Was your college coach GOOD????????

My coach was Will Freeman, author of the Quest and Take the Lead, he would call Dr. Vigil on the regular lol, was amazing at the sports pysch section of running, had interesting training plans

My coach was obese and he worked us into the ground. I ran D3. I was always completed cooked by the end of XC season. I feel like college running for me was one big plateau. It was frustrating because we had a couple guys who could weather the intensity of my fat coach's training and emerge strong at the end of the season. But for every 1 guy who made it out OK there were 10 whose legs were shot when it mattered.

To give you an example, here are my best 5-mile times from XC each year (which were always run in the first or second meet after a summer of easy mileage):

Freshman — 25:51

Sophomore — 25:46

Junior — 25:47

Senior — 25:42

Only 9 seconds of improvement in 4 years. Lame!

Really just a bad coach in college. He was a very mediocre XC coach, but we won our league championship my Jr year.

I was an 800m runner, and he was tasked with us. Zero belief, zero feeling, just a very feeble coach who would follow daniel's running formula. It was unbelievable. I went from an up and coming 800 guy with the will to train and race to being like overtrained and deep down didn't want it anymore. I can't blame the coach 100%, because college can do that to a lot of guys... they think they want to be good at running, and overtrain, and fail at their goals which creates a cycle of increasing apathy. I ended up giving him a bad anonymous review in our end of season athletic department reviews, and he coincidentally kicked me off the team a month later for "not running fast enough" when I was running times that were completely alright for a private school D1 team (1:58/4:06), and better than a few of the other guys (kept guys on that were running abysmal 2:01/2:02's and stuff like that).

In retrospect, I should've gotten out earlier because I poured my heart and soul into trying to become a better running when everything was sort of flowing in the opposite direction. Really took me awhile to recover my "heart" if that makes any sense.

I would rather have a guy that prescribes some stupid workouts, or has some voodoo magic kind of stuff, but believes 100% in his runners and talks positively and powerfully with you than some schmuck like that.

She definitely wasn't not good

Coach #1 Pretty Good

Coach #2 Awful

Coach #3 Awful

Coach #4 Awful

Coach #4 is still there coaching after 25+ years. I throw the alumni donation letters in the trash whenever I get them.

Did you go to UW Lacrosse?

ayyyyy wrote:

Having run for my coach for 2 years i can say he does suck. I'm a decent runner that got looked at by some decent track/xc programs but picked a lower end D1 school because of money. Have had some okay races since college because i do my own thing but whenever i have to deal with the coach it is a horrible experience.

Not saying this is the case but we have a coach on staff that has developed conference, regional and national champions four consecutive years. And yet I see some individuals comment he doesn't know what he's doing, don't trust the plan, want to do their own thing. Those athletes usually end up crashing and burning and blame the coach for being an idiot.

I've seen idiots ruin a program. I've seen idiots get buy in and do magical things.

Say No To EPO wrote:

She definitely wasn't not good

So she was good! I'm glad *someone* had a positive experience!

Nope, terrible. Gulley at Tulsa. Overtrained. Majority of team was injured most of the time, or eventually ended up injured. Lots of talent and scholarships. Just bad coaching.

I ran for a university at a large Canadian city. Compared to perennial winners Guelph, all we seemed to do was hammer intervals (two interval workouts a week?) and all our runs. For the talent we got, I thought we were a graveyard for runners. We certainly didn't develop runners as a program, the success we had was in spite of the coaching. Really an eye opening experience.

Westside wrote:

Blaming your coach because of your partying? You sound like a real champ.

No need to allocate blame anywhere than at my own feet. However, isn't part of a coach's job identifying strengths and weaknesses of individual athletes and at least attempting to address them, especially idiotic 18 year old legends in their own mind like me? Wouldn't the same be true for an athlete who over-trained and was not corrected?

I was my only coach, so I guess I was alright. Never had one through high school or college.

High School 10/10. My team won conference every year from 4th to 11th grade when I went there, my senior year we lost because the natural talent went to the wrong guys it seemed, perfect sh*tstorm of a season for 3 sub-17 kids who couldn't even make varsity at the end.

Always taught that 'we get what we put into it'. There was no limiting attitude or behavior, it was always up and onwards, and then taper near the end and run damn fast at conference, sections, and state. I ran a 23:20 in 8th grade, ended up at a 16:30 my senior year despite several injuries just by progressing through the system, and I was the normal.

College 4/10. Rigid workout schedule. Horrible communication and a vehement dislike of the women's team (they're worse than us). Horrible recruiter. Abrasive personality even to people he likes, like me, and that's only because I'm normal and successful so he can wheel me out in front of recruits. Mostly negative speech, causes a sort of ho-hum attitude that causes a lot of runners to become jaded or apathetic to running.

I do the same exact all-out workout every Tuesday from mid-December to the first week of May. It was only once a season before I got there, but because the freshmen seemed to do well in it (we were racing each other), the whole mid-d team now does it weekly.

Nope. Northeast.

My college coach was terrible. He forgot to get us XC spikes so he gave us left over sprint spikes before our first 8k race. He made an excuse like we didn't have enough money to get them( we are sponsored by a shoe company so we pretty much get shoes for free.)

He also didn't understand how to train us properly. A typical XC week would look like this

M Intervals 5-6 mile repeats at 8k pace 5minute rest

T 8 mile progression run

W10 miles east

Th Hard tempo 5-6 miles

F 10 miles

S Race

S long run

Weight training 5 days a week in the evening as well as a 30 minute recovery run.

After the second meet I found out I had a stress fracture in my foot and had a calf strain. He said the injuries were all my fault and said I could have prevented them. He threatened to take away my scholarship because I didn't produce at all.I ended taking 5 months off from running.

After the break I ran 3-4 mile easy runs and strides for 2 months and he said I was ready to race a 1500m and 800m on the track

I ended up running a 4:15 1500, 2:01 800, and a 28:30 8k.. I can just say my freshman year as a d1 runner was a horrible one.