I have a question for anyone intersted in answering. I am finish my teaching degree (PE and Health) and my minor in coaching this spring. From there I intend to settle in a school and build a strong athletic program. I live in Montana and the schools I am intersted in are very small compared to anything most of you have even imagined. I personally came from a high school of 100 students. I was a three sport athlete and most kids at these schools participate in at least three sports. I am a basketball guy and that is wher my primary coaching interests lie, but I have also always been very passionate about sprinting and would ideally like to coach the sprints in T&F at the school I settle into.
My question is this, in a situation where most athletes are coming off a basketball season, and the high school track season is only about 14 weeks long, how would you set up your training progression? What type and duration of GPP? Differences for 100m, 200m and 400m runners? To score points at this level your sprinters need to be pretty busy, at least running two seperate individual events and a relay. Would you train all athletes to be able to compete in the 400? How would you set up your strength training?
Just looking for some input beacasue I am very excited about coaching using the concepts I have learned on this forum. From my own experince and observation, hardly anyone around here knows how to train sprinters. Any input would be appreciated.
First off, congrats. Second, if you remove Montana and insert Illinois, my early lift is identical to your.
I now am a strength coach at a high school so I hope i can help.
Forget about periodization and sport specific training with regards to weight training in a small high school. I wasted way too much time trying to be cute in programming. Luckily you are in a small area so you don’t have to compete with training facilities. Keep your strength training simple and progressive.
In-season back off a lot as the season progresses. Lift 3 times a week in pre-season and early season. Then drop it to 2. As the season progresses, reduce the amount of lifts required. You’ll never get your basketball players to do much if any leg training deep in-season. I’ve reduced your lifts down from 6 to 4 per session in January. 15 minutes in and out, you won’t get any more than that, and that’s ok.
Again, don’t overcomplicate training. You are lucky, in that, because the are in-season playing so many sports, you have them under your control more often. A consistant program even at 2 days a week can really result in progress throughout the year. Don’t get greedy, do less than you think you need to do.
You can pm me on this also if you’d like. I love starting programs in high schools and i have a lot of “what not to do” experience:) .
There are several articles floating around the net about how to plan and program a 13-14 week high school season, from the first day of allowed practice to the state meet and these seem to at least be written by people who’ve had at least some symbolance of extended success coaching at the high school level. That’d probably be a good place to start.
Also, there are quite a few high school/youth coaches on this forum and i’m sure they’d be willing to lend a hand.
Another point, basketball is a pretty good GPP and you might be able to hasten things up in your progression a bit more and do more specfic work just a thought.
also, the 400 is probably a good spot to focus alot of your efforts with a winning program, espically with weaker levels of competition(and pulling no punches, montana fits that bill perfectly), 400 runners can move up, down and also probably do some jumping for team points as well if they’re instructed how.
the main key for any successful high school program, beyond good coaching, is obviously alot of participants. The high school dynastys of both track and XC rely alot on tons of participants. I’d focus as much effort in getting people out to run as anything else if i were trying to build a successful program.
I coach the T&F team at my school of 150. There are only about 12 high schools in our zone, but we came third last year at the Zone Championship with only 8 kids, and almost ever other school is 500-1000.
I don’t attribute our relative success to my coaching, but to the fact that I had almost all of the school’s best athletes competing.
If you are at a similarly small school, I suspect that your biggest issue will not be related to your training program, but getting your athletes to participate. Because there are so few people, you don’t have many athletic kids to draw from and if they aren’t participating, not even some of the world class coaches on this forum could help much. Some of the things I’ve done to recruit the kids…
-Show videos of some world records (field events always look more impressive to teenagers) or recent events before the season starts.
-If you have excellent control of kids and a loud voice, bring out a couple throwing implements and let them play around at lunch. This requires extremely close supervision of the kids doing the throwing and kids who might wander toward the throwing area.
-If you are decent at some or all of running/jumping/throwing, try “organizing” a mini-meet at your school with 3 events and offer small prizes for anyone that can beat you (in whichever events you think you’d beat almost everyone), but some good events would be 60m, Long Jump, Javelin. If that doesn’t pan out, try to get some of the senior kids playing around with Long Jumping in public view. Younger athletes will then know that it’s ok to do track&field.
You are absolutely right about the particpation factor. That is the absolute key in these situations. In this state, schools are seperated into 4 classes based on enrollment (C, B, A, AA) The powerhouse programs have the most kids out for teams. It is easy to get kids on board after you start winning championships, but building it to that point is the key. At my old high school they added freaking golf to the spring season. It is ridiculous to see the best athletes in the school golfing while the few track kids get dominated at track meets. They need to understand that the skills in track and field are the foundations of athletic ability (running, jumping, throwing) and will make them better football and basketball players.
I like your ideas for recruiting there interests, excpecially the beat your coach idea. Basically if any kids in this state could beat me in the 60, or longjump they could contend to be the state champion. I don’t throw anything for shit so they might get me there.
Anymore ideas like that would be great. Thanks again.
With a short season (12-13) weeks, would there be a concern for mesocycles? If doing 3, 4 week mesocycles, how are low, med., and high weeks created? In other words, what changes in each.