Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Indoor reflection 2017

As we start the first week of outdoor season with some fresh snow I wanted to take some time to reflect back on the past season and my past year and a half at Baldwin Wallace.  I am excited where things are heading.  We have a great group of kids that come to practice and work hard on a daily basis.  The distance group has bought into the blue collar, hard nose work ethic and racing style.  I think it showed at our conference meet.  We had several young kids who performed at a high level at our biggest meet of the year.  Several of them ended up on the podium some multiple times.

Culture is something that is talked about quite a bit, how do you build a culture what does a good culture look like?  To me culture is about having standards and holding people to those standards.  Its about doing the right thing when no one is looking.  Its about doing the little things to the best of your ability.  We have a kid on our team that ran with some of their high school teammates that go to another school in our conference over spring break.  They were telling me, in an almost state of shock, that this team doesn't do a warmup or cool down at practice, they don't meet for runs at all on the weekends, most don't even run.  They said they felt bad for making their former teammates wait to go for a run while they did their warm up before their spring break runs.  To me this is what its all about.  These are lessons that our athletes can take into the real world.  They probably don't even realize it now, but it will help down the road both athletically but more importantly in life.

I am excited for outdoor and the future in general.  Our current kids are doing a fantastic job and we have some very solid commits that I am excited about what they can add to the group!  To outdoor we go.


Monday, March 6, 2017

Just missed

We found out today that Kelly was the first person out of nationals in the women's 800. She missed by 0.12. On the down side we were all disappointed. She is fit and is ready to go. I think she would have had a legitimate shoot at making the final and standing on the podium. She has gotten better at her tactics each race this year and has competed well at each big meet we have gone too. One the up side she had a huge boost of confidence from running a 3 sec PR in the 800 on Saturday and is excited for outdoor. Based on her workouts she has a lot more left to give and hopefully this small set back will be just the thing she needs moving forward.