End of Season Reflections on Coaching a Hurdling Gymnast
by Steve McGill
My school team’s season ended in late May, culminating with our state championship meet on May 17-18. In the past couple issues of The Hurdle Magazine, I’ve been chronicling the progress of my hurdling gymnast, Janie Coble. This article will serve as the final documentation of her first season running track, and running the hurdles.
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My team competes in the small-school private school division here in North Carolina, which means the competition level isn’t as high as it is among the bigger private schools, much less the public school divisions. Janie entered the state meet with the fastest seed time – 16.88, as there were no other girls who had run under 17.00, and there were only two other girls who could three-step a whole race. Still, I felt nervous heading into the meet. We hadn’t gotten in much training; we had trained even less than our usual once a week. We had lots of bad weather – thunderstorms, etc. – throughout the month of May, which limited our training time. In addition, Janie, who was still training in gymnastics five-six days a week, was having chronic knee issues. When we did train, I always saw her wincing and trying to hide a limp every time she slowed down at the end of a rep.
Whenever I asked her if she was okay, and if she needed to stop, she assured me that she was fine. “It only hurts when I slow down,” she said. But I’ve learned over the years that when coaching competitive warriors, I can’t always listen to what they’re telling me, but instead should listen much more intently to their body language. That’s what I did, by limiting the number of reps we did, and by choosing instead to just keep her in tune with the rhythm of the race. I don’t think any of our practices in that last month of the season lasted even an hour, including the warmup. Which is fine for that time of year, as quality is prioritized over quantity. But still, for someone who hadn’t been hurdling for very long and who still had a lot of flaws to address, I had my doubts that we were doing enough to be sufficiently prepared.
Then there was a fact that a change was made to the state meet schedule due to incoming storms in the forecast. Usually, the first day of our state meet consists primarily of prelim races (except the 3200 is a final), and finals are run on the second day. But to get in as much of the meet as possible on the first day, the meet organizers changed all the sprint and hurdle events to timed finals on the first day. I had been hoping that Janie would be able to use the first race as a warmup to get herself used to going over a full flight again, and to re-acclimate herself to the pressure of running with people beside her. But with the change in the schedule, she would have just one shot.
In retrospect, I can see that this change in the schedule was actually to her advantage. I don’t know, with all of her knee, back, and ankle troubles, if she could’ve made it through two races. Especially when considering that she would be running the 100 and 200 meter dashes as well.
Anyway, the race went great. She got in a few really good warmup reps over the first three hurdles out of the blocks. She looked confident, calm, ready to go. When the gun went off to start the race, she shot out of the blocks with her best start of the year, and established a commanding lead that she never relinquished. With her winning time of 16.56 she set a new personal best by .32, while the second-place finisher was almost a full. 06 behind her, in 17.25.
Janie was the only athlete on our team to win first place in an individual event, although our 4×800 team also won gold in a thrilling race. Despite the fact that Janie’s time wasn’t all that impressive in the big picture of things, and despite the fact that there were dozens of girls all over the state in other divisions who had run faster, I felt proud of her, and I felt a sense of accomplishment myself. She hadn’t started hurdling until January. And she only trained hurdles once a week. And she was beating up her body with gymnastics practices and competitions all the other days of the week. By the end of the season she could barely train at all. Yet she ran 16.56 and won the state meet.
The above video is from a recent workout with Janie.
Looking back on it, I could definitely make an argument that the work I did with Janie this past year represents the greatest coaching job of my career. I’ve never never made as much progress in as minimal amount of training time. We might have had a total of twelve training sessions all year long, and the last few of those were truncated due to her gymnastics-related injury issues.
Next year, our school will move up a division, where we’ll compete against the bigger private schools in the state. Janie’s time would’ve earned her a fifth-place finish in that division. If she wants to win a state championship next year, she’ll almost certainly need to run under 16.00, which I’m sure she is capable of doing. We have continued our once-a-week workouts, and they are going well, as we finally have the time and space to drill instead of always race-prepping.
Meanwhile, as I indicated in last month’s issue, coaching a competitive gymnast while she is competing in gymnastics is very much a frustrating experience, because I can see way more clearly than she can what her potential is in this sport. And as someone for whom the hurdles mean everything, I can’t fully accept that hurdling is a part-time venture for her. If it were a full-time venture, she’d be well into the 15’s by now, on her way to the 14’s.
My plan heading into 2024-25 is to move on from coaching the school team so that I can have more time to do what I love the most: coach hurdlers in my private training. The early part of the summer already has me very busy in that regard, and there are a handful of athletes who are local and whom I’ll be able to continue working with when school starts up again. This past year, I had to turn down several hurdlers who wanted to train with me simply because I couldn’t fit them into my schedule due to my responsibilities as head coach of my school team.
That led to feelings of resentment on my part. I was a grumpy person by the end of the school year, and I don’t like myself when I’m that way.
As I told my athletic director, I’m a hurdles coach, not a head coach. Three years as head coach has proven to be more than enough for me. I now feel that there are no running events that I’m not able to coach effectively, and I’ve gained a greater appreciation for all of the running events, and, to a lesser degree, the field events. But my heart is with the hurdles, and it always has been. So I’m following my heart.
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