Does the Head CC and Head Track & Field Coach have to be the same person?

John Jacob Jones wrote:

I started out as Head CC coach. We won the district title my third year at the helm.

During those three years I had also been an assistant track coach in charge of the distance runners.

Immediately after we won the district title our head track & field coach fired me from the

assistant track job.

I have continued on in coaching but my cc teams have dropped in quality while track & field is

merely "spring football" at our place.

Similar situations are very common at the high school level. I have a friend who was in charge of

the boys programs as head coach. He developed 6 sub-2:00 800 meter runners and was promptly

scurried over to the girl's programs!

(The above situations are true. A few facts have been altered slightly to protect identities.)

Please share your experiences and solutions if you have developed one:

You've covered all the basics. How are we supposed to respond?

You've had a hard life I feel sorry for you. Get off your but and get a job.

Football is King. There is nothing you can do against the king.

John Jacob Jones wrote:

I started out as Head CC coach. We won the district title my third year at the helm.

During those three years I had also been an assistant track coach in charge of the distance runners.

Immediately after we won the district title our head track & field coach fired me from the

assistant track job.

I have continued on in coaching but my cc teams have dropped in quality while track & field is

merely "spring football" at our place.

Similar situations are very common at the high school level. I have a friend who was in charge of

the boys programs as head coach. He developed 6 sub-2:00 800 meter runners and was promptly

scurried over to the girl's programs!

(The above situations are true. A few facts have been altered slightly to protect identities.)

Please share your experiences and solutions if you have developed one:

I think you are a troll.

I am appalled at the lack of brains and experience people on LRC have.

This is a common thing in our high school programs. Either people do not care

or they are too stupid to know it even happens!

LRC should exist to help out our running programs. You cannot tell me there

isn't one person who knows about this and has a solution? I mean we are not

even intelligent enough about it to start a conversation?

Does the Head CC and Head Track & Field Coach have to be the same person?

Why, absolutely, they must be one and the same. It's a universal law which, if broken, would result in dire consequences for the offending school. I mean, c'mon! Is the Pope Jewish? A separate Head CC Coach and T&F Coach? How could anyone ever fathom such a thought? That's flouting society's conventions! It's totally inappropriate. It's lewd, lascivious, salacious, outrageous!

Jackie Chiles, Attorney-At-Law wrote:

Does the Head CC and Head Track & Field Coach have to be the same person?

Why, absolutely, they must be one and the same. It's a universal law which, if broken, would result in dire consequences for the offending school. I mean, c'mon! Is the Pope Jewish? A separate Head CC Coach and T&F Coach? How could anyone ever fathom such a thought? That's flouting society's conventions! It's totally inappropriate. It's lewd, lascivious, salacious, outrageous!

Thank you for the post. At least you are trying to start a conversation.

I think many people think it is easy to get and keep both jobs. It's not and if you coach distance runners

it's crucial to have both. There have been a few cross country only coaches who have had great

programs...even some rare occasions where they have won multiple state titles. But most

go nowhere. Even fewer of them coach for a long time.

It only matters if you care about distance running in America.

Nah, I wasn't trying to start a conversation. Just interjecting a bit of silliness with this Seinfeld-related Jackie Chiles (the lawyer character) humor. I see some solid, serious replies to the OP's question, which is good, but we can all use a tad more silliness in our lives. Humble apologies if my attempt to bring Jackie Chiles into the mix brought on frowns, not smiles!

All posts are welcome here unless of course LRC identifies them as not acceptable.

I don't know how much I agree with you about it being crucial that a distance coach have both positions. In our conference, the best program in both cross and track has separate coaches from cross and track, both boys and girls. Another solid program has the boys cross coach as the girls track coach and the girls cross coach not involved in track at all. My program has me coaching both cross programs and assisting with boys track, but girls track had no coaching connection to cross until last year. Both cross and track on both sides have been incredibly successful.

I will say there needs to be communication among coaches and hopefully philosophies that align somewhat, but I don't think it's crucial to have the same person in both positions.

Yes, of course.

Maybe what I could have done is to impress upon the head football/head track & field person how

much good it would do for his program to have me around?

I am not sure you have a solution for those poor folks who run into school districts run by

ego-maniac combo football-track head coaches. I have heard Texas is overrun by these good fellas.

I think it's helpful if the head Cross coach is involved with the T&F team, I think it's weird if they're not assisting in some manner. I've been head coach of both sports at the same time at various points in my career, as I've worked in several districts and moved a few times. For the few years I coached Cross but not T&F I still came to meets and a few practices as I could, I just had a busy home life (four kids) and it got to be a little too much to manage, especially at the end of the school year. The T&F coaches always welcomed my assistance. We have bigger trouble not finding enough people to help with the program, so firing coaches seems like a foreign problem to me.

Why did you get fired by the head T&F coach? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, unless you were undermining them in some way. When I've served as an assistant that's the one thing I'd have a problem with - sometimes I'd have a philosophical disagreement with the head coach (about training, injured competitors, etc.)

Our current head XC coach is an assistant with the T&F team, he works with the distance runners but doesn't have enough time to commit to all of the away meets (has a house full of little kids himself, and wife works a pretty full schedule.)