Self education, expanding my horizons

I am trying to take advantage of this time as a volunteer coach at a D I school to expand my horizons as much as a can. We have such a great staff at Wichita State and I am very fortunate that most are willing to share there knowledge with me. Some areas I am trying to expand on are functional strength training, new/different methods of athletic training, marketing of track meets and recruiting.

Weight Room
Being down in the weight room while other teams are lifting has afforded me the opportunity to watch Adam Ringler http://www.adamringler.com/in action. Every time I see his groups at work I pick up some new things. He has been nice enough to let me pick his brain and is going to teach me the basics of Functional Movement Screen and go over some of the basics of his philosophy. I get to do this tomorrow and I am very excited. This is an area I feel I have a good grasp on but could use some work on how to “put it all together.”

Training room
Our training staff does some very cool things that previous schools I have worked for have not done. Mainly Graston and Kinesio taping. I have been teaching myself how to use Kinesio tape on myself and some of the kids on my team last year. I have some basics down but hope to pick the brains of Jeff Deits http://webs.wichita.edu/?u=athletictraining&p=/FacultyandStaff/Staff/jdeits/ who has more practice and has read more about the subjuect. He also said he would be willing to spend some time teaching me some of Graston techniques using Guasha tools http://guashatools.com/ So I am excited for some of these new lessons.

Marketing
I have been put in charge of coming up with creative ideas on how to get peoples butts in the stadium at our home meets. We have some good ideas but we have 2 home indoor, 2 outdoor regular season and our conference meet. Ideas range from HS invite sections at indoor meets, to tailgate party, carnival and music at outdoor meets. There are a lot of conversations I need to have but it should be very interested to see where it all goes from here.

Recruiting
I am not allowed to recruit. Which for me kind of stinks. But I am involved in conversations and brain storming sessions with fellow coaches in the office at practice or lunch and have been coming up with some good ideas.. Coach Wise also let me barrow Meat Market which is a book about college football recruiting, great stuff.

All of these have been in addition to reading as many articles and journals as I can find about all things running etc… I feel like I am expanding and become more educated so if and when I get a more permanent gig I will be able to have informed conversations with all the different people Coaches have to interact with on a daily basis.