MAGNESS'S NCAA team < Woodlands High school team

dontneednomoney wrote:

FURMAN

Please. Recruiting great and being able to turn 16:10-17:00 minute female 3 milers-5kers into consistent sub 20:30 minute 6k runners requires actual coaching ability which has to be proven and he's borderline at best in that regard. His guys still have a lot to prove and are a decent D1 team, but would have a difficult time winning against top tier D2 or D3 programs over 8k. Robert was a fine Wildkit and Buckeye, but he has a distance staff of 6 individuals when many of us have 1 or 2 and team sizes of 25-30 to his 28. A nicely built staff and possibly a nicely built pro squad on the side, but turning gold into pure gold is harder than most people think. Best of luck to him.

Yeah he definitely sold himself into a job that he's 100% unequipped for. He deserves this criticism. He is always going to be bad.

I forgot to come back to this thread. Am doing so now. I dont know if Magness is a good coach or not. I\'m just saying to judge him of some results at Prenats is absurd.

I'm certainly more jaded than in the year 2000. When I started the site, we were still improving as runners. Eventually you hit your genetic potential.

I do think there are some college runners who aren't at their potential as coaching is sometimes throwing a bunch of eggs against a wall and see who doesn\'t break. But the number of college runners being ruined by coaches running them too hard and not aerobically is not very high any more like it was 20 years ago.

Weldon needed more recovery, more mileage and more altitude than he got in college. When I started at Cornell, I probably thought I could turn most guys into 28:06 but that\'s just not the case.

I plan on starting a training site with JK soon. We'll talk about this. But if you asked him these questions, his reply would be, "I can\'t on average overcome more than 1 second per lap. If you do things properly, get the right base, etc, then it's worth about a second per lap."

Coaching plays a role but recruiting plays a MUCH bigger role.

Ok, I just called JK as I was typing this. Here is what he said, \"No coach can\'t make chicken shit out of chicken salad. I guarantee you there is no coach in the world that can take a team of 9:15 guys and have them beat a team full of 9:00 guys. It might have happened in the 1990s - it\'s not going to happen now. Because of the Internet, everyone knows how to do it now. Your welcome, by the way.\"

JK is still convinced with equal talent (and without drugs), he can outcoach anyone over the long term. He\'s got a long term plan that has always been incredibly succesful.

When I was Cornell, Sage Canaday finished in the 80s at NCAAs in xc (2005?). In HS, he had pbs of 4:09/8:46 for 1500 so that's 4:28/9:24 for 1600/3200. A coach at a current top 5 men\'s school came up to me a few weeks later and said, "Great job. We have a spread sheet where we have the HS PBs of all of the guys at NCAAs. There wasn\'t a single American in the NCAA results who finished higher than him at NCAAs who was slower than him in HS."

A few years later, Nate Edelman also was in the 80s at NCAAs a few years later and he ran 9:31 in HS. Now he didn't run all 4 years so that's not entirely fair.

John Kellogg believes a statistical analysis would show the guys we had at Cornell improved more than other schools across the country except for perhaps altitude runners/schools. Now how you do that with injuries, etc is very hard but he would do stuff like that and compare the stats. I remember one time he was raving about some obscure UC school (UCSB? don't rembmer who had some milers improve a ton).

Look, I'm not going to deny that Lananna wasn\'t special. But a) He had the recruits (very good ones) and b) was one of the few guys back then that had guys running aerobically.

But that was in the year 1985-1991. The game has changed drastically since then.

1) Due to the Internet, everyone knows who all of the recruits are. You know longer are the only coach on the east coast with the Kansas state meet results. You instantly and cheaply can contact the top100 guys in the country.

2) HSers are trained much better now (thanks to the Internet). It\'s hard to find some po-dunk 9:35 kid who is realy incredible but just had awful training.

3) College runners are trained much better now as well.

When I first got to Cornell, the first 3-4 years was easy. You just developed the guys to sub-405, sub 1415 and sub 2945 and they dominated. By the time I left, guys were running 29:10 and not scoring.

I was part of the greatest coaching dynasty in any men's sport in Ivy league history. We won 8 straight Heps outdoor crowns. No other men\'s sport in ivy league history has won 8 straight outright conference crowns in a sport that all of the ivies contest except you guessed it - Vin Lanana's Dartmouth xc teams (also 8 in a row in xc).

Now am I saying that if I been the head coach and put all of the resources into xc, would we have won 8 in a row? Hell no. I\'m not saying that. I\'m just saying that we achieved our #1 goal almost every single year.

My bosses #1 goal was to win outdoors every year and we did that for 8 straight years. I do think several of my teams at Cornell would have made NCAAs in xc had they been competing when I was in college. The whole game just shifted.

