Three times a year, at pre-season coaches’ meetings, my district Athletic Director instructs those assembled on the most positive procedures for cutting athletes following team try-outs.

It is a decent directive because for many athletes that moment will be their exit interview from scholastic sports. Few cut athletes return to reenact the Michael Jordan anecdote. To be sure, a lucky few make the team a second time around (the ones we laud at sports banquets for their perseverance) and another small percentage successfully find other sport teams. As the statistics demonstrate, however, the vast majority of cast-offs drift away from scholastic sports altogether.  This raises the basic paradox of high school sport, which touts itself as a teacher of character and positive values while systematically denying that learning opportunity to a great percentage of its students.

Ironically, that paradox is born in the promises of modern youth sport.  A fellow coach once described “the great soccer pyramid hoax” where kids and parents are taught if you start early, join every youth program available and, still young, focus exclusively on soccer, then you too will eventually step into the varsity stadium, bound for a college scholarship. Reality, however, limits the seats on that varsity bus, and through the years team cuts steadily unload the less talented, dashing dreams and denying sports opportunities along the way

To be fair, my coaching friend was probably describing any popular high school sport where this process of ‘narrowing the field’ is no accident. The functionalist theory of sport suggests this selection method is useful socially, teaching young adults the realities of the working world where competition for coveted roles is both commonplace and desired. Being cut, therefore, is supposedly a good thing because it prepares young adults for the demands of the marketplace. I doubt, however, that rationale goes over well with a sixteen year old who participated in every camp, made all the previous scholastic teams and faithfully attended all the ‘optional’ out-of-season intramural programs only to be shown the door after varsity try-outs.

The conflict theory of sport presents a less charitable view, one where scholastic sport is seen more for how it limits athletic participation through strict selection rules. That view reaches its macabre conclusion in school districts where making the team is no longer determined at try-outs but by whether an athlete participates in those “voluntary” pre-season intramural programs. Growing numbers of potential athletes, assuming they can’t master the intramural try-out process, don’t even bother, cutting themselves beforehand. It’s a tidy method of reinforcing the exclusivity of scholastic sports.

The obvious solution to such exclusivity is also the most radical: eliminate team try-outs and make all scholastic sports no-cut. Opponents argue that the popular team sports will be deluged by too many eager competitors and become unworkable; that ‘opening’ sports to everyone will degrade their competitiveness and value. Most are unaware that at Sagewood Middle School in Colorado, Francis Parker School in California and other no-cut athletic programs around the country, the true definition of sport as “physical activity engaged in for pleasure” combines successfully with public education goals promoting fitness and health for ALL students. Most also forget that properly run no-cut sports such as Track & Field have already shown us how it’s done.

          Regardless of one’s position, in a era when 17.1% of American youth are overweight or obese and where suicide has grown to the third leading cause of death among young adults 15-24 years of age, it’s time to reconsider ways of providing the positive aspects of scholastic sport to more students—not just the well-adjusted, well-supported average or elite athletes who can “make the cut.” It’s time to stop simply applauding divisional, sectional or state championship teams and start asking what those programs actually do for all the potential team members they cut, students who might, as the saying goes, need the sport more than the sport needs them. Right now, for too many school districts, the answer to that question is: not much.

Not So Lonely Anymore

A common portrayal of distance runners has been that of solitary, disaffected individuals who follow the beats of those different drummers. That overly romantic conception found its most popular expression in the 1959 classic, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, by writer Alan Sillitoe. Sillitoe’s protagonist was a British youth, Colin Smith, who had been sentenced to a boy’s reformatory for robbing a bakery. In the story, Smith’s distance running talent is discovered, and he subsequently revels in special opportunities at long, unsupervised training runs as the school’s prized competitor. Unfortunately, his rebellious individuality ultimately dooms him with the reformatory officials.

It’s 2007, however, and Sillitoe would have a hard time writing about the current crop of scholastic distance runners. Far from the angry, introverted model of runner embodied by Colin Smith, today’s distance athletes are about as gregarious as they come. They laugh, they joke--and they talk too much when coaches explain the day’s workout. If running’s in their blood, it’s an affectation they’re always willing to share. They behave, believe it or not, just like typical teenagers.

In this state at least, instead of robbing bakeries, our runners are hitting the books. On the New York State Scholar-Athlete Team rankings for the previous three seasons(Spring 06/Fall 06/Winter 06-07) girls running sports earned the top state team-averages of all sports. Wheatley’s girls track team had a 99.599 team average; the Greece Athena Cross-Country team earned a 99.070 team-average for the fall season, and during the cold winter months, the Smithtown H.S. girls indoor track team was booking to a 99.515 team-average. Boys running sports, meanwhile, were the top team of scholar-athletes in the fall(Clinton Cross-Country, 99.658) and second in both the winter and spring seasons.

If distance runners stand accused of being self-torturing egg-heads, then there are a lot more of them out there than previously thought. The National Federation of High Schools(NFHS) survey of 2005/06 school sports participation found that of all US girls sports, Track and Field enjoyed the second highest participation rate, with 15,417 programs and 439,200 athletes nation-wide, trailing only basketball. Cross-Country was 5^th in the number of programs(12,989), ahead of soccer, tennis and swimming. Track & Field and Cross-Country for the boys were also the 2^nd and 6^th most popular programs nationally. So much for disaffected youth….

