Musings from a track and field coach

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 ...

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...