HS Alternatives . . . Structural Changes Required?

Excellent post.

As a high school student, I do agree that it is disheartening to be stuck on a team that you know is holding you back. I would like to train on my own, yet regularly race other high schoolers, but that is hardly a viable option.

One problem with just allowing transfers and no sit out periods is that it really turns the sport into an individual one for all but the 1-2 schools that are magnets i ntheir respective sports. And then of course, some kids may not want to switch schools because theyll lose the friends, the school won't have as good academcis, or they cannot travel the extra 20min to and from school each day. i think allowing unlimited and unrestricted transfers would just place too much emphasis on athletics at a school, rather than the academics.

Like certain catholic schools around my area *cough cough* Of course the 4 state placers in wrestling all deserved thier "academic" scholarship solely because they are smart.

As far as suing for participation, it depends on who is prohibiting the athletes from entering certain meets, and who is the sponsoring or sanctioning association for the various meets?

If it is not a state hs assoc meet (maybe a college or private co. sanctioning via USATF, inviting hs teams?), then it is possible that the hs association, meet, and sanctioning association have come to an agreement on who is allowed to participate, so they make money from thousands of high school aged participants as opposed to a handful. It's more business to the college or private meet director, so they cater to the major client. You would still have to get to the underlying problem, which is why home-schoolers, or unattached athletes cannot compete against hs athletes under xyz state high school association rules.

I am going to presume this is pretty well-established case law, since the next step you could imagine would be a club soccer team or AAU basketball team suing to compete in similar events in those sports, and maybe to enter the hs state championships, etc. As they say in law, and why they make bright line rules, it is to avoid the slippery slope that would inevitably occur.

Finally, better get a Freshman for standing, because if the case lasts beyond a senior's elligibility/season, the judge may dismiss for lack of standing by plaintiff, since no remedy can be achieved upon his/her graduation.

There are options. Lucas V. didn't even run on his HS track team his senior year.

On the opposite end, I knew a kid who didn't run on the HS cross country team his freshmen year, instead running for the club team and at the AAU and USATF qualifying/national XC meets.

If you aren't familiar, the XC club circuit is tailored for the kids in middle school. Midget (12 and under) run 3000m, Youth (13-14) run 4000m, but they also offer Intermediate (15-16) and Young Adult (17-18) divisions that run 5000m. If I remember correctly, most of these club meets (that were during the same time frame as the HS XC season) had a 5000m course measured/marked out, but not many kids competed in that age group until the official HS season was over. That's when the AAU and USATF Junior Olympic qualifying meets were staged.

The same is also true for track, except the track club circuit doesn't really get started until May (towards the end of the HS track season), with most of the meets in June, July and maybe into August, including both the AAU and USATF Junior Olympics.

Moral of the story, if a kid wants to quit his or her team in order to run his true potential, there are race opportunities (the Junior Olympics for both AAU and USATF) for him or her to shine. If you are good enough, a college will still recruit you.

Also, consider transferring high schools to a better coach. Transfer rules vary by State association, so there may be eligibility at stake. But there are usually ways around this. Common ones... transfer from a private to a public school (for "financial" reasons), your parents "move" to another district/school boundary, etc.

All family’s that are legal residents of a state, paying taxes to support the local school, should be able to choose what programs they participate in. If a family chooses to home school why would you prevent the kids from competing in or taking classes at schools that they support? Let kids transfer an compete who cares, it should be whats best for the kid.

Everyone has a choice of public or private school options unless they've given themselves no-choice by moving to a city with a single high school. No one should live like that.

Wow, this is either meta-trolling or... LetsRun!

Here are some thoughts (7 for XC!) related to this, and every other "My coach sucks and I should be able to..." thread.

1. There should be more good coaches. I wish everyone had to do the USATF or USTCCCA courses and then there was some way to evaluate how well people apply it. But unfortunately, not everyone does, and to read these forums, those courses are taught by idiots and a waste of time. In fact, by LetsRun standards, there may just be a handful of acceptable coaches in the entire country. If you follow the discussions here, even the majority of COLLEGE coaches are horrible, and most of that small slice of successful coaches don't really coach, they just "recruit talent". So we're really up against it here.

2. Distance runners are prone to delusions. There's two reasons for this, I think. First, 7 guys get to be varsity in XC in what's the equivalent of one track event, and this gives them an overinflated sense of their talent. You don't see the #5 400m runner at a HS demanding to walk on at a Div. I college, but LetsRun always seems to have a thread on "Why can't I walk on with pr's of 4:35 & 9:55?".

Second, hard work pays off more in distance running than in almost any other sport. You don't go off for the summer, kick the ball a lot and come back a great soccer player, but you can up your mileage and come back a much better runner. The big jump that most distance runners make early in their career adds to this, and they assume if they could just train more and better (or less and better, depending) they'd make another big jump. The vast majority of runners don't have the talent to do this. You'll never find a HS senior sprinter who went from 25.8 as a frosh to 23.0 as senior claiming he would have run 21.2 if his coach wasn't an idiot. But you can't swing a stick around here without hitting that 9:55 guy, who ran 12:08 as a frosh, who just KNOWS he would have run 9:10 with proper training.

