Worst high school coach ever?

that sucks...i thought he would have been a good coach...when i was a senior in HS they had 4 guys under 4:30...2 guys under 9:40, finished top 5 at penn dmr...i also remember seeing "the 4 horsemen" at the brown invitational boozin and betting on dog races at 3 am and running great in the 4 x 8 the next day...i had an all intervals coach in college so i can sympathize...every day ended with an all out 400...your best bet is to make up reasons why you cant make practice on days when you want to make recovery days and just go out for distance runs yourself...i did that for a while and it worked decently...goodluck

I remember an anecdote about Andy Sythe when he was the distance coach at Long Beach State.

The only guy that ran decent times on their XC squad was the guy that missed two or three workouts a week because of class.

Needless to say, things have gotten better.

Trackhead-

That post was dead on. I ran for Andy Sythe when he first came into Long Beach State during 1990 and 1991 and he crushed everything that I liked about running. Although he is not a high school coach, he would be the worst ever if he were. The guy knew nothing about distance running. He got his ideas out of Runner's world and amplified it 10 times over.

I PR'd on the Fullerton course in 25:27 my freshman year and finished my senior year on that same course in 27:40. How is that for improvement. As you can see, I was not the guy that had class conflicts with the workouts.

Anyway, I have spent 10 years licking my wounds and have finally found my desire to run again.

They should have never given the reins to some overweight pole-vaulter fresh out of San Diego State.

Maybe things have gotten better, but last time I checked, he is still in charge.

I can relate, I know guys who came into our program running 26 mid to low and left running 27 high.

Bob Condon at gettysburg college is the worst coach ever.

Thank god he deals mainly with the girls and now has assigned the assistant coach to the guys team. Within 5 months of him taking over, guys on the team are actually healthy enough to run 6 days a week of which 4 are not track workouts involving 6 - 8 hard 1200s.

I get the feeling that many of these coaches read from the same how to book. What is their love affair with intervals? How many times a week do you have to do 400m repeats before you either burn out or break something.

I came into the Long Beach program purely on 10+ mile runs and no intervals and I ran the first few races in 24-26 minutes (24 on a flat golf course) and then that was the highlight for the rest of my college career. From then on, if there was 10 miles to be run, it would be in interval form or otherwise forget about doing more than 35 miles a week.

Somewhere in a race after the first mile, the interval work would play itself out and there would be no endurance or strength to carry me to the finish line which would be another 3-4 miles away.

My guess is that if a young runner wants to aspire to be the best that he/she can be, then it probably means staying away from these college coaches and maybe running for a club where you would have more control over your training. Also, having longer time horizon than next weeks race for development would be helpful.

Yeah, Sythe's distance coaching was pretty deplorable. My friend who ran under Sythe at Long Beach told me the same story (35 miles/week, hammering) and absolutely lost all passion he had for running.

He is still director of their track/XC program but their new distance coach is very promising.

It's good to know that Sythe stays consistently ignorant over the years.

On the other hand, my HS track coach sophomore year (I ran the 800/1600) never had us do workouts. We just went out and did miles every day. No speed. Ever. Fortunately, we moved and I got a real coach the next year.

My high school track coaches knew nothing either - we ran 18-20 miles per week with tons of intervals thrown in there. I wonder how good I could have been had we actually done some real mileage - we were encouraged to "rest" on the weekends, so I did pretty much. If only I knew then what I know now.

It has been my experience though that good high school track coaches are very few and far between. People take on coaching responsibilities in high school for extra money - hopefully you get one who has actually been an athlete, and then, even if you do, perhaps he/she was a pole vaulter or something like that and doesn't know a thing about distance training.

I went to two different high schools. The head track coaches at both schools knew nothing pretty much about distance running. The CC coach at the first school was the shop teacher and had never run a mile in his life - at least he made us run a little bit. The CC coach at the next school also had never run, but she took the job because she was a teacher in the system and her daughter was on the team. This coach would smoke while we ran our practices. On Fridays, she would bring out a huge medicine ball and we were to throw that and chase that around. Ever see the Seinfeld episode with Kirk Douglas as old man Mendelbaum? He used outdated exercise regimens to try to get Jerry in shape - same thing for me in high school. It's amazing I ever kept running at all after high school.