Team Steve Downhill Hurdling Academy #4
by Steve McGill
On June 24-25, I conducted my fourth “Team Steve Downhill Hurdling Academy,” and as always, it was a whole lot of fun. For the second year in a row, we held the academy at Mountain Ridge High School in Frostburg, MD, where Dave Shaw, the grandfather of a Team Steve alum, coaches. Several years ago, Dave brought his granddaughter Jenna down to North Carolina to train with me, and she attended one of my camps. Dave then offered to have us hold one up there in Maryland, so we came up there last year and liked it so much that we came back again.
My staff included my longtime partner in these events, Coach Kevin Howell, who is the head coach at Shaw University — a DII HBCU in Raleigh, NC. Kevin and I have known each other since way back in 2012, when he brought his daughter Jackie to train with me for hurdle-specific instruction. Kevin is a masterful sprint coach and always has been since I’ve known him. We worked together coaching athletes well before the first Team Steve Speed & Hurdle Camp back in 2017. At Shaw University he also heads the cross country program, so his overall knowledge of all running events beyond just the sprints has increased significantly since I first met him.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
Also on my staff was Wil Rasmussen, my assistant on my school team. On the school team, he mainly works with the distance runners, but being around me long enough has taught him a lot about the sprints and hurdles. This was Wil’s second time coaching at an academy. Last year, he mostly observed and helped move hurdles around because he was so new to it all and I wanted him to get a feel for the vibe first before diving right in and potentially giving kids misguided instruction. This year he was much more hands-on, and served as the go-to coach when an athlete was having trouble with a drill and needed to be pulled to the side for some one-on-one instruction. Last year, that role was held primarily by my former athlete Keare Smith, but Keare has since moved to Spain, so that was a little too far to come back for two days.
This year we had a total of 23 campers, up a smidgen from last year’s 21. I like to keep the numbers at a manageable level so that the kids can get reps in without a lot of standing around, and mainly because it helps me and my staff in regard to being able to provide individualized instruction as much as possible. Back in the early days of the camps, we’d get as many as 40-50 athletes attending, and that got to be too much. Especially when it came to block-start instruction. So by reducing the numbers and changing the word “camp” to “academy,” we’re now emphasizing the fact that what we are doing involves teaching, whereas the word “camp” implies lining people up and having them do a bunch of stuff and then moving on to the next drill. Each one of our academies is a unique experience. And the variations and alterations are decided upon based on the athletes that we have in front of us.
This year’s academy was unique in that it consisted almost entirely of hurdlers with a year or less of experience, including many who had never three-stepped in a race yet. Usually, we have a good mix of experience levels and ability levels, but this year was an exception. We did have five returnees from last year though, so that helped when I needed someone to demonstrate how to do a drill properly. Keare, again, had been my go-to guy for that in the past.
In seeing the final roster a few days before the academy, I informed my coaches that we’d have to be more hands-on about details this time around, that we wouldn’t be able to assume that kids would be able to figure things out on their own just through repetition and by observing others.
Day one went well. We spent a lot of time on the basics of sprint mechanics in the first session. Then in the afternoon we moved into my pet drills — marching popovers and quicksteps. But at the end of the day, I still felt like enough kids were struggling enough that we needed to go back and teach some basic hurdle drills before moving on with the plan to transition into 3-point starts and then block starts.
So in our first session on day two, we taught the kids how to do the fence drill Team Steve-style, and then we did some walk-over drilling, just to slow things down and place a greater emphasis on the specific movements of each leg and each arm, and also on the lean, upper body posture, etc.
Going back to those basic drills helped a lot, and I was glad that I was able to recognize that I needed to slow things down and reevaluate what the baseline hurdle knowledge was for the majority of the athletes.
The most difficult element for many of the athletes to grasp — even in the fence drill, much less the marching popovers, was the need to push off the back leg with force. It’s clear to me that that’s something that hurdlers don’t do naturally; they have to be taught to do it. The natural instinct seems to be to kick out the lead leg and totally ignore the leg that’s pushing off, even though doing so disrupts everything in the sprint mechanics.
In the afternoon session of day two, Coach Kevin worked with a group of kids on block starts while I took about half the kids to the other side of the track to do some work on the long hurdles. First I had them do some full-speed approaches over the first two hurdles to emphasize the need to establish a stride pattern and an aggressive attack from the outset. But after a few reps, the sun, which had been hiding behind the clouds for most of the weekend, came roaring out in full blast. And I knew the kids were getting tired anyway, so we moved down to the curve and did some drilling to work on negotiating the angles of the curve. For part of that session, I set up the spacing for a four-step rhythm to work on alternating lead legs. To my pleasant surprise, most of them already had some experience leading with both legs.
With the block starts, Coach Kevin started with no hurdles, then one hurdle, then two, then three. Hurdle heights were discounted, as was spacing, which is how we always do it. Our purpose with every academy is not to fix every flaw and create instant hurdle monsters. Instead, we seek to equip the athletes with the knowledge they need to continue to develop and build upon the things they learned while here.
Along those lines, about a week before the academy, I received an email from the parent of an athlete who had attended last year’s academy. In the email, the mom told me that her daughter, Riley, had entered the season hoping to break 15.0 this year, and ended up running 14.85 in her first race. By the end of the year she was down to 14.11. That’s the kind of success story I like to hear. When the teachings we provide lead to long-term improvements, I know we’ve done what we set out to do.
For more videos from the academy, follow me on Instagram: @artofhurdling.
[/am4show]