3. Training alone, is a further delusion. As mentioned above: "I would like to train on my own, yet regularly race other high schoolers, but that is hardly a viable option." NO YOU DON'T. Post-collegiate athletes delay careers, sleep on couches, and do crappy jobs just to be able to train with others and be coached. If training by yourself were an option, it wouldn't be viable if you want to actually run well.

4. People are disappointing. I wish more coaches were better coaches. I wish lot's of things are better, but they usually get better by working with people, not by running away. Remember that the "Into the Wild" guy died out there, calling for his Mother.

5. There are coaches that are genuinely power-hungry or dictatorial. In my time in the sport I've met two coaches that you just couldn't talk to, and one of them was actually a decent technical coach - he was just hard to deal with. On the other hand, our teams win championships and we welcome conversation and make changes in training based on athlete feedback and yet there's probably a dozen athletes out of the 250+ on our teams each year who genuinely believe we're persecuting them. So I'm guessing the proportion of athletes lacking self-awareness to dictatorial coaches is, um, high.

And while I'm on this theme, I'd note that distance runners are often big babies when it comes to how they perceive their coaches' demeanor. The hard-ass, dictatorial XC coach would be probably be regarded as a mild, friendly, players coach in a sport involving a ball.

6. Not training "exactly as I'd like to" doesn't mean you're being trained poorly. There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and almost all work is good work. If you're running, you're getting better.

7. The vast majority of coaches are happy to talk about their training, but it has to be in the right context. If you think you should run tempo by feel, don't bring that up when you're on the line to run 5xmile at a prescribed pace. And if your going to challenge a particular workout or part of training, make sure you understand your coach's system first.

When you take all of this into account, the number of talented runners who have been genuinely hurt by the system is vanishingly small. The reason "I could have run 4:12 and gone to Stanford" guy is out there is not a failure of American Track and XC - it's a failure of human nature. Just about every beer league softball shortstop believes he could have gone pro if his HS coach hadn't been biased (or bias - this is the internet) against him.

There are some changes we can make around the edge of the system - give home school kids a chance to train and compete with a local public HS, and maybe liberalize the transfer rules. But to overthrow the whole system? Nah.

So where does this leave us? There are bad coaches that don't understand the sport and you can't talk to. A distance runner especially can work around them - they can run more on their own if the volume is too low or they can artfully dog some reps if the coach is crazy about fast interval training. If you have to race too much, you can do more workouts and treat the races as training. But you can talk to most bad or confused coaches. Try it.

It shouldn't be that way, it would be great if every track/XC program (and hospital, and teacher, and fireman, and cop, and, and, and...) were top notch, but most of life is figuring out how to play the hand your dealt and realizing that your own perception of things is limited.

The above post is the best one that I have ever read on Letsrun. Thank you for taking the time to write it. Sadly, the delusional people who could really learn from it most likely will not.

Immense thanks Call Guy, and thanks to everyone that responded. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated. This isn't a troll, and I was never a member of the state pantheon of "almost-greats." This has been a real issue for a long time,

I agree with all 7 of your points. It seems the same already knowledgeable coaches attend the clinics, and the rest are rarely, if ever, seen. And most runners are entirely delusional believing they can run alone. They may last 3 weeks, possibly 6, and that's it. It's rare to find an athlete that can run alone, although I have seen it happen.

But there’s more to the issue. I think the magnitude of the "my way or the highway," for coaches that really don’t know what they’re doing, but know they’re in charge, is far greater than most can imagine or will admit.

I’ve seen one former world record holder quit her HS for that reason, as well as at least 5 other recent HS graduates (4 that went on to D1 schools, 1 of which is an Olympic hopeful, and 1 female sophomore 5:00 miler that sadly quit entirely). The last would have done quite well in college. It's a bigger problem at the elite level than most athletes and coaches are willing to acknowledge. I’m not referring to the dreamers, but the runners that have already demonstrated the talent. I can only imagine it’s an even bigger problem at the next level down, although I only have a few anecdotal stories supporting that.

And I think it's criminal that the home-schooled and non-affiliated athletes can't compete. That's an abomination that everyone should condemn.

I'd like to think more about the posts here. Really don't want to overthrow the system, but having a hard time thinking of another way to solve the issue. That's why I posted. I appreciate your thoughtful response.

What states prohibit home schooled kids from competing? The states I'm familiar with allow home schooled kids to compete for the public school within their attendance boundary.

Most states allow home schooled, or charter school kids to compete on the high school team that they would have attended if they were in public school. You do have to jump through a few hoops to do so, but kids are not ever prohibited from competition. And if your school does not have a sport that you compete in, you can often compete for a different school.

Transfer rules are in place because they are often violated. Foobtall and basketball are often the most heavily abused, but I remember a few years back in Florida when it was soccer that was the culprit. The rules are put in place to make competition fair for all. People seem to think that they are the only ones competiting, and they are not.

If you want better coaches, take it up with your local school system. The money offered to coaches is paltry and they almost always try to place a teacher there first. If you want changes do it the right way.

