Lots of high school coaches REALLY suck

There are more high school track coaches in the US than there are chain pizza places. A handful of them have a coach with any measurable pedigree. There may be more qualified runners working at pizza places than there are coaching high school. Virtually all of them are part time and filled by a teacher who happened to be available and want the extra pittance of cash. This issue here is with your expectations for a generic high school coach.

Maybe there are a decent number that are really bad. However, most of the coaches I know around here are decent....and this is not what you'd call a distance running hotbed (however it is getting better).

Many parts of the country just don’t care about distance running.

There are communities like in southern Indiana where coaches are hired just to fill a space. It’s so little money that they consider it just adding to family income… a couple thousand bucks.

They don’t necessarily even like the sport and it’s approached like a “ study hall”

There are no local newspapers anymore that even publish their results so it goes completely under the radar.

The victims are the young athletes who never know until they leave home how great a sport they had been involved in.

At many schools any warm body will do. I coached at So Cal small Catholic schools in the 90's and most coaches had no formal education of any sort. The AAF / LA84 coaching clinics helped alot but many schools hire walk-on coaches and take whoever they can get. My guess is it's worse now.

I love T&F. I am a running nerd through and through. I've done all kinds of running- HS, college, road races, marathons, trail runs, trail marathons, you name it. I've worked meets as an official, as a starter, clerk.

Right now I am coaching a HS team. Two Saturdays ago I arrived at a meet at 9am, and left around 930pm. Even a dyed in the wool track head starts thinking, "Why am I even doing this?"

If you are someone that only has a small interest in the sport, you are not going to deal with that for long. Saturdays are too few, the money is too little, and the thanks and glory are virtually nonexistent. Even people I know that are life time T&F people, have stepped aside and given up track (many still coach XC.)

We are eating our own. We burn through coaches and officials at an extremely high rate. The sport of Track is a pyramid scheme that relies upon the continued recruitment of newbies into the bottom rung, so others can get out.

I felt this when you said "arrived at a meet at 9am, and left around 930pm"

I am deeply passionate about running and love watching my athletes grow, but sometimes it just straight up SUCKS

Back in the day my high school coach was a pretty spirited man in his twenties, a former college runner so I guess in theory he knew what he was doing. But he blurred boundaries far too much. Not sure if anything happened that was untoward or not but I guess I'll never know...

He really liked this one girl on our team and she was our fastest runner and team captain the year we had the best team we ever assembled. But all regular season we never had weekend practices. I sort of started to wonder why that was. We had this huge goal of making regionals as a team, but we weren't practicing weekends.

Well I come to find out that instead of holding team practices, he was having "private practices" with her (his choice) every single weekend. He favored her heavily, and it was horribly evident. Anyways, she ended up absolutely tanking (really unfortunate don't take pleasure in that memory, she was a nice kid) and we didn't qualify for any of the races we wanted to.

Looking back it was so...weird. Like, how did he think that was okay? Why did he not realize how sketchy he was being?

But yeah basic high school coach 101--maybe don't have private practices with just one runner if you're whole team is stacked with talent just a thought.

Needed: Cross Country / Distance Coach for City Central High School

Applicant #1 - Self-employed consultant, former pro runner and D1 All American at 1500 meters, 2 x Olympic Trials qualifier. Bachelor's in Kinesiology/Exercise Science, MBA with emphasis in Operations Management. Founded successful youth track club with multiple USATF Junior Olympics and AAU Junior Olympics champions.

Applicant #2 - History teacher at City Central, two years of JV Soccer in high school, finisher at 2015 Flying Pig and 2016 Rock-n-Roll San Diego marathons with a best of 3:19:37. BA in History, state teaching certificate. Coached daughter's Lil' Kickers U8 soccer teams in 2018 and 2019. Member of state teacher's union.

After careful consideration, we are proud to announce that Mr. Jackson of our school's History department is our new head Cross Country coach! Go Central!!!

finisher at the 20215 Flying Pig event is the main reason for the hire!