The ‘jogging craze’ of the 70’s and 80’s had a largely beneficial effect on the popularity of running sports, though schools have been generally lax in promoting them as no-cut, life-long sports whose purposes dove-tail nicely with school mission statements. Today’s runners, however, don’t sulk about that. Here in central New York, their numbers continue to grow, their programs keep expanding and their visibility improves yearly(a team National Championship by the F-M girls cross-country team in 2006 certainly helped). Anyone who thinks distance runners only ply solitary miles back in the hidden woods has not watched those same runners push the long Manhattan Cross-Country Invitational finish through a gauntlet of screaming fans and teammates. We have, however, a shortage of local officials for the growing number of spring track meets and invitationals. And our Indoor track teams now confront the loss of their only readily available meet facility, S.U.’s Manley Field House, just at a time when they’ve had it bulging at the seams for noisy winter weeknight competitions. Support has obviously not kept pace with the growth of scholastic running sports.

Getting that proper and well-deserved support is the biggest challenge facing scholastic runners today. ‘Lonely’ is surely no longer their problem.

In Garrison Keeler's fictional idyll, Lake Wobegon, all the children are "above average." Those folks know. Here in America, average isn't good enough. And these days that certainly extends to scholastic sports.

"Average" is, of course, a subjective statistic. If you make the Olympics and come home with no medal, you are merely an "average" Olympian. If the vaunted Saratoga High School girls cross country team ends the season ranked second in the nation, they haven't even had an "average" year. And look what's happening because Barry Bonds wasn't satisfied being an "average" superstar.

In scholastic sports, "average" sports programs toil in anonymity, gathering nary a stingy paragraph in the local paper and often the ire of fans who expect winners and sectional crowns. Those teams are, however, the ones that fulfill the true intent of scholastic athletics as ably as any state champions. And though we invariably focus on the undefeated and the state top-10's, our average teams, those scholastic silent majorities, are the true foundation for successful high school sports.

That's the way it should be - and for one uncomfortable reason: it's only sports. Coming from a coach, I understand that is blasphemy and I'm due before the Boosters Inquisition soon. But winning as an ultimate measure of scholastic sports success often describes nothing but the passage of time. Good teams come and go. With coaching changes or administrative shifts in priorities, great programs do also. The basic values of scholastic sports, however, can endure. The dirty little secret of scholastic sports is that most athletes don't base their choices on whether they will play for a winning team, a losing team or an "average" team. Coaches may expect their teams to be terribly upset by losing and euphoric about winning. Parents may also, while the fans in the stands typically demand a thirst for victory. And the athletes, of course, understand winning is more fun, but for them the primary requirement is successful and enjoyable participation through their best efforts - not W's and L's.

Consider Amber. A neophyte 100-meter high hurdler, she would certainly admit she wasn't the fastest on our track team. During one meet, a misstep propelled her toward a collision with a hurdle, forcing her to literally stop short halfway through the race. She could have quit at that point; I'd watched others do so. Instead, with her opponents already speeding toward the finish, she stepped back, started up again and recorded her slowest time of the season. Dejected, she slumped off the track where my assistant coach stopped her. "That was great," he declared. She looked at him blankly, so he explained. "You could have quit, but you didn't. You finished. That was a great effort." She left smiling and ready to run again.

Alternately, I've stood in the warm twilight of a June evening in North Carolina, watching my 2,000-meter steeplechaser crossing the national championship finish line a few tenths of a second shy of sixth place and recognition as a high school All-American. Trudging off the track, totally spent, she gasped, "I had no more gears, coach." What do you say to something like that except, "Terrific, Kerry. Enjoy the moment."

In both circumstances, winning or losing was irrelevant.

Adults need to effectively coach and guide young athletes, of course, but we should also follow the lead of those athletes by organizing sports to elicit not just wins and losses but best efforts. That would prove an interesting paradigm shift, one that quantifies and then emphasizes effort and the development of athletic potential, rather than records or sectional championships, as the best measure of scholastic athletic programs. What might high school "average" look like then?

It is true that on the professional (and now even the collegiate) level, success is primarily about whether you win or lose. Perhaps that is why so many forms of cheating are condoned, or even promoted, on those levels. But scholastic athletics could - and should - remain the one arena where it still matters most how you play the games.

You don’t to wait long for the latest disturbing story about youth sports. One month it’s a radio spot on a coach publicly berating young players. The next it’s a newspaper article on a high school athlete who has died from steroid use. Wait another month and you’ll see the latest home video of fans attacking fans or parents attacking officials at a Pee-Wee football game. The lost innocence of youth sports is, by now, old news. And whether you like Bodie Miller or not, when he stated that we’ve taken American kids away from sports by taking away the fun, he was dead-center correct. The organization Youthfirst reported that startling statistic that 35% of kids quit after a single year of organized sports and 85% drop out between the ages of 10 and 17.  (Youthfirst.com)

 There is no single cause for that current problem in youth athletics and there is no simple solution either. But coaches are clearly an integral part of any solution, and because the vast majority of young athletes gain their first exposure to organized sports through coaches, these people—you people—can do a lot to give youth sports back to kids.

