High School Coaches: Do you treat your cross country team as a no-cut sport? Why or why not?

TooHardCoreHarry wrote:

You need to get over yourself. It's freakin HS XC. Ask yourself this: How can YOU benefit a kid more, by having him attend your practices or by being cut and sitting on a couch with an xbox or working a whopper flopper job?

Kids only have 4 years and then life gets real, I don't see why you can't act like a human being. Remember you are there to help them, not the other way around Mr. EgoBiggerThanHisJob.

Part of helping them is showing them that actions have consequences.

Honestly, its the ones who are wasting my time that get cut.

They aren't mandated to do XC or any sport. I'm not here for them to illegitimately pad their college applications with athletic participation bullsh!t.

I'm not a militant about attendance, however, you have to maintain a standard or everyone will think its optional.

As long as you show up and are not disruptive to the team, you don't get cut.

Most high schools would kill to have enough people come out to even consider cuts. I think you'll find cuts in track and especially xc are very rare. Since most meets are local or at least within bus ride distance, the only issue would be not having enough coaches to watch too many kids at the biggest schools.

I was a crappy xc runner. Was glad I wasn't cut. It instilled the basics and foundation for training. Years later I ran into my coach at a race. He was quite proud of where I went with running.

Basically I can currently beat 100% of the old team as a masters' athlete (from the few ones that I know of that still run at all). And my times now would have been competitive against the team back then.

It's not always where you are but where you go.

If I were coaching I would continue to not cut anyone. Show up and learn the sport.

Luv2Run wrote:

citius5000 wrote:

Never done cuts before in XC or track. Attendance is more of an issue in my experience in Track but you skip three practices your gone. I also do pushups if your late without a note. Of course you can get kicked off for other reasons but its never been performance based for me ever.

I hate the idea of using exercise as punishment.

Agreed. Why are they there?

I have kicked kids off teams for bad behavior. But never for performance. If I coached again I would be

a little more understanding of many things. You want kids to love running. That is your main goal.

Winning is important but that's something they should already want to do. Make it a team sport and

push healthy living. Have fun and enjoy your team!

longtimecoach wrote:

This fall will be the first time I make cuts in xc. Only returning runners can be cut. All newcomers make the team. I have noticed a small change in the culture of our team, so I have decided to hold the returning runners accountable for their summer training. Each kid was given a time trial standard to hit at the beginning of the season. Not a difficult standard, but one that assures me they didn't something over the summer. If they don't hit their time they don't make the team. Hopefully it works.

I support making cuts in HS XC but disagree that the cut should be based on what they did over the summer. You could have a time trial and make a cut based on their performance but I don’t think you can require summer training g.

This may be a semantic argument but a more objective approach would be

1. Everyone under a time standard makes the team.

2. The top (insert number) finishers make the team.

I’ve wondered what impact it would have to split the team into a varsity/junior varsity/everyone else.

If you created an incentive to earn your way into The top 1-14 you’d see the kind of competition you’d expect from a cut sport while still allowing everyone on the team.

- Provide special uniforms for the top team

- Provide a travel trip for the top team

- Invite the top team to to summer camp

- Provide separate varsity workouts

longtimecoach wrote:

This fall will be the first time I make cuts in xc. Only returning runners can be cut.

I get what you're trying to do, but to play devil's advocate: cutting their first year might be better, since it gives them more time to find a different activity for the remainder of high school.

Mr Incentive wrote:

I’ve wondered what impact it would have to split the team into a varsity/junior varsity/everyone else.

If you created an incentive to earn your way into The top 1-14 you’d see the kind of competition you’d expect from a cut sport while still allowing everyone on the team.

- Provide special uniforms for the top team

- Provide a travel trip for the top team

- Invite the top team to to summer camp

- Provide separate varsity workouts

This creates major divisions in a team and a tremendous amount of bad energy. I can't discourage this enough. I know from experience.

seen this too many times wrote:

Mr Incentive wrote:

I’ve wondered what impact it would have to split the team into a varsity/junior varsity/everyone else.

If you created an incentive to earn your way into The top 1-14 you’d see the kind of competition you’d expect from a cut sport while still allowing everyone on the team.

- Provide special uniforms for the top team

- Provide a travel trip for the top team

- Invite the top team to to summer camp

- Provide separate varsity workouts

This creates major divisions in a team and a tremendous amount of bad energy. I can't discourage this enough. I know from experience.

How did it work out?

This was my reaction to helping out a team that has 70 girls (all-girls school) with only ~20 girls that want to be competitive. The rest see XC as an club activity. The thought was to identify a competitive group and non-competitive group rather than cut the club kids.

Loudoun Valley coaches were thinking about doing cuts when 180 kids were interested in going out for the team. 10% of the school is on the team.

