cannot be overstated how bad of a fit this man is to coach at U of O. even if you somehow self-lobotomize and blank out the nandrolone episode. zero f's given for the community involvement a la Martin Smith and Jerry will suffer same fate.
Schumacher likely knew Oregon was going to be down this year and that it often takes a while for people to adjust to his training,
You are a BAD coach if it takes athletes two years to adjust to your training. That just means you overtrained them with no individualization.
^^This^^
The best coaches out there are the ones that develop their athletes, keep them healthy, progressing, and prepare them for the championships.
Running them into the ground and blaming the athletes saying it takes years to adapt to my training is a cop out. Doing hard training and impressive looking workouts doesn't matter if you aren't on the starting line 100% at the championships.
It's not all on the coaches. Coaches aren't moving chess pieces, the athletes have to want it and do the hard work... But coaches need to be able to hold athletes back and keep them from overdoing things. Save it for race day.
You are a BAD coach if it takes athletes two years to adjust to your training. That just means you overtrained them with no individualization.
^^This^^
The best coaches out there are the ones that develop their athletes, keep them healthy, progressing, and prepare them for the championships.
Running them into the ground and blaming the athletes saying it takes years to adapt to my training is a cop out. Doing hard training and impressive looking workouts doesn't matter if you aren't on the starting line 100% at the championships.
It's not all on the coaches. Coaches aren't moving chess pieces, the athletes have to want it and do the hard work... But coaches need to be able to hold athletes back and keep them from overdoing things. Save it for race day.
Agreed. The best running coaches can tailor their coaching to the athlete. Every athlete is different. He is ruining Cooper Teare, and Fisher and Schweizer (the two best US distance runners!) are injured and not going to compete in a World Championships. Besides that, his college program, with some of the best recruiting classes, is hot garbage.
Jerry's reputation as a coach has been forever tarnished after the Shelby ban. Now the veil has been lifted and we are all realizing just how poor of a coach he really is. He had success by coaching the best distance runners the US could produce and may or may not have been doping them. Once the veil had been lifted, half his team no longer wanted to be associated with him. All that Jerry is is a Nike corporate shill who knows where the bodies are buried and has some knowledge of running. There's nothing more to it than that.
The only time Jerry was good for the sport was summer of 2020 - doing pointless time trials when there was no testing. Not a fan of a coach that doesn’t believe in racing often or individualizing training.
Everyone here is so salty. For his first year they did pretty good, especially considering the controversy that ended the last head coach’s tenure. The women were extremely competitive but the men’s side needs work.
On the men’s side the only elite recruits that Thomas signed went pro. Jerry still got a pretty mediocre roster to NCAA cross and a respectable finish (better than Vin, just behind Andy Powell). A sweet 16 run for basketball coach in a rebuilding year is pretty solid.
Then to recruiting, he had a late start and successfully signed the 2 biggest names not from N.P. and some other really impressive kids.
So, they had some success and recruited really well. Also I think the staff outside of distance is very high level.
I think him showing loyalty to Shelby, who he thinks is clean, is admirable from a human standpoint. He's not cutting bait and viewing his runners as piece of trash - like Salazar did with Cain - when they are no longer producing for him.
Rojo you can show loyalty to someone without letting them train with your professional team. Support them publicly, have her over for dinner, use your social network to find her employment. That's all showing loyalty without spitting in the face of WADA rules.
A reminder that this is what Houlihan/BTC were accused of doing by GDS which neither party denied beyond insisting "we didn't break any rules."
- She was running on the same track/at the same training locations under BTC coach supervision while BTC were also there just not doing reps with them.
- She was using the private gym that was purpose built for BTC due to the pandemic and used it during BTC lifting hours and while BTC coaches supervised the sessions.
- She was told by AIU lawyers that if she bumped into her teammates while running it was fine but she drove "up to 4 times a week" to the BTC easy run meeting spot and would wait for the team to show up.
- When she went to altitude with the team in Flagstaff she lived with team staff.
- Jerry refused to show GDS or other team members the guidance Paul Greene or the AIU had given.
And to emphasise: neither Houlihan nor BTC denied any of these claims nor denied GDS' complaint that the team didn't seek independent legal advice beyond asking Houlihan's lawyer.
Rojo, do you want to confirm on the record, that you think this is fine, "admirable" behaviour that other coaches in the sport should aspire to follow?
I wouldn't say worse than Alberto as no one has accused Jerry of assaulting anyone. But 100% this is the exact same thing that Alberto loved to do - find the grey areas of the rules and stretch them to the absolute breaking point. "Well it doesn't explicitly say banned athletes can't live with team staff during team training camps so there's nothing wrong with it" is the exact crap Salazar and his apologists would try and spin.
Everyone here is so salty. For his first year they did pretty good, especially considering the controversy that ended the last head coach’s tenure. The women were extremely competitive but the men’s side needs work.