If you ran 13:32 in 1996, you made the the Olympics for the US. Now you barely make the trials. If you ran 28:06, you were an Olympic hopeful. Now if you run that , you are lucky to get a mention in the letsrun 10k preview. So my belief in 1996 (when I got out of college), that there were a ton of guys like my brother and Chris Lear who were way better than there results, was true.

Salazar is now viewed as a coaching genius. He certainly wasn\'t viewed as coaching genius when he was working with the likes of Chad Johnson and Mike Donnelly. He realized he needed better recruits (at a minimum) and maybe more than that to dominate the world.

lol \"more than that\". Well Rojo I think you\'re one of the only people on this thread besides Coach Green who didn\'t bash Steve so thank you for that.

Better recruiting definitely helps and honestly a better location helps a lot. Imagine trying to get a suburban kid to come to Houston when the school is right in the middle of the third ward. Why would he want to when Rice University is only 15 minutes away and is in a prime location. Or when they can go to UT or TAMU or the other schools in Texas that aren\'t straight in the ghetto.

Ask anyone on the XC team at Houston why they chose Houston. I can guarantee to you it\'s because of Steve. Why else would they go to a school that gets next to nothing in the XC budget and gets treated like crap by the University and the athletic department.

Being friends with the guys on the UH team and having been around Steve I can tell you that the team atmosphere there is great. Steve is awesome with the guys and the program is moving in the right direction. I know for a fact that in the next few years Steve will have UH competitive on the national scene. This stuff doesn't happen overnight especially at a school like Houston.

Nobody seems to be saying he's a great coach (because he's not), all of his defenders just seem to be saying that it's hard to recruit to Houston.

While it may not be easy to recruit at Houston, Magness should have a solid reputation to sell the recruits. Coaching pro's, he worked with NOP, he wrote a book, etc. yet he still can't attract decent talent. He has no excuse for his poor recruiting.

Plus he still can't coach worth a damn.

college jr wrote:

https://twitter.com/BRazzleDazzle5k/status/614428877461426176

I think from this, they just had a rough day at Pre-Nats. It happens. If you follow Magness, you know one of their guys got trampled, so a few could have gone day in that fall? Who knows (https://instagram.com/p/88TTCJxWaY/?taken-by=stevemagness)

The kids He ran at Pre-nats are mostly solid on the track. Just looking at TFRRS from last year.

Barraza- 13:56 5k

Tesfai- 4:03 mile. 8:08 3k

Broussard- 8:33 3k

Contreras- 3:52 1,500m, 8:31 3k

Munoz- 1st year

Anderson- FR

Nothing crazy, but they're a solid college team. So bad day at the office for whatever reasons for everyone but Barraza

Just go look at TFRRS. Houston is never going to be a national class team. It's a school in the ghetto in a major city that focuses on sprints.

If you look at track times in the mid and long distances they are solid. They had a slew of solid 800m kids, ran a 9:37 DMR, and so forth.

If you add post-collegiate runners in it's clear people improve. Hall's improved, Gracey has, he's got a slew of others who are good who he's worked with.

cross country runner wrote:

While it may not be easy to recruit at Houston, Magness should have a solid reputation to sell the recruits. Coaching pro's, he worked with NOP, he wrote a book, etc. yet he still can't attract decent talent. He has no excuse for his poor recruiting.

Plus he still can't coach worth a damn.

He has plenty of excuses. It's the U of H and he isn't in charge of the scholarships. As others have said, most college kids would rather go to UT or Rice in state.

You can build a distance power at any school if you have the purse strings and full rides to offer. He doesn't. The head coach is a sprint coach. Game over.

I was talking to a top NCAA coach at a crappy school when he took over. His team is quite good now. When he started there, I said, "How are you going to get people to go there?" He said, "Overpay for the talent." Steve can't do that.

Coaches aren't miracle workers. Alex Gibby is a a very good coach. Had a men's power at W&M. Was fantastic at Michigan. Now he's at Charlotte something or other and there aren't very good (not yet). Why? Cause he didn't have any guys to work with. I'm sure that will change soon (if he has scholarships).

rojo wrote:

cross country runner wrote:

While it may not be easy to recruit at Houston, Magness should have a solid reputation to sell the recruits. Coaching pro's, he worked with NOP, he wrote a book, etc. yet he still can't attract decent talent. He has no excuse for his poor recruiting.

Plus he still can't coach worth a damn.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree?

You're assuming he's using resources to recruit top distance kids.

Look at the team. Last year they had 4 or 5 1:50ish type kids, and a solid DMR team.

Look at his recruiting last year, a couple XC kids and a 1:50 and 1:53 guy. He's recruiting middle distance guys and then probably trying to sell XC guys on walking on and reputation.

That strategy is probably dictated by boss or purse strings.

