What has happened to that program?!? I know there was a thread about their fall from grace over the summer, but 12th place at SE regionals today is the lowest of the low for them. What is Steve Walsh doing with those guys??
What has happened to that program?!? I know there was a thread about their fall from grace over the summer, but 12th place at SE regionals today is the lowest of the low for them. What is Steve Walsh doing with those guys??
women won, coach is doing a great job
The success of the women is irrelevant when you look at how bad the men have been the past few years. Have they developed anyone from year to year. Their best recruits from the past couple years haven't done anything. Looks like to me that the women have gotten lucky with recruiting. From my perspective that doesn't demonstrate good coaching ability.
The women and men have different coaches. Natalie Hall is doing a great job on the women's side. The men continue to struggle under Walsh.
Out of curiosity, is Walsh or Solinsky really doing the day to day coaching of the guys team? I know Solinksky just arrived in August but was curious if Walsh was more overseeing the Men's and Women's programs while Hall and Walsh coach or if Walsh was doing the coaching.
Is this going to be the final cataclysm that has been 5 years in the making now? I just think someone would have gotten the hint that Walsh and William and Mary can't be compatible by now.
I mean whatever is going on with the men's team has been due to Walsh. You can't expect one person to turn a program around as an assistant coach especially if the person that is the problem hasn't been removed.
Walsh won conference and HIS women won regionals He is the director, deal with it.
He's not going anywhere so keep crying Tribe, within another year you're just another LaSalle, Butler, list goes on
According to Solinsky and Hall, per ustfccca interview, they try to arrive daily by 10am and spend hours bantering over staff fantasy football.
May not want to put that out there if your team is struggling.
what do you mean??? wrote:
women won, coach is doing a great job
Indeed.... ;)
I'm handing out some awards for the SE regional coaches this year. Without further ado:
For William and Mary:
http://postimg.org/image/beoot10r1/For Duke:
http://postimg.org/image/9k4y2vk7t/What do you think? Anyone have any other nominees?
It is incredible how fast he has destroyed the mens program. When Gibby was there it was guaranteed they were going to NCAA's.
Gibby made a mistake in leaving and the school made a mistake hiring this guy. Too bad they can't get back together.
Press release about the race is kind of hilarious. Apparently, 12th was a smashing success. They beat three teams projected to finish ahead of them! Not sure how they right the ship from here.
It's incredibly frustrating to watch these guys suffer. They aren't the most talented group out of high school, but they are no different than the guys they have gotten in the past. Stephen Walsh obviously can't get these guys to run well. None of them are running well, so you have to blame the coach in this situation. If anyone at W&M cared about this historic program, then they would surely do something about this.
He writes the training plan for both the men and women, but the difference once again is that Natalie Hall is the women's day to day coach (same as when Jill Miller was there) and Walsh is the men's day to day coach. Even if he continues to write the training plan (which clearly can work based on the women), he should remove himself from the day to day interactions with the men. If he cared at all about these guys, he would do this himself. A man should know when to step back. It must be so clear to him that he is the plague and he is just living in denial.
What's with the naked lady in the WM image. That your mom? Lucky you.
Time to give this thread a bump...William & Mary men finished DEAD LAST (36 out of 36) at the ADIDAS Wisconsin Invite this weekend this weekend by a wide margin. Despite hiring several new coaches, this program can't seem to get anything right. What is going on in Williamsburg? How has this program been decimated in such a short amount of time?
It's obviously time to turn the reigns over to Solinsky and let him prove his worth and begin his actual coaching career. What can it hurt, you really can't get any worse at this point.
Walsh has got to go, no? Those results are abysmal.
JT's Date wrote:
Walsh has got to go, no? Those results are abysmal.
Why don't all the W&M alums on the board petition to put Gibby in charge. It's not like he's retired or out of coaching.
Wouldn't that be ideal. I'd imagine the W&M athletic department has little to no desire to fire the Director of a non-rev sport based on a few years of bad (awful) men's XC results. That's prob the sad truth.
Seeing Gibby back at W&M would be a welcome change, I'd imagine. I would bet it would only take him 2-3 years to turn that program around. He has strong ties to the VA high schools and I'm sure recruiting would improve almost immediately.
The truth is, the W&M athletic department has become/is just like most other athletic departments out there: it cares about football and men's basketball.
The football team is a good but not great 1-AA team, which peaked in making the National Semifinals in 2004. Since then, there has been aggressive development to improve facilities, building a new practice facility and continually making improvements to the stadium. I don't know if they envision trying to turn the program into a D-1 program eventually, like ODU, or not. But, football is king, even if the stadium isnt always full and the team isnt always good at a level below the rest of the sports at the College.
The athletic department didn't even care about basketball until the team started making a couple of runs in the CAA Tournament the last few years. Coach Shaver has had his job for well over 10 years and only in the last 3-4 has he started winning consistently. He had the job for so long doing so poorly because the athletic department didn't care if they were good or not. They shared facilities with the women's team. There was no investment in men's basketball from the athletic department until very recently. But, now that the team is competitive it is a focus of the athletic department.
All this is to say that the athletic department won't care that the men's xc team is no longer nationally or regionally competitive. If they didn't care that the men's basketball team sucked for so long, I can't imagine them making changes to men's xc, especially when the overall state of the track program doesn't look as bad to a casual observer. It's a real shame, because men's xc was one of the only sports W&M was competitive at on a national level. Under Gerrard and Gibby those guys really made something of themselves, placing highly at nationals (save for the food poisoning year) despite not getting stellar recruits.
As an alum of the school, I hope things get turned around, but I'm not hopeful knowing how that athletic department works.