On the men’s side the only elite recruits that Thomas signed went pro. Jerry still got a pretty mediocre roster to NCAA cross and a respectable finish (better than Vin, just behind Andy Powell). A sweet 16 run for basketball coach in a rebuilding year is pretty solid.
Then to recruiting, he had a late start and successfully signed the 2 biggest names not from N.P. and some other really impressive kids.
So, they had some success and recruited really well. Also I think the staff outside of distance is very high level.
I don’t see a ton of failures here
Ben Thomas recruited the redshirt freshmen that Rojo bragged about. The 2022 XC team that placed 16th was put together by Ben Thomas - remember Jerry's training takes 2 years to work, not 2 months!
Oregon is going to get a ton of distance runners because they are tripling their distance scholarships and killing off sprints/jumps/throws. Also being able to train alongside the pro runners is a recruiting selling point.
Oregon distance is going to be good because it's Oregon. Not because of the coach.
Manangoi did not test positive. You should be more careful with what you write.
rojo wrote:
Nike's had some super high profile athletes test positive - Kiprop, Sumgong, Jeptoo, Manangoi, Alptekin, etc. - but Shelby isn't one of them.
As anon1 indicated - Manangoi never tested positive. While your article is accurate about him serving a two-year whereabouts violation suspension, your messageboard post is not.
Jerry had a terrible year at Oregon, but he sowed the seeds for its future success. The men barely even competed. Harrison didn't compete once for them in track. The women were coached by Shalane, so she gets any credit they deserve for overachieving. Vin won multiple xc titles with Oregon and distance was crucial to many track titles under Vin/Robert Johnson, so there's a high bar for Jerry. The performances of Ben Thomas's recruits, Rheinhardt Harrison and Balazs, in the postseason, as well as Jerry's recruits, including 1:47/3:37 (Birnbaum) and 3:58/13:37 HSR (Burns), show that they are really well set up for success next year, but he's not going to be able to take two years to achieve success with Birnbaum and Burns, among others new to the program. By investing in distance scholarships, he puts himself in position to contend in xc and win a lot of races in track but he'll be up against powerful programs in xc (NAU, BYU, and Stanford) and track (UWash, Stanford, NAU).
Are you kidding me? They nearly failed to field any competitors in the distance races at PAC 10s, regionals, and ncaas. It was the worst year for Oregon that I can remember. And they blew the conference title streak.
Everyone here is so salty. For his first year they did pretty good, especially considering the controversy that ended the last head coach’s tenure. The women were extremely competitive but the men’s side needs work.
On the men’s side the only elite recruits that Thomas signed went pro. Jerry still got a pretty mediocre roster to NCAA cross and a respectable finish (better than Vin, just behind Andy Powell). A sweet 16 run for basketball coach in a rebuilding year is pretty solid.
Then to recruiting, he had a late start and successfully signed the 2 biggest names not from N.P. and some other really impressive kids.
So, they had some success and recruited really well. Also I think the staff outside of distance is very high level.
I don’t see a ton of failures here
This is a fair assessment. Look, like any coach Schumacher can be criticized. But many of the posts demonstrate a fanatic out-to-get Jerry bent. Beyond everything that's been witten so far I remember Schumacher at Wisconsin years ago where he had some success. This coming season will really be his first with the athletes he wants. I don't expect that much in XC as he'll probably need a few more seasons to be in the most competitive tier of teams. Trackwise the men should do well in the middle distance events, although they have ground to make up with Udub.
The doping piece of this is just a cloud that hangs over the sport and it’s tough to speculate intelligently since most of us have no inside knowledge. I do think Jerry is a really effective coach in a lot of ways. He turns strong athletes into ones who can be globally competitive. He’s not a miracle worker, but he knows how to build fitness. I bet he’ll get the Ducks performing well in the coming years. All that said, I think a lot of folks posting here mistrust Jerry either because he’s not as open or seemingly transparent as a pro coach as Ritz or Mike Smith, or they mistrust him because he doesn’t appear (to our eyes) to be as adaptable or receptive to his athletes’ individual needs, and they often seem to get injured as a result. Jerry seems to believe that If you succeed in HIS rigid program, then you should be confident, end of story. Smith, by contrast, seems to focus a lot of energy on really supporting the emotional side of athlete development and he seems to provide individualization and flexibility that engenders a lot of respect from his runners and makes them feel like collaborators in a way that maybe BTC athletes don’t. I don’t know what is and isn’t a fair comparison here, but I get why people don’t care for Jerry and don’t trust him.
I think him showing loyalty to Shelby, who he thinks is clean, is admirable from a human standpoint. He's not cutting bait and viewing his runners as piece of trash - like Salazar did with Cain - when they are no longer producing for him.
