>I can't wait to see how it somehow gets ruined or thrown off
>track.

Yeah, I've written like four versions of this over the past few days, with varying degrees of background about my crazy school, and then deleted them with the expectation that it will just go south. But the variety of life experiences of people on this board never fails to surprise me, so I may as well just ask in good faith and let people chime in.

>I don't think it'd be overstepping your role to inform him
>this in conjunction with the possibility that he might be D1
>scholarship good. If he's a blood-in-the-water kid in races,
>and he's interested in getting to college/alleviating family
>financial burden, he probably needs to hear this from
>*someone.* I know firsthand from working with a lot of kids
>with D1 potential in California that the degree to which the
>schools will relax strict academic standards for an athlete
>they want is *astonishing.* Astonishing enough that, if he has
>collegiate aspirations, hearing he could potentially do D1
>might be enough for him to see the big picture and motivate
>him to pound through the hardness, the whiteness, the boredom,
>etc.

This is good reinforcement, and it's definitely the hope. There's a pretty small amount of scholarships that DI schools have to give out for track (I think it's 12.5) and relatively few schools are even permitted by their administration to use that full amount. But we've had a few good-but-not-scholarship-level students get the exact bump in admissions that you're describing here, and that's no small reward. One of my first years, I had a kid getting stone-walled by a bunch of Ivy League schools who then dropped a great 800m time and all of a sudden coaches opened up to him and admission was a breeze.

>Worst-case scenario, he hears that he has D1 potential and
>decides, "Nah, still not my thing." In which case, cool,
>you've done your part and subsequently respected his wishes.
>Best-case scenario, it opens his eyes to some real future
>possibilities that maybe he simply didn't understand upon
>first consideration. "Big picture" stuff *is* notoriously
>difficult for high school kids to picture (IIRC, there's a
>study that says people under 18 literally can't grasp the
>concept of time in terms of longevity, their brains simply
>aren't wired yet to do so).

Oof. This is helpful. I am obviously really cautious not to overstep, but the result has been a lot of policies (by me, for me - not external ones) that mean kids don't feel a ton of pressure from me but are MAYBE not being pushed quite hard enough.

>You downplayed your coaching ability below, but this tells me
>you're a hell of a coach, because you're absolutely right re:
>the coach wanting it more than the kid. Referencing once again
>my D1 kids, I have kids who are all about their sport, and I
>have kids just riding it out for the money-- and the latter
>group is *fucking miserable.* I've had swimmers and water polo
>players all tell me, "... yeah, if it were up to me, I
>wouldn't play anymore." Because swimming is really hard and
>boring and generally fucking sucks.

Thanks! I had to learn it the hard way though. I spent all last year battling with other coaches over the event allotment for an extremely all-around talented kid on our team, and then realized around April that I was contributing (hopefully minimally, but any amount is too much) to making this already-a-tough-sell sport kind of a bummer for him. Backed off, which meant he was done running any distance events, but he'll be around to help during cross country and he seems to be really enjoying himself just being good and running.

It would bum me out entirely to hear kids describe their sport as a grinding obligation like that - though it would be worse if they felt that way and were hiding it. Blargh.

>Just this morning, I had a student who's a brilliant classical
>pianist-- he's played Carnegie Hall, other impressive venues,
>etc. His GPA isn't great, but his dad is pushing him to go to
>all of these top-tier schools with big music programs, because
>they'll overlook his below-average-for-the-school GPA to get
>him into the music schools... but he told me in private that
>he's not sure he wants to study music in college. He likes
>playing, but he just isn't into working on it *like that.* He
>just happens to be naturally brilliant. And he doesn't really
>know how to tell his dad, because that would knock down his
>tier of university considerably, and the dad is crazily
>invested in getting the kid's music noticed. Just a shitty,
>shitty situation.

Fuck. That's tough. Good luck? I have nothing for that.

>I think you can find a way to level with him and give him an
>honest appraisal of his potential without pushing the issue.
>If he knows fully what good judges of talent know he's capable
>of, and he *still* chooses to want to do something else...
>then as you said, it'd be doing the kid wrong to hold a gun to
>his head and say "I KNOW BEST." Even if you do know best.
>
>I've made this mistake before btw. I got a kid with an
>absolute shit GPA into a prestigious acting conservatory. Full
>ride scholarship. Worked my balls off. Delivered all
>paperwork, wrote all recs, talked endlessly to people at the
>school. Got him in. 1.4 GPA in HS, then in a prestigious
>conservatory. I was so goddamn proud. Then, the kid dropped
>out five months in. Didn't want to be a professional actor
>anymore. Just "wasn't feeling it." I took it INSANELY
>PERSONALLY (privately, of course), but then I realized, as you
>alluded to, I'd cast myself in the role of "student savior"
>when ultimately his choices are his own to make. Personal
>investment can never trump letting a kid make his own choices,
>even if the kid ultimately makes mistakes. I think as long as
>you've done your part in fully informing him where his maximum
>potential lies (and the above advice of having another outside
>influence who's traveled the same path as him to add
>credibility to your argument is strong, imo), that's what you
>can do. That's what a good coach does. The bad coach is the
>one who screams and stomps his feet when the kid isn't
>interested.

Yep, which means you've exposed the nasty little dilemma at the root of this: the traits that make you really, really good at caring about these kids (which you clearly are) are the same things that will lay down a ton of little traps that use your commitment to make you feel like shit.

Edited to add: The one nice thing my coaching situation offers, which makes this job pretty lucky is that all of these kids are probably going to be fine. The school is goofy as hell, but it's extremely good at both preparing kids to be admitted to good schools but, further, to actually succeed academically there. Track can be a useful way for some of that to happen, but if I find the right frame of mind to approach it - the job can potentially be pretty low stakes for me. Kids find me and want to run fast, and I try to help them run fast.

But until I'm perfectly zen about it, any amount of wasted potential, even if it's just potential on the track without any larger meaning or consequences, is going to bug me.