 There are, of course, many books and videos addressing successful youth sports coaching, but in my experience it comes down to two basic principles, two ideas that incorporate most of what good coaches try to accomplish with young athletes. The first principle has to do with motivation:

 In 1974, I started teaching at an alternative school that integrated severally autistic students into classes with typical youngsters. It was hard work making it work, and during one after-school planning session teachers were voicing a lot of frustration about creating a group activity viable for all the kids involved. No strategy made sense; no solution seemed to really work. After haggling for a long while someone suggested that maybe it would be easier to not bother with a group activity. At that point, my head teacher and mentor, Joe Marusa, interrupted the discussion. “Before we do that,” he said, “I think we should stop and answer the question ‘WHY ARE WE HERE?”

 That’s also a good place for coaches to start. Answer the question: why am I here?  Why do I do this?  I think effective and well-intentioned coaching occurs whenever coaches are able to honestly state, “I’m here because I like kids, and I’m also here because I love this sport.”  And then, of course, act on that belief.

It sounds simple, but we’re only too aware of what happens when we get coaches who love the sport but don’t really appreciate the young athletes they instruct—or when we get coaches who like being around kids but don’t know anything about the sports they are coaching.  You should like the kids and love the sport.

 Incorporated into that principle is the sometimes messy notion of loyalties. Good coaches, I think, maintain at least two strong loyalties—one to their athletes, the other to their sport. Typically, those two loyalties are complimentary—but not always.  What should a coach do, for instance, in the case of Robbie?

 Robbie was a learning disabled student that I encouraged to take up competitive running.  He enjoyed three successful years on our cross-country and track teams. He earned varsity letters and showed improvement each season. Just as importantly, he made friends and learned a lot about discipline, effort and operating on a team.  Just before Robbie’s senior season of Cross-Country, however, his father informed me that Robbie wanted to take a part-time job after school to gain work experience. The father said Robbie would have to miss two practices each week in order to work and would that be possible?

 I told him I would consider his request—and I did, trying to balance those two loyalties, one to Robbie, the other to the sport of Varsity Cross-Country. The next day, before I gave the father the answer he didn’t want, I sat down with Robbie. I explained to him that he would need to make a choice. I agreed with him that work would be a valuable experience. I also told him that Varsity Cross-Country had been, and could continue to be, valuable to him also. I then explained how, for a variety of social and physiological reasons, 60% Varsity Cross-Country would not in my opinion be as valuable. Aside from our team and school rules about Varsity sport participation, I felt that making him a 60% team member would have done him a disservice and taught him little about success in the real world. 

 Understandably, the father disagreed, and then as a former strong supporter of West Genesee Cross-Country he accused me of running an elitist program. Ironically, however, it was Robbie who seemed to understand. After thinking it over, he told me that working was more important for him at that time and that he had decided to take the after-school job. I didn’t want to lose him, but I could only admire him for making a difficult and mature decision. I thank him and wished him the best of luck.

 My second basic principle for coaching is summed up by the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Everson. Emerson wrote: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful. O.K. so what did Emerson know about coaching football or baseball or basketball? Nothing, of course, especially since those sports didn’t exist in his day. Emerson did understand, though, that we live in a world of people, and it is the manner in which you interact with people that will largely determine whether you’re a success or a failure or somewhere in between.

 The same goes in coaching. Simply put, successful coaching is about teaching and winning and losing in a way that’s ultimately useful to your athletes. Participating in a sport is important of course, but what coaches help athletes take away from a sport is often more important. Not one of the thousand plus athletes I’ve coached has ever gone on to make a living by competitive running, but a lot of them have since me told how much they learned their high school sports experiences.  

 Coaches, then, can be useful in three ways:

You can be useful by knowing your sport thoroughly and by teaching it properly to your athletes. That’s a lot harder than most of the critical fans think, but you don’t have to be a former superstar to coach well. In fact, it is true that often the best athletes don’t make the best coaches.

 You can also be useful by knowing your athletes individually and by understanding their age group. Have I kept athletes on my team with 57% attendance averages because they needed the sport more than the sport needed them? Yes I have. Is there a vast difference between coaching “fundamentals and fun” to 7 year old kids and coaching high schoolers and all their attendant social and academic pressures? Of course.  But the coaching job is the same: understand your individual athletes and respect the learning needs of their age groups. 

 And you can be useful by understanding that sometimes—when push comes to shove—you change the rules. I wrote recently about Nicole. She was an incredibly talented young runner who might have been one of the best ever at West Genesee. That never happened, however. By the time she was running Varsity Cross-Country as a freshman, her father was already talking to me about the college athletic scholarship she was going to win. If Nicole wasn’t running up to his satisfaction, he would yell at her during races. As the pressures mounted, her performances dropped. At one invitational, I placed her in a Junior Varsity race to take some of that pressure off her, and the father publicly argued with me about demoting her. He would not listen, and things got worse for Nicole. And then there I was, sitting with her one October afternoon as she waited to be picked up late from practice. She was crying. She said she couldn’t stand it anymore. Cross-Country was no fun; it had become just pressure and arguments and oppressive expectations. So I broke one of those cardinal, unwritten rules of coaching. I told her she had my permission to quit.  It was, I thought, the only useful thing I could do for her at that point. Nicole didn’t quit, but though she decided to stick out the season, she never joined another West Genesee team.  