Rojo you can show loyalty to someone without letting them train with your professional team. Support them publicly, have her over for dinner, use your social network to find her employment. That's all showing loyalty without spitting in the face of WADA rules.
A reminder that this is what Houlihan/BTC were accused of doing by GDS which neither party denied beyond insisting "we didn't break any rules."
- She was running on the same track/at the same training locations under BTC coach supervision while BTC were also there just not doing reps with them.
- She was using the private gym that was purpose built for BTC due to the pandemic and used it during BTC lifting hours and while BTC coaches supervised the sessions.
- She was told by AIU lawyers that if she bumped into her teammates while running it was fine but she drove "up to 4 times a week" to the BTC easy run meeting spot and would wait for the team to show up.
- When she went to altitude with the team in Flagstaff she lived with team staff.
- Jerry refused to show GDS or other team members the guidance Paul Greene or the AIU had given.
And to emphasise: neither Houlihan nor BTC denied any of these claims nor denied GDS' complaint that the team didn't seek independent legal advice beyond asking Houlihan's lawyer.
Rojo, do you want to confirm on the record, that you think this is fine, "admirable" behaviour that other coaches in the sport should aspire to follow?
I wouldn't say worse than Alberto as no one has accused Jerry of assaulting anyone. But 100% this is the exact same thing that Alberto loved to do - find the grey areas of the rules and stretch them to the absolute breaking point. "Well it doesn't explicitly say banned athletes can't live with team staff during team training camps so there's nothing wrong with it" is the exact crap Salazar and his apologists would try and spin.
The same GDS who was posting Instagram posts in support of Shelby earlier in the year? Pretty quick change of mind for someone...
The same GDS who was posting Instagram posts in support of Shelby earlier in the year? Pretty quick change of mind for someone...
1) actually think she was one of the few athletes on BTC who never made any Instagram posts about it.
2) even if she did, don't blame a BTC athlete for buying the initial story before the CAS decision came out. Plenty of athletes not even on the team bought it but seemed to change their mind as more information came out.
3) what is that even implying? It is a striking point that Houlihan never contested any of the things Stafford said in that weird Kronkite News piece. Even if Stafford did previously support Shelby doesn't mean that anything she said on the matter is any less true or problematic.
Manangoi did not test positive. You should be more careful with what you write.
Did you read the piece? I never said he tested positive. You should be more careful when you read.
Lastly, 2019 world champ Timothy Cheruiyot got the job done in the men’s 1500, winning in 3:34.01. It’s worth noting that 2017 world champ Elijah Manangoi was just 8th in 3:39.99. Manangoi, 30, was one of the top 1500 runners in the world before he served a two-year whereabouts violation suspension from 2019 to 2021. While Manangoi’s pb is 3:28.80, he hasn’t broken 3:36.79 since coming back.
It’s also worth noting that Elijah’s younger brother George, who was the 2017 World Youth and 2018 World Junior champ, didn’t do well either. He was just 11th in 3:42.74. Prior to Elijah’s whereabouts suspension, George had run 3:31.49 for the 1500. He hasn’t broken 3:35.86 since.
You actually wrote Manangoi was among the athletes tested positive. I just laughed my pants of when Jerry told he didn't know what nandrolone was.
Schumacher lied to the press when he said he had never heard of nandrolone, which is laughable. I can think of another BTC athlete who ran her fastest times around the time Houlihan was running hers and has since likely gone off the sauce and isn't as fast as is often injured.
Critiques of Jerry are definitely off base. They fail to see his strengths, though they get his weak points right. His strengths are that he gets his runners in most cases to the short list of the best of their country. Look at all the sub-15 women and sub-13 men he has coached to that level.
Grant Fisher 12:46.96, 12:53.73i, 12:56.99
Mohammed Ahmed CAN 12:47.20, 12:50.12, 12:55.84, 12:56.46, 12:56.87i, 12:58.16, 12:58.61
Chris Solinsky 12:55.53, 12:56.45, 12:56.66
Marc Scott GBR 12:57.08i
William Kincaid 12:58.10 (his 12:51i and 12:54 this year were with Mike Smith)
Matt Tegenkamp 12:58.56
Lopez Lomong 12:58.78, 13:00.13
Matthew Centrowitz, Jr. 13:00.39
Shelby Houlihan* 14:23.92, 14:34.45
Karissa Schweizer 14:26.34, 14:45.18
GDS? 14:44, 14:51 (2019)
Elise Cranny 14:48.02
Vanessa Fraser 14:48.51i
Courtney Frerichs 14:50.06
Emily Infeld 14:54 (2021, still with BTC?)
Shalane Flanagan may have run sub-15 with BTC but I don't recall when she moved to BTC.
Lisa Uhl 14:55.74?
Find me another American coach with anywhere near as many people on these lists. He gets his athletes injured plenty but he gets times and medals like no other current American coach. Mike Smith's pro group is only really starting to be successful now.