How does one HS produce so many of the top HS runners in the country (Crater & Newbury Park)? Don't say it's luck

If were talking about great HS coaches, Bill Aris and his son are hands down the best to do it at a national level. FM at its peak did things that don't make any sense.

In 2010 they swept the NY state meet with a perfect 15 points. The team they beat was Saratoga who went on to finish second at NXN.... They swept the second best team in the nation. Take that in for a second.

They also posted a lower total score at NXN than the 2021 NP boys did at RL.

The FM girls won 7 NXN titles in a row, came in second in 2013 and then won another 4 in a row. Thats over a 12 year period which is 3 completely different groups of girls. FM is not a big school and NY doesn't have relaxed transfer rules.

People also don't realize that by podiums the FM boys are also the most successful boys program in the NXN era with 5 podiums over a 14 year period with a win in 2014. (American Fork also has 5, but have never won).

Granted their success never fully translated onto the track, the Aris's had the greatest HS xc run ever.

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in the 2010 the FM girls team won NXN with 27 points.

Places were 2, 4, 6, 16, 29.

The girl that took second couldn’t break 26 minutes in ‘08

To address the Brosnan haters:

Lets not forget that they won NXN in 2019 with only 2 of 5 members being from the young/sahlman families against an insanely good Great Oak team.

Here's another fun fact for you: In 2021 if the Youngs and Sahlmans never existed and the team was 5 hypothetical Daniel Appleford's (thier 5th runner) they STILL would have won running lane (by 20 points) against a Cheyenne Mountain team that many put in the top 10 all time boys hs teams.

Did Brosnan get lucky with those two families - obviously. But acting like he isn't the real deal is pure insanity. If he still coached HS, he would be challenging for nxn podium spots every year in the same way that Soles is.

Crater men are supposed to be in college. Racing currently in high school at 19. Not so impressive when you see that.

Kitchen doesn’t turn 19 until Aug 18

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Tayvon KITCHEN | Profile | World Athletics

Tayvon KITCHEN, United States - 5000 Metres, 1500 Metres, 5000 Metres Short Track, 1500 Metres Short Track, Mile, Mile Short Track, 3000 Metres, 2 Miles

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What are key highlights of his particular Stotan training?

To answer the original question, I think high schoolers are getting faster because many of them have decided to train full blast instead of waiting for college to start training properly. If you look at when youth improvement really started to accelerate, I believe it was after Jakob appeared on the scene. The idea that someone that young could approach world class times seems to have taken hold, as we have now seen Laros, Meyers, and Kessler run ridiculous times at a young age since then (and actually quite a few others, depending on where you want to make the cutoff for what is a 'ridiculous time' for a youth runner).

More kids are going for it, the results speak for themselves. You can't tell me that these kids who are running 3:36, or 13:25, or a girl running 14:57 and 9:17 are doing this on the typical former high school training of 30 mpw. They are training like college athletes earlier, thus getting the results earlier. Some of them will flame out and hit the wall, while others seem to be finding out when they reach college that they can run world class times in college rather than hitting that level after college (compare Nico Young vs Grant Fisher) because they entered college at a higher level and kept improving. "Saving it for college" is stupid in my opinion. "Get good now" is the new philosophy and it's working.

We're far from the peak of this. In my city, which is kind of behind the power curve in distance running (but rapidly improving), the kids are beginning to experiment with new training methodologies. There is only one coach/program who has kids doing 40-50 mpw and they dominate their lower division completely. One of their athletes is pushing up to 70 mpw this summer. Most of the other programs are still doing very little, but the top kids are all aware of what is going on and are looking for answers how to get better. I'm aware of kids experimenting with lactate meters, double threshold, bicarb, etc. Kids know that the game is changing. You see more people pushing the mileage up on Strava.

My daughter and I had a conversation when she started running (she switched from gymnastics/cheer as a 9th grader, missing XC and starting during track). She started with the normal 20-30 mpw which I thought was fine for the first track season and improved from 6:45 to 6:05 within about 6 weeks. Then stalled for the rest of the season. She wasn't too happy with the results.

I told her that it was pretty likely that she could do the normal weak training and probably work down to sub 5:20 by senior year. Or she could just go for it and see what happens. She was not planning on doing any sports in college so I said to her "why not just go big in HS and leave it all on the table". Why save it for college if you're not running in college? You can go for it and maybe run sub 5 but you'll have a higher risk of getting injured from the training. It's a higher risk/higher reward situation. So she did much more running, about 50mpw, which she still thinks is easy (she's training for overall less time than when she was doing gymnastics). She's chopped almost a minute off her mile time (sub 5:20 already).

People think you'll get injured or burned out if you train a lot. I believe the risk is overblown. I ran for two D1 powerhouses. I had terrible results because I was massively overtrained the whole time. But I ran stupidly hard every day for years and never had a single injury and didn't get mentally burned out. I just did not improve because I did not understand the importance of easy days. I saw what my friends were doing (had some people who I used to regularly beat make it to the All-American level) and tried to emulate that, but did not understand that just because I could crank out sub 6:00 pace runs that it wouldn't work the same for me because I didn't understand anything about threshold. So I inadvertently conducted a horrible experiment on myself for years, overtraining into oblivion.

So I make sure that my daughter understands the importance of rest and only push on the hard days. Most of the running she does is very easy for her and so far the results are phenomenal. She is getting the kind of improvement my friends did because the higher mileage works fantastically when you make sure to do a lot of it at an easy pace.

