Participation, skill, and parity at all time highs. All sports, all levels.

Which team has CU destroyed? I’d like to hear more about this.

Not cool, but it's weird that "loss of life" was even included in this.

Where did I blame anyone?

I mean I guess the collective neurotic nature of the team in 98 made it seem like biking to and from a cabin in the woods on top of the heavy training load would somehow make him extra fit.

You can overcome a non-optimal situation and have a long career. I continued to compete after college and got better for example as did many of my teammates. Some of them went to the Olympics so I guess our program was fine too lol. People have very black and white thinking.

You said it, can't remove it, and yes, your Karmic meter is redlining negative.

I definitely agree (seriously) with all your points (post 202 above). However, I don’t think you understood what I was saying (that you bolded). I can see that I was very clear. When I was saying that he’s made mistakes, I wasn’t intending that he’s made mistakes that would be unproportionately in the weight / body composition area. I bet he’s made (and learned from) mistakes in all sorts of ways (and some could be weight-related, I don’t really know). I am not really being dismissive about the mistakes as I am in thinking there are appropriate ways to communicate with the coach, particularly a well-tenured one, and reach some sort of resolution. (As an aside many “mistakes” could be boiled down to simply being communication styles.)

Regardless, I don’t think an attempt at public character assassination (the new bullying, imo, by the weak passive aggressive types) is ever a good approach. I’m a uniter and not a divider - except against lame dividers!

Don't forget that prior to joining NOP, the Gouchers were training under Wetmore as pros through the 2004 OT. Adam being chronically injured and underperforming in that time certainly isn't a coincidence.

Again. Where did I explicitly blame Wetmore? Someone asked a question and I answered factually.

Insinuation matters

Only if you’re dense and/or looking hard to find things you want to be mad at.

This thread is kinda over at this point.
It’s reached standard levels of let’s run stupidity. Maybe 3-4 pages ago.

Really looking forward to the upcoming xc season!! Sco Buffs!

You never heard about the football program?

They are managing young men only in that situation, a vastly more mentally stable group when it comes to weight and their bodies. Women hate their bodies almost universally, no matter what they look like, so managing anything associated with that is an impossible task.

Half the women's team claiming they don't trust Wetmore is a staggeringly large number at first glance. But here's a hot take: I would not be surprised if the majority of power 5 schools, if polled, would have ballpark range similarity in data from this question.

Let me clarify this statement:

I'm talking about women's teams in particular. Its no surprise the women's squad had a much larger negative experience to Wetmore than the men. Women handle the experience of high-level collegiate sports much different than men, as they should. This can sometimes lead to drama and mistrust of coaches--not that this doesn't also happen on mens teams as well, but I'm going to make a generalized statement that it can happen more often with womens teams. Sometimes, its totally justified, and perhaps other times not as much. But it happens nonetheless.

And, when I say ballpark range similarity, I mean I wouldn't be surprised if many power 5 schools have 25%-40% of athletes saying they mistrust their coach, if given anonymity. I think CU is definitely an outlier here, but perhaps not as much as we might think they are. All schools competitive with CU are grasping for every competitive edge they can get--of course athletes are going to feel stressed and pressured to comply with instructions from their coach. One can't forget the reality that many, if not most collegiate athletes are at a stage in life where they question everything and believe they know best for themselves. If that attitude conflicts with a coach's wishes, its a recipe for disaster.

In my collegiate experience, our coach had a great track record of success on both the men's and women's side, was well-loved by staff and alumni, and on the surface level was loved by current athletes, especially on the men's side. However, within privacy, many on the women's side expressed mistrust for our coach, only to people who would hold that information in confidence and not tell coach, or people that were close to coach. I'd wager somewhere around 30-40% of our womens team might have expressed mistrust of our coach given anonymity. Yes, that situation was somewhat unhealthy for the team, but it was reality. It's not like our team had some extreme level of toxicity, in fact we overall had a pretty healthy atmosphere. My sense is our program was not too dissimilar to other programs.

Let's be fair. In the photo you provided, Ms E Odlaug appears at least 20 pounds heavier than her college running weight. Please include athletic performances at the current weight, even in a different sport if you like such as powerlifting or swimming.

My last post here.

I'm going to bookmark this thread to come back to when it's discovered that sum of seven body composition stuff was all junk science and doesn't actually enhance performance at all. So many broken bodies and minds over it for nothing.

I'll store it in the litany of junk science fads that running has always had that we swore by and later discovered didn't work.

Agree. Also Cobourn left pretty suddenly to be coached by her now husband, which strikes me as a pretty big risk to take for someone who was already very successful. Looks like a lot of former CU women went to Boss as well. Maybe there's nothing to it but my read on that situation is they wanted a coach who had a similar program (since he was a CU alum himself) but without some of the outdated baggage or perhaps other toxic elements that they weren't happy with at CU.

This also happened with my program. Most of the people who went on to some other coach chose one that had been part of the program. I can agree with that sentiment. I felt that my former coach's written program/philosophy was objectively solid, but that the environment he created and having to interact with him was not. For example, my training went a lot better during a period where I had an internship that had me training on my own with only a weekly email exchange as interaction.

Another thing I'd say to the women defending all of this... it's possible to acknowledge that something that wasn't awful for you personally might not have been a great choice. My program had similar accusations of irresponsible body comp/medical stuff and eating disorders. I didn't have those problems while in college and I felt that the information that was delivered was useful and scientifically accurate. However I could see how other athletes with existing eating disorders would twist that info in their mind.

If you are working with track athletes (both male and female) you need to accept that most of them have an eating disorder and tailor your content appropriately. The way men have their eating disorders socialized is different and often comes off as orthorexia (objective is "optimal health"/obsession with health not being skinny). This is probably because the idealized male body type in society isn't that of a track runner. So being told to gain weight is like permission to go back towards the ideal. If most of the CU men's team was being told they were underweight that's basically a neon sign saying that many of them had eating disorders even if they don't want to accept that. It's true that running a lot will make you thin, but to get that thin you need to be intentionally ignoring hunger cues, which is a hallmark of disordered eating.