 Situations like that are by far the most discouraging moments of coaching—but they are also the reason it’s important we know why we coach and exactly what we are trying to accomplish for young athletes.

 In the end, principled coaching is always worth the effort, and it will help you get it right most of the time.  Regardless of everything else going on, coaches can make sure they are doing it right. And if they do, their athletes will know--some sooner, and some later.

 I’ll close with a letter from Morgan, a former runner of mine, a graduate of St. Lawrence University now living in metropolitan New Jersey and working in a running store.

December 20, 2005

Hi V:

I like how I tell you that I’ll write to you and then I don’t. I’ve been so busy since I’ve gotten back—curse of retail in the Christmas season—plus, I got a position as a coach with a local catholic prep school(volunteer basis). I can say that the first time they called me coach I was pretty excited.

It was really nice to see you at the race for Thanksgiving, glad to hear that your team is shaping up so well. SLU is always recruiting—please spread the word or feel free to contact myself, Kerry, or the coaching staff with anybody who may remotely have an interest. I think SLU can win anyone over. Our facilities are now the best in DIII[(and there may be some coaching changes/restructuring)]

Which I guess is a really crappy segue into a discussion about coaching that I wanted to share with you. I greatly underappreciated you while I was in school and didn’t realize that not everyone has a first coach like you(or even a second for that matter). What you taught me helped me to self-diagnose when I was having a problem(and help others) and “the shoe thing” obviously stuck(it did help me land this job). I find a lot of your style in me and my leadership techniques and coaching methods. My running philosophy is different than anyone else that I’ve run with and met—the most valuable being training by listening to the connection between your body and mind. No one can define “comfortably hard” by a time; you have to feel it. Although I could hit any split demanded of me—my favorite workouts remain those in which you connect time, body and mind—that’s why I love racing so much. I hope that I can take what you and the SLU coaches taught me and transpose it to my new runners. Being around “young blood” and excitement can really refuel my love for the sport.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is thank you. I know that I thought and sometimes still do think that theatre and the arts are my passion, but I have realized that running is my passion and the other is my hobby. Thank you for instilling this love and having faith in me and my decisions. Sometimes I feel very few people understand, but seeing you in Baldwinsville made me feel better that I’m doing the right thing. Thanks again. Happy holidays and best of luck for the coming track season.

Morgan

And I thank all of you for the opportunity to be here this evening.

One of my most discouraging experiences of coaching was not the fault of any athlete.

On a clear, crisp October day, I sat with Nicole(not her real name) after cross-country practice, waiting for her ride home to arrive. A young runner with impressive potential, hers had been an oppressive season. Only an underclassman, her father had already boasted about the college athletic scholarship she would earn. He had argued with me publicly once about placing her in a junior varsity invitational race instead of varsity. At dual meets, he would scream at her to run faster with the leaders, so much so that following one race another concerned parent confronted him in the parking lot and they argued heatedly. On that pristine autumn afternoon, Nicole told me she couldn’t stand it any more; it was all pressure and no fun. Having failed to influence the parents, I did what I thought I never would: I told her she had my permission to quit. She instead hung on for the remainder of the season, but she never joined another team.

There are, of course, such stories from other sports--discouraging tales of formative sporting moments and experiences stolen from young athletes.

That from a parent on a sports forum. What’s ironic is that while too many parents and coaches can’t seem to understand what youth sports are for, an increasing number of kids get the picture and are responding with their feet: "Over 35% of the millions of children who play youth sports quit after the first year of competition. 85% of the children who continue to play dropped out of organized sports all together between the ages of 10 and 17." (Youth First: Why Kids Quit Sports, www.youthfirst.info)

A once silly question now begs to be seriously considered: who really ‘owns’ youth and scholastic sports these days?

Looking around, it’s sometimes hard to tell. The possessive excesses are spread across the spectrum of those affecting youth sports. Over-zealous parents on one end who refuse to step back and simply let their child enjoy practicing and competing. Travel teams, clubs and out-of-season programs on the other end that step in and literally seize control of the evenings and weekends of a family for months on end. And the middle landscape is wide enough for everything in between: unrestrained alumni plotting against Athletic Directors; parents dictating school athletic priorities; pee-wee football practices run like high school teams and high school coaches trying to replicate college programs; school boards micro-managing sports programs. It goes on. Too many young athletes today are living every one’s sporting dreams but their own.

If we really want to know, the kids will tell us what they want out of sports. Firstly, they want to participate, to play, to compete. The Josephson Institute of Ethics, in their Sportsmanship Survey of 2004, found the following: "72% of both males and females say they would rather play on a team with a losing record than sit on the bench for a winning team." Watching winning teammates from the sidelines probably isn’t the great benchwarmers character builder that we coaches and parents pretend it is. The University of Maine Sport & Coaching Initiative’s report, Sports Done Right, cites the following as a Core Principle for student-athletes: "Each student who meets the eligibility standards has the opportunity to participate and learn through sports." Their report recommends several practices that will promote that principle: 1. Proper school funding of all interscholastic and intramural sports; 2. Support of alternative athletic programs for athletes who are cut from teams or who choose not to try out for interscholastic teams: 3. Academic eligibility standards that better reflect the potentially positive effects of athletic involvement. Added to that list might be stronger school support of ‘no-cut’ sports.

