Pomona-Pitzer Men's Team Coaching Carousel DRAMA

Careful, all the sprint coach are going to come crying about this.

I can give you nine reasons why they have made that hire....

looking at her background more closely, she decimated the distance program at Colgate. There is not much reason to believe that she is capable of, nor willing to, keep the Pomona Pitzer distance program strong.

Who cares! I hate posts like this. She is a track coach, she can coach the team however she wants and if they are successful (likely based on number of kids on the team, team gpa and number of kids at nationals or conference winners) who cares how she does that.

Being annoyed that a coach devalues distance and focuses on sprints and jumps or whatever random events they want is like being mad that the new football coach runs a spread offense instead of the option offense you’re used to seeing… it doesn’t matter, they can do whatever they want to be successful as a team. I know that cross country exists also so being moderately successful in that sport is great but if she has the same number of total kids and the same number of total kids going to track nationals, the AD probably doesn’t really care.

Is this all true?? They ran off two national championship winning coaches in a row? And then hired a former hurdler who has only been in charge of one small, terrible D1 XC program?

PP finished 5th at nationals last year and are returning their top six runners! This is like deliberate sabotage. What an insult to those guys. What a difficult situation to thrust Ms. Williams into. What would Will Leer do?

Please tell me this is a joke. A team won two NCAA xc titles and neither time was the coach made the permanent head coach? Instead they hired a spint coach to be the head coach?

Are we sure the xc coaches wanted the job? Or there wasn't a scandal that caused one of them to not even be interviewed?

Ok. I spent 5 minutes researching it. They did inded hire a sprint coach. But she came from Columbia - not Colgate. Ivy league baby!!!

You're not going to address the obviously racist insinuations being made on this thread?

How typical.

Pretty much. The drama, if there is any, sounds like it's coming from a bunch of butthurt distance losers who are borderline racist at best.

How do we know either interim coach wanted the job? How do we know both didn't do something to disqualify themselves? How do we know that the new coach isn't going to be successful? How do we know the AD doesn't want the team to move in a different direction, because sprinters can more easily perform multiple events on the track? How do we know that the AD isn't going to augment this hire with a distance assistant? How do we know this new coach is automatically going to change everything that's been done and worked before?

We don't. Only kneejerk discriminatory idiots in this thread assume that it's going to be a failure, almost exclusively because she's black and she's a woman.

This is the most Karen response ever. Shaming and attacking people. That’s how you get your way in the world today. Proper women’s response.

Butthurt distance loser confirmed

This is LetsRun, so there will undoubtedly be posters who respond to this story with racism. But if Williams were a white man my opinion would be the exact same.

You don't hire a sprint coach and/or someone with limited distance coaching experience to coach a cross country team with legitimate national championship aspirations. Not hiring two consecutive national championship winning coaches is EXTREMELY odd. Maybe Williams turns out to be a great coach! That doesn't mean there's some highly questionable decision-making going on here. It looks like this very wealthy school only wants to pay one coach for two sports, so they hired her primarily to be the track coach and consider XC an afterthought.

The school will probably get exactly what it deserves, and with the transfer portal we should know within about two years (or less) exactly where this will go.

My bet? They go from winning NCAA titles to being dog meat in record time.

The coach was at Colgate for 4 years, then Cleveland state for 2 and Columbia for 1.

The previous coach was Hispanic…

Someone lurking from PP can probably answer this better, but my recollection is that head coaches there are technically faculty of physical education, and get tenure. They can take other admin roles within the college and still technically hold their athletic positions. Boston left Pomona in 2022 for Dickinson, so I wouldn't expect that they're holding a head coaching position for him any long at Pomona.

You do realize that Amber can hire her own distance coach to work with Cross Country, correct?

No high qualified coach is going to assume head cross country coach responsibilities for a lowly assistant coach salary, and without even being able to have a head coach title.

Private schools like Pomona have a limited number of recruiting "slots" where they can guarantee admission or reduce admissions standards for top athletes. With a sprint head coach, more of those slots will go to sprinters than distance runners.

They might have a couple good years until their current strong runners graduate, but their cross country teams WILL decline from D3 national relevance.

According the PP athletics website, the school has won three team national championships in its history. One women's tennis championship in the 90s, and then the two recent XC championships. Men's XC is by far the most successful sports program at that school and it seems like they are probably the favorites to win another championship this year. And we're talking about them being coached by a sprint-focused coach or some new, unknown assistant coach. Total mismanagment by that athletics department.

This post sort of has a point with the football analogy. But...this is like if a school won back to back national titles in football running the option offense, then you hired a coach who can only run the power-I. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn't, but it's a baffling decision.