Mandatory Strava for HS team to hold them accountable for their mileage?

In high school running you ask for compliance , you encourage it of course, but I can't see why someone would want to appear to act so coercive as the OP. The high school coach should watch the kids as individuals and treat them as such.

The traveling varsity kids might merit being more demanding, but everything except team practices could be optional for the kids just breaking into the sport. If the school allows for recreational /social runners on the team, mine did and now my son's does, it's absurd to brow beat them. Again , nothing wrong with inquiring as to what they are doing and encouraging work, just don't be a nasty task master to them.

Anyway , I would apply that attitude to public schools. I don't no if private schools might or might not have some other justifications for being tougher.

Free_tge_thigh wrote:

This kind of overbearing coaching would make me want to quit the team

I was just reading this for recreational purposes and not planning on posting but this one (yeah, just this one!) got me thinking. It's the only of the many posts I would have made. Now, maybe the social climate has changed enough during the last few decades that HS teams are not in danger. Parental and peer pressure may be protecting school cross from extinction.

I would tread lightly, though. When I was in HS, the teams existed. Track and XC were 2 different unrelated things and there was no continuity between them. In fact, I believe State law prevented that by outlawing contact between coaches and students outside of well-defined seasons, and the coaches were different and not in contact with each other. So just from what I've mentioned so far, no year-round program existed which an incoming student could buy into. No school-affiliated summer trying was available but those who already ran independently of any school ran all summer like they always did, which is to say, like they did all year.

So, given that climate, joining a school team was somewhat of a hard sell. If you were doing it for social reasons or to please your parents or to boost some resume for the college-bound or whatever, then of course you signed up for some sport or other. But if you ran distance, you already ran distance and if you were doing just fine with it, then the school didn't have much to offer. I suppose if you sprinted, it's hard to find a race you're allowed to enter. My trying partners and I would rhetorically ask: what would we do if our best events were shorter than 10k? Where would we find a race? For the fast-twitch, there was an argument to be made since the school system allowed access to starting blocks and the races for which they're used.

As far as my friends and I were concerned, the school offered no expert training, no long distance races, and no free equipment. My main running partner (if there was one) nevertheless offered to join the track team our Senior year. He figured he'd try some event shorter than he'd run before so he approached the coach and offered his services. He was denied. I can't imagine they'd have taken me, but I never asked nor met the coach. The distance crowd did just fine back then, and at the races we attended there were a lot of competitors in our age group. More than a dozen high-school-aged kids at a random marathon or 10k that we didn't know. They went to other schools but apparently ran on their own and needed nothing from whatever schools they went to.

Well, those days may not return. It would require parents allowing training and racing with no school affiliation. I would probably require a critical mass of students at a particular school who did run but had nothing to do with the school teams. If everyone else was doing it, maybe you would too. That would describe any number of campuses in 1980. But if everyone else bought into the program, the lone wolf would be forced by peer pressure, ridicule, alienation, or fists to join. Therefore, there may not be much danger of no one joining your team from here on out.

I have to say, though, that this Strata thing would certainly deter me if the decision was close already. Even if it wasn't, and I was planning on joining you the first day of school, it might be offensive enough to my sensibilities that I'd just go it on my own. I saw a thread the other day about running shirtless. I read it for amusement just like this one. The message to me was the same: the more egregious participating in your program becomes, the less likely I'd be to do it. I am lucky to have grown up in a time and place in which non-school-affiliated running was socially acceptable and widely practiced. If I were in my youth today, when it is not, I'm not sure I'd run at all. The more sensless rules come into play, the more discouraged I'd be if running on my own was considered unacceptable and school was my only option to train and compete.

I urge the OP and any of you to do as little as possible to impede today's youth from participation in sport - especially our favorite one. I hope I did not offend. Thanks for reading.

I agree that it´s 2019 & times have changed.

Depending on where you coach, you can hold Summer Running & decide how often to hold practice. Some coaches go two days a week & others more often.

I´ve tried having kids fill-out a google doc. I´ve had kids keep a running diary & have their parents sign-off on it. I´ve tried the 1st practice time trial.

Nothing beats holding off-season conditioning (if you´re allowed to be there). But, even setting it up where everyone is supposed to meet at the town park at 8AM can help (even if you´re not allowed to be there).

I coach at a small school (like the above poster mentioned) & there´s much less of a margin of error. If 20 kids are really dedicated on a team of 100, does that mean only 2 runners really care on a team of 20? Then, what does that do for a team score? Will you suffer as a coach with a bunch of kids who didn´t take Summer Running seriously? Tough season.

coach123 wrote:

Thoughts on making Strava mandatory for all athletes to keep track of their mileage? Sometimes they can't make it to practice or they're required to run on their own and I have no way of knowing if they actually run or not.

I don't think it should be mandatory. That is a terrible idea. That will probably make people obsess about running and social media more when they should be focusing mostly on there education. It is not like they are going to be the next Bekele. Running should be a hobby in high school. The main thing they need to worry about is grades and not flunking. When they graduate they can worry about strava and all that crap.

If I was a HD coach I would ban Strava, not make it mandatory. I know that if my HS or even college team had Strava we'd be overtrained/injured non stop.

You want kids racing segments every easy run?

Coaching is about teaching life lessons through sport. The best coaches show their charges that THEY (the kids) should want to work hard.

Surveillance is counterproductive to this goal.

Back in my day, if we wanted to be on the varsity team, the coaches just made us show up for the voluntary summer morning practices.

Sit and kick wrote:

Too easy to Strava cheat

Are you saying they'd drive their car around, or ride a bike around for an hour to fake an hour run?

Why?

Coach1984 wrote:

It's unfortunate you have so little trust in your charges that you feel a need to resort to this sort of Big Brother-ish surveillance.

When I ran in high school and college all the athletes on the team competed out of a love for the sport and we needed a coach more to rein us in and keep us from

overtraining than to crack the whip, so to speak. Skipping training would only be cheating ourselves, and was unthinkable. You sound more like a member of the Stasi than a coach.

Excellent hostility and anger