Lots of College Coaches REALLY Suck

Alcohol and sleep plays a big role. Going to a top track / XC school, especially BYU with the alcohol restrictions, will have a far better culture of success.

It’s a copy cat game, NCAA training.

It’s all about who you know.

1) No longer eating healthy home cooking. 2) (10 to 100)% more homework. 3) Much greater exposure to alcohol. 4) College is just more stressful. Courses my be taught in buildings over 1 mile apart.

A loss of motivation is extremely common with the young college kids. They go into college with big expectations and suddenly find themselves getting blown out the water by older athletes and more talented foreigners. They also lose the structure of high school and having their parents in control. College coaches aren't parents. Kids can stay up till 5 AM drinking and roll out of bed to practice every day if they choose.

We've had a lot of freshman who redshirt and go through a cycle of living/training like idiots, getting hurt, going MIA, coming back 4-5 weeks later ready to get their sh*t together. They usually learn their lesson after a bad freshman year and make a big jump as Sophomores indoor or outdoor season.

Unhealthy, inedible dining hall food

10x10 room with a roommate who may not have same sleep schedule

The Freshman Flu

Hours of homework in weed out classes (calc, labs, Econ)

There are some bad college coaches but in my experience it is rarely the training “coaching” that causes poor performance.

80% of college athletes aren’t even in shape!!! You get ten freshmen women, 7 of them aren’t going to hit their HS times with Jesus holding the stopwatch

I completely sucked my freshman year, and most of my sophomore year too. it wasn't cause of bad coaching, it was cause I went from drinking maybe 2-3 times a year to 3+ times a week. it was cause I'd skip meals since my dining hall food was only good like 50% of the time, and I'd stay up way too late since I didn't have any classes till 9am vs being up at 6am for high school. I sustained a freak injury playing basketball the year before college that just completely changed my motivations and direction and it wasn't until I matured a bit more and got my head on straight that I started improving again. there were times I wished my coach would hold my hand a bit more, like they might in high school, but I had to realize that they had a family to take care of outside of practice and that I as an adult had to organize myself appropriately. theres plenty of other reasons why people don't improve in college, bad coaching included. but its unfair to say that a freshman having a difficult time adjusting to new college training is a result of bad coaching since its pretty common and usually due to external factors

This is your logical conclusion? Really?

As a former elite high school athlete, and D-I athlete who later did the D-I college coaching thing for 9 years, let me just say, you are clueless.

The number of intentional factors that can trip up a former elite high school athlete, as well as the number of unintentional factors are many. All it can take is one fateful decision, or a series of them and it is over. I was on a team that had incredible amounts of talent come through the doors, and my coach converted that to many, many national championships, yes THAT program, and even he couldn't save them all from themselves. So much talent went home or was sent home.

You have to accept that SOME, and these days it looks like more and more, young people just want to do what they want to do and won't get out of their own way even when you are trying to lay success at their feet. All they have to do is reach down and pick it up.

THERE WILL BE ATTRITION. It's sad when its your kid, or an athlete that you coached, maybe someone with whom you grew close to the family, but there is no way for you to know what that "good kid" you spent so much time with, is doing in their 21 hours away from the team/coach. Its a part of growing up.

Having said that, I will readily admit that not every coach is a good fit for every athlete, which is why getting your choice right is so important, although, now with the Transfer Portal, that has become less important, though there is still the loss of time and possibly eligibility.

Sorry for the long post, but when I see this position as a former D-I coach, now turned local high school coach, I always feel the need to comment as someone who has seen/lived it from all the angles.

Most high school coaches ruin their athletes in high school beyond repair. I went to high school in the 90s and did 5 hard track workouts per week, no mileage. That training is unsustainable and ruins athletes.

You get guys that should be 5k runners in college (such as 1:55/4:14 in high school with a 52 400 PR) that get to college and have no aerobic development and refuse to build mileage.

It's about damn time these incompetent, creepy coaches are called out. Too many to count. Want all the praise with athlete success but can't take the heat when they take an L due to stupidity.

a lousy college track coach can put their energy into a handful of people and then put on his resume how he had 4 conference champions in his program last year. and in reality put up like 60 team points. it takes an attentive AD to notice, oh, they finished 5th in conference 150 points behind the rival school down the street drawing off the same recruiting area.

football coaches are simply more accountable, and the team nature of the games and you either W or L implements that. lane kiffins get exposed. he can't fall back on, well, but my TE won conference. or i had two guys first team all conference. you either win games or not. in track we might sense a coach is overrated, but it's an opinion based on HS times and other esoterics. and not competing well at meets can be excused. oh, but the distance program is good. he trains that sub 4 kid. except sub 4 kid was running sub 4 in HS.

i had a college prof who said that it bothered him if the curve going out was the same people as the curve coming in.

