Camillus NY - Hot on the heels of cross country, Winter Track is back. After the success of Jim Vermeulen's XC Journal in the fall, we've asked again for him to provide some news and notes once a month this winter. Think of these as the thoughts that cross the mind of your average coach. Up from Section 3, we present you with "Thoughts From Three."
The End Games
I had an assistant coach once. He could typically be heard exhorting our athletes along the final meters of any particular race. "Finish! Finish!" he'd boom their last exhausted meters. You wouldn't think athletes need that reminder, but he was there just in case.
Each year, by mid May, the season has reached that metaphorical end-line for a majority of scholastic track and field athletes. And the stakes are raised on those who remain. My assistant's metaphor is apt in either case. You watch how athletes approach their final events, maybe their final scholastic seasons, and those last efforts tell you a lot about not only where they began but where they are headed in their running lives.
The media always pumps up the volume for big meets and the big endings, but there's no shortage of drama quietly unfolding long before states or nationals. We've all watched this parade. With our final dual meet, two thirds of my team handed in uniforms and marched off in mixed moods. Some of them expressed regrets for unmet goals or aspirations. They are lucky. Their disappointment will spur renewed efforts and resolve in future seasons. And if they did not score points for the team this time around, they typically found alternative ways to contribute. For them, track and field became not an activity but a pursuit, sport in its finest sense.
Others, though, if pressed would admit to no small measure of relief for the open afternoons ahead. Coaches understand that. Each year, our no-cut sport is visited by a significant number of students who want to try a varsity track team on for size just to see if it fits. For many, there's honest hope there--maybe a sport that can be done well. That hope is balanced by the nonchalant curiosity of others. In both camps, many of those students sampling our sport are truly surprised to discover that something so available to them is, if done right, so hard.
As a result, some of them predictably will not return next spring. They will have their reasons--and all of them, in their own way, will make sense: It's no fun; I'm not that good; I keep getting injured; the coach doesn't give me enough attention. With the late emergence of our track from winter snows, the signs of their departures mounted: accumulating missed practices; spring vacations taken; early-season PR's stuck on hold. Even with the scholastic track regular season as short as it is, some of them by the first warm days had already begun going through the motions and counting the days. Unintentionally perhaps, they were proving again that you can't have it both ways. If you're happy to see the end, then the end won't be that memorable.
The championship athletes, meanwhile, soldiered on. Year-round athletes for the most part, urgency and expectation appeared to rule them. Hopes for a proper finale were sometimes kept hidden, sometimes not. Mary made no secret of the fact that, following a difficult competitive year, the graduation present she wanted to give herself was a 3000 meter faster than any she'd ever run. Six laps into her final scholastic race at sectionals that hope was in doubt. Then she must have channeled my old assistant because the arms came up and the lap times came down. When I verified her PR time after the race, there was a smile, a slight fist pump and a quiet "yes." Sometimes a second is a huge gift.
Delaney also went on a tear this May. After four dedicated seasons, one lost to injury and only one sectional championship qualification--that as an 8th grader--she was due. Early May, this senior dropped five seconds off any previous 800m. Half a week later, she lopped off three more seconds in a dual meet. Then Delaney set sights on the 1500m, and at our last invitational meet ran eighteen seconds faster than any previous personal PR. She easily met the sectional championship standard, and with a smile Coach Delsole told her afterward that we were having her drug tested.
Open Qualifiers are coming up. True character will be on full display in those end games. You are the fortunate coach if you can count in your experience multiple athletes who bring their best last. Sheer statistics weigh against you. The fairy-tale endings, the 'miracles on track' are, for the majority of coaches and athletes, few and far between. But you plan for them; they are what you expect because, though we think of this as the province of elite athletes, to go out at the top of one's game, to run big when it matters most, is an open opportunity.
Still, I always think back to Kerry:
Attempt #1 at Outdoor Nationals ended in water. A torrid of rainwater. Someone squeezed the celestial sponges again and again as the low-lying stadium track began to fill. Puddles swelled, linked, deepened. I noted the irony as flooding advanced to the edge of the steeplechase water pit, paused, then spilled in. Within an hour, darkness had descended and the stadium below became a shallow lake, populated only by splashing athletes instead of ducks. The final meet events, including Kerry's steeplechase competition, were postponed until the next morning. Regents exams, however, prohibited a rescheduled flight, so her running year went under with everything else.
She tried again as a senior. It wasn't easy getting back. Her promising fall cross-country season succumbed to illness at Sectionals as she failed in her final attempt to make a State Championship. Ten days before the Indoor Track State Qualifier, she was diagnosed with a stress fracture and stood on the sidelines several weeks into the outdoor season. Spring went hard. Behind in training, she plugged on, slowly earning back lost fitness.
The weather warmed. Teammates surrendered to senior-itis, accepted lackluster seasons and handed in uniforms. Kerry mustered the resolve and pushed harder. She qualified one more time for nationals, then trained alone for two weeks. In mid-June, seven days before graduation, she returned to North Carolina. The lake had drained. Saturday evening, a soft southern breeze meandered through the stadium, and when the gun for her seeded heat cracked, the last sunlight of the day had escaped through the tops of trees. Dusk found her circling, fighting the mounting fatigue of land barriers and water jumps, reaching for what was left from a difficult year.
Then it was over. She had a sectional record to take home, and she'd finished seventh in the nation, three tenths of a second from All-American status. I waited by the exit to the infield as she slowly walked away from her final high school competition, utterly spent. She approached, head bowed but not by regret. When she reached me, she said, "I had no more gears coach."
Were all our athletes so lucky.