Without reading the whole thread I will tell you why home schoolers and unattached athletes are not allowed to run in my state.

Simple: insurance reasons.

Home schoolers and unattached athletes are not covered under the schools insurance thus it opens the school up to a number of legal issues by said runners if something goes wrong.

This has been debated many times in my state. It got to the point that the state legislature banned home schoolers and unattached athletes from competing in local high school events.

There are genuinely times that I come on Let's Run and damn...I actually learn something! Or, at a minimum, a point of view different than my own.

Once again this thread and some of the thoughtful posts...especially this one by Cali Guy is one of those times.

This is a topic that has been brought up many times on this forum, each time with thoughtful response. (There must be a lot of delusional mid/long distance runners out there.)

The one observation I would like to make is this-- distance running is deceptively complicated. Coaching teenage and young adult distance runners is really complicated as unlike old slugs such as myself, they are going through so many physiological and psychological changes that contact with a misinformed or misguided individual and their respective coaching philosophy can get particularly damaging.

Now once again, depending on the size of the school and its program, there are many other factors that need to be considered. (as one poster so eloquently put it in response to a question "why do I do so much speedwork and race so much" said "its because high school programs and schedules are not for the 20% who are dedicated to sport, put in the work year round and want to develop long term....its for the 80% who are looking at it as something to do this season." Perhaps a simplistic answer but to my early comment it was a point of view that I had never thought of.)

Its just damn hard when your child comes in contact with a misguided individuals whose philosophy is difficult to understand and you end up having to deal with the collateral damages associated with it-- inclusive of injury and sickness.

Yes, we learned we had no viable options for getting our child out from under the thumb of an abusive coach, short of selling our house and moving to another public school district. Transferring her to a private school was something we couldn't afford and besides, the student would have had to sit out a whole year her junior year, which would have been disastrous for college recruiting. There are no competitive meets run in the state for high schoolers that are not sponsored by the state sports organization, and one has to run for a participating school in order to register for those. No unattached athletes or home-schoolers are permitted. So having her train on her own with a private coach would have been unproductive unless we had had the time and money to cart her around the country for open meets run by colleges or something, and for those presumably she'd need to have met an pretty fast entry standard we were unsure she'd meet. And no, were weren't delusional about her ability--the coach was a nutcase and took a particular dislike to her for political reasons.

In my state you can only run for schools that each independent school board lets you. The state doesn't decide, it only allows, leaving it up to each school to decide. I would say that the school should be able to at least afford insurance for kids that don't use any of the resources that the parents are paying taxes for. In my case I pay over 6 thousand to the local school district. The home school team in my area had their own insurance but still were not allowed to compete after the sectionals started, why not? The state HSA said you made the decision to home school so that’s the way it is. So I couldn't help but feel it is about power and control and not really whats best for the kids. If the state mandated letting tax paying residents of each state decide if they wanted to use school resources or not, that would make more sense to me. With each school board deciding it becomes way to random and inconsistent. I want my kid competing with the best kids in the state, not the best kids the state allows to compete.

A few additional thoughts.

The insurance issue doesn’t rise to the level of a red-herring; it’s a complete canard. Simply requiring the home-schoolers/unattached to join the USATF, where insurance comes with registration, would address that. A simple waiver at teh online registration form would take care of the rest.

And the NFHS affiliated entities simply granting the local school districts a proxy to determine home-schooler participation is rife with inconsistent application and a veritable gold mine for abuse. Simple google search of [home school participation athletics] reveals a good article posted by an attorney that endured two inconsistent applications (http://www.hsc.org/teensports.php). Also, the other article at the top of the search confirms that most states don’t permit participation for home-schoolers (http://www.home-school.com/Articles/can-homeschoolers-participate-in-public-school-programs.html).

But the heart of this issue goes beyond the home-schoolers and unattached runners. Yes, there are a lot of delusional distance runners that don't understand their coaches' methods. But there are also a fair number of coaches that simply don't have the credentials for training the athletes. It's fairly easy to have an issue with an authoritarian coach that has no knowledge of what he's doing, but he knows he's in charge. What about the dedicated runners that want to run in HS and in college, but the coach is an impediment?

Sorry, clarify that last sentence.

What about the dedicated runners that want to run in HS and in college, but their "HS coach" is an impediment?

(don't want to bring the colleges into this; an athelete has a choice when it comes to college (and that may invovle a scholarship), but not typcally for iHS)

Big City wrote:

What states prohibit home schooled kids from competing? The states I'm familiar with allow home schooled kids to compete for the public school within their attendance boundary.

California. If you don't attended a CIF member school you can't compete in any CIF sanctioned meets.

Californication wrote:

Big City wrote:

What states prohibit home schooled kids from competing? The states I'm familiar with allow home schooled kids to compete for the public school within their attendance boundary.

California. If you don't attended a CIF member school you can't compete in any CIF sanctioned meets.

Here is a roundup of what states allow homeschoolers and which do not:

So 34 schools allow them to participate and the rest don't. That's crap. All kids should be allowed to participate regardless of their school. Why not?