87 years old, 28 Illinois state titles at York. They've slipped a bit in recent years, only 2 titles since 2006. Sounds like he won't be around much this season but it won't be official until after this year. No pressure 2016 team...
87 years old, 28 Illinois state titles at York. They've slipped a bit in recent years, only 2 titles since 2006. Sounds like he won't be around much this season but it won't be official until after this year. No pressure 2016 team...
He's coached amazing high school teams, but ran his kids into the ground. Over 60 years Don Sage is the only relevant alum, and he never broke 24:30, 14:00 or 3:39.
So if, per the article, his tenure as head coach at York started in 1960, he's averaged a State title every two years...in Illinois, which during that span has generally been regarded as one of the top three cross-country states.
I'd say that's pretty good.
I ran HS in Illinois 78-82, and the most impressive thing to me besides the incredible track record of success, was simply the awesome level of participation. Seeing the dozens and sometimes hundreds of green clad athletes when our team had maybe 15 or 20 was quite impressive.
Seeing that same level of participation in several programs here in Minnesota i still find quite awesome.
Cheers for Mr. Newton.
George II wrote:
He's coached amazing high school teams, but ran his kids into the ground. Over 60 years Don Sage is the only relevant alum, and he never broke 24:30, 14:00 or 3:39.
I hate criticisms like this. It's not Newton's fault that the best coach most of his athletes ever had was...HIM. That's why they didn't improve as much in high school.
If you were recruiting two 9:10 guys and one ran for York and one for another school, obviously you should pick the other kid. It's not because the York kid is OVER trained but because he is WELL trained. The kid who had worse HS coaching but ran the same PR probably has much more upside.
Congrats to Coach Newton. A legend in IL and beyond.
Who's your hs's best? wrote:
George II wrote:He's coached amazing high school teams, but ran his kids into the ground. Over 60 years Don Sage is the only relevant alum, and he never broke 24:30, 14:00 or 3:39.
I hate criticisms like this. It's not Newton's fault that the best coach most of his athletes ever had was...HIM. That's why they didn't improve as much in high school.
If you were recruiting two 9:10 guys and one ran for York and one for another school, obviously you should pick the other kid. It's not because the York kid is OVER trained but because he is WELL trained. The kid who had worse HS coaching but ran the same PR probably has much more upside.
More to the point, how many schools out there have had ANY runners as good as Sage? Our school won a ton of titles but I think we max out at at 1:47/3:42/14:10/29:15/2:14 prs for the guys. Now the guy that ran 2:13 might have gotten better track PRs but there aren't many 10k track races for a 27 year old with that level of talent and I have a feeling he would have rather made 500 bucks at a 10k road race instead of hitting the track.
Stillwater in MN comes to mind. Don't know about their depth, but they're certainly top heavy.
Luke Watson- 2x top 7 at NCaa Cross and very good track career (3:57i)
Luke's brother was a sub4 guy at ND
Sean Graham ran low 13:20s
Ben Blankenship- 3:35, 7:38, Olympian
Those guys all ran for the same HS coach. Even eliminating Luke's brother because obviously the family is genetically talented, those are 3 different stud athletes.
Reboot runner wrote:
I ran HS in Illinois 78-82, and the most impressive thing to me besides the incredible track record of success, was simply the awesome level of participation. Seeing the dozens and sometimes hundreds of green clad athletes when our team had maybe 15 or 20 was quite impressive.
Seeing that same level of participation in several programs here in Minnesota i still find quite awesome.
Cheers for Mr. Newton.
This seems to be the secret of coaching XC and track. You need to make it fun to discover those freak athletes who are playing baseball, soccer, football, LAX, etc.
Now that you have a large contingent of athletes, run them a lot more than your competitors.
Simple.
"He's coached amazing high school teams, but ran his kids into the ground."
I thought you were writing about Ron Helmer when he coached high school in Virginia.
George II wrote:
He's coached amazing high school teams, but ran his kids into the ground. Over 60 years Don Sage is the only relevant alum, and he never broke 24:30, 14:00 or 3:39.