Secondly, kids value enjoying their sports more than they value winning at their sports. That’s a hard concept for many coaches to swallow. According to the same Sportsmanship Survey, only one in five athletes felt they had to win in order to enjoy their sport. ‘Having fun’ is a very real objective in youth sports, especially in the pre-high school years. And a big part of the fun is, believe it or not, learning. While school teachers struggle daily to make learning exciting for students, sports seem to have that all worked out—as long as athletes are allowed the learning opportunities that sports provide. I have taught middle-school students who seemed to view long division lessons as a form of state-sponsored torture. But after school, those same students can’t get enough of down-and-out pass pattern drills. Both are basic skills. Watch any well-coached Modified sports team, and you will witness young athletes having a good time learning the fundamental skills of their sport. Aside from social reasons, it’s primarily why they are there. The Sports Done Right core principle in that regard states: "Learning and personal growth form the foundation for interscholastic and intramural sports." The word winning is missing from that formula.

Thirdly, athletes don’t want to feel excessively judged by others about their sports participation and sports efforts, whether that be by a coach, a parent or the demanding spectators in the stands. This is a fine line to tread because any decent coach maintains two loyalties. One is to the athletes; the other is to the sport. Sometimes the two don’t mesh, especially where 50% efforts or lackluster commitment can’t be greeted by coaches with the enthusiasm that some young athletes have been taught to expect for any of their efforts. Still, this is where the logical consequences of sports, whether it be playing time, competitive competence or simply making a team, can be the strongest teachers. Young athletes figure out their comparative abilities pretty quickly. It’s when adults try to pretend otherwise that the stage is set for parent-coach battles. And the losers are usually the athletes.

For some parents, it’s difficult to remain appropriately detached from a child’s sporting efforts, but one thing is certain: athletes don’t need a second coach at the dinner table each night. What they need is a parent who views sports as only a tool for improving the life of their child. To the extent that they assist their athlete’s teams while refraining from usurping the roles of the coach, they strengthen those programs and enhance their athlete’s sporting experiences. Some of my greatest parents have confessed to knowing nothing about the nuances of distance training. But they sure raised great kids, disciplined, self-assured, goal-oriented kids who were then capable of succeeding at competitive running.

One healthy trend is the move toward teaching more individual, potentially life-long, physical activities in high school physical education classes. But why wait for high school when too many have already been ‘taught’ that athletic success means only team-sports success and have drifted off in negative directions? An improved balance between team and individual physical education experiences in the elementary and middle school years would be better for all kids. Physical education teachers on those levels who have introduced students to snowshoeing, hiking or running are already demonstrating just that.

Unfortunately, some simply claim the solution is a return to those "good old days." Their calls are fueled by memories of riding the bike after school to the dusty, weed-infested local ball park with a chicken wire backstop and a left-field home run fence that doubles as boundary for the local cemetery. In that perfect world, kids are choosing up their own sides, cracking jokes while wacking line drives and arguing ever close call until someone realizes it’s supper time and the bike tires spin as the place empties out in 40 seconds flat….

Yeah, well, those days are irrevocably gone. And they weren’t so "good" if you were a girl and not allowed to play with the boys. The next best thing is to give back to kids as much of scholastic and youth sports as possible. For adults, that means giving up some of what was never really theirs in the first place.

They sure know how to yank my runners’ chains. Any time one of the scholastic distance runners I coach gets dragged into a silly my-sport’s-better-than-your-sport argument with a non-runner and makes a loyal attempt to defend our arcane pursuit, the opposition can usually declare checkmate with seven simple words: yeah, but running is not a sport.

Talk about incendiary comments. You may as well tell a distance runner that he or she was switched at birth. Ever see a competitive runner froth at the mouth before racing?

When that ultimate put-down is indignantly described the next before a team practice, I try to sympathize. "Invite them to a week of our practices," I’ll offer, knowing full well that a week of hill repeats, segmented thresholds, surge intervals, a long run and races would simply reinforce why such fools utter their seven word invectives in the first place.

The truth is, they have a point.

As a competitive runner pre-dating Nike Waffle Trainers and as an long-time observer of the steady rise of team sports and the so-called ‘soccer revolution’ in America, it’s painfully obvious to me why your average scholastic students don’t flock to the no-cut, life-long sports of track or cross-country. Forget the mumbo-jumbo about adolescent lemming behavior. Disregard the soccer/basketball/lacrosse parents burning up with ‘Scholarship Fever.’ Ignore the rising average weight of American youth. From the perspective of the athletes themselves, there are other more potent reasons why most teens would rather eat dirt daily than run competitively.

If allowed, football players would probably wear their helmets to General Physics and lacrosse sticks would clog the classroom aisles of every northeastern United States middle school. Girls would style softball gloves into pocketbooks and soccer shin guards would become de rigueur apparel for navigating crowded hallways. Especially for young athletes, one of the great charms of any sport is its toys--all the ‘stuff’ necessary to play that particular game: shoulder pads, goggles, batting gloves, ad infinitum.

