Centerville OH runs jv at district, fails to advance

Ridiculous wrote:

Oopsypoopsy wrote:

Centerville was ranked 5th in Ohio, and had two sub-18 girls (Walsh and Bucher). The coach's ego got the best of him as he decided to run his JV squad at districts instead of the varsity - apparently thinkind they'd qualify easily. Oops. They finished out of the top 7, so their season is over.

No state meet for those sub-18 girls, or that 5th ranked squad.

Ouch.

That is ridiculous. Are you sure there weren't injuries or illnesses?

Or O.D.'s?

just stating the obvious here wrote:

another perspective wrote:

Amazing to me that coaches are this arrogant and take chances like this. What a tool! It must have been a miracle that my team in HS raced every Saturday for 10 weeks in a row, ran as hard as we could, and still won state in a very tightly contested meet. How did we survive? Surely we all needed 2 or 3 weeks off from racing in there to do our best right? So stupid.

You survived and won state because every team did it then. No one was smart enough to rest their runners.

Let's get past this notion that Dave Dobson is a good coach. He's mediocre at best, and this decision of his was stupid. Put any mediocre coach into the giant Centerville High School, and they would have the same level of success. Other high schools, especially those in Central Ohio, that have split off and formed multiple high schools in the district would destroy Centerville on a regular basis if they had only one giant high school like Centerville. Combine the high schools in the cities of Dublin or Hilliard or Worthington, and they would rip Centerville a new one with regularity.

Mediocre coach. Stupid and arrogant decision.

SomeoneWhoKnows wrote:

just stating the obvious here wrote:

You survived and won state because every team did it then. No one was smart enough to rest their runners.

Let's get past this notion that Dave Dobson is a good coach. He's mediocre at best, and this decision of his was stupid. Put any mediocre coach into the giant Centerville High School, and they would have the same level of success. Other high schools, especially those in Central Ohio, that have split off and formed multiple high schools in the district would destroy Centerville on a regular basis if they had only one giant high school like Centerville. Combine the high schools in the cities of Dublin or Hilliard or Worthington, and they would rip Centerville a new one with regularity.

Mediocre coach. Stupid and arrogant decision.

While I agree that this is a stupid and arrogant decision, to say that a head coach who won 4 straight State Championships (2014-2017) is mediocre seems a bit extreme.

Having a big school is a clear advantage, no doubt, but it also cannot be the only factor when it comes to building a successful team. Hudson, for example, is a relatively small school when compared to Centerville and other larger school districts, and they could be on the verge of winning their 3rd straight State Title this year. Solon, Lousiville, and other schools of a similar size have also been consistently good for at least this decade. These are the teams I love to root for in Ohio.

Meanwhile, you have plenty of examples of massive schools of similar size to Centerville (Walnut Hills, Lakota East, Lakota West, Kettering Fairmont, West Clermont, Oak Hills, Fairfield, Hamilton, Middletown) who do not have good teams.

Out of that entire list, I believe only the Lakota East girls and Lakota West boys moved on to Regionals. East girls should move on to State. West boys have an outside, but legitimate, chance.

There are also certain unique challenges in having a large team. It's more complicated to coach 125 athletes instead of just 25.

Make no mistake, it helps to have a big school, and I think Dobson failed exceptionally here. But, there are more factors at play when it comes to having a successful Cross-Country team than just enrollment, and he clearly should be credited​ for his 4 state titles.

another perspective wrote:

Amazing to me that coaches are this arrogant and take chances like this. What a tool! It must have been a miracle that my team in HS raced every Saturday for 10 weeks in a row, ran as hard as we could, and still won state in a very tightly contested meet. How did we survive? Surely we all needed 2 or 3 weeks off from racing in there to do our best right? So stupid.

I think a lot of people forget that high school runners get more fit just by racing....if most are relatively under trained, and running low mileage, races are just as good as building fitness as anything else. I get maybe the very top tier seniors who are running and training very hard can use some rest, the rest of the team, young freshmen who just have a lot of talent, and run varsity, would just get more fit by racing...and they learn how to race. These runners especially would benefit from learning to pace and strategize, before the high profile races.

just stating the obvious here wrote:

You survived and won state because every team did it then. No one was smart enough to rest their runners.

That's just plain bullsh!t.