Norway's Marius Bakken ran at York for a year as well. I believe he was a 13:0x guy.
Perhaps a more recent example at York would be Jack Driggs. He finished second to Verzbicas and ahead of Schrobligen at IL State XC 2010.
What did Driggs do in college and how many miles / week was he running at York?
I've got massive respect for coach Newton. I've been coaching for many years and have loved every minute of it. 60 years is so impressive. He has had lots of great runners come through his program and I think many of them have been coached to these great times. Very impressive and the boys the town and the state should do Something wonderful for him as he retires. I know he routinely got alum back for meets and how great would it be if he could get captains, teams etc from every year he coached.
I'm in awe of this man, don't forget he was an Olympic te coach in the 1980s too....I have great respect for good coaches and he is one of the greats.
Even as someone who ran for him at a high level and had mixed views on him personally, I have a hard time understanding the criticism that he got guys to their peak too early or caused burn out. 99% of athletes don't participate in sports at a competitive level after high school.
He got plenty of guys to peaks they would have never come close to at other schools or even in college. He got hundreds of guys per year to participate. They got the experience of winning state and nationals titles as a team, a much more fulfilling experience than individual glory.
If the price of that is potentially impairing the long term development of the 1% of guys that have the ability to run post high school or post college then that's a good trade off. That said, Bakken ran 13:06 and made an Olympic final. Sage won a NCAA title. Not all bad.
What did Verzbics do in college? LOL.
Newton will go down as one of the greatest coaches in HS history, if not THE greatest. The guy's been coaching for 60 years, do you really expect his training to be the same as a guy who's fresh out of college and is versed in modern training? Newton had some great athletes and built a great program. The biggest thing he'll be remembered for, though, is not the number of titles his teams won, but his impact on the lives of so many young men.
Yep, they can flame out south of 31st Street, too.
The point was not how good X was to Y in college, but where X was in HS relative to a couple of peers whose names have appeared on this blog from time to time, and what did X (or A, B, C ... Y or Z) do after. I don't give a flying f- about Verzbicas one way or the other. He hardly ran with his high school team at all.
Maybe the better analogy would be when the Cubs were scouting Kerry Wood in high school in Texas. Scout watched Wood pitch first game of doubleheader. Scout figured why not stay and watch the second game. It was worth it, in a way - Wood pitched the second game, too. Brilliant high school managing!
Newton mastered the fat tail of the normal curve, well before Nassim Nicholas Taleb / Black Swan. Get everybody in the school to come out - the opening scene of The Long Green Line, right? The larger the sample size in a normally distributed population the larger the subset of at the tail. Then throw the eggs against the wall and see who is still around the first week in November.
I saw Newton speak when the Long Green Line movie came out. Someone asked him when he would retire. He said:
"A cross country course is a good place to die."
Newton clearly, clearly had a gift. Great leader, great motivator, very charismatic, knew how to build a program and have kids progress.
But I do share the concerns about how many miles he had his kids run. Some kids could handle it, and did great. Lots of others couldn't. I don't know how he handled those kids. If he let his less durable or often injured kids run less than 80-100 mpw as seniors and still be part of the JV squad, more power to him.
My issue is with the meat-grinder programs that make all kids, regardless of durability, run really high mileage. I don't know if Newton was like that or not. I know he made sure not to bring his freshman and sophomores along too quickly, which I respect.
I would be interested to hear from people who know the York program well how that would be handled. Let's say you've got a kid with OK (but not varsity -level for York) talent, maybe runs a 17:00 for 3 miles. He's not really durable and gets injured frequently but wants to keep running. How would York handle that?
I'll leave technical coaching criticism to others, although I take it all with a grain of salt since every coach gets these kinds of criticism.
Those criticisms really only matter, however, to his top runners who may or may not have trained to their potential. But based on watching the Long Green Line, I think Coach Newton is important is that he made running a positive and character-building experience for thousands of kids. There are so many high school coaches who make kids hate sports that they go out for and who get something out of the sport in spite of their coaches, not because of the coaches, that it's important to recognize coaches who get the non-technical side of coaching right.