Lots of College Coaches REALLY Suck

And repeatedly put them in three races 2-3 times a week to get points for dual meets that don't mean anything. lololol. Not all coaches but a lot of them do this. Waaaay tooo many.

I know a coach who's never wrong. Even on crap unrelated to running. Always putting in his two cents with his chest puffed up. Quite funny.

this is puritanical rubbish. your college kids probably partied some in HS when they made those times. if it was really that, BYU would be dominant rather than ok. most high achieving kids know their limits.

now, full blown alcoholic or addict is bad, but is that really explaining 1:52 vs 1:54, and that's a small percentage of kids.

maybe it's i also played a fall sport but i never met the freshman 15, nor would any XC/TF double kid. you burn it off.

you don't have to get up at 6 or 7 am for HS every day and do several hours of classes straight before a 3 pm track practice. most of us it's like 3 hours a day, perhaps scheduled to sleep in -- which i loved. i personally ran my ship where i could even sit out there an extra 15 minutes in the sunshine before we started.

no, buzz, sorry, i am not buying all this pro-authority, blame-students or blame-college stuff. i had more free time and more rest.

re food, i didn't remember the food being a negative other than at my small school you had to hit dining within hours our coach didn't necessarily consider with his practice timing. and even if i accepted your blame-shift, if the athletic department is x% of kids on campus, a significant percent at my small college, and the coaches think the food is bad, do you not see where the coaches should be leading the charge on the issue or have obvious influence?

that and memory serves some of my D1 friends mentioned athletic dorms and cafeterias. in which case, umm, bull. as well as under the new rules supplemental feeding by AD is no longer student athletic aid. my little D3 now offers kids some food and snacks. i wish it was so when i went there and the cafeteria was closed.

Like I said egos.

that and, do you really think HS cafeteria food is so great?

I guess it depends on your situation. I live in an area where there are a ton of high schools. We have plenty that aren't competitive in anyway in XC or track. I think a good coach drives numbers to the program just because they have someone interested in leading. So if you have low numbers it's because you have bad coaches (unless it's a really small school).

I do hear plenty of stories of coaches that just don't know the first thing about the sport but got hired because they are a teacher at the HS. Some coaches that are giving their athletes too many hard workouts so they get worse. Some that tell them to go run and then sit in their office and eat donuts.

But I also interact with plenty of good coaches at the HS, college, and club levels. I think there are plenty of good coaches and bad coaches at all levels.

no, it was my personal experience (a) the college soccer coach overtrained us, resulting in injuries and attrition and (b) both my college coaches were worse than my select soccer coach and HS TF coach. the college soccer coach was better than my HS soccer coach but that doesn't say much. the only college coach worth a crap was the assistant GK coach who became head senior year.

re the arguments about training demands, what we have is an abstraction and power issue. you may think you have the money tree figured out. as discussed earlier, if you have a few great kids who survive your rigors and succeed, you can hang your shingle on them. but if you are fighting the essence of the recruited kids, it's your fault as coach, not theirs. if the kids YOU recruited mostly hate what you do -- that's on you. if the kids YOU recruited generally "break" at an x% breakage rate every year -- that's on you. you can blame the kids, but the kids could handle HS workloads and put up the times you wanted.

and i think college TF coaches can get away with it in a way team sports can't. you run a soccer team into the ground and hurt people and make them quit such that we're dressing and taking 17 of the allowed 18 for a road trip, from a cut of 25, this shows up in team W and L. which we hold agains the coach.

however in TF if you break 1/4 or even less of the team but a few kids win conference, you have your resume items in spite of yourself.

no, what has actually changed?

IMO

(1) sometimes it's folks who could control races losing control and being unable to execute a race they longer control. the dominant kid rests at the shoulder of the leaders for the 800, almost jogging as a kid. you send him to college, the pace is down a few seconds and he can no longer ease into it. some people if they can't run their patented race plan, blow up running the way a college race requires.

(2) in soccer and team sports, sometimes a guy from a good program was propped up by the players around him and doesn't look the same in different company.

(3) my experience the coaching i received, other than the limited comments from the GK coach who was good, was lower quality than HS/select. unlike in football, where HS-->college is a progression, it felt like a lot of people can step right into being a college assistant or even head with little coaching experience. perhaps because of low pay. my HS track coach was part of the furniture at the school. my select coach had other previous teams and had put people in the pros. my college track coach was on his first TF coaching gig ever as a side gig from being a hoops assistant there. my college soccer coach had been a D1 assistant after playing, but never a head anyplace. advantage HS.

i also personally felt like my select and HS coaches responded to results -- the discussion here -- while college coaches tended to be dictatorships to which we would see if you responded. thus HS TF looking tired might end up with pool work to recover, while the college soccer would run his team right off the cliff to prove some abstracted theory on the required conditioning.

i also get annoyed listening to people diss athletes' opinions of coaches as ill informed. we have generally consumed coaching for years. we know who seems knowledgeable, who looks out for their athletes, who gets results.....and who doesn't. we know what we did that was tough but fair. we know easy. we know too hard. we are not JV HS runners on our first sports team since tee ball, upset we even have to practice. we are usually the top x% that stayed academically eligible and went to college, and have decent horse sense if we're being run in the ground or otherwise worked wrong.

personally i find some of the counter-thread on here to be gluttons for punishment quibbling about what too hard really is. i don't care if this is a pro workout. we're not pros. if you hit class after class with that workout and finish mid-or-low conference with high attrition, i don't care if you believe it should work or this generation are wusses. do something else.

in soccer we have a critique where a guy is just a "system zealot." there are coaches who recruit, and then come up with tactics to fit who shows up, who generally succeed year to year. they adapt. if something they do results in losses or injuries, it disappears. then there are system zealots. they believe the only way to play soccer is x. they try to recruit to that. if you show up and aren't quite that, they hammer away at you trying to make you fit the scheme. with most of those guys, they actually aren't that great of coaches and the scheme doesn't make for wins. but they often breed further system zealots.

