Best Way to Recruit Within my High School?

If you coach High School, how do you have access to 6th and 7th graders? Or, is it one big school?

Its a bit late to recruit for track. However, if you're recruiting for xc next year, the key is travel. Pick nxn or footlocker regionals and emphasize that you're taking anyone on the team who tries hard to that. Pick some good invites 1-4 hours away too and emphasize the level of competition, multiple races, etc. Find some good places to run around campus, preferably you have trails a 1-2 mile warm up jog from campus, but if not bus the team to a local park a couple times a week for a tempo and a long run. One of the hs teams near me has always taken the bus (with jrs and srs driving cars too) to the local park to train in the afternoon and compared to the other local hs teams theres are huge. Do not emphasize silly games like indian runs, wind sprints, tag, whatever, if you are doing these things, stop and make the practices serious. Talk about the possibility of college scholarship if kids run fast enough, talk about athletes you've coached who are now competing in college and where they are at.

Here are a few things my old HS coach did:

1. He was great friends with the gym coach at the middle school that fed our HS. That coach would give him names of kids that showed promise as runners. Usually guys that did well on the 600m run from the old Pres. Fitness Test.

2. He would talk to runners and their parents at any road race when a youngster would run particularly well.

3. He would go to the middle school and address each 8th grade gym class and tell them about XC and track. He usually did this towards the end of the school year, letting them know that XC started practice in July. This was usually only 5-10 min at the start of PE class.

4. He would put up posters at summer parks & rec. events

5. He would put up a bulletin board at the Middle school with pictures of us running and LOTS of pictures of us with medals and trophies.

Thank you very much!

I am actually talking about recruiting WITHIN my school, to avoid any legal SNAFUs of outside recruiting. How to get kids who are already enrolled interested in running. (And, yes, thinking about XC next season, not Spring Track this year.)

To the other poster: Yes, K-12 on one campus, thanks!

+1

Thats great!!! Being able to have kids for five years is amazing. I assume this is a small school with not a lot of numbers? Things i have done is take everyone but focus on the younger kids in recruiting cause years of development is whats going to make your team good first off. My school did a few event sport specific things i could go to and kids would sign up for things they are interested in. I would also go to middle school lunch time and get kids to sign up and tell them when the summer practices started etc. With the high school kids i would give them sign uo sheets and have them walk around the school and sign up friends etc. I would go after the gym class miler winners etc also. My athletes did a great job at recruiting friends with talent to the team but not everyone shows talent right away keep that in mind.

Anther thing that helps is to go after kids that are seen as leaders. I don't think there was one year where we didn't have 1 or 2 class presidents on the team. They weren't usually the best athletes but having popular kids on a team DOES help (again we're talking about the HS mindset here.)

The fastest 6th to 7th graders may not be the fast high school distance runners. I became a distance runner in 7th grade because I knew I did not have the body build for speed/sprints or any field events. I became the best distance runner in 7th and 8th on my small team only because I was motivated and I learned to love distance running and practiced on my own on weekends and between seasons. One of the fastest distance runners from my high school was one of the most awkward his freshman year. I don't think he ran on a team before his freshman year. He grew to love the sport and greatly improved over the summer and was one of the fastest on the team his sophomore year. He went on to run DI until grades and injuries caused him to transfer and later drop out. The biggest improvements came from runners who put in the mileage on their own over the summers.

Instill the love of running and competition in the younger runners. Encourage them to run on their own too. Those will be the best prospects at the high school level.

A local high school coach has four young sons who run. They run local mile and 5K cross country races in the summers at a local park. His 7 year old proudly said they get to run their first 5K when they turn 5. I asked how much they run each week. He said he runs a timed mile once a week down the road past his house. They don't go out on runs otherwise. His father said his sons run all the time while playing games outdoors. Their father has instilled a love of running. The 8 year old ran a 6:30 mile and 22:40 5K this past summer. The 7 year old ran an 8:00 mile. The 5 year old ran an 11:30 mile. The oldest is 10 and runs about the same times as the 8 year old.

