I am moving from a school with over 1,000 to a school of only 200. I won championships with the bigger school and the track team i am taking over is basically dead last in conference and has never won any titles along with pretty weak school records. Any coaches done the same switch? Advice?
Enjoy the purity of the sport and treat every runner as a champion. Make them better runners and better people.
Well of course! Looking forward to being able to spend more time on each kid with the smaller numbers.
It sounds like you are going into it with the correct attitude. don't expect to have the same results you had at the larger school - very quickly anyway. if your kids are improving, learning from, and enjoying the experience you will be doing a world of good for them! Good luck!
Hi Citius,
I do this every year. In the fall I coach XC for a large school and in the winter I coach indoor track for a small school. For me I feel like the experience with both has made me a better overall coach.
There were and still are different dynamics coaching the small school:
- At the larger schools there is a competitiveness within the team to make varsity, a relay, etc. that naturally drives kids to work harder. This often does not exist with the small team.
- It's difficult to find kids of the same ability to train with on the small team and when you do it's difficult when one of them misses a practice due to some unforeseen circumstance. The result is that athletes are forced to train alone.
- The athletes on the small team are often awestruck about the bigger teams and often are intimidated at meets.
- When you do have a runner / jumper / thrower that can compete with the "big boys / girls" your team is in much more jeopardy of losing meets if this one person is off. Even if they are not off, the way the scoring works in track the kid can win the event and you still don't get ahead in the scoring. This is true even in a dual meet when the top 3 are scored 5 / 3 / 1. You can get first place and still only go 5-4 in the event. It's very frustrating as a coach in a big meet to watch your athlete clear the high jump bar by a foot or more than everyone else and still lose the event because the opposing team had four kids that can clear minimum height. We lost a championship meet once to this.
-Most of the time our athletes are competing with the other small school teams and don't really have a perspective on what kind of performance is needed to compete at a higher level.
-Each team big or small has years when the team is either strong or has graduated key athletes making it somewhat weak. This can be a lot harder on the smaller teams. Of the "peaks and valleys" for team performance I find the "valleys" to be a lot deeper. One year I had a girls team with 12 members. 9 of which were Seniors. When they graduated, of the other 3 only 1 returned (my daughter). That year we only had four members. It was really tough.
So it seems like a lot of negatives that go on with the smaller teams but when the team accomplishes something in many ways it's way sweeter. I had a team one year from the small school with only nine girls that lost their divisional meet by only two points but managed to finish really high at the state meet with two state champions. I've had three All-Americans in the last five years, a competitive relay team at Penn Relays, and New Balance Indoor and Outdoor Nationals. These may not be major accomplishments for a big team but if you puts things in perspective you will know how significant they are for the smaller school team. The real athletes from the small school will sometimes adopt a David versus Goliath type attitude and they love to take the athletes on from the larger programs.
I have thought of many of these also and you make some good points. Another thing i am finding out as this is a private school where most kids drive longer distances and i have always had six practices a week so im finding Saturday mornings to be difficult etc. for many.