Coach Joe Newton post HS success

Don Sage

Marius Bakken

Peter Cioni (sub-9 for steeple)

McNamera twins

That's not a whole lot...

fig, you are right on! If you figure how many runners that have come through his program, the number who have excelled collegiately is remakably low. His approach does not develop athletes with a long term committment to the athlete.

How many athletes have come through any program and had success collegiately? Perhaps you could frame the question as "How does Joe Newton get guys who don't have collegiate talent to become high school state champions year in and year out?"

Bakken was only at York for one year, not really a product of the system, probbably never would have had the success that he did if he would have been at York for 4 years.

What have the McNamara twins done?

I think you mean Dettman twins, and they have done very little at Oregon as of yet that many expected them to do. Sean McNamara is at Michigan and having a solid career so far...he's only a sophomore this year.

The York dominance until the past seven years or so, was done by having great teams, not great individuals up top. York has won state trophies before having only one or two all-state athletes. Obviously guys like Don Sage, Marius Bakken, Jim White, etc. were state champions, but the majority of the team are guys who work really hard and are apart of a family bigger than any college team can offer.

People can bash York all day long, but if you've ever met Joe Newton and talked to his athletes, you know that this is a family and Joe is the father figure. It's a special combination of a lot of things that help athletes succeed so far beyond normal expectations there. The York burnout myth is just that...a myth.

CoachB wrote:

How many athletes have come through any program and had success collegiately? Perhaps you could frame the question as "How does Joe Newton get guys who don't have collegiate talent to become high school state champions year in and year out?"

Sorry, if you are a HS state champion then you have collegiate talent. Sick of hearing how he turned a bunch of misfits into runners. The program is popular with 100 plus kids each year.

The question should be "how does a program with 100 plus kids on it's team each year produce so little beyond HS"?

I promise I am not trying to bash the guy or the program. From what I have seen and heard he is a guy I would love to run for. I was just curious as to how many runners have done much either collegiately or professionally... i.e. any York runners at the Olympic trials?

fig wrote:

Can somebody tell me some of his athletes who were great after high school. I know his whole philosophy is to give kids the best high school experience possible. I am not trying to knock him, I just had a friend who was trying to tell me how great his athletes have done after high school which I said was false.

Boy, it seems like we get these threads every few months. (What, Greenliner hasn't weighed in yet?) I suspect some time could be saved if the OPs would just use this site's search function, rather than starting new threads.

*Some* of Joe's guys have run great at the college/post-college level, particularly (as Greenliner will doubtless point out, at length) if you include levels other than DI.

*Most* of Joe's boys have not run in intercollegiate competition at all--just as is true of EVERY OTHER good high school program that I know of.

But your friend is right: Joe's runners, by and large, *have* done great after high school. Many have maintained a healthy habit of running (or other regular exercise), whether they compete or not; many have parlayed the millions (in scholarship monies that his athletes have accumulated) into great educations from the country's top colleges and universities; many have become productive professionals and educators and other working people, who've drawn on what they learned from their time on the team to raise their families and to gain success in their occupations.

I coached for 25 years and I would be proud to have had one tenth of his success in developing teams and people.

Yeah, I'm getting a little tired of this too. Joe Newton is a high school coach. His job is indeed to "give kids the best high school experience possible." He seems to do pretty well at that--arguably the best of any HS coach in the country.

I understand what the threadstarter's question was. His friend was doubtless referring to running success at the Div. I and professional levels. I'm sure that Joe could lay out, at length, the DI/pro success of the guys he's had, and I'm also sure that in raw numbers it matches the success of virtually any other high school.

If you're looking for the _percentage_ of his guys who go on to that success--sorry, that's not a fair comparison. The whole point is that he gets ~100 guys every year who probably would never have run at another school (and a dozen or so who would have). Looking for post-HS greatness from guys like that is not a fair way to evaluate York's program.

By the way, I don't think individual runners' post-HS greatness is the fair way to evaluate *any* high school's program. "Building kids for the future" is not the primary job of a high school coach, and frankly I think it's the copout for a lot of coaches who've never matched Joe's success.

dutch.. wrote:

CoachB wrote:

How many athletes have come through any program and had success collegiately? Perhaps you could frame the question as "How does Joe Newton get guys who don't have collegiate talent to become high school state champions year in and year out?"

Sorry, if you are a HS state champion then you have collegiate talent. Sick of hearing how he turned a bunch of misfits into runners. The program is popular with 100 plus kids each year.

The question should be "how does a program with 100 plus kids on it's team each year produce so little beyond HS"?

No, you are the one who doesn't get it. Few athletes from any program go in to run collegieately. If most of these kids from York who don't run in college had been in another program, they probably would have been much slower and not learned many valuable lessons. Rather than being the #7 man on a York state championship team, maybe they would have been the #2 or #1 guy on a crappy team and would have run a minute slower. Maybe they would not have even run at all.

