Your Freshman Class Is Already Decided

Full transcript

0:00

This is Salty Talks. No fluff, just science-based coaching that works.

Every August I get some version of the same email. It starts with, “I just got put in charge of the middle school team.” Sometimes they volunteered. More often the high school job came with a feeder program attached, or their kid signed up and nobody else raised a hand.

And then the question is always the same. What do I actually do with these kids?

Here is what most coaches do. They take the varsity plan, cut every number in half, and hand it over. And that is the exact wrong instinct, because middle school cross country is not a smaller version of the same job. It is a different job.

0:44

I’m Coach Saltmarsh. Twenty-five years coaching high school cross country and track, thirty-one state champions, and I want to tell you something about where those athletes came from.

The freshman class that walks into your program in August was decided about two years earlier, by somebody you may never have met. Whether they show up at all. Whether their feet and calves have ever been loaded on purpose. Whether they know what easy actually feels like, or whether they have spent two years learning that every run is a competition.

You cannot coach that away in a season. So if you have any say over the middle school program, you have more leverage there than almost anywhere else in your job.

The job at that age is three things. They come back. You build an athlete instead of a runner. And you teach them the language, so that when you say easy in ninth grade, they already know what you mean.

Notice what is not on that list. Winning the league. Peak mileage. Personal records. Those are consequences, and they take care of themselves.

1:38

So let’s get practical, and I want to start with the single most useful change you can make. Stop counting miles. Count minutes.

Here is why. Your slowest middle schooler runs a ten-minute mile. Your fastest runs a six-thirty. You assign three miles. The slow kid is out there for thirty minutes. The fast kid is done in twenty.

Think about what you just did. You gave your least-developed athlete fifty percent more training stress than your most-developed one. That is exactly backward, and it happens on middle school teams every single day in this country.

Now assign twenty-five minutes instead. Everybody gets twenty-five minutes. The dose is equal. Nobody finishes last in front of the whole team. And a slower kid never has to hear a number out loud that makes them feel slow.

As for how much, here is roughly where I put the ceilings. A first-year runner, whatever grade they are in, tops out around a hundred forty-five minutes a week. That is about fifteen miles. Second season, around a hundred ninety, call it twenty miles. Third season, an eighth grader who has handled it, around two hundred twenty-five, which is twenty-five miles.

And I want to be clear that those are ceilings, not targets. A kid who is thriving at the bottom of the range stays at the bottom of the range.

One more thing, and this is the part coaches get wrong. You set that level by training age, not by grade and not by talent. A fast fifth grader is a first-year runner. So is a slow one. The athlete most likely to get hurt in your program is the gifted seventh grader whose ambition has outrun their tendons.

3:05

Now here is the trap that catches everybody, and I have walked into it myself.

You want them to work. You know intensity is part of development. So you write a workout. Four times something, at a controlled effort.

And then eleven-year-olds do what eleven-year-olds do. They race it. Every rep becomes a competition. The session lands two gears higher than you planned it. And you have accidentally run a time trial on a Wednesday in September.

The fix is not to avoid intensity. The fix is to stop handing them a session they can race.

You wrap the dose inside a game. And there is one rule that makes it work, which is that you set the dose before the athletes ever see the game. You decide the session is four one-minute efforts. Then you pick the wrapper. Never the other way around, because a game left to generate its own dose will always generate too much.

4:24

Let me give you the simplest one. I call it Traffic Light.

Before practice, you write your calls on an index card. Green, yellow, red. Green is conversation pace. Yellow is comfortably fast. Red is controlled hard.

Then you stand in one spot where everybody passes you, and you call a color. And they shout the gear back to you as they go by, which is how they learn to name an effort instead of just feeling it.

The index card is the whole trick. The card is the dose. You count your reds against it, and when the card runs out, the session is over. Because I promise you, if you improvise the calls, you will add volume. Every time. The group looks good, you feel good, you call one more red. The card stops you from doing that.

And here is the test at the end of a rep. Ten seconds after the whistle, ask a kid a question. If they can give you a three or four word answer, that was the right effort. If they are bent over with their hands on their knees, that was the wrong effort, and it was your fault, not theirs.

5:26

Now, the seventeen minutes that almost every middle school program skips, because it does not look like running.

I call it the Athlete Base, and it goes at the front of every single practice. Five minutes of movement prep. Seven minutes of skills, so A-skips, B-skips, bounding, pogo hops, bear crawls, backward running. And then five minutes of actual sprinting, three days a week.