I gotta be brutally honest here, man. They're both supposed to be going into their sophomore year of college already. But it's ridiculous to still be calling their times high school times.

Nico ran 5:06 in middle school. Guys with similar MS times as Lex and Leo didn't develop much. Brosnan raised the bar for everyone and as he said Nico was looked up to by everyone there as he developed and he set the paradigm for everyone to buy into Brosnan's training. Since then we've also seen the shoe technology and frequency of high level competitions improve times a lot but we also have seen an elevation of expectations and that's improved results even for the stalwarts like Soles and Mostert. Loftus has his top guys doing really hard workouts but they are not just random workouts. 6k tempo with 800 pickups followed by a 1:47 800, then 5x400 at 64 and 5x200 at 32>26? The top coaches show that they can virtually repeat their top results with others, whether it is having half a dozen sub-9 on the same team or multiple 8:30s or sub-4 type guys. Luck accounts for guys like Gary Martin with no other sub-5 guys on the team, not two sub-4 guys. Those are just the best of the lot on the team. Sometimes the most talented are the ones who do the workouts and summer training coach specifies and let themselves rest on other days.

Graham Blanks is not a phenomenon? He just won 2 consecutive NCAA cross country championships in a row, made the olympics all the while studying at Harvard.

How many of the kids at these schools actually reside within the attendance boundaries of said high school?

From the way I understand it: When Soles was at Great Oak, he was the beneficiary of an attendance policy that let kids choose between any of the Temecula high schools. Also, that NP was on the receiving end of kids who came from outside of a school's attendance boundaries.

I don't say this to disparage those two programs, but it seems like that is a reality that certainly aides the stockpiling of talent at one school. Private schools like Jesuit were mentioned as having had lots of good guys. As a private school, Jesuit can be the recipient of basically any talent from the Sacramento metropolitan area. This is not a disparagement to Walt Lange or any of the coaching he's done there either. Obviously, he's built something that people WANT to be a part of. Same with NP and GO. I'm not familiar with the schools mentioned from states other than CA, so I'd be curious to see.

I've had the opportunity to see the rise of a local CA state champion team that had previously had relativly little success. It went like this (mind you, were in a fairly rural area, so transfer students have a higher barrier to get from one school to another, but this is how it went)

1. Good school which is in one of the more affluent towns in our area, already had good sports teams.

2. A new coach comes in and starts doing a great job with the talent on campus (which was nurtured by a local youth program).

3. After a couple of years, kids from neighboring towns start to notice, and file for interdistrict requests. They sit out the required period and join the team.

4. Those transfers, along with the talent that was already there, dominates the medium size division at CA state for a couple of years.

5. That group graduates and the team is back to being simply very good, but not threatening a CA title or NXN berth anymore.

I'm wondering what the attendance policy is like in Medford's schools and if any of kids from the city can attend Crater High.

There have always been state titles and scholarships on the line so none of the top runners were running 30 mpw. That anyone would wait until college to run well is not true. The concept of hard/easy has been around for a long time. Like you, I ran too hard on easy days and doing so backfired on me.

With respect to Newbury Park, I have read that the Young and Stallman families live in Camarillo, which is outside the attendance boundary of Newbury Park High School.

And Cantu lived an hour away

re southlake carroll, that's coaching meets sheer participation. they have 100+ kids out which is unheard of in TX. more kids = more lottery tickets.

but they accumulate those lottery tickets by seemingly shoving everything in one direction. they have nobody in their district finals in the hurdles, varsity or JV, or the sprints through 800. their relays are bottom half. one guy each on the throwing podia. it's very very specific.

net effect being they are a great XC team but finish bottom half of their district on team scores then try to win state on the distance stars.

also, southlake carroll, while they won the 1600-3200 this year, many years has just 1 guy in the final finishing like 7th. and they haven't produced some plethora of dominant college runners. they don't have the state mile record. to me they are a machine for producing good runners in bulk which wins you cross in HS.

It is about creating the conditions and culture where all the athletes, regardless of their level, improve and thrive. If those conditions are met every once in awhile the highly talented athlete will come to the surface. People forget that it is not just the elites that are being challenged and pushed at the programs mentioned here. The runners with less natural ability are also improving and running very well. It is just not making running news. High expectations, a culture of support, a culture that celebrates running and incredible commitment and energy displayed by coaches-these are the hallmarks. The talent will come episodically, and be highly visible when it shows up. So, really not much luck to any of it. If Crater had different coaching, the elites would be elite, but not nearly as elite, and the rest of the program would look like every other 5A in Oregon. Enthusiasm, support and sheer coaching dedication go a long way towards establishing these top programs. In many programs the coaches have no race plan and don't even call out splits. At the top programs the coaches believe that any athlete can run a bit faster and this belief is infectious, intangible and motivating.

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EXACTLY

In the 1990's I left a in state college to transfer as a walk on to a out off state college. 10.15 100m man out of high school, 3 sub 46 second quartermilers, 2 sub 8:30 steeplechasers, sub 48 400h guy etc. SUCCESS breds SUCCESS. The same college that went to Arkansas Razorbacks when they TOTALLY dominated NCAA track/cross country and we destroyed them in a 3 team competition at their home meet. I scored in two events because the coach expected us to ALL score in ALL our events Mass team success is a great motivator, I begin to believe in myself and then had an extremely serious knee injury.

So success raises the bar for those around success and also those that immediately follow it.

Medford and Central Point are different school districts but it might be possible. That being said, their top 7 from XC all went to Central Point district middle schools.