You guys are assuming XC is the most important thing. For a college like UH, XC is probably an afterthought. It's whether or not they are scoring on the track and winning conference champs on the track. Which they seem to be.

nchs wrote:

rojo wrote:

I think you're barking up the wrong tree?

You're assuming he's using resources to recruit top distance kids.

Look at the team. Last year they had 4 or 5 1:50ish type kids, and a solid DMR team.

Look at his recruiting last year, a couple XC kids and a 1:50 and 1:53 guy. He's recruiting middle distance guys and then probably trying to sell XC guys on walking on and reputation.

That strategy is probably dictated by boss or purse strings.

You guys are assuming XC is the most important thing. For a college like UH, XC is probably an afterthought. It's whether or not they are scoring on the track and winning conference champs on the track. Which they seem to be.

This guy probably is Leroy or Carl posting because it's spot on with what is happening at UH...

On the men's side at outdoor conferences, it took 15:13 to score in the 5k. Only their top guy scored and placed 2nd. No other points there. Nobody ran the 10k so no points there either even though 32:00 scored. Nobody scored in the 1500 even though it took 3:55 to make it to finals and then a 3:56 for 8th in the finals. They did decent in the 800 but only managed 1 point in the steeplechase.

Their distance men scored 20 points at the conference championships outdoors (out of their team's 124.5 total). The distance women scored 7 points. Do you think Magness is proud of this? Would you be happy with these results?

It's not like they are in a distance powerhouse conference either. No clue why their 1:48/3:46 guy ran the 5k at that meet either. He didn't score, if he managed 3 points in the 800 or 1500 their team would have been 2nd overall instead of 3rd.

The head coach is very up front at UH when hiring distance coaches. They tell you how it is going to be scholarship-wise.

What I'd probably be doing there is going all in on the DMR to add value in track. Then make what you can for XC.

So get a few running nerds from the suburbs for books (more than they'll get at A&M or Texas or Baylor, etc) and then pick up a few 800 guys who swing toward the mile. Sprints can supply a decent 400 runner. This way there is value added toward track (what is paying the bills) and you do what you can for XC with those 2-3 studs and the local running nerds who turn into 14:30 5k guys over 2-3 years.

Whoever suggested that Syracuse is the same as UH... Serious? That area also provides the top HS team in the nation in Fay-Man. It is a great training ground. UH is a harder sell. Not impossible, but harder. The other option is to go and get some internationals.

Magness is adding to his collection of post-collegiate runners. I think he has a former SFA runner or two along with a former A&M runner. Perhaps this is an ideal situation for him while he pursues his doctorate.

YOU GUYS REALIZE HOUSTON WON 2 X NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP IN CROSS COUNTRY???

It is a great place to train.

The world's best 50yr old runner on the planet runs faster than all of UH Top 7.

Long live Al Lawrence, Leonard Hilton, and Sean Wade.

Since I know Steve, I'll post this. It won't make a difference because no one really thinks he can or can't coach, it's just trolls.

Coaching is developing people. So I went and looked at UH TFRRS account from last track season and then looked up what those guys did in HS. It gives a rough idea of how much these guys improved

Tesfai- 4:17 HS--> 1:48/4:03mile

Barraza- 4:13/9:05 HS--> 13:56/3:44

Contreras- 4:21/9:46--> 3:52 1500 8:31 3k

Broussard-4:38/9:44--> 8:33 3k, 9:12 steeple

Anderson-Kaapa-- ??-->1:49.0

Fernando-- 1:54.68-->1:51.84

Coleman-- 1:51.91--> 1:49.33

Parmley-- 4:27.0--> 4:00 1500m

Beacham- 1:56.62-->1:58.48

Barrett-- 4:22 -->4:08 1500m

Walker-- 4:32-->3:59 1500m

Stewart- 4:50 --> 4:01 1500m

Lara- 4:28--> 9:48 steeple

Hawley- 4:25/10:05--> 8:35 3k

That's every guy on the TFRRS list last year for Houston.

Those are facts. From my perspective, that's development. Take them for what it's worth.

wadeyballs wrote:

Since I know Steve, I'll post this. It won't make a difference because no one really thinks he can or can't coach, it's just trolls.

Coaching is developing people. So I went and looked at UH TFRRS account from last track season and then looked up what those guys did in HS. It gives a rough idea of how much these guys improved

Tesfai- 4:17 HS--> 1:48/4:03mile

Barraza- 4:13/9:05 HS--> 13:56/3:44

Contreras- 4:21/9:46--> 3:52 1500 8:31 3k

Broussard-4:38/9:44--> 8:33 3k, 9:12 steeple

Anderson-Kaapa-- ??-->1:49.0

Fernando-- 1:54.68-->1:51.84

Coleman-- 1:51.91--> 1:49.33

Parmley-- 4:27.0--> 4:00 1500m

Beacham- 1:56.62-->1:58.48

Barrett-- 4:22 -->4:08 1500m

Walker-- 4:32-->3:59 1500m

Stewart- 4:50 --> 4:01 1500m

Lara- 4:28--> 9:48 steeple

Hawley- 4:25/10:05--> 8:35 3k

That's every guy on the TFRRS list last year for Houston.

