Doug soles greatest coach of all time?

Who? I am not kidding who is he?

When your school enrollment is 3500, you better be good!

Funny wrote:

When your school enrollment is 3500, you better be good!

Because every school with over 3500 students is good.

You mean WhINe, don’t you?

coach wrote:

Funny wrote:

When your school enrollment is 3500, you better be good!

Because every school with over 3500 students is good.

No, but if you are good at recruiting and get 150 kids on the team, any training will produce 7 good guys/girls.

His training is out there, it’s just super hard, pretty high mileage. Of course you’ll get a great varsity crew with numbers like that.

High school cross country is a numbers game. Big team + competent coaching usually works wonders.

I mean not to crap on the guy, but the head girls coach from Carmel (Indiana) did a podcast with Ben Roasario and he basically sounded clueless when it came to training. Yet they win state every year and go to nxn all the time. Huge team though.

He gets a lot out of his athletes in high school. That's impressive.

What's not impressive is what they do when they get to college. No, not impressive at all.

Coach Soles’ longevity and competitive record certainly put him in the pantheon of great California High School coaches. Without worrying about who is the greatest of all time, it is worth mentioning that a couple of recently retired coaches: Don Norford from Long Beach Poly and Lee Webb from James Logan certainly belong in there as well. Coach Webb did a lot more than just win, although as the earlier post points out both of these coaches also had very large teams and very large schools.

Not sure it’s fair to criticize a high school coach for his athletes not improving in college without considering who their college coaches were.

1. It’s easier to improve an under developed athlete than a well developed athlete.

2. To improve a well developed athlete, the college coach needs to be at least as good or better than the high school coach.

Anyone capable of naming the best single coach ever is certainly brighter than I could ever hope to be.

It’s certainly ok to ask whether he’s a great coach though. What makes a coach great is strong organizational skills, a high degree of integrity, effective communication, and being someone who can create a rising tide that lifts all the boats on his/her team. If people disagree with his methods or believe he’s in a position where it’s easy to be good, none of that is very relevant. My impression of Coach Soles is that he’s a great coach because he meets what I consider to be the criteria of a great coach. Not all winning programs have coaches who meet that definition, at least not in my opinion, so it’s not necessarily true that winning = great coach.

Fwiw, I think Soles is great. Out of the California coaches. I have always found him and Paragas to be especially effective. I really like reading and/or seeing their thoughts and interviews.

I think your missing out on many jr. High coaches that gave most of us our start. Oh sure you forgot their name but some of them deserve credit for keeping you off of drugs.

Problem is, I can't think of ONE Great Oak athlete who's had any significant college success. It's very possible I missed one or more, but none come to mind.

Seems to me they get to college burned out with no room for improvement. And skip the nonsense that none of the GO kids' college coaches aren't as good as Soles and that's the sole(s) reason they don't improve. That's just silly.

Problem is, I can't think of ONE Great Oak athlete who's had any significant college success. It's very possible I missed one or more, but none come to mind.

You haven't missed any, they have not done much on the next level. I'm sure Doug will read this, so how about it coach why is that?

lkmnfvbn wrote:

Problem is, I can't think of ONE Great Oak athlete who's had any significant college success. It's very possible I missed one or more, but none come to mind.

You haven't missed any, they have not done much on the next level. I'm sure Doug will read this, so how about it coach why is that?

I've had a similar pattern. Highly structured environment, ambitious team, fun trips, etc.

Sometimes (often?) college doesn't replicate that and the magic isn't there.

It isn't an Xs and Os thing. It is that the reason why they do it isn't strictly about the running.

Just my guess.

the american fork boys last year were really good and improved coming into college

Meh, Meh wrote:

Problem is, I can't think of ONE Great Oak athlete who's had any significant college success. It's very possible I missed one or more, but none come to mind.

Seems to me they get to college burned out with no room for improvement. And skip the nonsense that none of the GO kids' college coaches aren't as good as Soles and that's the sole(s) reason they don't improve. That's just silly.

You didn’t miss anyone. They go to college and don’t get much better. But, high school coaches like him probably don’t care about the long term success of his athletes. Just run them into the ground to get yourself the glory is the name of the game. That alone doesn't make him a bad high school coach.

The boys and girls teams at FM are rarely large.

Their girls team won NXN every year between 2006 and 2017, except for 2013.

Their boys team went to NXN every year since 2008 and won it 2014.

Both teams are coached by Aris.

Doesn't Ken Reeves (former Nordhoff and now Foothill Tech XC and Track coach) have the most California state titles of any coach in any sport?

lkmnfvbn wrote:

Problem is, I can't think of ONE Great Oak athlete who's had any significant college success. It's very possible I missed one or more, but none come to mind.

You haven't missed any, they have not done much on the next level. I'm sure Doug will read this, so how about it coach why is that?

Doug is reading this but chose to answer on twitter instead. We should be celebrating our great HS coaches, not tearing them down. This sport is so self-defeating from the bottom to the top that sometimes I want to switch to competitive drinking.

People tear down what they are jealous of. Coach Soles consistently wins and gets huge turnouts for his teams, so he must be doing something terrible, right? I wish more coaches would do such terrible things to get results like Coach Soles.