Camillus NY - After the success of Jim Vermeulen's XC Journal
in the many falls of Cross Country, 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."
A Saunders Field Mentality
Occupied with mindless backyard chores in late spring sunshine, I started thinking about baseball. Maybe I should have been putting my thoughts into post-season championship track preparations, but I instead found myself trying to recall exciting moments from my Little League days way back. Even with effort, I couldn't remember anything special. Nothing but vaguely bland recollections of heavy-weave uniforms and shouting adults. And that was true of Babe Ruth League also.
There were, however, other baseball memories that brought back smiles. What came to mind were the endless dusty summer afternoon hours at Saunders Field, a worn dirt diamond with a rickety wooden backstop and chicken-wire fencing. Left field at that small-town sand lot slopped upward toward the old town cemetery. Dead-away center just gradually degenerated into a local farm.
As kids, we'd bike there for afternoon pick-up games. Sides were noisily chosen and half of us sat on a broken bench under the shade of an expansive maple while the other half stood out under the hot Jersey sun kicking dirt bombs and taunting every batter who approached home plate. It wasn't much of a plate. We'd even, if someone decided to leave, exchange players halfway through a game to balance things out. And a game was whatever number of innings we felt like playing.
My favorite Saunders Field memory was the day Dale got bored waiting to bat and thought it an interesting idea to set fire to an old mattress that was plugging a hole in some broken backstop boards. Kenny noticed it in time, before it could jump to the wood of the structure. Once he sounded the alarm, everyone pitched in to beat down the flames with dirt and bats while Dale stood off to one side hiding a smile behind his glove. What he didn't notice was that his old man, working in their front yard a few houses down, had spotted the fire, lumbered his way over and quickly figured things out. That afternoon game ended with Dale being ear-yanked home by his dad, who was explaining loudly, "Boy, you need religion boy!"
Those lazy, lingering and unsupervised days of youth are largely gone, well chronicled by some and now typically recalled sentimentally by us older folk. No need to embellish the mythology further. My thoughts of pick-up sandlot baseball were, however, intersecting with summer running plans for my fall cross-country athletes. Like many coaches, I've inched up the spectrum of organizational strategies for the hot months, tilted toward more voluntary team runs and more athlete accountability, the assumption being that more structure is better. Over the years, one summer team run each week became two, then three, until one summer we were up to four days of servitude, two of running, two of light runs followed by conditioning and drills. That was the year Coach Delsole looked back from the perspective of October, and then summed up all the June-August hours and efforts at this or that improvement in either the fitness or psyche of our irregularly attending runners. "That was worthless," came his conclusion.
Such thinking, of course, goes against the grain of most persistent and driven coaches who don't want to let go in summer for fear of losing November championships. The prevailing attitude is that we (coaches) must organize those open weeks lest the athletes escape our well-meaning passion. Supposedly, nothing good can come of just standing on the sidelines for a while. You cannot, it's assumed, motivate or support by merely observing from afar.
But I think Coach Delsole was on to something. The summer weeks that we encouraged our runners through multiple days of workouts and drills certainly weren't worthless for the amount of work we managed to extract from our charges, but there was another more subtle measure we failed to consider, something that had to do with the difference between Little League and pickup games at Saunders Field.
Burning down backstops aside, I am pretty confident I learned a lot more about the value of sports from sandlot baseball than from my over-organized Little League. Others have effectively argued the benefits of free-form, pickup sports for kids, and still others have also adequately described the potentially stultifying nature of youth sports when they are too tightly controlled by adults. Think T-ball, where the big deal for the kids is usually the treat after the 'game.'
In running, the risks of over-regimentation are also high. We just fail to recognize them as readily as some do the obvious boredom of young baseball players picking dandelions instead of guarding the right field line. Running, after all, is not something you get together to do 'for fun' on a lazy summer afternoon. In our sport, it's believed, youngsters and young adults must be organized and taught by adults to actually understand how much 'fun' it can be.
Which is at least partly true. What's different, however, is that such thinking persists. Our sport typically does not develop its own momentum as the participants grow older. For a majority of our seasons, running always seems to 'happen' only because some adult is making it happen, whether with practices or meets. When is the last time, for instance, that anyone pulled over near a local high school to watch a pick-up track meet? Left to their own devices, what happens to a large percentage of your average scholastic runners is non-running. And maybe, instead of charging in with even more structure and requirements, we should consider whether, despite our expertise and passion, we've inhibited the development of that proverbial "love of the game" in our runners. The media will reliably highlight the unique few who simply can't be stopped and are out the door at all hours of the day to run here or there. But what about the rest who supposedly, in the free-zone of summer, need to be cajoled and scheduled to do something they are then expected to love? Where does that running passion eventually come from? Is there any education or learning theory that can demonstrate how such self-motivation and discipline and the simple joy of covering distances--the basis for successful middle-distance running--simply appears out of nowhere?
The cross-country runners, this year's gaggle of hopefuls, slowly assembled at our middle school training site in the early evening. When we had enough, we sat them in the shade and kicked off our summer training season. Actually, we had more than enough, with a sizable percentage of new faces who'd signed on for this longest of scholastic seasons. They sat fidgety with anticipation and a perhaps a little apprehension. I talked briefly about the season ahead, the training approach of predominately low-intensity summer work that would build the base safely and include just enough faster stuff. And I told them, in effect, that they might see less of me this summer. They'd been assigned to Summer Squads of 7-8 members, each led by a veteran Summer Squad Captain whose job it was to organize three squad runs each week at a time and place of their choosing. Trail runs, canal path runs, road runs--keep it interesting, I told the captains. Be inventive, try something new, make getting the work done as enjoyable as possible.
Those captains will report to me weekly, and all the runners will be required to keep summer training logs to be turned in the first day of team practices in mid-August--so I'll know what's happened. We'll meet as total teams, of course, at least once a week for the higher intensity work better monitored by a coach. And our mid-summer Distance Camp will provide a nice check on things at the halfway point. But to a greater extent than in summers past, the runners and their captains will be on their own to develop (or not) that love of our game. This year at least, we're not following that institutional inclination toward lowest-common-denominator planning. We're giving a sizeable chunk of the summer back to the athletes.
The squads met before breaking for the evening. Plans were already underway and some were arguing for a squad name and maybe even a T-shirt. Two groups asked if they could compete against each other as teams in our early August Wildcat Challenge 5k race. Sure, I told them, knock yourself out.
Will it work? For some, I have my doubts. For most others, however, I have my hopes. Regardless, Coach Delsole has come out of XC 'retirement' this fall to sub for the boys modified coach. He will be around and, come October, will surely let me know.
