New High School Coach

First off, get off Facebook. You aren't trying to recruit wine moms - you are trying to recruit high school students. Get an Instagram page.

If your daughter is on the team, you already have some kind of connections in the school. As you say, you are late to the game regarding recruiting but you are likely to have a rough first season anyways with such low numbers and basically nonexistent program. I would tell your daughter to help you with recruiting, contact the track coach and see if there are any other distance runners in the school you can contact. In the fall, soccer tryout cuts are a great place to go too. Even just roaming the halls and recruiting girls in the hall who look mildly athletic.

For the first season, focus on making the team fun and a place where people want to be. Serve more as hype man than running coach. Celebrate every PR like it is the Super Bowl. You want word to spread that you are building a fun environment cause quite frankly XC is a tough sell to high school students - especially coming into a nonexistent program.

In terms of running knowledge, lots of great threads on here if you look hard enough. Buy Daniels Running Formula and read through it this summer. General outline of each week should be a tempo, some 3k/5k pace repeats on the track, and a longer run. The rest is easy running with strides. Keep the mileage low since it sounds like you will have lots of girls that are completely new to running.

Good luck - building a program is a ton of work but few things are more rewarding.

Fresh man: 25+ miles per week

Softmore: 30+ miles per week

Junior: 40+ miles per week

Senior: 40-60 miles per week

Fun Workouts:

400 (40), 300 (30), 200 (20), 100

4 minute rest

300 (30), 200 (20), 100

3 minute rest

200(20)100

1 minute rest

100

10x400 sprints downhill, crab walk/bear crawl uphill "recovery"

3-5 mile run starting out at 1% to 100% effort followed by up to 8 400s (for the really mentally tough).

Indian Runs (look them up)

You should also get them in the weight room doing high weight, low rep exercises to strengthen their glutes, hamstrings, chest, and abs.

Thanks so much for your input. I appreciate it!!

Awesome, thanks for that info!!

Sham 69 wrote:

Fresh man: 25+ miles per week

Softmore: 30+ miles per week

Junior: 40+ miles per week

Senior: 40-60 miles per week

Fun Workouts:

400 (40), 300 (30), 200 (20), 100

4 minute rest

300 (30), 200 (20), 100

3 minute rest

200(20)100

1 minute rest

100

10x400 sprints downhill, crab walk/bear crawl uphill "recovery"

3-5 mile run starting out at 1% to 100% effort followed by up to 8 400s (for the really mentally tough).

Indian Runs (look them up)

You should also get them in the weight room doing high weight, low rep exercises to strengthen their glutes, hamstrings, chest, and abs.

This is in the running for the single worst post in LetsRun history.

Sham 69 wrote:

Fresh man: 25+ miles per week

Softmore: 30+ miles per week

Junior: 40+ miles per week

Senior: 40-60 miles per week

Fun Workouts:

400 (40), 300 (30), 200 (20), 100

4 minute rest

300 (30), 200 (20), 100

3 minute rest

200(20)100

1 minute rest

100

.

A 400 in 40 seconds, followed by a 300 in 30 seconds and a 200 in 20 seconds does not sound like my idea of fun. How fast is the 100? 10 seconds? You're gonna have a hard time hanging on to kids with this training.

Are you allowed summer practices? Some states don’t. I would have my athletes meet three days at week at 5:30pm to help keep them motivated. Obviously I asked them to run 5-7 days a week and gave them plans. I also invited anyone who wanted to run so sometimes this encourages kids to switch fall sports or do track over another sport.

Have at least one weekly run during the summer. Do fun things after the run like have Rita’s afterwards, play ultimate frisbee, scavenger hunts... Post this on your social media page or pages. Use this to see if you can get more bodies to come out. Likely some will come and go but the goal now is just to get bodies.

Encourage the newbies to take walk breaks. Seriously though they need to learn just how to do easy runs and walk breaks can help them build up to it. To start make the “runs” 30-40 minutes and tell them to take a one minute walk whenever if they need it. Remind them that these runs are not races but they should be able to hold a conversation while running. Don’t worry about tempos, hills, repeats... until you have a core group that can handle it. Anyways they will get plenty of harder running just with a typical high school packed racing schedule.

Be ok with not being competitive. Have a 5 year plan to build the program. Be positive even with your slowest runner.

Thank you for your willingness to coach. Youngsters need sports like XC and it wouldn’t happen unless adults like you stepped up.

Last don’t tell your runners about Letsrun. This place is mostly toxic and has a lot of bad info.

Good luck!

This is pretty good advice… also talk to the pe teachers and ask them to promote the program… like the poster above said just make it more of a fun club environment to start out… you can alone add competitiveness when it’s appropriate.