Those are facts. From my perspective, that's development. Take them for what it's worth.

LOLz, why is everyone judging Steve Magness based on athletes improvement from high school?? OF COURSE THEY ARE GOING TO IMPROVE GOING FROM 18 TO 22-23 YEARS OLD! If you are simply running and doing workouts, improvement from high school is a given.

Barraza stands out from his solid HS times to stud college times. Other than that, nothing really stands out. Tesfai, his other solid runner, is Ethiopian, skinny as a rail, & ran 1:52 in high school. So 1:48/4:03 is no surprise there. Now if he took one of those 9:40 kids and turned them into a sub 30 10k runner...

Scuba Diving wrote:

LOLz, why is everyone judging Steve Magness based on athletes improvement from high school?? OF COURSE THEY ARE GOING TO IMPROVE GOING FROM 18 TO 22-23 YEARS OLD! If you are simply running and doing workouts, improvement from high school is a given.

Barraza stands out from his solid HS times to stud college times. Other than that, nothing really stands out. Tesfai, his other solid runner, is Ethiopian, skinny as a rail, & ran 1:52 in high school. So 1:48/4:03 is no surprise there. Now if he took one of those 9:40 kids and turned them into a sub 30 10k runner...

Because that is how you judge coaches. Only 1 didn't improve, that's a pretty solid job. Plenty of school's where this doesn't happen and runners stagnate.

You nailed it. Except I'd argue that 9:05 in the 3200 in high school is very very good, better than solid. So that kid seems to be hitting a natural progression, not any crazy development going on there.

But every crappy coach in the country "develops" kids in the sense that they get better than they were in high school. That happens by default, really. But developing kids to be conference scorers or regional qualifiers takes some real coaching and that's something that Magness hasn't really done beyond the couple talented recruits he inherited/brought in.

Great point there wrote:

You nailed it. Except I'd argue that 9:05 in the 3200 in high school is very very good, better than solid. So that kid seems to be hitting a natural progression, not any crazy development going on there.

But every crappy coach in the country "develops" kids in the sense that they get better than they were in high school. That happens by default, really. But developing kids to be conference scorers or regional qualifiers takes some real coaching and that's something that Magness hasn't really done beyond the couple talented recruits he inherited/brought in.

You are maybe trying to be more subtle and credible, but still obviously on a mission to damage a guy's reputation regardless of the facts. Any objective reader can see that your evaluation criteria depends on the talent level of the recruits, and the resources available for recruiting. This has all been covered.

And to say that the level of improvement on the comprehensive list of the current team is just normal- that's ridiculous.

I don't know the coach or anybody associated with the program. I just know bs when I see it. And he wrote a really good book- you should read it.

Great point there wrote:

You nailed it. Except I'd argue that 9:05 in the 3200 in high school is very very good, better than solid. So that kid seems to be hitting a natural progression, not any crazy development going on there.

But every crappy coach in the country "develops" kids in the sense that they get better than they were in high school. That happens by default, really. But developing kids to be conference scorers or regional qualifiers takes some real coaching and that's something that Magness hasn't really done beyond the couple talented recruits he inherited/brought in.

I think you are missing the point. In terms of actual coaching, natural progression is one thing, but to have runners do that consistently is a sign of a good to great coach from the application side. On the administrative side things like recruiting and scheduling its also tough to judge someone, because of budgetary concerns.

Lots of crappy coaches out there. They do a great job of highlighting people on their resumes, but never their teams. There are going to be injuries and at some point every athlete stagnates in the short-term. However, crappy coaches are going to have these problems more frequently than better coaches. Crappy coaches are going to be able to develop kids to, but not with any consistency. Just most people aren't willing to call a coach Crappy when they have produced national qualifiers, but had the luxury of recruiting all the talent in the world and killed most of it.

The point is Houston distance is improving, so what if they score 20 points, that's 1/6th the point total on a non distance oriented team at the conference meet. Tulsa dominated the distance events as would be expected, and UConn scored 22 distance points with a well balanced squad and won the team title while Tulsa was second and Houston was third. Houston's Sprints, Hurdles, and Relays scored 61.5 points, distance scored 20 points, jumps scored 20, and throws scored 23 points. With the focus of the Houston staff on sprints and really that's short sprints considering they have 5 points total from 400 and 4x400m really its hard to argue that Magness is doing a bad job or not holding up his end of the bargain.