As an athletic development coach how often have I heard the lament – How can you prepare us you never played the game? I have heard that more times than I care to mention. Personally I think one of the worst qualifications for being an athletic development (S&C coach for the uninitiated) is to have played the game, especially if you were a star at the sport. This goes back to my first days as a [...]

Before I go out on a limb and say that this could be our best Decathlon team sent to the Olympics ever! While it certainly is a great assembly of athletes, we need to take a look at the previous OT's and compare. Here are the top 3 finishers from 2008 back to 1976 with Bruce Jenner (now featured on the E Channel). 2008Brian Clay8832 Trey Hardee8534 Tom Pappas85112004Brian Clay8660 Tom Pappas8517 [...]

Two days ago, I posted about a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that surprisingly featured 3 track athletes in its Top 10 (including Decathlete Roman Sebrle at number 1). Today, in some rare down time at the USATF Jr. Nationals I saw a related article that had a pretty interesting video of Bryan Clay going through the SPARQ testing protocol. The premise is that most athletes only do one o [...]

The Wall Street Journal recently published a list of the Top 10 Athletes in the world. I was surprisingly shocked to see that not only did 3 tracksters make the list but the WSJ said that the number one athlete in the world was Roman Sebrle. Joining him was Liu Xiang in 7th and Jeremy Wariner in 8th. I'm not sure I fully agree with their rankings but (I think Sebrle's claim to the number 1 spot [...]

I recently integrated my twitter microblog on my elitetrack author page and I've found a good way to put it to use. I'm at a mid-week multi with my best decathlete at a meet in Princeton and I thought it would be a cool way to live blog what should be a nice competition. There are several NCAA qualifiers here and conditions are great. We've come with the explicit goal of breaking 7,000 points. [...]