Building a Championship XC Culture: Lessons from F-M, Niwot & Newbury Park If you study the nation’s most dominant high school distance programs—places like Fayetteville-Manlius, Newbury Park, Niwot, and Southlake Carroll—you start to notice something: their secret to success is hiding in plain sight. It’s visible in every practice, every conversation, and goes into every…
The 5 Mistakes New Distance Coaches Make I still remember my first season as a head cross country coach. I hadn’t planned for it to happen. I was a competitive masters road racer who had been recruited by the outgoing coach. I already worked at the high school, and my daughter was a sophomore on…
The Three-Ring Circus: How to Coach Multiple Training Groups It’s 2:50 PM on a Tuesday. The bell has rung, the locker room doors are banging open, and sixty high schoolers are spilling onto the track. You have your Varsity squad looking to qualify for States, a solid JV group that needs development, and a dozen…
I’ll never forget the kid who showed up to practice sophomore year announcing he’d run 60 miles that week because “that’s what David Rudisha (800m world record holder) did when he was my age.” By the of September, he was sidelined with overuse injuries. His fall season? Gone. His ability to help his teammates win…
The Science of Periodization: Building the Perfect High School XC Macrocycle The season had fallen apart by mid-October. A talented squad that had looked promising in August was now scattered across the training spectrum—two kids injured, three overtrained and flat, four undertrained and fitness-lagging. The coach, well-intentioned but flying by instinct, had programmed workouts week-to-week…
It’s the Fourth of July. The local 5K just finished. I see my breakout sophomore limping. Don’t be a casualty of the ‘June Jump.’ Here is the veteran coach’s guide to navigating summer mileage. Building a massive aerobic engine is crucial for XC success—we all know the science. But if you build the engine faster…
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