weird response but OK... never thought of myself as a tough guy on the net or any where else.
Obviously its tragic what happened to this girl and the coach would have been better to just ignore her than to openly ridicule her. There was no need for that.
weird response but OK... never thought of myself as a tough guy on the net or any where else.
Obviously its tragic what happened to this girl and the coach would have been better to just ignore her than to openly ridicule her. There was no need for that.
No weirder than your crap, gratuitously piling-on someone who died by suicide. It would have been a better, adult, professional decision to have positive intentionality about anyone he decided to have on the team he coached, this isn't the hard choice know-nothing outsiders like you make it out to be. It's not that difficult to refrain from telling people you choose to work with, people who are doing nothing to harm anyone else, "you suck." I ran at a far better, more accomplished program than this one and that sort of attitude and language were never part of the experience. Not even when I saw one of the women having a meltdown in the middle of a cross country workout. Because our coaches had class and acted professionally. We're talking about the University of Jacksonville here, not even G5, dude needed to know his place. He didn't belong in coaching, bottom line, far more than any given athlete he allowed onto the team "had no place" running collegiately.
If you are promoting suicide for a fellow LRC poster you should seek professional, mental, and spiritual help. I suspect Satan has infiltrated your life and you can't see God's goodness in all creation.
TBH it sounds like she was ill-suited for college.
Maybe she was but you never treat someone like that.
When you work towards something your entire adolescent life, only to find that you aren’t having success anymore, and to add insult to injury have the coach and schooling you thought was going to help you evolve to the next level in academics and athletics treat you so poorly, it’s easy for your mental state to fall apart.
At that age that’s your entire world. Your coach is your primary leadership figure, and your teammates are really the only people you have time to be consistent friends with.
Any athlete brave enough to put the work in and try to compete at this level deserves respect, regardless of whether or not they are successful. There’s ways of going about telling an athlete their academics/performance isn’t up to par without insulting their character and dragging them down like that. I hope her parents can milk it for every penny it’s worth, and that the coach never coaches again.
I feel really bad about what happened to this young woman.
I looked her up on tires. I also see that she had a PB of 12:00 for the 3000m and one of her last race was a 6:22 PB in the mile. Her last race was a 12:27 for 3000m.
She obviously had problems across the board. Not only academically. It feels that perhaps her parents were pushing her to do and be somewhere she should not have been. Perhaps I am wrong, but I doubt it was completely her decision to go to College and be on the track team. Typically ADHD children hate every day of school. Why do that to herself?
This situation is perhaps more complex than it looks.
Ok so now we’re down to “you know she was not that fast ackshually!!” and “it’s her parents’ fault really” part of the LetsRun forums. No way would she have wanted to be in college and that’s why being treated so poorly by her coach and college would have led to this tragedy.
And you’re right about people with ADHD - none of them ever go to college or achieve anything academically. They don’t actually ever have goals or even need to participate in society by getting a job or paying bills. They just float away into the sky once they turn 18.
The only complex thing here is you understanding how to be empathetic.
No the coach sounds like a jerk, should have never let her on the team.
I believe she was let on the team because of the dumb NCAA rules. Now once you let someone into your program it doesn’t give you the right to be an awful person to them.
These programs shouldn’t exist in the DI structure. Jacksonville University has a 44% graduation rate. The athletic department is probably expected to double that for student athletes. Their enrollment is under 5k, no way they have the money to support everyone academically. So many programs should be run clubs and give the students an amazing experience.
Because of the current NCAA rules, more kids at these bottom school are going to be thrown into situations they should not be in .
I assume he had to keep her on the team for some reason. So if you must have someone that slow on the team, you give them easy miles, easy workouts and hope they improve but you spend your time and energy on the runners that can actually compete. In college it is not the coaches job to "inspire" you. That's Hollywood BS.
Your only metric of success is winning. I'm sorry if you went to a program where this was the culture.
People try to justify this by saying that it's "part of the business"--that you're hired to win, so that's the only goal you should have. People with this mindset literally end up in the kind of situation at Jacksonville. Maybe you see success here and there, but ultimately it's just a toxic team environment.
Believe it or not, there are coaches that care about all their athletes--like they should be doing. They see progression as their metric of success, not winning races. That way, everyone can participate in the success of a team, not just the top runners. When everyone's needs are met, everyone does better. And you might even see that one of you're "slow" runners becomes a diamond in the rough--they just needed the right kind of attention from their coach.
This kind of job is a tall order. People underestimate the sacrifice involved with being a good coach.
I assume he had to keep her on the team for some reason. So if you must have someone that slow on the team, you give them easy miles, easy workouts and hope they improve but you spend your time and energy on the runners that can actually compete. In college it is not the coaches job to "inspire" you. That's Hollywood BS.
Your only metric of success is winning. I'm sorry if you went to a program where this was the culture.
