Great Oak program under Doug Soles shredded by Runners World

I wonder how it’s gonna be for Herriman

2 social justice warriors write an article bashing the best 2 high school coaches of the past decade. Big surprise there. I find it interesting that the main person speaking out against Soles is Desiree Stinger. Basically the whole article against him is from one girl. Seems like they won an awful lot with a lot of different girls over the years to have an entire article against a person based off of one girl's experience. Imagine if in your life one of the people you didn't get along with got to write an expose about you. Would it be unbiased?

Aris had even more success, but more girls spoke out about their experiences. Why is this article focused only on girls? No boys coaches need to be named here? Seems to just be a smear of 2 great coaches to me. These authors should be ashamed of themselves, as should Runner's World.

I would have liked to read the article but I am not paying for a RunnersWorld+ account.

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Think of any of your PRs at 5000m or longer. Think back to the body weight that you were at when you ran that PR. Now add 20lbs to that weight and ask yourself if you would still have been able to run that time at that distance....

Krannick is still coaching.

anyone around these programs know that there is a lot of unhealthy behavior in an attempt to win. Mackenzie carter is an adult now and is able look back and see she was literally having panic attacks and no one cared. That's bad! Her teammate had a full fledge eating disorder and permanent pain from HS sports injury. That is crazy! There are a lot of others who have similar stories and just don't speak about it. In one aspect it is very hard, because it was a very happy time in their lives (winning/ being with friends) but also being forced to be a professional at an early age. Watching FM it seems the biggest thing (and mackenzie states this) it becomes hard to be a real HS student or try other things, walking away isn't really an option, taking a season off to do the school play isn't an option. So you choose the sport at 13 and your stuck. That is not healthy.

From the article: “A DEXA bone density scan revealed that [Stinger’s] 18-year-old bones were on the borderline of osteopenia, a precursor to osteoporosis that generally occurs in postmenopausal women over age 50, putting her at risk for stress fractures and possibly hampering her ability to run well into adulthood. Many of her high school teammates had it worse: One would learn she had severely low bone density after developing three stress reactions in her hips, while another tore both of her labrums, the thick cartilage that acts as a bumper around the hip socket. Ultimately, both girls were so debilitated they had no choice but to quit their collegiate teams. Stinger’s best friend from Great Oak suffered similar problems, racking up a stress fracture in each of her femurs in high school. Burned out, she left her college team after just one season.”

I don’t know these coaches and athletes and have no stake in this but it seems like at a minimum they’re talking about four female athletes facing serious overuse injury from their Great Oak high school training?

A point they brought up in there about there being no regulating body sounded interesting to me. Football forces you to report practices and tells you when you're allowed to do them. Also lets you know what type of intensity you're allowed (padded, no pads etc)

In XC, all of that is just lumped into training. And you don't need to organize like 50 players together to do XC practice, so regulation would be impossible anyway.

It's tough. I agree with what you are saying that kids need time to be kids. However...

Some kids are ready to become more productive and responsible before other kids are. Should these achievers be held back? Should we affirm a culture of laziness and irresponsibility in order to purportedly promote "better health"? When I look around, I can't tell if we're going in a good direction or not. Some people are really truckin' along nicely while a whole bunch of others seem to be really struggling.

I definitely don't like systems that push too hard. My own personal line is Jr High and younger. It really bugs me when I see adults really steering and pushing hard a child in a specific direction (but that's just me, I am sure many well-meaning folks would argue otherwise). I have a hard time being down on good HS programs that have fostered a "disciplined is cool" culture. At the same time, stories such as the one you mentioned are a bummer and those kids shouldn't be kicked to the curb.

"By the end of her freshman year, her weekly training would begin with a 13-mile run on Monday morning before school. In the afternoons, she and her teammates would usually return for another six miles."

19 miles in doubles as a HS freshman... Am I misreading this?

I don't know what the truth is on what these kids have done. Some things are done on their own. Not sure the 13 mile run was "required" as a freshman or was this something she was doing on her own because she was too driven? I don't think they have enough facts and just going off one or two stories.

Imagine if you had one kid that blames your coaching for everything in their life and they go back and write a story on it.

Nope. What it does fail to mention however are the 10x100m all out hill sprints as part of the afternoon run.

Followed by workouts on Wednesday and Friday and another long run Saturday. Oh, and doubles of 5-7 miles in the morning before the afternoon workouts.

Don't worry, they take Sundays off.

I don't have an RW+ account and the story loaded just fine.

I ran for Soles. I am the person I am today because of him. He ran an amazing program. I know the girls in the article well and ran with them. Desi Stinger didn't get to run State or NXN as a junior or senior and behind the scenes she hated Soles for that. Always said she would get back at him, I guess we now know how.

Nobody on our team was running 19 miles on a Monday, we usually did hill sprints. Milesplit did a video on it. Loved those days, they were lots of fun and Soles always made us laugh. Freshman had regulated miles, usually like 30 or something like that. They didn't do any hills until the end of the season from what I remember. They certainly weren't doing 19 miles in one day. Use your brains people. We had a huge team full of happy kids. We dominated almost every meet we went to. It was a great run with an amazing coach. When I talk to GO athletes now, they all say the same thing. They miss Soles. No surprise the new school he is at loves him. Best coach I ever had! You should have seen the horrible soccer coaches I had over the years. Now there is an article!

It does seem funny to me that they mentioned one doctor (Emily Krause) was a former runner while not mentioning that Adam Tenforde wasn't too shaby either. If I remember correctly, he was All American at Stanford and married to one of the O'neil sisters?

"Why is this article focused only on girls?" - Ah ha ha ha! You've really got your finger of the pulse of things, don't you!

You may be legit but this sounds like something Soles would come on here and write.

Good for you for being thankful for someone else's effort and speaking up for your coach. If Soles is being "shredded" by RW today, he probably feels pretty bad about things. Some good coaches may appear really confident bordering on arrogant on the outside, but not quite feel the same way on the inside. Sometimes they just feel really comfortable in the HS coaching situation, but not at all feel comfortable in the limelight (or even speaking to large groups of adults!) and they often do not want to have to "defend themselves". So, when things like this happen, it can be a real downer to the good coaches. They wonder if it is "worth it" because the complaining voices that are in the distinct minority can often be much louder. Plus, good coaches simply feel real bad when things didn't work out for an individual athlete (even if said athlete seems to be out to get them, so-to-speak). So, I am hoping that somehow Soles is able to read your post sometime soon.