There are a ton of good high school and college coaches. There are a ton of terrible high school and college coaches.

Every single program in high school and college has aspects that give an advantage and a disadvantage to success. Every coach, athlete, administrator, and teacher/professor has an effect on the student athletes success on some level.

All that being true...........wait for it...........it is a biological certainty to see bigger gains as a high school coach. The worst high school coaches will have huge improvements due to basic human development. a 14 year old kid that is 80 pounds and 5-3 is going to be a lot better when he is 18 5-10 135 and has been doing anything even remotely resembling "activity" for any amount of time. Guys especially are going to get bigger, faster and stronger no matter what they are doing. This does not mean that high school coaches suck. There are many high school coaches that can coach rings around a lot of college coaches.

College coaches have to be much better coaches to see improvement than high school coaches. That is why there are so many mediocre college coaches. They are not better. It is much harder to improve a kid that has a training age of 4-10 years before you get them. This is why more college coaches get exposed. Coaching college is vastly more complicated and difficult than coaching high school for reasons than usually have nothing to do with actual coaching, an it is getting worse with transfer portals, NIL's, and every other issue facing them.

So in conclusion, coaching is hard. Some people excel at it, some people suck at it, and everyone else is somewhere in the middle. Find a coach that fits what you want out of track/cross and give it your best shot. Sports come with failure. You will fail at some point. Most coaches are trying desperately to prevent that. Sometimes it will just happen.

Cheers

I think there’s a few factors at play here:

1. College coaches have ego, especially when successful, this can lead to the idea that it’s always the athletes fault and not their fault when things aren’t panning out.

2. It’s really important that you pick the right program. BYU is a balanced 800m program, their guys run 30-40 mpw and lots of faster shorter race paced work and tempo intervals. This will not be good for long sprinters nor will it be good for the Nick Symmonds, Peter Snell succeed off of high mileage and strength work types. It’s not that many D1 coaches are incompetent and that’s why many athletes fail, it’s more that the program isn’t a good fit.

3. Athletes lose that drive that made them great. They can get involved in partying, or other outside of track activities, a relationship, or be demoralized by moving from the fastest kid on the team coaches favorite in highschool to a nobody training fodder in college.

There's no weed-out process to stop people from becoming high school coaches who are ignorant of track and field and xc, and there are a lot more of them, so you will inherently have a lot more bad hs coaches. The college coaches usually will have at least succeeded in D1 athletics and so know more and they usually will have experience to become head coaches. However, they burn out so many distance runners by raising their mileage and intensity simultaneously in their freshmen years, so many get into an injury cycle. They often do not adjust the training to help them get out of that cycle because they have a win now mentality, which leads to the rare standout, and let's face it, NCAA scoring really emphasizes the rare standout who can score more points than the entire rest of the team. Coaches know this and so focus only on the few great ones, leaving the others to rot. The really good coaches don't make these mistakes but even they are going to get quite a few injuries because performing at the NCAA level requires a good deal of risk-taking with mileage, workouts, and races.

the reason some high school track stars run slower in college? the same reason some high school football stars can't get off a college practice squad, the same reason high school basketball stars get cut after their freshman year, the same reason some high school pitching phenoms get lit up in college.

you act like this is some sort of anomaly only in track but its like this is every NCAA sport. A huge chunk of high school standouts/scholarship athletes either can't cut it in college, lose interest when they realize they'll never become a pro, or just settle in and are content with being a good teammate while enjoying college. it has nothing to do with the coaches. some athletes just peak in high school, it's as simple as that.

Same reasons a lot of college kids have a lower GPA in college than high school. Everything is generally harder, it's a huge life change, and with a lack of parental oversight it's easy to eat trash food, consume drugs and alcohol, party, not sleep, get really stressed, etc. etc. etc. Hard to coach well when that's what you're dealing with.

My first college coach didn’t care. He did it for a paycheck. we trained ourselves.

my second one was a passionate alumni, young driven, a former captain of the team they coached. That coach was awesome and have massive respect to this day.

For me, Your whole comment is based on you and your experience.

I on the other hand have coached college since I was in my early 20s. I have seen it all. The fact is some good high school kids will run the fastest they ever have in high school. Sometimes through no fault of anyone, they just run slower(injury,food,sleep,etc). Most of the time it is poor management of themselves. On the other end, sometimes it is lack of coaching or poor coaching oooooorrrr different coaching philosophy.

There are plenty of reasons for athletes not to progress in college, but if you are going to criticize HS coaches then College coaches definitely deserve the criticism. They should definitely be more qualified than HS coaches, but many coaches simply get the job because they know someone. I've seen several coaches in NCAA Div II and III as well as NAIA get fired (for nefarious reasons) and have another job the next season. I've seen one make a career out of it jumping from school to school until they finally ran out of options and ended up selling insurance.

Agree! College coaching, it's all about who you know.

I had some mild disabilities which made it difficult to be a high school athlete or coach. But it does depend on the individual as there were seasons where I was outstanding, especially as a coach. This was a great thread because I never realized that partying was such a huge factor for guys blowing it in college. In my case, I got sick in high school, got seriously injured trying to comeback from that, and wound up having very little opportunity to compete or train in college.

for the really good D1 type kids most people are talking about here, those dual meets are threshold effort or less for them. people need to get over it.

i have state champion on my team who last week tripled with a 5:43, 2:05, and 11:22. I hope he doesn't crumble to dust from it.