Me. Incentive wrote:

seen this too many times wrote:

This creates major divisions in a team and a tremendous amount of bad energy. I can't discourage this enough. I know from experience.

How did it work out?

This was my reaction to helping out a team that has 70 girls (all-girls school) with only ~20 girls that want to be competitive. The rest see XC as an club activity. The thought was to identify a competitive group and non-competitive group rather than cut the club kids.

This is what my school did, minus the summer camp. Everyone could go to camp, but not everyone did. We made no cuts. We had about 35 freshman on the team my freshman year, and two seniors by my senior year. I was the only one on varsity. Not sure if we ever had more than three seniors or less than 60 total runners.

CuriousPerson56 wrote:

So I’m legitimately curious what drives this militant level of commitment that high school XC coaches demand out of the runners on the team. Summer running, mandatory attendance policies, etc.

Summer running does help a ton. But practice is voluntary until Aug 1st here. I've never heard of a complaint, but you literally could lose the ability to coach if you punished someone for not coming to practice.

There are those kids on the team that really don't want to be there but were convinced by their parents to be on an athletic team to boost their "well roundedness" for college considerations. No matter how much you try to motivate this group they will be the ones hiding in the woods, constantly being negative, and will mock your dedicated runners for doing the assigned training.

Time trials do not work as a means of eliminating the slackers because some of them are talented enough to pass the test regardless of whether they ran over the summer or not. We have also had athletes in the past who have no talent that work hard and would not pass a standard time trial. They are great kids and a great example to the team. We would never cut them from the roster.

I firmly believe that you are teaching kids discipline and commitment which are traits that are needed to be successful in life. We have had kids that were cut from the team for missing multiple practices come back the following year and dedicate themselves. They learned something they would not have if we just let them come and go at practice as they pleased.

It's about having a team with a positive and great attitude that are willing to commit to each other. It's less about winning championships, although that is often a biproduct of having such a hard working group.

The kids who take the team serious form lifelong friendships and share a common bond in their commitment to each other. They look their coaches to create something that they are proud to be a part of each day. They look to us to shield them from the negativity from those who do not want to be there at all, make fun of them calling them "try hards", and are only there to add to their college resume.

So when we make cuts we do so not for us or for success in terms of our win / loss record, we do it to establish a positive environment for those who want to be there. Ironically, we coach the largest XC team in our state in terms of numbers. It's because we retain the kids that value the team that might not have stayed if the team was full of "wet blankets".

We need all the bodies we can get, and keeping kids inside the circle means that if they improve and start taking the sport - even in a different, future season - more seriously then they can begin to help the team. We're not good enough to ignore that possibility. Between runners who stuck around and got good once they matured physically and ones who had talent but didn't really commit to using it until they got a bit older, the upside of this policy has been useful.

We've had to dismiss kids whose lack of effort/commitment risked influencing the team though. Maybe once or twice a season at most. Actually, our more recent issue has been juniors who've really buckled under the specific academic pressure of that year. That's been kind of frustrating, because it's gotten worse since I've been doing this and it feels entirely out of our control. Five, six years ago I could count on a pretty linear improvement through junior and senior year - lately I've had upperclassmen flaking and it's not really effective to reply to concerns about grades and standardized tests with "you're gonna be fine. stop worrying."

Glad you've got over that then.

Did you happen to notice the level of commitment required of football players while you were grumbling about the demands of running on your high school xc team? I'm sure that your coach explained it all to you on day one. You chose to continue. Every team has student athletes that participate for reasons other than excelling at their chosen sport. That's fine, as long as they don't bring a negative attitude that poisons the well for the "try hards". For most of the kids, racing in high school is all they get, competition wise. Why shouldn't they give it their all and be able to look back fondly on high school memories later in life?

I don't know what Coach Kern does at York now, but when Coach Newton was coach the team was well over 100 runners each year, and with very specific rules- open to all, but you cannot miss practice. Ever. Not for a family vacation, not for anything except a funeral or doctor-proven illness. Further, you had to keep above a C average on a weekly basis, not term basis. In fact, you could not be late for practice. And it worked very well; everyone knew the rules.

greenliner wrote:

I don't know what Coach Kern does at York now, but when Coach Newton was coach the team was well over 100 runners each year, and with very specific rules- open to all, but you cannot miss practice. Ever. Not for a family vacation, not for anything except a funeral or doctor-proven illness. Further, you had to keep above a C average on a weekly basis, not term basis. In fact, you could not be late for practice. And it worked very well; everyone knew the rules.

Just because it worked doesn't mean it's the right way, the correct way or the only way. Kicking a kid off the team because his FAMILY scheduled a vacation teaches a lesson, but it's certainly not a lesson I want to teach.