Distance runners, by comparison, are pathetically equipped. No ornaments--the physics of the sport prohibit it. For runners, less is more. How anti-consumer is that? Sure, they have the neat, removable spikes they can fiddle with, but try walking those weapons into any school and see how expertly janitors can gang tackle. For young adults, the apparel and toys of a sport are powerful symbols of identity, and the trouble is, runners just can’t muster up enough paraphernalia that shouts ‘look at me, I’m a distance runner.’ That’s a problem, a big problem.

Nobody wants to admit it, but we live for our sports rules. The more complex the rules of the game, the better. We prove our cerebral fitness not by our personal great books lists or analytical political discussions around the dinner table, but by how complicated we can make our sports. Consider, for instance, the myriad of rules regulating any particular football play: required line positions; time-between-plays; permitted backfield movement and blocking angles; designated pass receivers; allowable downfield hits, ad nauseum. Here, by comparison, are all the ‘directions’ you need to compete in a 1500 meter race: 1. Don’t start before the gun; 2. Don’t get in anybody else’s way; 3. Stay on the track. Not very impressive. Take a look at the American Federations Rules & Regulations for Track & Cross-Country. It’s a puny little thing. Face it, running the 1500 meter--or any other distance running event--can never become a mass sport. Not enough rules.

Here’s a familiar scene: Two rival cross-country runners at a Sectional Championship figuratively beat each other up for 3.1 miles. They fly from the start, neither giving any quarter. One surges, the other counters. One charges the hill, the other doggedly pushes the carry-over to cover the gap. Shoulder to shoulder for the last mile, they punch in a long, furious finish sprint and barely wobble out of the finish chute erect. Epic sporting battle, great contest of wills. So then what do they do? Does one sulk off to lick his wounds and secretly vow revenge while the other soaks up the adulation of an adoring crowd? No, they stand around congratulating and admiring each other’s effort like best buddies. It’s practically un-American, something not allowed in most athletic venues. Truth be told, nothing irritates the free-market capitalistic system more than the notion that cooperative competition often leads to superior performances. Distance runners suffer for that perception.

This would be a funny story if it wasn’t true. A coach had a very talented distance athlete who quit running to take up a ‘more popular’ sport and lasted exactly one non-varsity season. Why? Well, this former runner later confessed to really wanting to participate in a sport where ‘you get to wear a jersey with your name on it.’

Certainly not true for distance runners. They’re forced to toil heroically on the track or cross-country course in their nameless/number-less singlet, and when they finally lunge exhausted across the finish line someone in the small crowd says "who was that" so the guy next to him says "how the hell do I know?" Had this occurred at a football or soccer game that guy-next-to-him would have said, "look it up in the game program you idiot." That, in a nutshell, is one of the main problems with distance runners. They fail to advertise.

As the Nike ad for runners suggests: "Yeah, we’re different." Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe, in an era of mass popularities, distance running provides a home for all the dangerous oddballs other sports and their spectators don’t know what to do with. And really, if you check closely, those scholar-athlete runners are doing just fine thank you. Anyway, if you took this discussion too seriously, my advice is simple: get qualified help immediately. Talk to a distance runner. Better yet, go out for a long run yourself.

©Syracuse Post-Standard, October 29, 2004

(1000 words)

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Hearts and Minds: Selling Scholastic Distance Running

Hoping to glean some illuminating recruiting tips, I once asked a very successful area coach how he, year after year, convinced gifted athletes to run Cross-Country in a fall scholastic sports arena dominated by football and soccer.

"I beg," he told me.

Unless you coach the perennial state-champ Saratoga girls team, you do what you have to as a Cross-Country coach. And in convincing athletes to endure the rigors of distance running during the fall and other seasons, dedicated area coaches have left few stones unturned.

One area coach speaks about the success he’s enjoyed with "soccer retreads," athletes possessing a running aptitude who tired of the endless battles to make a soccer team or to get playing time. With some quiet persuasion, they switched sports and immediately enjoyed the more direct correlation between effort and success in distance running. Another coach finds distance prospects by giving talks to elementary school classes about the positives of running. And still another creates a substantial database of all the middle school mile fitness run results from which he recruits potential runners. Of course, any distance coach who teaches in his or her school district can usually be found in the hallways between classes, talking up running with students, cajoling and encouraging future distance runners to give our ‘different sport’ a shot.

Still, within a culture that emphasizes ease over effort, and amid a sports climate that usually favors team-oriented spectator sports, promoting distance running among young adults is often a tough sell.

It’s tough because whether as Cross-Country, Indoor or Outdoor Track athletes, running is not perceived as one of those ‘popular’ sports by most high schoolers who place a heavy emphasis on belonging. Potentially superior runners are often drawn first to soccer, football, basketball or lacrosse. Once there, they may remain marginal team sport athletes for years due to the social pull of those sports. It’s no secret that distance running seldom draws the large, boisterous crowds for home meets. Nor do most school districts and booster clubs promote running as energetically as they do field sports.

Distance running is also a tough sell because the choices those athletes must make are demanding. You can’t dabble in distance running. It requires native aerobic ability and speed certainly, but realizing potential is a process of accumulations—accumulations of the miles necessary for maximum fitness, accumulations of the competitive seasons needed to reach running maturity. That means self-discipline and dedication. And sacrifices. Dedicated distance runners almost always give something up, whether it’s that extra school club, an after school/weekend job or just social hang-out time.

