Former NAU XC Coach Eric Heins: Starting a NEW NCAA D3 track program !

can you relax with the spamming

I don't know how good they will be, but when all we've heard about in the last month was schools cancelling programs, it's cool to hear about a school that is adding one, especially when the sport being added is track.

Depends on how committed the administration is to having a winning program

A good coach helps, but Houston is still a difficult place to train distance runners. And he'll have to recruit athletes. What does St. Thomas offer that other schools don't? He may be successful eventually, but it will be a long road.

NEW D3 Track and field program wrote:

Former NAU XC coach Eric Heins has lead the team...

No, he LED the team.

This is a verb that occurs frequently in our sport. Getting it right would be a good thing.

my 2c wrote:

A good coach helps, but Houston is still a difficult place to train distance runners. And he'll have to recruit athletes. What does St. Thomas offer that other schools don't? He may be successful eventually, but it will be a long road.

Exactly. Coaches are only a small part in terms of determining the success of a team.

NEW D3 Track and field program wrote:

Former NAU XC coach Eric Heins has lead the team to their first NCAA D-I championships win. He is now starting a new track and field program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. This school is NCAA D3. Do you guys think the program will rise to the top and ultimately be the best XC program in D3?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-0LWm-dW48&t=827s

I think he will do great. Houston is a great running town with a great youth program. TrackHouston has some great coaches. I have seen them build great runners out of all kinds of bodies. And they can run in a 115F heat index. I doubt they will recruit in Michigan or Maine.

All Heins needs to do is work with this club and he will have inhouse recruiting.

He is obviously a talented guy. I wish he would have picked Caltech or Claremont - much better weather.

Will have to get used to wearing a winter parka when the temps dip below 80F otherwise he will not fit in with the crowd.

Magness has really struggled to build a successful distance program at Houston. Heins is a much better a coach but he's got a tough task.

NAU has so much going for it. Altitude is a huge advantage, great places to run in flagstaff. A lot of pros live and train there. Amazing scenery. All you have in Houston in extreme heat.

NEW D3 Track and field program wrote:

Former NAU XC coach Eric Heins has lead the team to their first NCAA D-I championships win. He is now starting a new track and field program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. This school is NCAA D3. Do you guys think the program will rise to the top and ultimately be the best XC program in D3?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-0LWm-dW48&t=827s

Coach Heins is not the XC/Distance Coach at St. Thomas. Ryan Dohner is the XC/Distance Track Coach and started the Cross Country program 3 years ago. They have started off well for a grassroots program in downtown Houston.

Now that they are starting Track and Field, Coach Heins is the head Track Coach and works primarily with the sprints and field events. Coach Heins will do a good job with the kids he works with, despite the event he coaches. Recruiting at D3 school is a very tough task and can take a good bit of time to build up to being a highly successful program.

He'll be successful as Head Track Coach at St. Thomas, I've no doubt. But Houston's a terrible place for distance running, about the worst in the country, so distance recruiting may not be great. One virtue is that the weather is excellent for winter training, really November through March.

Interesting. Dohner's a former Magness athlete, and if Heins then already has distance runners in place and just needs to build up the other parts of a track program, he might have an easier time of it. UH has already shown that Houston can be a good place for sprinters and throwers. Now the challenge is to find students who want to run DIII and study at a private school in Houston.

Well, UH is really a glorified community college so at least it's low tuition for in-state walk-ons. Though admittedly Rice has had difficulty building their program to the level of even, say, a Baylor. Despite his high profile image on SM, I frankly don't see a great program built around an autistic coach so there are multiple dings on UH.

JMar Superstar wrote:

Well, UH is really a glorified community college so at least it's low tuition for in-state walk-ons. Though admittedly Rice has had difficulty building their program to the level of even, say, a Baylor. Despite his high profile image on SM, I frankly don't see a great program built around an autistic coach so there are multiple dings on UH.

JMar, can you clarify your first statement on UH? Is it that the academics are poor, or do they get students who are otherwise not too interested in learning anything?

To the earlier commenter on Rice, can you share some more details on that? Academically, they seem to reject applicants who end up going to Chicago, CMU or MIT. I know that MIT emphasizes some level of athletic achievement. Does Rice? Or do they focus more on the photo memory types? So is the trouble with the recruiting or with the environment - athletes don't have time for practice because of the academic rigor?

Yes, and the former leads to the latter. Yet the latter also leads to the former, as in UH needs paying students in seats in lecture halls.

As for Rice, they've been buoyed along by distant memories of football success (they beat Alabama in a bowl game in the '50s and won a handful of SWC titles) to remain D1 though they're essentially irrelevant in all sports in a G5 conference in today's world. You do raise a good point, between academic rigor and the weather, it's tough for the athletes and thus the coaches to devote the required input into sports at a high level. So even when they do have time to practice, they're probably not thrilled to miss extra study time to go run in muggy Houston weather. Given that they have the second-lowest enrollment in D1, they'd probably be more at home at the D3 or D2 level in competitive terms.

Rice definitely doesn`t have the second lowest enrollment in D-1 fwiw.

I give it two years for the XC team to start beating UH.

You're right, it's actually second lowest for FBS and they'd certainly compete well in FCS.

I'm going to contest two of your points here:

1) What are you using as a metric of "Successful distance program"? Is developing one of the best steeplers in the nation good or not? He's also had some good success with other athletes, given how long he's been a coach.

Further, why did everyone expect magness to be some wunderkind coach? I mean, he has had some great success, but not sure why he was supposed to be the next great icon in college coaching.

2) I, and many other scientists, don't think altitude is a "huge" advantage. Listed to a former doctoral classmate of Jack Daniels' talk about how they've had difficulty reproducing any benefits to altitude that would be similar to the benefits derived from EPO (which is, as I understand, the primary reason for going to altitude in most people's minds).

Flagstaff does have great scenery, the placebo effect of altitude (if there isn't a true effect), elites (you don't really see them around, or, I haven't), but most importantly, it has a great climate year round, which is the true benefit, I think.

It is Houston TX. The End.