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Honestly, the only thing I do genuinely well as a coach is build training groups that support each other internally and try to succeed together. The way I do my job is closer to "cult leader" than to "track coach" but I've been doing it for awhile now and have both:
a)been the asshole who doesn't want to change the way he does anything
b)met a bunch of other assholes who don't want to change the way they do anything
So, if I'm understanding you correctly, the only real thing I have to offer is any possible insight on how to grease the wheels so that you can help kids by doing what you're good at.
>My focus, nor my aim, isn't to replace the coaching - rather
>supplement it via my understanding of health, biomechanics,
>and movement (motor control, neuromuscular control, sensory
>integration, etc).
Sweet. Because that's the biggest bit of absent expertise from most youth coaches. Which makes sense. The time, effort, and motivation to stay up on that immense and highly technical knowledge isn't always compatible with just moving a huge (jesus, that group you're describing is *so* huge) bunch of kids with wildly varying background, interest, and enthusiasm in the sport into something resembling specialized training groups and an actual team. Hell, the things I know and incorporate into my group's training aren't systematized in any meaningful way - they're just collected answers to problems I've run into over the years. Why did all my runners have hip injuries during cross country of 2015? Why can't my runners double and triple more effectively within individual meets? What do I do with a 15 year old who already profiles as a 5K/10K guy and therefore struggles with the necessary pop to run a good two mile in high school? That's a pretty dumb way to build a program, but it's pretty much the only way I ever learn new things and I am ... above average in curiosity when it comes to youth track coaching.
And I suspect you're going to find some coaches who've had bad experiences with people in your field too. Often that's on the coaches. Nobody likes being told (implicitly or explicitly) that they're doing something wrong. Be willing to explain why what you're suggesting will work (I don't suspect that's a problem, based on your enthusiasm for talking about it on this board) and try your best not to correct other coaches in front of the kids (unless they're doing something which is immediately harmful) because even if you're absolutely right, it hardly ever goes well. We've our share of petty dickheads whose only currency is authority. You only win arguments with those guys by not having them.
>My first goal is to really help the coaches and kids
>understand some rules of thumb when it comes to pain
>indicators (duration, severity, type, trendline), so there's a
>little more nuance then "o shit, that kid is limping in the
>warm-up, maybe he's hurt", injury prevention (namely targeted
>muscle activations in their warm-ups and strength training in
>key areas - hip abductors to start) and then move into the
>performance side.
God damn that sounds helpful. I hate how useless I am with injuries, though working at a rich high school with an actual sports medicine staff means I get to (have to, actually, for liability concerns) outsource stuff. Still makes me feel like a useless asshole to just shrug and say "go see the trainer".
If your concern here is how to get coaches to buy in, it is sadly not really enough to point out that they could just watch a high level program to see that the time committed track athletes spend on their warm-up, cool-down, and supplemental strength training is immensely greater than the amount of time they spend doing eyeballs-rolling-back-in-head 400 repeats.
I wouldn't have listened to that five or six years ago because, as dumb as I am now, I was a much more stubborn kind of dumb when I started. And coaches also have to treat available time as a scarce resource. If you've got kids who don't drive themselves or are just absurdly over-scheduled as a lot of kids are now, coaches will look at a warm-up and strength/flexibility program and cool-down and say "I've got two hours with these kids and you want to take one of those to not do any of the work I think is important?"
One thing I may have listened to is pointing out that a good, full warm-up may be the closest that track gets to a team dynamic. For workouts, everybody's going to break out into specific training groups, but treating warmup as something that's important for a full team dynamic may get some traction. In describing what you'd like to accomplish too, it's probably worth pointing out that you *are* suggesting something that's physically taxing and engages them as athletes. The biggest shift since I ran is that the short sprints are basically coached like a technical event. And for a lot of technical events, the clear and bright line between the stuff you do for injury prevention/strength/flexibility/etc. and the traditional "workout" doesn't really exist any more. That dynamic is only going to increase into other events, and the importance of your field in youth sports is only gonna grow.
I don't actually think you'll need to do much to get traction with the kiddoes. They're way more intellectually flexible than people think, and a lot of them come from a background in other sports where you spend practice doing a pretty wide diversity of stuff. Football players don't just break into two teams of eleven every practice and play a game. Kids understand this so if you can talk them through why what you're doing is helpful and important they'll understand that in the same way that basketball players understand that sometimes they run plays, sometimes they work on defense, and sometimes they work on shooting.
Parents are weird. I have nothing. 99% of them are totally easy and just want to see their kid happy, competitive in a healthy way, and improving steadily. The 1% that are problems can't be avoided preemptively.
>With all that in mind, any advice on navigating and cementing
>the relationships with the coaches, parents, and kids?
______________________________
"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"
--Walleye's Dad
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