And distance running is a tough sell because, ultimately, it requires something of young adults that most other activities do not. While today’s youth don’t hesitate to mix it up physically--jumping high to head a corner kick into the goal or making that dangerous cut over the middle to grab a quick slant pass—distance runners face a unique challenge. For them, competing means no time-outs, no substitutions, no half-times. The bread-and-butter-reality of distance runners, whether training or racing, is sustained discomfort. Stop-and-go sports all have their extreme physical demands, but one are based on a steady, prolonged increase in physical discomfort as a normal condition. Distance running does. That may be why Jerry Smith, who with Mike Guzman coached the Fayetteville-Manlius boys XC team to a State Championship in 1998, recently told the Weedsport XC team that one of things distance running does so well is to define your true character. Or why one of the local legends of distance coaching, Oscar Jensen, observed simply of the long runners, "Those are special cats out there."

The positives of running, as any distance coach understands, are easily overlooked and often undervalued by students, parents and schools alike. Which means it’s usually the distance coach who’s out there promoting running as an avenue to long-term physical and mental well-being. They become advocates for distance running as a life-long sport, one that can be actively pursued years after the notion of a vigorous afternoon game of soccer or lacrosse seems dated—or dangerous.

Sometimes the messages register. At a recent summer half-marathon race, one of my female high school team members ran portions of the 13.1 mile course with a 48 year old woman. Betsy’s reaction? She was duly impressed and declared that was what she hoped to be capable of when she was 48 herself.

Ironically, though, we’re hardly talking about a backwater sport here. Central New York enjoys a very rich distance running tradition and a national reputation for excellence. The long list of state and national level Section III runners roll off the tongues of veteran coaches, from Baldwinsville’s Don Paige, ranked #1 in the World in 1980 for the 800 meter, to two-time high school 1500 meter state champion and subsequent Olympian Jen Rhines of Liverpool, to this year’s three-season state championship runner Tracey Brauksieck of Homer. Section III Cross-Country in 2001 boasted two state champions and thirteen state top-20 teams in the A-D classes. Of the eight Northeast Region female runners who qualified to run in the Footlocker National Scholastic Cross-Country Championship, three were from central New York schools. And as we move into another competitive running year, the Saquoit boys XC team is pre-season ranked #8 in the Northeastern United States.

But the potential Paiges, the Rhines, the Brauksieks, as well as all those below their abilities, are seldom banging on the school nurse’s door to sign up for a distance sport. So the coaches will go out searching for them, the overlooked, the ‘misplaced,’ potential runners. They’ll encourage, they’ll prod, they’ll cajole. They know there are a fair number of "special cats" out there, runners capable of unique things. If only they can be convinced…..

©Syracuse Post-Standard, September 21, 2002

(993 words)

©Christian Science Monitor, August 10, 2000

School’s The Place For Positive Passion

After teaching for almost twenty years, coaching for ten and raising my own children, I have developed at least one opinion about ‘kids these days.’ That opinion is not that we are expecting too much effort from young adults. It is, instead, that we are expecting too many efforts.

This past Fall, for instance, I had to warn my high school cross-country team members about attempting to excel scholastically and athletically while holding down a night-time/weekend job and squeezing in the requisite family/fun time. In the spring, I ‘negotiated’ with runners who wanted to slice their time-pie between track, non-school soccer leagues, clubs, class-trips and family vacations. My head was usually spinning after those conversations. I didn’t know how they were going to ‘just do it’.

Actually, I did. Too many of them were going to load the plate by reducing their involvement in each activity. After practice, homework was going to be wedged between a micro-wave supper and the evening’s club meeting or school function. Families sitting together and discussing their days over dinner would become an antiquated notion for these student athletes. On Saturdays, immediately following their track invitational event or cross-country race, parents were going to whisk them off to a school music festival or to a soccer tournament or to their part-time job. Too many of my athletes were destined to spend their seasons ricocheting from obligation to obligation, inadvertently developing a short attention span for endeavors. This year I was not surprised when a runner needed several days off because she had so overextended herself with activities she was, according to her mother, ‘on the verge of collapse.’ Instead, I was surprised it only happened once.

The problem is not that many students want to be everywhere and do everything. They’ve always wanted that. The problem seems to be us, the parents, teachers and coaches of involved young adults. We seem to have trouble these days saying ‘no’, or even understanding that sometimes ‘no’ is the correct response to a kid’s desire to join one more club or try just one more sport.

Our common culture, after all, heavily promotes the notion of ‘well-roundedness’. People who remain in a particular position or career very long are often perceived as unambitious, in a rut. ‘Growing’ is too frequently equated with changing interests or professions. The job market reinforces the notion by warning us to shy away from specialization and become ‘more flexible’ or risk trapping ourselves in a vanishing job field. Becoming proficient at something is considered a signal to move to other endeavors. Think but a moment of all the sports superstars who can’t be ‘just’ superstars but must also act or sing or play another sport.

Young adults, of course, should enjoy various sports, activities and interests as they grow. They benefit greatly from a variety of experiences. There is, however, an age and a limit beyond which young adults may pay a price for over-involvement. By continually bouncing from activity to activity, from event to event, they can too easily forfeit a chance for good old-fashioned passion.