Yes, sprinting. Distance runners. Ten to forty meters, full recovery, on grass.

Here is the argument. You have heard that there is a window for coordination that slams shut at puberty. That is the popular version, and it is a little too neat. Lloyd and Oliver’s Youth Physical Development model, which is the standard reference now, makes the case that every quality is trainable at every stage. What changes is how the body adapts, not whether it can.

But here is what is true. A twelve-year-old learns a B-skip in two sessions. A seventeen-year-old takes a month. The window is not a door that locks. It is a sale that ends. And you should buy while it is cheap.

And if you think that is soft, look at what USATF itself does. They run a program called RunJumpThrow with Hershey that teaches kids seven to twelve how to run, jump, and throw. Free, no competition, and it passed a million participants earlier this year. If the governing body of the sport thinks a twelve-year-old should be jumping and throwing, your distance kids can spare five minutes to sprint.

6:44

Let’s talk about racing, because race distance at this age is a mess. Every league just does whatever it has always done.

USATF actually has a clean answer, and it is worth knowing because it is the number to quote when a parent tells you the race is too long, or another coach tells you it is too short.

USATF races their Junior Olympic age divisions like this. Nine and ten year olds run three kilometers. Eleven and twelve, also three kilometers. Thirteen and fourteen, four kilometers. Five K does not show up until fifteen.

Grades five through eight land almost entirely in those first three divisions. So the national governing body of the sport is racing your athletes at three K, moving up to four K for the oldest of them. If your league runs a mile and a half or two miles, run what your league runs. That is close enough and it is fine.

And on the five K. USATF Foundation guidance and the RRCA both put it in range from around age twelve. But permission is not a recommendation. One five K in an eighth grade season is a graduation race. Two is a program that has confused middle school with high school.

How often? Six or seven opportunities across a twelve week season, and no individual kid runs more than six of them. Sit an eighth grader out of one and tell them why, which is that you are pointing them at November.

7:52

Last thing, and this is the situation half of you are actually in. Two teams, one field, one whistle, and maybe one coach.

It is solvable, and it comes down to three things.

One loop. You measure a single loop, eight hundred to twelve hundred meters, with a spot in the middle where you can see all of it. Everybody runs the same loop. Volume is laps, not routes. A fifth grader runs six while a senior runs fourteen. Nobody is out of sight, nobody gets lost, and your fastest and slowest athletes pass each other four times in a session. That passing is your team culture, and it costs you nothing.

One clock. Every session starts and ends at the same minute. Time is the constant, distance is the variable. That is the whole reason to write middle school training in minutes in the first place. It makes a joint practice arithmetically possible.

And one session type, six different doses. On a Wednesday everybody in your program is doing threshold-family work. The first-year middle schooler is doing four times one minute. Your varsity senior is doing five times six minutes. Same loop, same whistle, wildly different amounts. And that twelve-year-old gets to watch what the work turns into, which is worth more than any speech you are ever going to give them.

Two rules on top of that. Keep the bookends joint, so the whole squad warms up together and cools down together and only the running block splits. And pair every high school athlete with one middle schooler. Small job. Partner them in the strength circuit, check the log got written, find them at meets. It fixes your supervision ratio without hiring anybody, and it addresses the actual number one reason a middle schooler goes out for high school cross country. Which is not you. It is that they already know somebody on that team.

9:02

So here is your one thing to take into practice this week.

Your middle schoolers are not a small varsity team and they are not a daycare. They are your program in two years. And the only number from a middle school season that still matters when those kids are seniors is how many of them signed up again.

The American Academy of Pediatrics put out a clinical report on this in twenty twenty-four, and the finding that should stop you cold is that injury and burnout are among the leading reasons kids leave sport. Not boredom. Not other interests. Injury and burnout. Both of which are coaching decisions.

You cannot control whether a twelve-year-old decides they would rather play basketball. You can absolutely control whether cross country is the sport that hurt them.

9:38

Build the athlete. Protect the joy. The mileage can wait, because you have got seven more years with these kids if you do this part right.

If you want the whole thing laid out, the full guide to coaching middle school cross country is free on the site at coachsaltmarsh.com, with all the sources so you can check my work. And if you want the twelve weeks already written, three levels deep with the games and the practice structure, that is there too.

I’m Coach Saltmarsh. Run fast. I’ll see you next week.