I would try to host a running club runs say 3 times a week during the summer and not just limit it to invitations to the fastest 6th graders. Encourage the high school runners to run throughout the summer whether they run with friends or during your organized runs. Maybe have them set a goal of being prepared to run a local road race together during the summer so they know they have mid to late summer goal to reach before the start of the XC season in the fall.

The national association rules are changing next school year to allow 6th graders to compete with 7th and 8th graders. My state's association will be following the national rule change.

Hey - I'm gonna be that poster who is tired and skipped all the above posts, but I have a lot of experience with MS and HS coaching.

1) Make practice fun, WORD spreads!

2) Don't have cuts, no one like cuts and it's easy to have the slow kids do BS workouts.

3) Take on late entrees! A lot of kids will try out for other sports who are very athletic but don't make the cut. Don't deny these kids because many of them are very fast but lack some hand-eye/foot-eye coordination.

4) Make practice fun - I've been at the same school for over five years now and my XC team has gotten so big that the soccer team wasn't able to fill a full 11 player roster; this all occurred because I kept things fun and the soccer coach didn't. Don't get me wrong, I worked the kids hard and they certainly ran hard to get fast. At the end of the day they enjoyed the sport, which is always the golden rule.

My HS coach was an amazing recruiter.

He was also a history teacher at the school who had just about every incoming 10th grader in one of his history classes.

His secret was to spend half of every class period, every day, all year long talking about the track team.

I am a parent of two Jr. High runners. They have both recruited a lot of their friends to the XC and track teams. I think 1 to 1 peer recruiting will be your best tool. Include all returning 8th graders in summer training. My boys' team all met together during the summer 7th through 12th. The friendships built during summer practices had them all telling their friends how great it was. A lot of those friends showed up for XC tryouts the first week of school. Organic growth.

I respectfully disagree. These things may be good motivators for high schoolers, but the OP wants to focus on the younger kids. Fun and games are what keep the younger kids on board--there's nothing that says the middle schoolers have to do the same kind of workout that the HS kids are doing that day.

Moreover, most middle school kids will benefit from a real mix of activity. Break up (most of) their sessions: intersperse different kinds of calisthenics among their bouts of running. Long steady running is deadly for keeping most of these younger children in the program.

One thing that the younger folks really love are relays. These don't have to be formal relays with a baton, on the track; they can be in a park, on a cross-country course, or whatever. Use some imagination. The youngsters thrive on having some element of competition in many (not necessarily all, though) of their practices.

And OP, since you're going to be the T&f coach as well:

1. KIDS LOVE TO COMPETE IN AND WIN (team wins, that is) MEETS. Strive to schedule dual, tri, or quad meets against appropriate competition. You're not primarily developing college/open athletes; you (and certainly the students) are looking to win NOW. (Big meets may not be realistic "win" opportunities for a fledgling program, though you'll want to emphasize those more as your team grows and improves.)

2. FIELD EVENTS AND HURDLES (aka the "technique" events) WIN TRACK AND FIELD MEETS. Your default for a kid who comes out for t&f is that s/he is a field-eventer and/or hurdler unless and until proven otherwise. (Doesn't mean s/he can't do flat running, too.)

A great thing to do with newcomers, especially middle schoolers, is to train them for a pentathlon, teaching them shot, high jump, long jump, and hurdles (all of which may have to be modified some in deference to the kids' size and strength). Don't worry, they'll get plenty of running, too.

3. Make getting a letter a meaningful accomplishment and not just a participation award, BUT be inventive in terms of what can count toward a letter: grades? getting other kids to join the team (and *stay* on it through the season)? perfect attendance at practice? You'll have a better sense of what works in your situation than I will; the key is to be recognizing and rewarding the things that you think will help your program.

I would focus on getting some strong older guys to help inspire the young ones. Schools become successful when they have cultures of running and strong teams throughout the years, not just stellar years here and crappy years there. Show them pro runners and how it's cool to be fast. Once they see any semblance of results my guess is they'll buy into the program.