Her high school coach was aware I worked withe her in summer and fall and starting back helping in the spring, but there wasn’t any communication between the high school coach and myself in this instance (I just worked off of what I got and in these cases responsible athletes that report workouts/take good notes of what they do are key). Her head coach is a very nice lady that runs a consistently competitive program within her conference.
It’s a tough situation as a private coach when kids start their high school season. They are not many high schools where you feel you are handing off to a complimentary program that will continue the development. You also won’t find many coaches who want to be told how they could adjust their programs or get better results for an athlete.
Kids in short sprints or tech heavy events like short hurdles are often doomed as the delicate rhythms and need for speed and power are often neglected in high school programs. (Her goal was a long hurdle state title (and her program does get kids in solid 400 shape (dense extensive tempo and IT mostly), but lacks speed development; as such fall was learning how to hurdle really well both legs(she was a single legger), general development of a sprinter (some tempo, some accel, some speed, some IT, some speed endurance).
Speed and power development and short speed endurance were emphasized as those pure skills would decay in season while her conditioning increased (sub 19 standing 150 late in the fall without any comp or anything to get juiced up about off of very little SE work, which in kids I’ve coached in the past would have likely meant a girl capable of breaking 25 in the spring in the deuce). Also we still did short hurdle work at least once a week for frequency and speed skills and just to make her a better hurdler). She, like short hurdle kids I’ve coached in the past PRed early in the season and got worse as the season went along (she still won a division state title in the event indoors, but by outdoors her rhythm had decayed too far for that as high school coaches usually hurdle full spacing full height and fatigued).
Generally kids that do S&C three days a week with me in season are able to hold up and we can manage their work a little bit and take a workout they have to do in practice and make it work better for them. More importantly in-season S&C allows me to keep people healthy from a monitoring and training perspective and also increase some of the speed power qualities that are neglected in their programs that kids have such a large adaptive window in.
Ryan, as you are successful in the club coach type world I’d love to hear how you interact and what kind of relationships and influence you’ve been able to build with high school coaches.