I think that combined with different coaching scheme(not better or worse, different) screw a lot of kids. You spent high school in a 45mpw scheme and then get dumped in some 80mpw scheme and you go from everyone on the team going to hard to keep up with you to being the one fighting not to get dropped…

I will also point out that in HS there are often kids who run great times JR year who struggle to match those times senior year. Stuff happens

I agree. One thing that used to frustrate me was to frequently my old athletes would ask for summer plans because their now college coach didn’t give them one. Which is just nuts to me. How hard is it to make a generic summer plan with different mileage groups etc. Type it up and hit save and its there for every summer. Then assign athletes to each plan etc. And college coaches can be bad just like high school coaches at times. Sometimes its about who you know etc.

I thought I'd set of a bomb with this thread. So far most of the responses have been reasonable.

I'm amused at how so many people are quick to jump on the "HS coaches suck" bandwagon (as evidenced by the weekly threads) and completely discount all of the headwinds we face but then when I post something like "college coaches suck because of this hard data I actually observed from one year to the next" People are eager to jump in and list all of the headwinds that college coaches face.

I know a lot of high school coaches. Some are good, some are great and a few of them shouldn't be coaching. The same can certainly be said about college coaches.

I think there are a lot of bad coaches at every level.

I am a HS coach but I don't get offended when people say there are a lot of bad HS coaches out there because I have seen plenty. They just don't take the time to do the work and as a HS coach you know there is plenty of work, learning, preparation that should go into coaching but some just don't have the time, energy, or willingness to do it.

Same can be said for college coaches. Some try to live on recruiting but then don't know how to coach the kids once they get them there. Yes it's a change in lifestyles for the college athlete but that's not the only limiting factor. Some mentioned a different training program and that's very true as well. Take the kid off what worked in HS and do something completely different and of course the results will vary.

If you only looked at times then that would be an easy thing to figure out. Fact is, in a lot of cases once a kid gets out on his own with no one to regulate them. They do not have the capability to regulate themselves and spend their time focusing on things that do not help them progress. Like, partying, drugs, drinking, not focusing on school work, eating a lot worse and irregular sleeping habits.

Of those cases you are speaking of, I'd like to know their GPA as well. Their GPA will tell a little more about the story IMO.

Another thing to think about is. Their focus may be different once they get to said college. Coaching philosophy may be different. A 1:51 kid in HS is not the greatest thing ever in the 800 until they are running 1:48 or faster. But a 1:51 kid that can run 5k has great potential. There are too many factors then just the time itself. Then you have this time period we are in where kids, because of social media, have learned to be very manipulative and it gets worse as they go to college.

I'm not necessarily offended. It's more that I just don't see this plethora of bad coaching at the HS level. I mean, there are programs around here where kids underperform and there are programs around here where kids overperofrm. One thing I haven't seen is any of the BS workouts that people always post about on here. So, maybe one guy in your area has his kids do some really dumb stuff and then you post it on here and someone else 3 states over has the same experience. That doesn't mean the majority of coaches in between these two bad programs separated by 3 states are doing the same stupid things.

As to the culture at colleges......isn't that part of the job? To help instill team culture? My local D2 (of which I'm an alma mater) had a rough time fielding decent cross country teams for years. Speaking from experience, we had a lot of drinking and partying going on. Around the time my old coach left and a new coach (Diljeet Taylor) came on board, the school also hired John Underwood to come and help install the principles of his Human Performance Project (then known as "Life of an Athlete". The culture of the team began to change and the program started to have more success. I had a few athletes matriculate to run for that program and also made friends with people in that program. They told me that there really was no culture of drinking and partying anymore.

So, a coach can make a difference there.

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Lets call it the way it is. Most coaches have incredibly high egos. They know everything, they know all the answers.

Lets take 5 4:32 boy milers, give 5 coaches one of these milers and check their progress in 3 years.

The best coaches are the ones who actually coach rather than manage the genetics they recruited.