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.

Been a long time

It has been a long time since I have posted on here. And in that time a lot has happened, I don't even know where to begin. This year has had its ups and downs. Fortunately it has had more ups than downs. I have slept in more beds and couches than I care to remember, I have spent more time on the road than I ever have in the past. Between trips for the team going to meets and trips for recruiting it has been a very busy year.

For recruiting I have gone to California three times, Texas twice, Missouri at least three times. All of the trips were productive in one way or another. I have gone through patches where we would have 5 kids verbally commit and sign and others where I would have 5 kids tell me we were not established enough of a program, and who could blame them looking at our past. But I was not concerned with our past and knew if I just kept working and made one more call or made one more home visit that we would get maybe one more kid. As of today we have 28 new men and 10 new women with the recruiting not done just yet. In the past couple of weeks we have had a hot streak of men committing to the program. I am hoping that we can get a few more girls to come on board before the summer ends. Next year is going to be exciting.

As for the current team we have made huge leaps and bounds from where we were last year. Things can always go smoother and I still have a lot of learning to do as a young coach, but we are making some great progress. Both the men and the women scored more points at conference than they have in recent history and we had several conference champs and even a National Champ. I am very excited for what the future holds for McPherson College track and cross country.

Personally I wore myself down this year. I have still only had two days off of work since winter break. I have been sleeping in all of this week and plan on sleeping in until I feel my body has caught up with lack of sleep. 5 hours just doesn't cut it for me. I have stuck to my new years resolution fairly well and have been reading more. I have read several books, mostly about running or coaching and plan to continue to do this. I hope this summer that I will be able to read even more. My running has taken a hit due to injury the past few months but I hope to get rid of the nail that seems to be stuck in my heal in the next few weeks by meeting with a ART doc i talked with yesterday who has a practice in Wichita.

For now I think that catches up on where my life is. I hope this summer to get a good start on recruiting for next year, to get more organized with the administrative side of things and to read and learn a lot. I am very excited for what the next school year will bring and to see all the hard work this year pay off.

New Start

This weekend marks my first meet as a head cross country coach. So far things have been a lot better as a first time head cross country coach than they were as a track coach. A lot of it has to do with the athletes knowing where I stand and setting up my expectations early on. I am excited to see where we are and how we do against different colored jerseys.

As for my training. I have had a down week which has been very nice but the reality of having an up week next week will set in soon and I will have to be a lot more disciplined with getting up and doing my runs in the mornings. It is hard to find time to get them in since I will be running farther than everyone on the team on most days. So far so good. Had a good 2 hour run last Sunday, was tired and sore from it but it felt good to get back to training and not just running to run....

With the past few weeks being very busy with Camp etc... my recruiting phone calls kind of fell to the way side but I got back on it last night and had some good calls. I need to keep plugging away and utilize the fact that Becky has started grad school and spends a lot of time studying to my advantage and make my calls then. I am excited to see what I can do with a full year of working with recruits. I feel we have a good base of athletes and if we can get another good year we will become very competitive very quick.

Catching up

I have been watching and reading a lot from Jay Johnson the past two days. I really like a lot of the stuff he does. I have incorporated the same things into my teams strength routine and have found great results from it. He has lots of videos on his web site. I highly suggest checking it out. http://www.coachjayjohnson.com/

I have had a real roller coaster ride the past few days with recruiting, but whats new. Had a great long weekend with my top 3 recruits.

Showed them all there is to see in this area of Kansas. They all had a good time. Two of them are now signed. I am still waiting on one, who happens to be the best of the three. These three would make a huge impact, possibly even take us to the next level in half a year. But only time will tell and right now I am just sitting and waiting for his response. Every time my phone goes off i get nervous and my heart sinks a little. You might ask why would my heart sink. Well I have had 2 girls and 2 guys who were a done deal tell me they are no longer coming to McPherson College next fall. Nothing that I could do, one has some Dr. apts and a follow up surgery, another wants a major we do not have etc.... So we will see where we are at in the next week. I am going start focusing on the class of 2010 starting Monday. So it will be back to the phones for initial calls with the goal of getting kids on campus for visits over the summer. So i will keep you updated.

My running has been very up and down. Now that the college and high school kids are back into the swing of things I am getting more miles in. I am doing what I can to hit every group run in the area that I can and running twice a day for the past few days. By no means am I fit, but I am enjoying running a lot more than i have since Feb. 1. I did a few workouts on the track Mt. Union style and had fun with that. I still have nothing to train for which I find hard. I need a goal and I need to go for that goal. If anyone has any suggestions for what you think I should be training for please let me know. I could use some help.

All in all the summer has been good. I saw a tornado for the first time in my life, its been hot, but I have had some fun. Hope things keep going in a positive direction on the whole.

Kansas State meet

Very happy about how the recruits performed overall. I am very excited about next year after today. They seem excited about next year.

Recruting

I have been out to california twice this spring to try and bring in some good Community college people. The first time I went out there I was flying blind and just went to a bunch of meets and tried to talk to as many kids and coaches as I could. I feel like I was successful at this and was worth the time and money.

The second time was to seal the deal with a few of the people I met on the first trip. I was able to do that with my top guy. I hope to have a handful of them on campus in a few weeks to sign them and get them enrolled in school. We could have a very good team on the men's side with a few of them joining us. I have added some of pictures from the trip.

Great night

Had a great night of recruiting last night. There is a ton of potential with next years team. Just need some pieces to fall in place now.

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.

Work work work work

I have spent a lot of time in the office this week. I have started to take a graphic arts class to become more savvy on photo shop, in design etc. so I can work on recruiting pieces on my own time when the inspiration hits me. the class has been fun and I have learned a lot.

With out having Beck here I have spent all of my time outside of eating and sleeping and running in my office working. I am in the office by no later than 8 am and have been going home around 10:30 at night after finishing up my phone calls. I am starting to make some head way with the recruiting process but I still have a lot to figure out with the scholarship situation. We do not have what you would normally think of for scholarships and things have to get passed through AD and admissions people. It has been a busy time but I have not felt over worked just yet.

Recruiting Philosophy

My basic philosophy is to find students that I feel would fit well at the school academically, socially, and athletically and recruit those students. When you receive questionnaires back or talk to a recruit you have to profile that student based on academics, parent’s income, major and athletic ability to make sure they will fit in at your school and work with those students. The goal is to increase the depth and quality of the team. This is done by not only improving people currently on the team but new recruits as well. As the team improves so will the level of recruits to the program.