People try to justify this by saying that it's "part of the business"--that you're hired to win, so that's the only goal you should have. People with this mindset literally end up in the kind of situation at Jacksonville. Maybe you see success here and there, but ultimately it's just a toxic team environment.
Believe it or not, there are coaches that care about all their athletes--like they should be doing. They see progression as their metric of success, not winning races. That way, everyone can participate in the success of a team, not just the top runners. When everyone's needs are met, everyone does better. And you might even see that one of you're "slow" runners becomes a diamond in the rough--they just needed the right kind of attention from their coach.
This kind of job is a tall order. People underestimate the sacrifice involved with being a good coach.
I agree. There are several different levels of programs as well. P5 and the worst college team that is just trying to get a team together are not all the same thing. It absolutely IS the job of the coach to "inspire" people. If you don't believe that then you have either never been a coach, only had bad ones, or you are a bad coach yourself. I am not saying they are going to "inspire" someone every day to do everything, but inspiration is part of the job.
I assume he had to keep her on the team for some reason. So if you must have someone that slow on the team, you give them easy miles, easy workouts and hope they improve but you spend your time and energy on the runners that can actually compete. In college it is not the coaches job to "inspire" you. That's Hollywood BS.
Believe it or not, there are coaches that care about all their athletes--like they should be doing. They see progression as their metric of success, not winning races. That way, everyone can participate in the success of a team, not just the top runners. When everyone's needs are met, everyone does better. And you might even see that one of you're "slow" runners becomes a diamond in the rough--they just needed the right kind of attention from their coach.
.
Just like college isn't for everyone, college athletics are not for everyone either. What you are describing is a track club and yeah.. that is for everyone of all abilities and all levels of experience, from noobs to experienced trained racers.
I don't think Duke lets church league basketball players dress out for games because they really work hard and really like basketball. The track teams should be no different.
She obviously had problems across the board. Not only academically. It feels that perhaps her parents were pushing her to do and be somewhere she should not have been. Perhaps I am wrong, but I doubt it was completely her decision to go to College and be on the track team. Typically ADHD children hate every day of school. Why do that to herself?
One of the worst parts about American culture is it tells young people they have to go to college to be successful in life. It forces people into situations where they are set up to fail. And [then] blames them for it.
Hear, hear. The average IQ of college graduates is (or was) around 115. Encouraging someone whose measured IQ was two standard deviations below that was doing her a disservice.
The majority of Americans don't, and shouldn't, go to (four-year) college. There's nothing there for them beyond four years' postponement of adulthood and a mountain of debt.
Believe it or not, there are coaches that care about all their athletes--like they should be doing. They see progression as their metric of success, not winning races. That way, everyone can participate in the success of a team, not just the top runners. When everyone's needs are met, everyone does better. And you might even see that one of you're "slow" runners becomes a diamond in the rough--they just needed the right kind of attention from their coach.
.
Just like college isn't for everyone, college athletics are not for everyone either. What you are describing is a track club and yeah.. that is for everyone of all abilities and all levels of experience, from noobs to experienced trained racers.
I don't think Duke lets church league basketball players dress out for games because they really work hard and really like basketball. The track teams should be no different.
Duke is probably not the best comparison for obvious reasons. I don't think they have any 23 minute 5K women on their team like Jacksonville does. Some of these teams take people onto their team just to stay afloat. Without them, they have no program and no funding. Then people will complain that their program got cut.
I knew Julia, and she was a lovely, kind person who made other people feel good. She cheered and rooted for other people to succeed, and it's so tragic to learn that she did so while she felt so low herself. She also really, really loved running and wanted to be as good as she could be. She deserved a coach who would help her and appreciate her, and instead he degraded her. Shame on him.
I recall having seen this video in the past. She seems entirely normal, actually pretty much like any other college woman her age. She's confronted by the fact that the coach does not appear, in the conversation with the officer, to have violated any laws. It would have been necessary for her to talk to a lawyer to determine whether that was the case. So, she's in the wrong place. The university should have been listening to her and investigating the coach and firing him while she was still alive. The coach brought her into the program knowing both of her academic issues and what speed she had run, 6:22 mile, 20:46 5000m, 46 10k. It's not that Jax was a bad program for women. In one of her xc races on tfrrs, a Jax athlete actually beat a freshman Parker Valby to win the race. Nor was she that close to the back of the race. A fundamental human respect has got to be the basis of how coaches deal with athletes. They don't have to validate everything they do, but they should not be breaking them down and making them suicidal. Her GPA was under 3, and he cut her because the NCAA allows that, but she says that the reason he cut her was that she was complaining about his treatment of her, not because he had to. He could instead have gradually coached her up and helped her continue to get better.
This so called coach was anything but. A good coach is up to the challenge to pull their slowest runner up. But that's hard. Much easier to take faster kids and give them workouts you got from the internet and claim success. So to cover up his failure he takes the low road and blames it all on her one way or another. A real coach can strengthen a team around an athlete who's not as talented. This guy, not even close to being a real coach.