Already working in district, happened to me too. A current collegiate athlete on my last year of track/ as well as coaching my athletes to a conference victory (first one since 2005) and 2 indoor state medalist. They chose the jv girls volleyball coach as the next xc head coach. Teacher unions suck, but are also necessary at the same time.

oh man thats hilarious. I'm currently on my first year of coaching and able to compete my last year of collegiate track. It's a great time

From what I've seen in my area, the majority of coaches at big schools seem decent. Not great, but not completely clueless. A lot of those coaches train their runners sub-optimally, in my opinion, (some combination of: nobody over 30 mpw, lots of anaerobic intervals, racing multiple times per week, racing workouts when they aren't racing, no threshold work) but still in a way that resembles a reasonable training plan.

Small schools are a different animal with a lot of teams coached by somebody's dad or a teacher who ran JV track at some point, and urban schools seem more likely to have a football coach as head track coach and little interest in distance running, so they don't tend to have great coaching.

There's also the issue ClubRunnah referred to above. This sport is so time intensive. In April and May, I get home after 9pm multiple days per week (typically a JV meet one day, varsity meet another). Other sports have separate coaches for different levels (football, baseball, etc) or all levels generally compete on the same day (xc), but track tends to require coaches to attend multiple meets per week. Occasionally, we host a middle school meet on top of all that. If we had kids at home, there is no way my partner would be okay with me coaching.

well. It's a fair question. I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that he was, but what I do know is that he was spending a lot of time alone with her, certainly a lot more than what would be acceptable today. He would also do things like; if we were all going on a group run together and she was there, he would talk to just her. But again, that's not an indication that anything illegal was happening.

I truly don't think a full blown affair/abuse was going on, just a young and immature coach who really needed to grow the heck up. But the aftermath is not so much what might have been happening, rather, how his blurred boundaries affected everyone else on the team.

With that being said, because they spent so much time alone and because he favored her so much, if she were to come out and say this that and the other happened with him today, I would believe her no questions asked.

I was a passionate runner for a half century and coached for only 7 years.

i was not a teacher. I will say that I don’t blame schools for hiring the trained teachers over the local guy everyone saw at the local races and running on the streets.

I got results faster than the “ teachers “ who aren’t really interested but after some meets I might have been so worked up that I didn’t do a proper head count back on the little “ half bus” or really had to remember to stop at McDonalds after the meet.

Teachers are trained to pay attention to the kids in ways most of us crazy runners aren’t

Do you all get a sense we are dealing with Machiavellian Egomaniacs?

But they all read Daniels.

Many just don't care. Just like teaching. Many are just dumb or with no knowledge. It's just a job with low pay.

what you need is soccer-style coach certification. it's a barrier to entry and annoyance but the experienced runner passes it with ease. that requires some clue to coach and encourages learning your field.

my experience football coaches varied in quality, the head TF guy was special teams and he was excellent and one of my favorites as he engaged every kid and their parents. there were some others who were more the stereotype but if the head is good then he can formulate the training for the scattershot football types as the assistants. so there was a dingbat distance guy but the head wrote his plans and as a result, you get performance in spite of a know nothing assistant in the area. the kids are motivated. the head tells the assistant want to make the motivated kids do.

to me where it goes bad is clueless football head or clueless assistant with full planning power delegated the whole job. a good assistant can fix a poor head, for that part. a good head with figurehead assistants can program them and fix that part.

to me a lot of it is engaging the material and the athletes. some football coaches ran themselves. some are good caring people. some football coaches are the sort who do film study for games and they can school-up some if they pay attention. some are tyrants who haven't the first clue what their plans do to athletes, or what they are doing. to me the worst mix is authoritarian and foolish. asks too much, brooks no dissent.

the other issue i thought i ran across was football coaches who demand football type attendance. where i went we had quite a few baseball and soccer people. some coaches tolerated it well that we missed most or all of practices. our hurdle guy punted me to sprints for always being with soccer instead. thought it was crazy as i was the best low hurdler in meets. but some football coaches run track like football.