Winter was a wash. The kid in question stuck to his "I want to be a sprinter" stance, but was still up for 800m duty when we needed him for a relay. The difficult thing that I didn't anticipate is that our sprint crew as a whole took a pretty big step forward and so the previous dynamic that I was hoping would persuade him - wherein our distance runners were the most successful track athletes on our team - became somewhat blurry. It's still largely the case, but our single best runner (and a likely recruit for any number of decent-to-good D1 programs) is a 100/200m guy and that's going to overshadow any "see how the distance crew as a whole wins shit" argument.

Throw in some injuries and a variety of other issues that caused him to miss some time and we're basically starting from scratch. I can't make the case that I can make him a noteworthy 800m runner this year anymore because he's lost too much of his base, so we're mostly just hoping he gets through the season fine so we can restart this process for our (rebuilding, after this very senior-heavy) cross country season.

As I said previously: you can't want it more than the kids.

The good news is that the push/pull between sprint group and me is getting a lot better. The success of our sprinters has led the sprint coaches to concede that they don't actually need twenty freshmen/sophomores who think they're 100m runners and we've been able to cooperate a lot more. What that means practically speaking is they're looking at kids who aren't ever going to run faster than 24.xx and saying "maybe you should give the 800/1600 a try." That's going to help a lot going forward because I'm losing a lot of seniors this year.