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I need to write something

OK, I am falling down on my resolution to post here every other week. Although I have been doing a lot of writing. Just for classes and grant applications. So I want to talk about another topic today that has nothing to do with track coaching. OK, it has little to do with track coaching. It will also be less tightly written and more rambling than I like. Lately I have been running into so many instances of what I am choosing call "expert syndrome" in which people attack or put down someone or something in order to establish their bona fides as an expert at something. Upon reflection, I realized that this has bothered me for a long time in a couple of different arenas that intersect my professional life. The first is in programming. I have a general rule that when someone says that a particular operating system or programming language "sucks" or "is terrible" I pretty much want to ignore them. It happens a lot with students. We are a Mac district and ev
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Good Coaching Starts With Why?

So I recently looked back at my old logs to see what I did in my first couple of years of coaching. I must confess, I cringed. Not that it was terrible. But there were so many things I was doing simply because that’s how I was coached, without any rationale for why I did them beyond some really vague ideas. I know this because I kept notes along with the the training logs. This lead me to look at some of my lesson plans for my first couple of years of teaching. These were actually a lot closer to good (though very far from what I would currently call optimally useful) than the coaching plans. I asked myself why? 
 I think I have a good answer. We knew a lot more about the content of mathematics in the early 90s, when I learned to be a teacher, than we did about how physiology related to training. The first thing I noticed is that my distance training plans were definitely better than my sprint training plans. Not good, just better. Probably because Dick Michaels and Tom Mulligan spent
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What is (and isn't) wrong with soccer in the U.S.?

I have coached a variety of sports for the past 27 years. I think soccer, basketball, swimming, football, track, cross country, and robotics covers it. Though the last three, with over 60 seasons worth, constitute the bulk of my coaching experience. I have been thinking about doing more writing, and have been thinking about coming up with something like a coherent model for my coaching. Since it’s 2018, I naturally thought I would do something revolutionary and share my thoughts in a blog. In any event, I am going to kick off this blog about my cross country and track & field coaching with some thoughts about soccer. Maybe not the best idea, but it’s where my head took me, so there I am. The World Cup in Russia is starting, obviously without the United States. And we just got the announcement that we will have a joint USA-Canada-Mexico World Cup in 2026. So soccer is on a lot of minds. Truth be told, it has been on a lot of minds in the U.S. for a while. Since we failed to qualify
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