First Track Meet

it is said that you must step outside your comfort zone in order to become stronger! I believe I have done this with my new middle school track coaching gig. at least I am learning alot.

Yesterday was our first meet as a team which meant it was my first meet as a coach. Wow, was I nervous before the meet, more nervous than before my last marathon. Maybe because I knew I was trained perfectly by Sean for the marathon and I knew I was doing nothing but winging it for the track meet.

Let me give you some background first before I tell you about the meet. I am coaching at a very small private school in the area that has a very small track team and no track to practice on. We started practice last week - about 6 weeks behind all the other schools and we only had 2 practices before our first meet.

The meet was at First Academy which is a first rate facility - best track I have ever seen. When I showed up I almost wanted to hop on and do a track workout myself just to take advantage of this first rate facility. While the other schools show up in their school buses my kids have to be driven by their parents because the school does not provide transportation. While other teams had 30-40 kids we had 13 at the meet last night. While other schools had very spirited and kowledgable track coaches our school had me.

I got there early so I could pick as many brains as I could and learn as much as I could before the meet. When the kids started showing up with their parents I was really nervous - would the parents boo me off the field, would they fire me on the spot? I figured one thing I am good at is motivating people and having fun so I made that the goal for the meet. We will try our hardest and we will have fun (and maybe learn something) along the way.

I did notice that a lot of the teams had 2 or 3 coaches - one for the field events, one for the spinters and one for the distance events - then there was me - jack of all trades master of ZERO! Since I am a distance athlete and the longest event in middle school is 1600 there was nothing that I really had a lot of experience in.

So the meet was off and it starts with the field events and the 4x800 relays. Since we had no one in the relays I could get all my kids to the right places and cheer them on in the field events. We do not have a place to practice high jump so we did not have to worry about that. After the field events the running starts and continues on in a mass chaos kind of way until the very last event is run.

Let me just say that I hate it when everyone gets a trophy or when they do not keep score or when no champion is crowned - well this has none of those - there are first place finishers and those that finish behind first place - there are team awards and there are kids giving it their all for themsleves and the team.

I could not be more proud of our kids - they were awesome - the tried hard, they gave it all they had, they did not give up. We did end up second to last in the girls and last in the boys team comp. but a lot of that was because we were out numbered. However we did have some very good results,

2nd place in boys shot, 4th place in girls shot, 5th place in girls 100 and some other fine performances.

The warriors of the meet went to two 6th graders that even though they were a good foot shorter than whover they competed against and ended up near the back of the pack in their races they ran hard for the whole race and tried their hardest - they did not give up and they did not quit at all!

We will continue to work as a team and try to get better. I do not think we will ever compete for a team title becuase we do not have the numbers but we will try to get better and sneak in for some individual awards in our next meet. Stay tuned.

Side note - some of those coaches take this stuff very seriously - maybe a little too serious. Let me say that I want the kids to do well but I want them to have a good time too so they will continue with the sport. If I ever get as intense as some of those coaches I saw yesterday I will kindly step down from coaching youth sports because they are just too intense for the good of the kids (in my opinion only).

Cheers and stay tuned for my next report - we get one practice before our next meet :-)