You have 143 hours between races to rest. (6 days, 23 hours)

From reading this thread and the thread on the other website it sounds like it's a tradition to run the second seven at districts, not to rest the top seven, but to give the other girls a chance to compete for the varsity. I can't fault him for that. It sounds like he comes from a huge school that should be able to cruise through districts year in and year out with the JV runners. Sucks for the girls on the team that he couldn't see the writing on the wall and realize that the JV wasn't going to be good enough to advance this year.

Supertramp wrote:

If you haven't read the Yappi thread about all this, you need to.."

I got on yappi a few years ago and on my first post I posted an opinion they didn't agree with.

They booted me off.

On the bright side, they should be really, really, REALLY well rested for footlocker and nxn!!

So our school runs varsity every race no matter what and we were actually talking about the ability to run our jv and still advance just yesterday not having heard about this story. I wondered why our coach started tapering the varsity girls 5 weeks out from state for the district meet. There aren't even enough complete teams for us not to advance past districts. 4 teams advance and only 3 schools have a complete team.

We discussed either just foregoing the taper, running JV so varsity didn't have to alter training, or tapering varsity and JV differently. For this particular team it seems this was a very risky move but for us (barring 3 runners DNFing) it has no downside that I can see. Our school won't do anything that wouldn't result in a 1st place finish so they will probably never do that.

AnonymousRunner wrote:

So our school runs varsity every race no matter what and we were actually talking about the ability to run our jv and still advance just yesterday not having heard about this story. I wondered why our coach started tapering the varsity girls 5 weeks out from state for the district meet. There aren't even enough complete teams for us not to advance past districts. 4 teams advance and only 3 schools have a complete team.

We discussed either just foregoing the taper, running JV so varsity didn't have to alter training, or tapering varsity and JV differently. For this particular team it seems this was a very risky move but for us (barring 3 runners DNFing) it has no downside that I can see. Our school won't do anything that wouldn't result in a 1st place finish so they will probably never do that.

why would they have to taper for a race they are easily going to win? It's just another workout

high school xc coach wrote:

why would they have to taper for a race they are easily going to win? It's just another workout

I'm no coach and I didn't even run until I was in my late 30s. Over the years I've read quite a bit of threads about tapering and so I initially would have guessed he would have started the taper 2 weeks out from whatever race he deemed it necessary. I went to a booster club meeting for my own child and the head XC coach mentioned they had begun to taper. I did some quick math and realized it was 5 weeks out from state. District was a week away. I have a buddy whose daughter runs so I asked him what their mileage looked like. He said mileage had gone from 20, to 17, to 14. That's what began the conversation about things he might could do to avoid tapering so early.

It was really just us shooting the breeze because this coach has a history of winning for our school and we're in no position to question his strategy. He's probably got over 50 gold medals between boys and girls, xc and track. Some individual, some team. In the last four years alone his runners got 17 golds, 5 silvers, and 1 bronze that I am sure of.

AnonymousRunner wrote:

[quote]high school xc coach wrote:

. He said mileage had gone from 20, to 17, to 14. of.

What do they do the other 5 days of the week?

Asking for training advice wrote:

AnonymousRunner wrote:

[quote]high school xc coach wrote:

. He said mileage had gone from 20, to 17, to 14. of.

What do they do the other 5 days of the week?

Nope, that's the whole week. We're a small low-mileage school.

Lol, “4 weeks of ‘somewhat hard’ racing”. Try Southern Section in California. Especially in Track season.

What’s more surprising is none of the athletes said anything and just all sat out. (Maybe they did argue, who knows). I have to wonder if this would’ve happened on a boy’s team. Girls tend to just trust the coach and don’t spend as much time researching other times like guys do (nothing wrong with that). If the boys had to sit out, I feel like Someone on the boys team would’ve done the math and said this is too close, there’s not a chance I’m sitting out (Athletic.net makes it pretty easy these days.) Give high school athletes some credit.. they can use athletic.net too. When I was in high school I knew pretty much all the PR’s of all my close competitors. Even my freshman year I knew the rival’s team 5th runner who I had to beat to win state and we all knew what times we had to run to likely win... I still remember... I needed to run 15:53 I told myself weeks before the race.. I didn’t btw.. I choked and ran 20 seconds or so slower.. but had I run 15:53 we would’ve won by 3 points.

First, I'm so sorry for the varsity girls, especially their seniors.

Second, even LV doesn't run their 8-14 for their pre state meets. They mix up their 14.

This coach needs firing.