Bob Szymanski has been the boys coach at Shoreham-Wading River since 1981. His squad, led by Bobby Andrews, won the Class B state championship last year in their sixth consecutive trip to the state championships. With a veteran group ranked third overall in the state, Shoreham-Wading River is the mid-season favorite to repeat in Class B.
SWR beat Smithtown Tuesday, 57-84, for the Section 11 Division title, where Andrews won the individual 5k title, finishing in 16:06.25 at Sunken Meadow State Park. It was days after SWR dominated the Varsity 1 race at the Brown Invitational in Rhode Island with 23 points.
AT: Briefly describe your coaching philosophy.
BS: I like to get them a background first –long slow running which to build from. If you don’t get the background in, you can’t run. I tell the kids that if you can run for me five days a week in the summer before camp. Then they move up to seven days and in camp they’ll run twice a day and twice a day when school starts.
The philosophy is you don’t yell at kids. You don’t scream. But they have to do two a days when school starts. I like to get between 50-55 miles a week for high school kids. The farthest race they’ll run in high school is 3.1 miles. Every book I’ve ever read says that you don’t ever really run three times what you race. During workouts, whatever we run, we jog, meaning that if we run a half-mile, we jog a half slow. We do it the opposite way to avoid injuries.
I believe you have to go to the track once a week in cross country season. So if we go to Van Cortlandt or Sunken Meadow Park on Monday, we’ll go to the track and run 6 miles, 3 miles one way 3 mile the other way.
AT: What’s one of your staple workouts and why do you do it?
BS: We have training trails in Shoreham. We like to do repeat halves and 1,000s in the woods. We’ll do eight of them and we jog the distance back. We do it in say, whatever the kid runs at Sunken Meadow, basically, because you want them to feel smooth at race pace. We don’t do it faster than race pace because then Mother Nature doesn’t let you finish the workout. For example, Bobby Andrews will do his first two in 2:14 and I’ll ask him, how many times do you take out the first mile of a race in 4:28 and he’ll know what I’m talking about. I’ll make him do the first two in 2:30 and then we’ll get down to race pace. If they go out too hard they can’t finish the workout or they’ll be tired and the workout feels like drudgery. I’ll almost stop them if they go out too fast.
It’s like a measuring tape. If they can handle that workout then we have something to work off. For example at Manhattan we came in, in a big group. That’s how we do our workouts in the Nature Trail. I only let Bobby go wild at the end of a workout. I make them run together in the beginning.
AT: How do you decide your race schedule?
BS: Usually it’s when we get invited to meets. It depends on the quality of your team. Now we’ve had some great teams in the past seven or eight years. Section 11 gives us a 
league schedule. We had the Jim Smith Invitational and Bob Pratt. We’ve been to Van Cortlandt. We’re going to Brown so we can get off of Sunken Meadow and Van Cortlandt. You want to try to get off the hilly courses. Going to Van Cortlandt twice a season is enough. If we have a weaker team we won’t go to some of the bigger invitationals. You don’t want to stay on the same courses. We’ll go to Wappingers Falls, Bowdoin Park for the state federations. So they’ll go to Bowdoin, Van Cortlandt and Sunken Meadow. We’ll go to Brown. If you’re a cross country runner variety really is the spice of life.
AT: What would you say your biggest challenge is as a head coach?
BS: It’s getting the youngsters to believe in you. It helps that I’ve been around a long time. Most ppl know that a lot of want I’m doing is working. But you may get a kid that’s new to the community. You have to get kids to believe in you. The kid has to have confidence in you. Like I said, I don’t yell at the kids at first. I let them go for a week and see how they are doing and then we’ll see what to do.
AT: Your team had a great performance at Manhattan. Talk about that race and the outlook for the remainder of the season.
BS: That was our best meet to date. We were actually looking forward to Manhattan. Once we found out Smithtown was in our heat, we wanted to beat them. At Bob Pratt, Smithtown wasn’t in our heat. We had two of the toughest teams in the state in our heat, Queensbury and Arlington. Smithtown didn’t want to be in our heat. They didn’t win their heat that day. When we beat Smithtown at Manhattan, that was big for us. I can’t let the kids let down now but that just gave us more confidence and I think it put a scare into Smithtown.
AT: You’re strapped with a veteran group of runners. What's different about working with such an experienced group?
BS: The thing is it makes coaching a lot easier. They know what I want from them, they know what to expect from me. But I get spoiled by that. Next year I’ll have new kids and I’ll have to start all over. My patience wears thin with eighth-graders. They’ll still throwing rocks and pulling kids pants down. I was like that too as an eighth-grader. I’m hoping that they learn from our veterans. I tell them that the only reason we’re going to Brown is because of our top five guys. So they understand what it takes. You have to get invited to meets like that. Like if we make the state meet this year, it’ll be our sixth straight year. You have to tell the kids that you just don’t make the state meet because you run for Shoreham-Wading River. You have to work for it.
- Christopher Hunt