Team Steve Hurdling Academy #3: A Huge Success
by Steve McGill
A couple weeks ago, on June 25-26, we held our third Team Steve Downhill Hurdling Academy; while previous ones have taken place at the JDL Fast Track indoor facility in Winston Salem, NC, we did this one in Frostburg, MD, at an outdoor venue on the campus of Mountain Ridge High School. Though our academies are relatively new, we’ve been doing camps since November 2017. After a hiatus caused by the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to start calling them “academies” when we came back in November 2021, as I felt (and feel) that word put a greater emphasis on what actually goes on during those weekends — a whole lot of teaching.
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How we ended up in Frostburg is a cool story. About five years ago, a young high school girl named Jenna Green traveled from Maryland to North Carolina to train with me for a weekend. We clicked instantly, as she eagerly soaked up the instruction I was providing, and made rapid improvements in her hurdling. After that, Jenna came to just about every camp/academy that my staff and I conducted, and she grasped our concepts so well that I had her serve as a demonstrator at a coaching clinic that I did with Hector Cotto in October 2018. At our academy in Frostburg two weeks ago, Jenna, who is now a sophomore at Frostburg State University, again played the role of demonstrating drills — this time with our campers as her audience.
Meanwhile, I have become close friends with Jenna’s grandfather, David Shaw, who is an assistant track coach at Mountain Ridge. Dave is the one who organized for the Team Steve staff to conduct a camp at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania a few years ago, and Dave is the one who organized for us to come to Mountain Ridge. I drove to the school from my home in NC, and I can that the drive was not fun for the last hour or two, as the winding mountain roads put my nerves on edge. But once I arrived at the hotel and got settled in I was cool. And once I got to the track, it was time for me and my staff to work our magic.
The track was a newly-surfaced 8-lane beauty that had just been redone about a month prior to the academy. So the track was fresh — a nice, layered, soft-rubber that is very athlete-friendly when it comes to shin splints and other overuse-related aches and pains.
We had a total of 20 athletes attend the camp, 7 from MD, 3 from WV, 3 from PA, 2 from NJ, 2 from VA, 1 from NY, 1 from DE, 1 from NC (via AZ). Three of our participants were collegiate athletes — one from Lincoln University in PA, one from Shaw University in Raleigh, and one from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The rest of the athletes were high school athletes, ranging from age 14-18. Gender-wise, we were split down the middle — 10 males and 10 females. Experience ranged anywhere from beginners to seven years of hurdling.
Day One was typical for a Team Steve event — heavy emphasis on sprint mechanics prior to doing any hurdle-specific drills, as based on my philosophy that almost all flaws in hurdling mechanics are rooted in flaws in sprinting mechanics. We started with A marches, then had them do A skips, and then high-knee cycles. Those three drills ate up most of the first 2-hour session in the morning.
There are a few non-negotiables that my staff and I are super-nitpicky about with the sprint drills: 1) dorsiflexion. If the ankles aren’t dorsiflexed, and each stride isn’t landing on the ball of the foot, we can’t go on to the next drill. Lack of dorsiflexion, for a hurdler, will take away space to clear each hurdle, as it leads to kicking the foot out too soon and an upper body posture that is too erect, preventing the athlete from leaning forward properly. It also leads to a flattening out of the trail leg. 2) Knee and heel come up together, as one piece. Knee comes up to the point where the thigh is parallel to the track, and the heel comes up under the hamstring, and the athlete should feel a squeeze in the hamstring before the foot comes back down. When we say “lead with the knee” in hurdling, this is the first step to ensuring that the athletes will be able to do it — making sure that they’re already leading with the knee (no back-kick, no swinging the foot forward with low heel recovery) in their sprint drills, and then in their sprinting. 3) Upper body posture should be slightly forward, with the chest pushing forward and the core tight. A slumped-over posture will lead to a lean from the upper back when hurdling, with the eyes and chin pointing down. A too-erect posture will lead to a lack of a lean altogether when hurdling. We want to already be pushing the chest forward so that when we hurdle, all we have to do is exaggerate that angle.
We literally could spend the entire first day just doing sprint drills alone, but the aim of every camp/academy we do is to make sure we expose the athletes to all the major components of the “downhill” style that we teach at Team Steve. We don’t expect them to perfect anything in two days, but we want them to take a lot home with them that they can work on and continue to master throughout the course of their season.
So we spent the last hour of the morning session, and all of the afternoon session, working on hurdle drills. In our first few camps, we had the athletes do some of the basic drills that everybody does to teach hurdling mechanics — the fence drill, side walk-overs, etc. But this time we just went straight to the Team Steve drills, starting with the marching popover. As has always been the case, most of the athletes had a whole lot of trouble simply pushing off the back leg with force. But with persistent effort and patient instruction, they started to get it, and as they could feel how it made hurdling easier, they began to embrace it. From there, we moved on to the cycle drill, and then the quickstep drill. So there was a whole lot of hurdling going on. Throughout the afternoon, we emphasized that the lessons we taught them in the morning directly relate to what we were teaching them now.
The athletes were great. Even during breaks and the lunch hour, a good number of them stayed on the track to work on their mechanics. One of my coaches, Kevin Howell, had a whole group of about 10 kids around him during lunch time as he explained to them the principles of running the 400. I spent my lunch time working with kids individually, and I loved every minute of it, and hardly even remembered to grab a sandwich.
On day two, we moved the emphasis away from mechanics and shifted to emphasizing speed. We started by having them do some bounding drills to get the athletes in the habit of driving with power as opposed to being too quick with their movements. The whole idea for a hurdler is to shorten and quicken the strides the closer you get to the first hurdle. Think bigger strides early, because you can always make them shorter and quicker as you get stronger and faster.
From there, we worked on three-point starts with no hurdles, continuing to work on driving. In the afternoon, Coach Howell continued to lead the athletes in start mechanics, teaching them to come out of the blocks and drive toward the first hurdle. Meanwhile, I took a group to the curve to work on negotiating the curve in the long hurdles. Throughout the afternoon, some who were with me left to go with Coach Howell, while some who were with him came over to work on the long hurdle drills. Toward the very end of the day, another of my coaches, Keare Smith, led the kids in some quickstep drill races over six hurdles, pairing kids of similar abilities.
A great time was had by all. A whole lot of learning took place, and I left feeling invigorated. The group really bonded, and as corny as it sounds, we felt like a family by the time we parted ways. The video below is a hype video made by Jenna Green’s sister Jordyn, who volunteered her time to take photos and videos on both days of the academy. Big thanks to everyone who was there.
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