See if you can get the feeder middle school(s) to send out an e-mail to 8th graders (if you're a 9-12 team). See if you ca get the high school to send out an e-mail to any potential students.

Build on your small core group during the summer.

If you have a freshman orientation day prior to the start of school, send your core group around with clipboards and go for sign ups. This is where I traditionally get at least half of my runners. Be super patient with those newbies. Some of them may be god awful at first, but go on to become solid varsity contributors. Every year, I have at least one kid on my varsity squad that has initially run 18+ minutes on our initial 2 mile time trial (which we do about 3 weeks after the first day of practice)

If the school principal sends out messages to all parents, have him include a message from you inviting students to contact you if they are interested in running cross country. Have some team runs over the summer and include a date for one of them where potential athletes and their parents can meet you.

funny coach wrote:

Sham 69 wrote:

Fresh man: 25+ miles per week

Softmore: 30+ miles per week

Junior: 40+ miles per week

Senior: 40-60 miles per week

Fun Workouts:

400 (40), 300 (30), 200 (20), 100

4 minute rest

300 (30), 200 (20), 100

3 minute rest

200(20)100

1 minute rest

100

.

A 400 in 40 seconds, followed by a 300 in 30 seconds and a 200 in 20 seconds does not sound like my idea of fun. How fast is the 100? 10 seconds? You're gonna have a hard time hanging on to kids with this training.

There isn’t a single athlete in the country that could pull that off. Sham, 0/10.

Also treat September races like hard workouts. Don’t emphasize racing performance and be fine with them underperforming. Then when October comes and the races actually matter they will improve and be more excited for the sport. See how many runners they can beat at the league champ meet who beat them in dual meets. This shows how consistency pays off and begins to bring a fun competitiveness. Have a banquet at the end of the season and talk about each athlete and how they improved.

funny coach wrote:

A 400 in 40 seconds, followed by a 300 in 30 seconds and a 200 in 20 seconds does not sound like my idea of fun. How fast is the 100? 10 seconds? You're gonna have a hard time hanging on to kids with this training.

Those seconds are the rest periods after the interval you boob.

Coache wrote:

Also treat September races like hard workouts. Don’t emphasize racing performance and be fine with them underperforming. Then when October comes and the races actually matter they will improve and be more excited for the sport. See how many runners they can beat at the league champ meet who beat them in dual meets. This shows how consistency pays off and begins to bring a fun competitiveness. Have a banquet at the end of the season and talk about each athlete and how they improved.

^this os good advice. Make improvement the most important metric. Find some non threatening things and measure improvement throughout the season. We run periodic 6 minute time trials. Sometimes we get beginners who can’t even make 1200m their first time. I do 2-3 of these over the course of the summer and at the end rank the kids by how much they improved. I might have a varsity boy go from 1800 to 1900 over the summer, but the noob that goes from 1300 to 1600 is going to get ranked on top. The noob needs the recognition because the varsity guy already knows he’s fast.

Have a big hill near the school, set standards for how fast they can get up it. Make t shirts for hitting benchmarks on the climb.

Read these articles:

https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20851008/the-shape-of-things/

https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20806851/solving-the-5k-puzzle/

Buy these books:

You simply MUST buy this book! A lot of high school, college, & professional coaches just use this book! Whoa!

https://www.amazon.com/Daniels-Running-Formula-Jack/dp/1718203667/ref=pd_lpo_14_img_0/146-8124970-6108536?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1718203667&pd_rd_r=0dd756a0-3174-435e-a329-b8d2cb888365&pd_rd_w=voDiP&pd_rd_wg=lOR0l&pf_rd_p=a0d6e967-6561-454c-84f8-2ce2c92b79a6&pf_rd_r=QKNEGX5XEKZ80ECTBYT2&psc=1&refRID=QKNEGX5XEKZ80ECTBYT2

I think this book does a good job explaining XC running & coaching:

https://www.americandistanceproject.com/?pgid=km0z4288-e2d26de6-64c7-49ba-bcfe-1a298cf2fe49

I'm reading this book now & while it's geared towards a high school runner to read, I think it's pretty good:

https://coachjayjohnson.com/cikbook/

Arthur Lydiard is the king of miles. Some of his ideas may seem antiquated, but the heart of building a base is still paramount! Here's a PDF file of some of his teaching:

http://www.championseverywhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/lydiardiowa99.pdf

If you want a more modern understanding of Lydiard's ideas, here's the best interpretation of his ideas:

https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Intelligent-Training-Principles-Lydiard/dp/1841263117

Let me second some of this. You need kids out there to have a program. I would send a message to the AD or to the PE teachers and see if they will let you come talk to their classes the first week of school to go along with everything from above. Yes that's late to get kids but it will help in the future.