Coaching a Full-Time Gymnast
by Steve McGill
“Start where you are,” “go with what you got,” and “make the best of a bad situation” are all cliched phrases that, despite being cliche, provide good advice. All of them are saying that we can’t always control circumstances or conditions, so we have to be creative in making a less than ideal situation work. Such is the case with the situation I’m navigating now — coaching a full-time gymnast in the hurdles.
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The girl I’m coaching — Janie — has been doing gymnastics since she was a little girl. She is currently a junior in high school, and is one of my students in my AP Language & Composition class. Early in the school year, I asked Janie, who is about 5-8 and very physically fit, if she participated in any sports, as I had not seen her participate in any sports at school. She responded that she was a gymnast, and I let out a gasp and asked her if she wanted to come out for track and run hurdles. Whenever I hear an athlete mention a background in gymnastics, that’s going to be my reaction. One of my hurdling teammates in college had a background in gymnastics, and he, at only 5 ‘8 “, was able to clear 42-inch hurdles with no problem, due to his unique combination of muscle strength and flexibility. Meanwhile, throughout my coaching career, I’ve encountered several athletes — almost all of them female, who, like Janie, started in gymnastics at a very young age.
In every case, the physical and mental tools needed to excel in the hurdles were already in place. The physical aspects include the strength and flexibility mentioned above, but also the explosive power that many athletes from other sports don’t have. On the mental side, gymnasts can take tough coaching because they’ve endured plenty of tough coaching. In addition, they don’t have a fear of the obstacles because they’ve been doing much more dangerous activities in their home sport.
The difference between those hurdlers I’ve coached in the past and Janie is that they had a background in gymnastics, but were no longer competing in that sport; instead, they had switched over to track. But Janie still competes full-time, travels across the country for competitions, and trains whenever she’s not competing. So I have very limited time to work with her. If I coached at a school that has a track (we don’t), and if I had a team comprised of 60+ athletes (we have eighteen), I probably wouldn’t have bothered to try to make it work. But in playing the hand I’d been dealt, I decided to give it a try.
Janie and I started meeting once a week, on Sundays, beginning in December. Past experiences have proven to me that if I have access to work with a kid once a week on a consistent basis, and that kid is talented, motivated, and a quick learner, we can make progress and be competitive. After Christmas break, Janie and I remained very consistent with our Sunday sessions. Most of the times, she was traveling back from a gymnastic competition in a different part of the country, and after a 9-hour car ride with her parents, she’d hop out of the passenger seat and start warming up.
So I was impressed by the commitment she was making to the hurdles, and I was equally impressed that she was spending her one day off from gymnastics to train with me. That told me that she was serious about this, but it also made me feel frustrated that I couldn’t get in more days per week with her.
The fact that she was a quick learner was huge. The fact that she already had a tremendous work ethic was huge. She mastered how to run dorsi-flexed on day one. Fear of the obstacle was non-existent. By our second session I was able to give her more detailed hurdling-specific instruction.The one thing I haven’t had time for is drilling. I’ve had her do a few marching popovers and we did some quick-step drilling one day. But I soon recognized that if I was going to have her ready to go by the beginning of the spring season, I couldn’t follow my usual progression of drilling-drilling-drilling and then speeding things up. We had to keep things fast from the giddy up. All workouts would have to involve clearing hurdles with the first hurdle at full spacing and all hurdles after that moved in one foot from race spacing. She was three-stepping without reaching, so we just kept doing the same workout every week.
I kept my technical instruction basic. Lower the arms because they’re swinging too high and keeping you in the air. Drive the knee of the lead leg higher so that your trail leg won’t hang behind. Focus on leaning forward during take-off so that you don’t glide over the hurdle. These simple instructions were easy for her to pick up and apply, and she kept looking faster between the hurdles as the weeks went on.
Her first meet was the team’s third meet, as she had missed the first two due to gymnastics competitions. Without a block start, from a standing start, she ran 16.98 and three-stepped the whole way. I didn’t implement the block start until after the first race, because I wanted her to get through a race before introducing her to the blocks. Her block start still leaves much to be desired in terms of reaction time and pushing off the pedals, but she’s getting to the first hurdle with good speed and with good body positioning. She’s been looking better and better in practice lately. My hope is that she’ll be able to drop into the low 16’s prior to our state meet in mid-May, and that she’ll be able to break 16 at the state meet.
Nothing is guaranteed, but those are the goals. In her second meet she faced a forceful headwind and ran much slower, but I’m not too worried about that. Her body is wracked with gymnastics-related injuries, but she always gives me everything she has each Sunday, and she’s also been coming to practice on Wednesdays now, which enables us to get some running workouts in — usually speed-endurance work.
If we can continue to work together once a week through the rest of the season and into her senior year next year, I think there’s a chance she could get into the 14’s. But I don’t know how motivated she’ll be if she plans on competing in gymnastics in college, so I’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I’ll continue to work with her without fixating on expectations or possibilities. What I’ve already learned from coaching her is that I can only focus on what I can control, and I have to let the rest be. If she wants to be a gymnast and remains devoted to that sport, I can’t be mad at it. I wish her all the best. Below is a rep from a recent practice session with Janie. I don’t film her often because it kind of makes her nervous when I do.
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