Thursday, March 12, 2009

Inspiration




My mom bought me a John Wooden book for my birthday. First off the dude can flat out coach. I have picked up big time lessons off of each page. Almost everything the man writes is inspirational. I find myself just wanting to read this book all the time.

His big thing is SUCCESS. Not winning or loosing but being as successful as you can be, doing the very best you can in practice day in and day out. I have found myself gravitating to this the past few years. If I work with my team and prepare them the best I can do run the best they can when it counts that is all that matters. He also speaks of holding tight to your principles and being true to who you are. This is something that I have been struggling with more than I have in my life as of late, how strong do I put my foot down on things and what do I let slide. I need to make sure that I do not feel like I am being taken advantage of and putting the team first. Wooden was very big into making good decisions for the team and what is best for the group. This is definitely the direction I want my teams to head in.

Be a team, work as a team to be the best we can. If we are the best we can be and work at that goal on a daily basis we will be successful on the track but more importantly in life. I need to make this very clear in the recruiting process so that I am getting the people on the team that will buy into the system. So far I feel that I have done a good job of this. I also feel that the majority of the people on the team are buying into this as well.

I have also gotten inspiration for some recruiting pieces for next year. I am going to stick with the success theme, more to come on that I cant give all my secrets away :)

Monday, March 9, 2009

NAIA Natioanls

So I learned a lot from our cross country trip this weekend. We drove 17 hours to Johnson City TN this weekend for the Indoor National Championships. In order to be competitive at the NAIA level you have to be fit, very fit and you have to be able to recovery quickly. There are heats for all events and several people were running multiple events over a three day period. The heats for the most part were quicker than I was used to at D3, there were not as many tactical races. It was an interesting experience and one that I walked away with a lot more knowledge on how to build a program at this level.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

team dynamics

There are some team leaders that are starting to emerge from the group slowly but surely. It is nice to have people that I can trust within the team. I had a class room session with the distance people to go over why they are doing the workouts and mileage that I am having them do. There were a few questions that came up on people wanting to know. I have wanted to do this since I got here but have felt strapped for time on a daily basis to fit in the things we need to do and get them off to night class, work, dinner or wherever else they go after practice. SO on Thursday we had an easy run so I decided to do it then. I went into the classroom and drew up a big calender and put all of our long runs and workouts up and talked them through the progression of everything. The exciting part about the whole meeting was that most of the group came out of it very excited not only for this season but for next year. I am going to do a much more in depth talk at cross country camp next summer, but I feel that the majority of them understand and buy in to what I am trying to accomplish.

Recruiting

Recruiting is finally starting to come together. I have been havening some good conversations with the students who are interested, it has just taken me a long time to go through the list of prospectives and figure out who truly is interested in McPherson College. I have had a few phone calls and emails where I found out that they have signed with someone else before I even got a chance to talk with them, no surprise there. But I have also talked to a few Community College Coaches, Club coaches and High School coaches who have given me some names of very good athletes who are interested in small schools. I feel a have a very good shot at hitting my goals for recruiting and think that we might get more track athletes that originally anticipated. But only time will tell. I have several athletes coming to visit campus within the next few weeks starting tomorrow so I will keep everyone posted.