The Year-Round Athlete
Back in the day, athletes who trained year-round for one sport were a rarity. The “best” athletes at a high school competed in more than one sport, and there was no greater accomplishment than being a four-year letter winner in three sports. The true athletic studs were those who played football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring. I played two sports for most of high school – basketball in the winter and then track in the spring. In the modern era, however, specialization has increased across the board. In just about every sport you can name, athletes are specializing more and more, and they’re doing so sooner and sooner. This trend has definitely had an impact on track and field, both positive and negative, and that’s what I want to get into in this article.
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Let me first talk about the specialization that occurs in other sports, and how that affects track and field. As someone who coaches at the high school level, the specialization in other sports serves as a constant source of frustration. The school where I’m currently teaching is not a big track school. Getting kids to make a serious commitment to track is a challenge. I’m making inroads, but it’s a laborious process. I’ve always said that success is the greatest argument, so I’m hoping that will prove to be the case here.
Heading into this school year, I was doing some recruiting for potential hurdlers. In addition to a freshman girl who was returning from last year, I was able to convince two other girls to come out. One was a volleyball player, and the returning girl was a basketball player. I’m sure you can tell where this one is going already. Both the basketball player and the volleyball player play those sports year-round, which has severely inhibited my ability to coach them in the manner that I am accustomed to. With the basketball player I expected it, but with the volleyball player I was a bit naïve, I guess, not realizing how serious and intense people are about that sport.
In January I began holding Sunday afternoon workouts at a local high school that has a rubberized surface, and I had about five kids coming pretty regularly. Once the outdoor season began in mid-February and it was time to crank things up, the volleyball girl informed me that Sundays would not be good for anymore. Why? I asked. She explained that she had club volleyball practice at 11am. That was the first I had heard of that, but I rolled with it. No problem, I said, I can move practice back to 1 (we’d been having practice at 12). She said she couldn’t make 1 either, because she had another volleyball practice at 2. So now she no longer comes to Sunday practices.
She also later informed me that after our weekday practices, she goes to straight to club volleyball practice, which lasts for three hours.
The basketball girl, likewise, goes straight to AAU practice right after track practice, and she goes to basketball tournaments on the weekends.
The volleyball girl ran a 55-low in her first meet in the 300 hurdles. Not bad for someone who is totally new to the sport and who had had a very limited number of practices for that event. Her technique is still pretty terrible, to be honest, but she’s athletic and strong. At last week’s meet she said to me that she wants to get down to 48 by the end of the season. I just looked at her. I thought, but didn’t say, You talkin’ ‘bout going to three-hour volleyball practices on the daily, and you want to drop from 55 down to 48? Do you realize how out of your mind you are?
So I find myself doing the most basic of workouts and drills with such athletes, and I’m almost at the point of just telling such kids to either go ahead and focus on their main sport or get serious about these hurdles. My sport is not a hobby. And if we weren’t such a small school, desperate for any athletes we can get ahold of, that’s exactly what I’d say. Step up or step off.
On the other side of life, you have the kids who run track year-round. This is the type of athlete that I’m used to. The track athlete who competes indoors and outdoors for the school team, and then in the summer for their Junior Olympics team. Again, back in the day, you didn’t have a lot of kids who ran track year-round like you have now. Only the kids who were really talented and had obvious college scholarship potential did no sport but track. But now it’s pretty much assumed that if you’re going to run in the spring, you need to get ready for it by running in the winter. And since the summer gives you opportunity to further improve your personal bests, it makes sense to run for a club as well.
Back in the day, there were a handful of big meets. There was the Golden West, the Golden South, the East Coast Invitational, and that was about it. Now there are so many meets available that high school athletes can pretty much have a year-round competitive schedule the same as pros. And not just the elite high school athletes. There are plenty of invitationals and relay meets, and even Nationals includes the ever-growing “emerging elite” sections that allows athletes who aren’t necessarily nationals material to compete at nationals.
I like this trend, but I also don’t like it. I like it because it has allowed me opportunity to work with athletes around the calendar, without the issues I brought up earlier – of kids being stretched thin by doing too many sports at once. When I was coaching kids like Johnny Dutch and Keni Harrison, for example, track was their only sport. Though Keni had played competitive soccer for several years prior to her junior year of high school, she decided to devote herself full-time to track at that point because she recognized her potential and wanted to see how far her talents could take her. So with athletes like her I could be creative with workouts, I could develop them gradually. We could make plans to peak for certain meets. She’s an obvious example, but there are many others I could refer to. Athletes who weren’t as talented but who devoted themselves and accomplished great things. Some earned college scholarships, others didn’t, but for all of them, the experience proved to be quite special.
The reason why I don’t like the trend is because of the uber-competitiveness that it has fostered. There are so many meets, and so many athletes vying for collegiate scholarships, that the competitiveness has taken away from the ability to coach. Everyone wants to run personal bests at the first indoor meet in December. Everyone is comparing themselves to everyone else, keeping up with rankings. Without a real off-season, track becomes a source of stress, not an escape from it. Athletes want to know if they’ll be able to incorporate something they’ve been taught by the next meet. If not, they think, then what’s the point of learning it? Athletes are always expressing frustration that they can do something right in a drill but not in a meet. My reaction: of course you can’t do it right in a meet yet; you just learned it. Johnny Dutch did years upon years worth of drills before he got his lead leg to a point where it was automatically fast as lightning. It baffles me that athletes think they can learn a new skill one day and then incorporate it in a race by the end of the week. To me, that’s a modern-day phenomenon, caused directly by the emphasis on competition throughout the entire year.
I think it’s healthiest for athletes to participate in different sports throughout the year, or to at least have one season out of the year in which they participate in a sport other than their main sport. Playing other sports breaks the monotony of training, it forces the athlete to use different muscle groups, and it actually enables the athlete to return to his or her main sport with renewed energy.
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