Is Buchanan HS bad for hs distance running

The kids and their parents are just as complicit as the coaching staff. Many assume that state titles = full ride and pursue accordingly. Let's be completely honest about the sport, whether the kid goes to Oregon or CS Northridge, 98% of all kids going off to collegiate programs will be done by the time they graduate due to injury, burnout, or just deciding that it is time to grow up and start working for a living.

It's the same with ball sports but, no one wrings their hands over Junior's fastball hitting 90 MPH too soon or Taylor's three point shooting becoming too proficient. High school and college sports are a meat grinder by design. The days of "developing the whole person" and "enriching the academic experience" is an egalitarian relic.

No horse in this race but does anyone else notice that there seems to often be runners from this school that stagger across the line at every major race? Just a coincidence maybe?

That's on the college coaches tbh. You don't see Mike Smith shying away from recruiting kids that trained like pros in high school. Blaise Ferro went to CBA, Luis Grijalva worked with a private coach, as did Brodey Hasty, and he recruited three runners from Newbury Park. Buchanan might be toxic but so is Saratoga and that didn't stop Nicole Blood from doing well at Oregon, or Kelsey Chmiel at NC State, or Hannah Davidson at Providence.

Nicole Blood left and move after 2 years and went Royal HS in California.

and Buchanan has a history of no success late in HS and no success in college on the girls side.

That was mostly Grace Hutchinson, who recently graduated. She staggered across the finish line a number of times, but most of the other Buchanan girls have been OK.

It's not just Buchanan. Other high schools train their kids hard and then the kids don't do much in college.

CBA boys have been one of the best teams in the country for the past 40 years, and most of their graduates didn't do that great in college.

Somehow people think it’s the high school coach’s job to get their past athletes to run well in college.

Honestly, I think that most burnout isn’t physical. These high school coaches train their athletes like collegiate runners, so when they end up at a university where other athletes ran similar HS times off 25 MPW, they will quickly fall behind. Most probably become discouraged when they are training as hard as their peers without showing any signs of improvement, leading to an eventual mental burnout.

Most of the time though, I think the HS coaches did a good thing. These athletes would have never run that fast/win races/receive athletic scholarships if the coaches gave them a lighter workload.

There is the other end of the spectrum, where kids are held back by design so they can pop in college, only to be so discouraged in HS that they mentally stop trying. Seen it!

Luis' High school coach Was his coach.. He's a good one, and certainly didn't overtrain him.

His senior year his high school coach left to coach Sacramento State, and he worked with Karl Wurzbach and ran 70 miles a week. Obviously the training worked and I'm not saying training like a pro in high school is the same as overtraining, but your statement is false.

BYU is not a "running school"?

Didn't Wurzbach become Luis's new high school coach, though? I thought Luis had Monk for his first three years, and then when Monk left for Sac State he found his old buddy Wurzbach to fill the role at Armijo for Luis's senior year. I'm not sure who is getting referred to as the "private coach" here. Unless Wurzbach was solely coaching Luis, and there was some other coach officially employed by Armijo HS? That wasn't my impression, though.

I went to Buchanan in the early 2000s and was decent but not great. Like 430/950/1630xc times. I don't know how much the training has changed since then, but it was very much geared around getting a standard number of miles per day in 1 run at a much faster pace than what I did in college. For example, the top guys were running 7-8 miles at 550-600 pace consistently all season. If you don't get injured, you would get in great shape. We had one kid who went from like 455 to 420 between junior and senior years when he got lucky and trained without injury. However, it was hard to not get injured. There were some greats, like Kyle Alcorn who won state his junior year and second as a senior, went on to run in the Olympics. Fernando Cabada. CJ Albertson now in the marathon. Etc.

The main thing that stood out was the lack of easy days. Again, not sure how applicable any of this is now.

Buchanan boys team took 18th at the sweepstakes race at Woodbridge. Their 1-5 are returning next year

Doesn’t matter. JSerra is better than Buchanan now anyways

Excessive training? I am in contact with these coaches and their upperclassmen barely even make it to 50mpw, one practice per day and Sundays off. That is very low mileage compared to many successful teams in the country. And anxiety at the 4-year level? How on earth is that the fault of a high school program?

It's not the HS coach's job to get them to run well in college but it is the HS coach's job to leave something in the tank so they have something left in the tank so they have a shot at running well in college.