Team Steve Hurdling Academy #5 is in the Books
by Steve McGill
On the weekend of March 2-3, I held my fifth Team Steve Downhill Hurdling Academy. This one took place at Mercersburg Academy — a boarding school in Pennsylvania. This was our second time in this very nice facility, as we had conducted a camp (back when I still called them camps) here back in October of 2019, which turned out to be our last one before the Covid pandemic. We were planning to conduct another camp in March of 2020, but had to shut it down before it even got started, as everything in the world was shutting down around that time. During the hiatus, I decided to rename the camps as “academies” in order to emphasize the emphasis on instruction, and to discourage any athletes who held thoughts of fixing flaws quickly and dropping time dramatically.
For this most recent camp, I was lacking my usual go-to tried-and-true assistants. My right-hand man, Coach Kevin Howell, who coaches at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC and at Corinth Holders High School in Raleigh (don’t ask me how he does both; I don’t know), couldn’t make it because his college team had a meet that Saturday. He offered to drive up after the meet and help me out on Sunday, but with the relatively low numbers we had (thirteen athletes), I told him I could hold it down without him instead of having him drive all that way (eight hours or so) for one day. Then, my former athlete Keare Smith, who has assisted in about four past camps/academies, had no chance of making it because he’s living in Spain right now and doesn’t plan to move back to the States until sometime next year. Then, my assistant on my school team, Wil Rasmussen, who has helped me with the past two academies in Frostburg, MD, couldn’t make it because he had used up almost all of his sick days in the first semester while tending to his dying dog. (Wil teaches in the middle school at our school).
Finally, I thought I had secured a coup when I reached out to my former athlete Johnny Dutch, who agreed to come when I asked him a few months ago. For those of you who don’t know, Johnny was one of the most celebrated athletes I’ve ever coached. He finished his senior year of high school (2007) as the number one ranked 110 hurdler in the country and the number two ranked 400 hurdler. In college at the University of South Carolina, he won an NCAA championship in the 400 hurdles, and then went on to have an outstanding professional career as a 400 hurdler. He and I have kept in touch off and on over the years, but this was going to be the first time he’d be helping me with one of my Team Steve events. But as fate would have it, it wasn’t to be. While chilling in the hotel in Hagerstown, MD on Friday night after my 6-hour drive from Mooresville, NC, I received a text from Johnny saying he’d been in a car accident and that although he was okay, he wouldn’t be able to get the car repaired on time.
So I was just catching L’s from all sides. Fortunately, I was able to bring one assistant with me — Tevin Colson — the 26-year-old 400 hurdler that I started coaching this past August. In the time we’ve spent together as coach/athlete, Tevin has quickly picked up on the principles of downhill hurdling that I teach, and how that principle applies to all hurdling events. In addition, I helped him garner a head coaching position at a rival private school with a small team, so in working with his own team, even though it had only been for less than a full month, was giving him an understanding of how to work with kids who are inevitably going to be at various levels of ability.
Still, Tevin was new to the camp setting, so I had to do all of the heavy lifting, especially on day one. When Wil had come for the first time, I had Keare and Coach Kevin with me, so Wil could afford to observe and learn for the most part, and mainly serve as an equipment manager of sorts before taking on a more active role the second time he came. But with Tevin being my only assistant this time, I needed to kind of throw him to the fire, and he did a great job assisting me, especially on the second day, when I put in his hands the hurdlers who wanted to work on the long hurdles.
We had thirteen kids at this academy. A nice number that allowed me to give plenty of individualized instruction as well as plenty of group-based instruction. I took the athletes through my usual routine: sprint mechanic drills in the first session, fundamental Team Steve hurdle drills in the second session (marching popovers, cycle drill), different types of starts (falling starts, three-point starts, block starts) on the morning of day two, and then block starts over hurdles in the final session on day two. In that final session is when some of the athletes decided to focus on the long hurdles, getting over the first two barriers.
None of the kids at this academy were “elite,” I would say, although we did have three girls who have run in the 15-low range, and whom I know can go well into the 14’s and maybe even the 13’s if they’re able to grasp what they learned at the academy and build on it. Some kids came with personal bests in the 16-18 range, and every last one of them, talent-wise, looked capable of running a whole lot faster. So I spent a lot of time explaining about running efficiently, which starts with keeping the ankles dorsiflexed and landing on the balls of the feet. Over the hurdles, it means cycling one leg and then cycling the next leg right behind it. No locking the leg at the knee. No kicking, no snapping. Lean forward and stay leaning forward, even after landing off each hurdle, and even in the strides between the hurdles. Punch the hands up and down, minimize side-to-side action with the hands.
To many of the athletes (to my surprise, although I should’ve known better), the principles I was teaching them felt foreign and seemed bizarre. Even something as fundamental as pushing off the back leg with force upon take-off bewildered many of them. About three of the kids had come to one of my academies before, so sometimes I’d have them demonstrate. I had more than athlete approach me between reps and say something like, “My coach taught me that I’m supposed to kick the foot out” or “my coach taught me that the trail leg is supposed to wait before it whips to the front” or “my coach taught me to ‘look at the watch’ with my lead arm.”
I was like, here at Team Steve, we don’t do none of that. We don’t kick the foot out, we don’t snap the foot down, we don’t let the trail leg lag, and we don’t look at no damn watch. We sprint to the hurdles and we sprint over the hurdles. No pauses in the action, no power moves in the action. Be aggressive, be efficient in your movements, create a downhill angle at take-off, and you won’t have to try to be fast; the speed will happen to you.
By the end of day two, there wasn’t an athlete who wasn’t sold on the fact that the downhill style we were teaching them was more effective and more efficient than the style they’d been using up to that point. Many of them progressed significantly before our very eyes. I always say that the downhill style won’t make sense until you do it, especially if you’ve been taught to kick and snap, and to delay the trail leg, and to flatten out the trail leg. Once you execute the downhill style correctly, even if it’s just in a drill, you’re thrown off by how easy it is to step over a hurdle. It’s like, that’s all I have to do? My answer is always, yes, that’s all you have to do. Step over the hurdle like you’re stepping over a bookbag in the hallway.
In the final session of the academy, when we did competitive block starts, I told the athletes that the focus shifts from thinking about technique to just running as fast as you can and trying to beat the person next to you. The reason it’s important to not think about technique in such reps is because we want to find out what muscle memory the body has retained vs. what needs to still be developed. The video below features one such rep, where two of the 15-low girls went against each other.
All in all, this academy was a great one. The athletes were very coachable, very eager to soak up knowledge and apply it. I learned all of their names before lunchtime on the first day. I was cracking jokes on them and they were cracking jokes on me. It was fun, didn’t feel like work at all. Thanks to Mercersburg Academy for having us, and thanks to my good friend David Shaw for doing so much behind the scenes to make it happen.