Webster’s defines passion as extreme, compelling emotion, enthusiasm or fondness. The word derives from the Latin passus, which means to endure or suffer. Once the word is freed from it’s present association with sex, true passion seems in short supply. That’s unfortunate. There are many young adults today, both the over and under involved, who would benefit greatly from pursing reasonable ambitions with passion.

Passion teaches discipline. In healthy forms, passion encourages goal-setting, sacrifice and positive choices--practice instead of the mall, healthy nutrition instead of cravings and long-term personal rewards instead of the momentary thrills of drugs and alcohol.

Passion promotes personal excellence. Personal excellence is not reserved for the stars of our teams or classrooms; it is possible for all students, regardless of their ability levels. More than any particular scholastic grade or athletic achievement, the passionate pursuit of a productive goal is an invaluable experience for later success as an adult. Being exceptionally talented is not critical; being exceptionally committed is critical.

Passion creates links and strengthens a student’s sense of world and community. Passionate learners seek out the people who know what they want to know or can do what they want to do. They read; they talk to people; they think about the objects of their passion and in the process gain a sense of belonging somewhere and to something.

And finally, passion can provide a necessary refuge. My years as a coach have been punctuated by too many after-practice conversations with young athletes in secret distress:

‘My father says we have to move again. I’m so sick of having to move every two years.’

‘They don’t fight any more. They used to. Now they just don’t talk to each other.’

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A SEASON ON THE RUN

This was to have been the autumn of high hopes for our boys Varsity Cross-Country squad. My seniors remembered their early years--two winless seasons. Only last fall, with a few dual-meet victories, had they begun to display the team competitiveness needed to contend in a league typically dominated by eventual state champions and top-10 teams. This was our season to begin arriving, pay-back for the guys who had certainly paid their dues as underclassman.

As I sat in the coach’s locker room with my two best runners, I knew I was about to dash those hopes. The two had violated team rules for the third time that season, demonstrating once again an unwillingness or inability to follow team rules and procedures. Their behavior and attitudes had become a major team problem, and it could no longer be tolerated. Still, as I informed them of their dismissal, I felt for my other runners.

I do not recall exactly all I told the two. The requirement of personal discipline, the need to learn from mistakes, the link between self-sacrifice and excellence--all these were surely mentioned. One statement, though , stuck word-for-word in my mind. I was explaining(or attempting to explain) how the goals of the team take precedence over personal desires. From their expressions and rebuttals I sensed little of that message was reaching home. "Look," I finally said with some exasperation, "I want a team that works more than I want a team that wins."

How archaic of me, I thought later, that in this age of end-zone choreographs, in-your-face slam-jams and home-run-struts, I should be coaching as though TEAM was anything more than an antiquated notion, simply a vehicle for individual displays of talent. Why should I emphasize the rules of team behavior when professional athletes day after day model something very different and even high school coaches sometimes accord more lenient standards of behavior to their stars? Was I merely being naive in trying to build a program based on shared struggles and common glories rather than just the orchestration of individual egos? After all, the pundits claim running is only that, an ‘individual sport.’

There is no fairy-tale ending to this story. The following day, my former front-runners handed in their uniforms and for the remainder of the season we struggled competitively, losing in invitational meets to teams we had previously beaten, finishing far lower in the county and sectional championships than our optimistic August predictions.

But we learned a few things. A co-captain, frustrated to the point of quitting by the team dissension, made a choice to stick out the season. Within two meets, he became our new race leader and was ultimately voted Most Valuable Runner. Other guys stepped up too as we revised our season goals and then nearly obtained them all. By the last race in early November, it felt as though we had run two seasons--and if we hadn’t scored big victories in that second phase, we’d run it harder, tighter as a squad and with more honest enjoyment. The ‘New Unit,’ as I dubbed them, had redefined the notion of winning.

I felt good about the athletes that finished our season, but was bothered by those that didn’t. No one knows what lessons they have taken from their shortened seasons, but I do know it is difficult learning to function on a team by being excluded from that team. The irony is not lost on coaches, who must decide on rosters season after season while under pressures to produce winning teams. Those pressures make it easy to justify ‘weeding out’ unmotivated or ‘problem athletes’ to obtain a winning record. But if scholastic coaches believe(as they should) that participation in sports can provoke positive changes in a young athlete’s attitudes and behavior, then second and third chances are critical. Working harder with kids who haven’t yet learned the demands and values of group participation should be a civic as well as athletic goal for scholastic sports programs. Sure, we make our jobs easier if we only coach the coachable, but we probably do the school, and certainly the athlete, a long-term disservice. My sense of disappointment stemmed not from the season’s losses, but from the small group of runners I was unable, in the end, to discipline and motivate.

Several weeks after our last meet, I ran the Thanksgiving morning Turkey-Trot Race with my son. Several of my team members were there and among them one of the dismissed runners. I don’t blame him for eyeing me warily as I approached. To his credit, he chatted amiably and then offered positive plans and ideas for the fall of 1996. I told him I was looking forward to having him back the following year.

That season is a long way off, and even then he will have to prove his words the old fashioned way--with hard, selfless practice and preparation. But something tells me he will take advantage of this chance to improve and contribute to the team’s success.

I also think it’s going to be a very good year.

©Syracuse Post-Standard, December 15, 1995

(880 Words)

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