Let me preface this with the fact that I truly enjoy the guys on our staff. They are awesome to hang out with, work hard, and put in a lot of time. I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining about our staff, but I have a lot of frustration right now. Here is our situation with as many factors as I can really explain without you being a part of the staff:
We are a large school with a huge lack of sprinting talent. Since I've been on staff, we have been keeping guys who could see marginal success in the 400/800 down in the 100/200 to run mid-high 11's which does not score many points at our level of competition. These are athletic kids who like to compete but just don't have the natural speed for the 100 and 200. We waste them in events like the 4x100 to get 6th place and they don't place top 8 in individual events when I fully believe that these kids could give us a middle distance program to be reckoned with. There are about 6-8 of these kids who are our best athletes on the team.
Much of our staff is made up of football coaches. I believe there are two factors that are keeping them from moving these kids up in distance:
1. They want these kids in sprint events so that they improve their short burst speed for fall football
2. They don't think the kids will stay out if we move them to middle distance
As for number 1, there's not a lot we can do to change that. To address number 2, I firmly believe we need to tell the athletes that the middle distances is where they would help the team the most and then if they don't want to help the team, it won't hurt us for them to quit. They are scoring 1-4 points per meet each at a maximum when we go to competitive meets. With a good training program, they could score 6-12 points per athlete with relays in there.
We have a bit of a culture problem within our program. We have a lot of negative attitudes from our upper classmen who could be great leaders because they are good athletes. They curse, screw around, and don't set great examples with regard to work ethic. I, personally, would rather not have them around than have them score a couple points per meet with crappy attitudes. They are the big men on campus, but they are big fish in a small pond. We have a VERY talented freshman class who could be one of the best to come through our school in quite some time, and I worry that the older guys' attitudes will bleed into our younger guys. With our leadership consisting of a lot of our football staff, the boys sort of see it as an extension of the football team. Just the other day, one of our other (non-football) coaches was talking to an athlete about running a mid distance event and he said to the coach "f*** the (mid distance race)." Sorry for the ambiguity, I'm trying to retain a bit of anonymity. No repercussions, no consequences, nothing despite the head coach being fully aware of the situation.
There is a slight chance that there will be a shift in staff leadership next year. I'm looking for any thoughts and/or advice that you might have with how to approach this situation next year, as it already feels like it's a lost cause this year. My thoughts are that we sacrifice the 4-8 points we score in sprint events total and focus on scoring points in the middle distance next year. We throw in our #8-#12 kids into the 100/200/4x100/4x200 and just take our lumps in the sprint events in order to get our top athletes into events where they will score us points. If there is no change in the staff next year, how do I approach the head coach without sounding disrespectful or sounding like I'm trying to undermine him?