Do You, Coach
by Steve McGill
Recently, in one of my high school English classes, I was teaching the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost. The poem is set in rural Massachusetts, and the speaker of the poem is talking about how he and his neighbor meet every year in early spring to mend the wall that separates their two lawns. The speaker finds it ironic that the only time they meet is when they work together to build the wall that serves to separate them. His neighbor, meanwhile, doesn’t see the irony, and doesn’t care to talk about it. When the speaker points out that they don’t really need the wall, the neighbor simply states, “Good fences make good neighbors.” When the speaker presses further, wanting to know why they make good neighbors, the neighbor refuses to get into a back-and-forth about it, but instead simply repeats, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
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The neighbor in the poem is unwilling to listen to the speaker not because he firmly believes that good fences good make good neighbors, but because his father taught him that good fences make good neighbors. As the speaker says, “He will not go behind his father’s saying,” which seems to imply that the neighbor is staying loyal to his father, and that his refusal to listen to the speaker is more so a refusal to consider thinking outside the box of what his father said.
I bring up the above example as a segue into a discussion about coaching. All of us who coach have had mentors who have shown us the way when we were lost and trying to figure things out. The point I want to make in this article is that, like the neighbor in the poem, we often feel a sense of loyalty to our mentors, to the point where we fear going against what they taught us. Instead of acknowledging that it’s natural to grow and discover new ideas as we grow, we try to stay attached to the things our mentor taught us because we don’t want to hurt our mentor’s feelings, or because we doubt that we have the right to think we could possibly know more than the mentor who has accomplished so much. What I have found, however, is that, paradoxically, the best way to honor one’s mentors is to expand upon their teachings, to even deviate from their teachings, and possibly to even abandon their teachings. The fact of the matter is, everything you do remains rooted in what they taught you, and you wouldn’t have ever found your way to where you are now if they hadn’t first provided you with your foundation.
My one and only coaching mentor was Jean Poquette, the high school coach of Renaldo Nehemiah. He was my mentor before he even realized he was. As a Division III college hurdler with no hurdle coach, I had to figure out on my own how to clear that 42-inch barriers without smacking my trail leg knee and ankle all day long until the break of dawn and beyond. I also had to figure out what workouts I should be doing to get myself in shape properly. I bought a copy of Ken Doherty’s Track and Field Omnibook, and studied the section on the 110 hurdles religiously. There, I found gold: a full-length article in which Poquette discussed the training methods he used to coach Nehemiah that help Nehemiah to become the first high school hurdler to ever run under 13 seconds. Though I didn’t just copy and paste the workouts into my own training plan, the workouts described in that article did serve as the basis for how I coached myself. And because our head coach had a lot of respect for me, he allowed me to plan for workouts not only for myself, but for our other three hurdlers on the team, in season. I really didn’t think of myself as a coach-in-training at the time, but, looking back, I can see that I obviously was.
A few years later, when I first started coaching high school, I basically transferred my training regimen from my college days to my own athletes. Everything I did was based on the Jean Poquette model, which emphasized volume and speed-endurance, and de-emphasized speed training. If you do enough reps and develop muscle strength that way, then, when it’s time to go fast, the body will be able to go fast.
In 2005, my coaching partner at the time and I took one of our elite athletes, Johnny Dutch, to train for a day with Coach Poquette at Brevard University in the western part of North Carolina, which was close to Coach Poquette’s home at the time. Dutch, who would later go on to have an outstanding collegiate career and a very good professional career, was a high school sophomore at the time. There, I was able to watch the master in action, as he meticulously took Johnny through a series of drills and provided instant evaluative feedback after every rep. It would be fair to say that after that trip, I was a true Jean Poquette disciple.
But a weird thing happened over the years since then. And it’s something that happened unconsciously. Really, it happened because I was inspired by the example that Coach Poquette set. I started coming up with my own ideas, started following my own choices, started experimenting based on my own gut feelings and observations. To me, Poquette was an innovator, and he inspired the innovator within me to break loose. Ironically, doing so led me further and further away from his coaching methods, to the point now where I emphasize speed, low volume, and long recovery periods in all non-hurdling running workouts, even in the off-season. Where I used to follow Poquette’s 4 sets of 4×200 workout religiously, I now never have my athletes do more than 2 sets of 4×200 even in the fall. Where I used to use Poquette’s well-known back-and-forth workout for hurdle endurance, I now use my own quickstep workout for hurdle endurance.
Along the way, I’ve cut a lot of hurdle drills out of my diet – all side drills are gone, all walk-overs are gone. I’ve replaced them with drills like the marching popovers and the cycle drill, which better suit my philosophy that hurdling is a jump, but is a jump forward, not a jump upward.
Now let me fast forward to a week or so ago, when one of my former athletes, Arthur, texted me videos of a few drill sessions with a couple of his hurdlers. Arthur helps me out at my camps, and I first came up with the cycle-arms theory while I was coaching him, so he’s very familiar with what I teach and how I teach it. So imagined how surprised I was when I saw in one of the videos that he had the athlete doing a side lead leg drill. What in the world? We don’t do that!
I texted him back that I wasn’t a fan of side drills, and that the athlete wasn’t doing it properly anyway, as her foot wasn’t clearing the hurdle, but was going beside the hurdle instead. He then texted me back explaining why he had her doing the side drill. He was just getting her started over 33’s, and in her previous workout, her form had broken down late in reps when going over the top. So, he wanted to build her confidence first by having her go to the side and get a feel for the height. And yes, that explanation absolutely made sense.
I found myself feeling angry with myself for dissing his use of the drill before knowing his logic for using it. I also found myself feeling a bit fearful of becoming the grumpy old-school coach who doesn’t want my protégés to stray from what they learned while under me. I realized that by having his athletes do one of the very drills that he knew I didn’t like, Arthur was actually being just like me – he was branching out on his own, exploring and experimenting on his own, figuring things out on his own. I texted him back the following message:
“I don’t like side drills, and I hardly ever use them. But if you like them, and you see a purpose in them, use them, regardless of what I say. You’ve got natural gifts as a coach. To nurture those gifts, never doubt yourself based on anything that I might say, or that anyone else might say. Always, do you.”
And that would be my message to every young coach out there, as well as those who are experienced. Do you. Doing so doesn’t mean that you’re arrogant; it doesn’t mean that you think you’re smarter than everyone else. Quite the contrary, it means that you’re willing to put yourself out there, you’re willing to take the fall when your athletes don’t do well. Your athletes will always appreciate you for that.
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