Newbury Park is CRACKED

Wow, now that's a hot take. The last sentence is especially hard to swallow. What does a coach have to do to set himself/herself above the rest? Obviously coaching the best team ever in our sport isn't enough. It's a high bar folks.

Do you write for the Onion!?

This is the dumbest take of all dumb takes.

The football team is littered with sub 4:20 milers at every school? Probably a sub 4:10 and maybe a sub 4. This is knee slapping funny.

You didn't hear, there are dozens if not hundreds of sub-4 milers in Kenya driving taxis.

I had the opposite experience. One time the football team was playing a scrimmage. I asked the coach if I could go on the field for a play and busted off an 80-yard run. The next play I threw a TD pass that traveled 60 yards in the air. During a basketball practice, I hit a 3 from downtown and then stole the inbound pass and postered the center for a dunk.

I was only the 10th best athlete on the XC and we would have obliterated the baseball and basketball teams and if we had more guys, the football team as well.

At a high school I coached they had an annual "fitness" mile. The football team (post season) had no one under 6mins. Basketball had four well under 6, Baseball had 1, and soccer had 6.

General stdt. body had 3 under 6, 2 of them girls. Coaching staff 🙋‍♂️ and teacher "volunteers" had 5 under 6. One under 5.

I don't think most footballers of the American sort are gonna break 6 without training for it.

Some years ago there was this kid who wasn't good enough for his church baseball team or junior high basketball team. So he decided to try running to give him a sense of fitting in socially. I don't think any of the athletes on the baseball, basketball, or any other team would have run the mile faster than this kid, no matter how much training they did. His name is James Ronald Ryun.

That and the 5:38 mile are stories that Ryun likes to tell but I would take them with a grain of salt. The guy was muscular and long limbed and would have been good at other sports.

Assuming the story is true, what is telling is that Ryun tried out for other sports before he started running. I think this is pretty common.

A lot of fast kids do try out for track but a lot of fast ones don't. I think part of being a successful high school coach is having a solid training program but ultimately that is can be duplicated at most high schools, there are lots of training books and resources that any coach can take advantage of. All things being equal high school tracks are pretty standard and its not like you need a lot of specialized equipment to train for most track events. The big differentiator in my opinion is in the recruiting and motivation. You need to get the fastest kids to come out for track and you need to motivate them to train and then to give their hardest effort when they race.

We used to do the presidential fitness test every year in junior high and high school, the fastest kids in the mile and the shuttle run were for the most part not on the track team. the Fastest in the shuttle run played basketball and the 3 of the 4 fastest in mile played soccer in the fall and then some combo of baseball or lacrosse in the spring.

As an aside, I had a classmate who won the state championship in wrestling, the only reason he wrestled is b/c he got cut from the JV basketball team. Had he made the team he never would have tried out for wrestling. He ended up having a growth spurt his junior year and as a senior was a beast on the football field (1,500 yards rushing), won the state wrestling title and was state champion in triple jump along with being a top high hurdler and 6'2 high jumper. (as a side note he probably would have crushed the decathlon but that wasn't really contested much in Massachusetts). The point is this person probably would have turned into a decent basketball player but timing, perhaps a bad day during tryouts, other factors led him to wrestling.

Almost any decent runner is self-motivated. If anything, the coach might have to pull on the reigns a bit. Distance running isn’t a sport for people that need to be cajoled into training.

Ah, "real athletes" as in would-be lacrosse and football standouts like the Sahlmans. Those guys are absolute tanks!

Your logic is awful.

Brosnan isn't convincing soccer or lacrosse players at the school to run, he's getting very experienced, high level middle school track stars to attend the school. Find a runner in his top 7-10 on boys or girls who started running in high school. If you're lucky enough to find one, you won't find many more.

He is one of the best coaches we have ever seen in this country at any level. To pull the "He gets talent" card is the oldest excuse in the book.

Most good high school runners are good athletes but lack the fast twitch muscles to do well in high school. They are good in the youth sports, but when explosive speed is needed they just don’t have it. If the hs cross country team has a good culture they might running.

Yeah I think Cantu will be up there with Doshi and Martinez. He was actually faster than both of them in Spring 2021.

It will be interesting to see how close their #7 will be. I think we could see a situation where he’s far behind their #6. This is what happened in Fall 2018.

In fall 2018, Newbury Park’s 4th, 5th and 6th runners were all together and their 7th was so far back. That’s exactly what we might see this fall.

Yeah without the Sahlmans and the Youngs Newbury Park would still have gotten top 8 at RL. They still would have had Appleford, Martinez, Doshi, Cantu, and Zaki Blunt. Blunt actually ran a sub-5 in 8th grade, yet he never made the top 7 on the team. And he just graduated. That’s just how Deep this team is.

Newbury Park has a freshman class coming in with 8th grade times almost as good as those from the Class of 2023.

Well…he did actually beat Doshi at NXN. I’m sure he is better than Martinez too now. Still hoping Martinez does track though. Based on his Instagram bio, he will be doing it

Doshi was sick

Newbury is built off 5 brothers from two families, then recruiting already developed talent to run with the talented brothers. If the coach wanted to prove that he wasn't just the luckiest coach in history, then he should've stuck around for a decade or more after his Youngs and Sahlmans graduated.