Until someone can post hard statistics on the percentage of athletes that run collegiatley, and then compare it with York's #s, these threads are moot.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but didn't Joe only coach xc, just one season per year with these kids. That means they run with a different coach for track. maybe the track coach is the one responsible for the success of the xc teams. Anyone who knows distance running knows that it is a long process of consistant training throughout the the year, a one season coach can't be responsible for development over a period of a year, can he?

WOW! some of you guys are so disillusioned! This team has 200 kids and have had huge numbers for so long! yet, they have what? one really good collegiate runner (sage) that went through 4 years of this nuts coaching. pathetic and sad. don't play the "you don't know him or his runners" card. i do, i have met him and many of his runners. he's a nut, nice guy, but a total nut. he drives around in a golf cart at xc races because he's so old and curses at his athletes. he runs them into the ground. sage quit running all together at the age of what? like 22 he was so beat. he retired from track a couple years ago, but their runners are still coached by his philosophy. in fact, charlie kern, the distance track coach and product of the system just resigned so i don't know whats next.

First off, anyone with an author name of "woow" already gives the red flag that this person is "disilluioned!" Second of all, he does run his runners into the ground, but if you actually "knew" the runners from a post collegiate perspective, many are academically focused and find that the experience while running at York High School probably won't be adopted on a collegiate level, and not that it makes them better than others, but it may be just a preference. Finally, Sage retired for a bit to get a head start on his career, but then came back into the professional running circuit running for Coach Gagliano up at the Oregon Track Club and in case you haven't noticed he hit a provisional time in the 1500 for the Olympic trials, something you can only dream of to be honest buddy.

It does seem like he didn't care about burning his athletes out. Doing well in high school is great, but obviously there are hopefully bigger and better things down the road.

As a HS coach I believe that it is my responsibility to make the experience as positive as possible. But, I do believe that I should take into consideration that many of these runners will continue to run in college and continue to develop.

If that means they are not the best they can possibly be in HS but continue to develop in College or beyond then that is OK.

The real question is why is it that he has as many kids running post high school as he does. Name another high school program that has as many post high school runners. Please name one. Newton has good teams but rarely what would be called great ones. The Dettmans while good HS runners were not great, 413, 912 guys.

If you had ever run in college you would know that it is the rare exception that goes on to greatness. It is not that Joe is doing something wrong, its that you are not smart enough to understand that only a couple of guys 2,3 maybe 5 go onto greatness in the whole country. So we start with with 50,000 to 75,000 boys for each grade level. At the end of high school York has one maybe two guys that are in the top 100 runners each year. Out of that top 100 5 become really great world class runners. Joe Newton is a failure and a bad coach because he does not have a kid that he is coaching become a world class runner. When his kids get to college they are coached by someone else. Maybe it is a failure of the college coaches.

Joe Newton is a credit all coaches who care about the kids that run. He pushes the kids to be good runners and tries to instill the need to be good human beings. He might not coach by the book on great coaching that all you haters have written, but until you do better you should show this man the respect that he deserves.

I did not go to York and I current coach against his teams. I hope that when I am done coaching that I can have half the positive impact on kids as he has had.

I don't know much about the York program, other than references here, and elsewhere on the successes, and Coach Newton's involvement in Vigil's Distance Running Summit.

But the quotes above such as: "By the way, I don't think individual runners' post-HS greatness is the fair way to evaluate *any* high school's program. 'Building kids for the future' is not the primary job of a high school coach, and frankly I think it's the copout for a lot of coaches who've never matched Joe's success;" and running kids into the ground, burnout, etc. are more indicative of what's wrong with scholastic sports, as opposed to what's right.

The myopic expediency of winning races now has trickled down to youth programs as well, that are typically directed by high school coaches and/or adults whose last experience was hammering away every day in high school. With that said, those in-the-know would have to clarify how applicable or truse those above quotes are regarding the York program. I see it all over the country in youth and high school, but can't speak to Newton specifically.

Couldn't the same things essentially be said about Pat Tyson at Mead? How many sub 9 minute high school 3200m runners has he had up there, and yet it is very hard to think of any significant collegiate, much less post-collegiate, success from former Mead runners. The Davis brothers are all that come to mind, but only Matt had any collegiate success, though he was injured most of his collegiate career and had outrageous natural talent.

Is this a trait of all traditionally successful high school programs? The kids get used up in high school and never get to the next level?

And if so, is that because the high school coaches (Tyson, Newton) developed them incorrectly, or because most of their high school athletes didn't have world class talent, but what talent they had those coaches developed completely in high school?

How is it possible to develop a runners talent completely before they are out of HS? Do you really believe that is possible, most would say that a male reaches physical maturity in their late twenties.

As a HS coach I take more pride in the number of my athletes that continue to run in college and beyond than I do in the State Championships we have won.