Lessons Learned, Lessons Taught
by Steve McGill
It’s a little hard to believe that my first season as a head coach is coming to an end, but that is indeed the case, as we only have one week left before our state meet. I know I’ve complained a lot in the past couple issues of The Hurdle Magazine about the difficulties I’ve had to face, but I find myself coming to a place of serenity about it all now, and in this article I want to talk about that journey.
We started the season with twelve athletes (boys and girls combined), and we will be heading to the state meet with four — one boy and three girls. The boy, Mitchell, is a 400/800 runner, and he represents our best chance to win an individual state championship in an event, as he has only lost once this year in the 400. Of the three girls, one, Sophie, runs the 1600 and 3200, Gracie qualified in the 800, and Grace qualified in both hurdling events. For 4 out of 12 to qualify for states isn’t bad. That’s 33% of the squad, which is about normal for most teams I’ve been on and coached for over the years, and it seems to be around the norm in general, although teams heavy in relay depth may have a higher percentage going to states.
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When the season began, and I took on the role of head coach just so the kids would have a coach (as the previous head coach retired), I emphatically told myself that this would be a one-year deal, and very little happened throughout the season to change my mind. But enough has happened that I have changed my mind, and I think I’ll probably give it another go next year. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way that have helped me to grow and that have me feeling much more encouraged than I did a month or so ago:
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Probably the most rewarding aspect of coaching this season has been working with my assistant coach, Wil Rasmussen. Wil, who is in his mid-20’s has a basketball background. He’s about 6’6”, played for Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and currently coaches the middle school team at our school. The athletic director asked Wil if he’d be willing to help me out with track, so Wil, who also subs at our school often during the day, came by my classroom, introduced himself, and we talked for several minutes about track. He said he ran track a little bit in high school, knew some things about distance training and sprint mechanics, but didn’t know as much about planning workouts. I told him, hey, I can plan the workouts and you can help me with the coaching and managing. My biggest thing was, would he be willing to drive the bus to meets? Because I did not want to drive the damn bus. He said that would be no problem, and, God bless his soul, he has driven the bus to every meet.
Working with Wil has been a pleasure. We clicked from day one. He’s learned a lot from me about track, but I look at our relationship more as a partnership, as I give him plenty of freedom to work with the kids in his own way, to prep them for meets, to guide them in the warmups, and to talk to the whole group in team meetings and after practice. With me being a big basketball fan, we have fun conversations about the NBA and players from back in the day as well as the current NBA playoffs. We’ve gotten to know each other’s backgrounds and we’ve come to appreciate each other’s approach to coaching. We’re both laid-back personalities but we’re both no-nonsense when it comes to putting in the work. He’s just a good dude, a good guy to be around. Whenever we can, we grab lunch together, and we always talk a good 15 minutes to half an hour after practice, talking about how things went, planning for the next day’s practice, etc. Will and I are a team, and I never let the fact that I’ve been doing this longer than him get in the way of learning from him, as he is a master at managing personalities and communicating effectively.
Learn a Little Something Every Day
I’ve coached everything from the 400 on down in past years when I’ve worked as an assistant coach, but this was my first year coaching events like the 800, 1600, and 3200. Having observed plenty of good distance coaches over the years certainly gave me some ideas of how I wanted to approach it, but I also had some of my own ideas I wanted to implement. For example, Wil and I placed a heavy emphasis on running mechanics, and not just for the sprinters. At my previous school, where I coached for almost two full decades, we had two sisters who ran sub-5:00 in the mile, both of whom ran on the balls of their feet with their ankles dorsiflexed. Watching them run for four years each taught me that sprint mechanics isn’t just for sprinters. So Wil and I spent a lot of time teaching dorsiflexion, upper body posture, arm action, etc. Early in the season, we spent huge chunks of workouts just working on mechanics, and it looks like it has paid off, as the athletes who made it to states all look visibly better in their running mechanics than they did when the season started.
Meanwhile, Mitchell, the one male who made it to states, actually dropped down to the 400 this year after being more of a 800/1600 guy in previous years. So he was really the only athlete we had this year who was “track smart,” so to speak, and could explain what he felt his strengths and weaknesses were, and what kind of workouts he needed to be incorporated into his training regimen. After one 400m race, he said he didn’t feel tired, but that he didn’t feel fast. That let me know that I needed to add more speed work — 200’s, 150’s, 100’s — something I hadn’t really considered because I was so worried about him losing the necessary endurance for the 800. Another time, Wil noted that our 100 meter runners had one thing in common — a crappy drive phase, which gave me the idea to incorporate more uphill sprinting into their training, which would force them to drive for the duration of each 90-100m sprint rep. Trying to teach drive phase mechanics without a track to train on definitely requires some creativity.
Our four athletes who qualified for states: Sophie Ratcliff, Grace Galloway, Gracie Redmond, Mitchell Zammitti.
Be Adaptable
As discussed above, practicing without a track means always needing to be creative. With my one hurdler, whenever we would go to meets, I would have to go straight to the start line and get in a mini-workout over 2-4 hurdles as soon as we walked off the bus. That way, we could get in some rhythm work at least, even if we couldn’t address any of her technical flaws. So we’d get in about 15 minutes worth of work upon arrival, and then I’d have her relax and then do her usual warmup 30 minutes or so later. A couple times I met with her on Sunday mornings at the nearby public school where I do my private coaching, and those sessions enabled me to teach her the basics of lead leg mechanics and trail leg mechanics. But overall, hurdling during the week was impossible, except for the most rudimentary drills, since we trained on a sidewalk all season long.
The other big thing I had to adapt to was athlete unreliability. Of the 12 athletes we started with, four were competing in other sports at the same time — club volleyball, club soccer, AAU basketball. Two of them were good enough that they could’ve qualified for states, but they ended up quitting, or fading away, because they soon discovered that they couldn’t do two sports at once. The lesson I learned — and Wil and I have already talked about this — is that if you play another sport during track season, don’t come out for track. Simple as that. It doesn’t work.
Accept Limitations
Not having a track to train on was a limitation that, at different points in the season, frustrated me, exasperated me, and nearly broke me.There were so many things we couldn’t do without a track. But as the team grew accustomed to running on the sidewalk loop around the pond down the road from school, we started to bond, and it actually became kind of fun. Wil dubbed our team “the pond squad,” and all the kids embraced it. Heading into the state meet, we’ve now been training on a loop that’s on a cross country course on the campus of Davidson College. The surface is soft dirt/gravel that is easier on the shins even if it’s not as easy to grip. During one of our practices there last week I declared, “We are no longer the pond squad; we are now the gravel group.” Everybody laughed, and it was settled.
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