I mentioned some of the other issues, and I think he largely cleared the issue of thinking of himself as a sprinter - but when you have a team where training groups are so necessarily separated, kids want to work with their friends. He improved a fair amount in the 400m, but not at all in the 800m and didn't race any 1600m. There was a couple small injury problems too, and I'm kind of coming around to the idea that being able to deal with an injury is a way more important skill than I used to think it was. Being able to:

a)tell where your body is on some continuum of discomfort/pain/injury
b)recognizing when to go hard and when to dial it back
c)shifting gears from workouts to injury rehab
d)following through on rehab with the same rigor as you workout

can really make or break seasons.

Anyhow, he knew he didn't race well and wants to get better. I had a really long talk with his parents about what he needs to do if he wants to run in college, but everybody recognizes you can't just make people move up in distance. You have to want the different volume/type of work. Everybody involves understands that his skillset is way closer to running an attention-worthy 800/1600 than a 400m but nobody is ready to just switch focus. Blargh.

He's running club track this summer, which makes me slightly nervous about cross country season but all of our kids are so hard to keep track of over the summer that my question for all of them isn't so much "will he get enough base mileage in" as "did he run or not". This guy's running, so he'll be fine. Plus, with respect to the rather rigid racial dynamics that governed this post - club track in our area is, like, 90% black. Furthermore, club coaches absolutely don't fuck around. It'll be a lot harder to say "white kids run distance" when there aren't any white kids.

We'll see, I suppose. It's going to be an odd season because I just graduated a large batch of pretty good seniors. For XC we're losing five of our top seven, and the kid in question here is the only senior of note for cross country (and will be one of two useful seniors for track). It's going to be harder to focus on him when I've got to do a larger rebuild, but the necessity of a leadership role might do some good. I pushed for him to be made captain, so there's no subtlety involved.