Suppositioner wrote:
I think the current Newbury Park team is a bad example. They clearly have good coaching and good culture, but they have off the charts talent right now also. Plus, I suspect that there is some sort of pretty good youth development program in the area as well. I believe that this year, they had a crew of freshmen come in where a number of them had already run in the low 4:50's for the 1600 before they had stepped foot on the high school campus.
If you look at some of the perennial power houses, they get transfers. Great Oak more or less gets all the good kids from the city of Temecula. Louden Valley.....transfers. A lesser known high school nationally, but one that is always in the mix in California Division 1 is Davis high. It is the only high school in town with sports, so every athlete goes there. The student population is 2800 or so, but they have every athlete in the city of Davis.
That being said, It's my supposition that every large high school has at least 5 kids with the genetic ability to run under 10:00, whether they've started running prior to high school or not. Get 5 guys running under 10:00 and you've got a pretty good team. In strong talent years, that number might be 8-10 guys under 10 with 5 of them at 9:30 or better, and there is your potential state champion team.
However, there are a ton of factors that prevent all of those guys from reaching their potential.
1. They will play other sports
2. They will not have the grades to be eligible
3. They will be unwilling to even try running.
4. They might have to work
5. Their parents might not permit them to run
6. They might have the physical potential but the mental side of the equation is not there.
7. The school might be in a socioeconomically disadvantaged area, with a whole host of factors that prevent kids from running or running fast
8. The school might have a bad coach, in which case, only the most talented of the kids will run sub 10. Or, the school might have a coach that has training knowledge but not the knowledge of how to create the culture for every kid to buy in, or the coach might know how to create culture but not really have the best training plan.
I've been coaching for a long time and have experienced all of the situations listed above.
My teams fall into the "usually very good locally" category, including a few CIF section titles, but I've NEVER been able to get all of the good runners on campus onto my team, for a combination of the reasons listed above. We're a small (750 student), low SES status school and the most common barriers for us are #s 1, 4,5, 6. (although some might argue #8 is the problem :)
I would put #3 at #1. Too many kids had coaches in other sports who punished them with running laps so running is seen as punishment by some. Also, for a lot of people it just does look like as much fun as other team sports or maybe even other individual ball sports (tennis, for instance).
I think the potential for more runners is there; at the same time I would like to get the kids to understand that running is something they can do the rest of their lives. Also, coaches can focus on getting the kids to improve based on where they are. No need to compare them to everyone else; they will do that, but if the coach reminds the runner of how much and in what ways that runner has improved that means a lot to a kid.