Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #363: TJ Lawson-IMG Academy | Building Culture, Multis, and a National Meet

Transcript

#363: TJ Lawson-IMG Academy | Building Culture, Multis, and a National Meet · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

0:00
Hey guys, thanks for being here today.
0:02
Real quick before we get on with today's amazing guest that
0:05
you're going to absolutely love. I'm so glad you're going to be
0:07
able to hear their story. Want to make sure that you knew
0:09
something a sale that we're doing for our throws coaches for
0:12
the month of April and May. We've got to buy one, get one
0:15
free sale on some discuses, shots and hammers.
0:18
Head on over to gillathletics.com to find out
0:20
the specifics for those hammers, those shots and those discuses.
0:24
But get call your preferred Gill dealer.
0:26
They have all the details as well, but it's only April and
0:29
May. Then it's there's no more.
0:31
So make sure you're taking advantage of this.
0:32
Now let's get on with the show. You're listening to the Gil
0:37
Athletics Connections podcast with host Mike Cunningham.
0:43
Track and field world UNL tuned in to a humble servant, Mike
0:48
Cunningham, for another extraordinary message for Gil
0:51
Athletics. Connections yo, you're back here
0:55
on the Gil Connections buses. I always say the same thing in
0:58
every intro and I just I get tired because you know, I don't
1:01
like saying the same thing over and over.
1:03
So I'm going to change it up here just a little bit.
1:05
First of all, if this is your first time being here, thank you
1:07
so much for being here. This is your one thousandth time
1:09
being here. Thank you as well.
1:11
If you would pause right now, do me a favor, go over whatever
1:15
podcast you're listening to of our app you're using or YouTube
1:18
or wherever you're at. Will you do like the review and
1:21
rating and stuff like that? That helps kind of amplify the
1:24
men and women that we have on here, their stories, their
1:26
journeys. And that would just mean the
1:27
world to me that help continue to amplify the amazing men and
1:30
women that we have on the podcast.
1:32
Now back to your regular scheduled show.
1:34
Thanks again for joining us here today.
1:35
Mike Cunningham, your host, the podcast guy, the Twitter guy who
1:40
knows just the guy. Just give me a call whenever you
1:42
need anything, right. I'm excited about today because
1:44
we're actually this is kind of a not officially A2 parter, but
1:48
it's more like a two-part series.
1:50
So today we've got the sun, if you will, and next week we're
1:55
going to get the other side. We're going to get his dad onto
1:58
the podcast and we're going to learn.
1:59
We're going to find out how much today's guest really is truthful
2:02
or not. We'll we'll find out.
2:04
Super excited to bring you these two individuals starting with
2:07
today. Help me welcome from the IMG
2:09
Academy down in the beautiful Florida, the assistant director
2:11
of track and field the wise, the wonderful Mr. TJ Lawson.
2:14
TJ, welcome to the show. Mike, how's it going?
2:17
Thanks for having me. Absolutely man, I love you know
2:20
when we do our pre interview, one of the and you know this now
2:22
TJ, one of our questions or you know, statements is about your
2:26
background. I love your background.
2:28
I love this little track in the blue.
2:30
Did you, if I remember, Craig, did you do that or who did that?
2:33
I have to give credit, that was my wife.
2:35
She came in, I got this office a couple years ago and I loved it
2:40
was all, it was all proud of it. You know, my wife, her name's
2:42
Abby. She walked in.
2:43
She's like, man, it's boring in here.
2:45
And next week she was in here with a paint can and she painted
2:48
the track lines and put the logo up and now it's my amazing zoom
2:52
background so. I love it.
2:54
Do I remember right? Was she a interior decorating
2:57
major or design? No, she's not, but she she may
3:00
claim to be OK. Her her first piece at least, is
3:04
amazing. I do love that a lot.
3:06
Yeah, she's the best. I do the same thing.
3:08
Whenever, you know, guys or gals get new offices, I'm always
3:10
like, what? OK, come on, make it your own.
3:12
Like even they're keep. Just make it you're here every
3:14
day. Make it your own.
3:16
Like this. This shouldn't be some kind of
3:18
sterile environment. So I love that.
3:20
TJ Mann, thanks again for being here today.
3:23
We're going to learn a lot about your journey.
3:25
We started this podcast over 7 years ago.
3:27
It's kind of crazy to say that out loud to uplift and honor
3:30
coaches around the country and sometimes around the world.
3:33
And I know there's probably a lot of people have pressed play
3:36
because they saw your name and IMG Academy and they're like,
3:40
what's going on? I've heard some things about
3:42
this. IMGI want to learn what's going
3:45
on the trackside. So we'll dig in a little bit of
3:47
what IMG, what IMG offers and why it's the right school for
3:51
some people. You, you got a great staff there
3:54
and a great roster there. So we'll learn more about IMG as
3:57
well when we get to that point. But to get there, we have to to
4:00
go through the journey, my friend.
4:03
Well, I see I get stuck in saying the same things over and
4:06
over. Tji was going to say, assuming
4:07
you were an athlete. Now I know you well enough that
4:09
I know you're an athlete. So let's take that off there and
4:12
let's just say, hey TJ, where in the world does track and field
4:16
start for you, my friend? Yeah, I always tell people, I
4:20
think it started the second I was born.
4:22
I know that during the, I want to say it was 1990, so I was
4:29
born in 1997. I know my mom was attending big
4:32
time track meets while she was pregnant with me.
4:34
And the minute I was born, I was born into a track family.
4:37
You mentioned it before and it's no, no hidden fact here that I'm
4:41
a son of a track coach. My dad, Bill lost, has been in
4:44
the track business for coming on 50 years, was a Division One
4:47
track coach for 40 plus years. So I got to kind of grow up in
4:50
the sport. For me, it was never something I
4:53
considered my main, main sport as an athlete.
4:55
It was always more of like, this is like my life, my life is
4:58
track. But I'm really invested into
5:00
basketball and golf and all these different other sports.
5:04
But yeah, I was born into it. I was born in Waterloo, IA
5:08
because my dad at the time was coaching at the University of
5:11
Northern Iowa. And then around like two or
5:13
three years old, I believe, don't really remember that far
5:16
back, but I believe we shot over to Eugene.
5:18
I got the opportunity to grow up in Eugene, which I think that's
5:21
where when I say I was born in the track and field, when, when
5:24
you're kind of playing around the sand pits of Hayward Field,
5:27
it's hard to not say I was really born around the sport.
5:30
My dad always tells me a story how I wish I knew the athlete's
5:34
name and maybe he can clear it up.
5:35
But there's some high level long jumpers jumping in Hayward.
5:38
And I was just a kid. I think probably now that I have
5:41
a kid myself, I would assume my mom was, you know, being drove
5:44
nuts by myself and my sister. And we were at the track with my
5:47
dad for practice and a long jumper went to land the pit and
5:51
I believe it was he came up and his leg was all cut up.
5:54
He's like what the heck. And they start digging in the
5:56
sand pit and there is one of my metal toy tractors.
5:58
No. And you know, the kind of
6:00
description of like how I grew up, I was just playing in the
6:03
sand at Hayward Field. It's kind of cool, yeah.
6:06
Were you? That's funny.
6:07
Better that than you know. We also know cats do some,
6:10
that's why there are covers for long that's attractive to a lot
6:14
of kids and animals, etcetera. Were you?
6:16
I was blown away, I remember. So if you were born in 97, 2008,
6:20
I was there in 2008 for the trials.
6:21
Were you like 11? Did you say you were born in 97?
6:24
Yep. You was at the trials.
6:25
I remember watching Galen Rupp run away.
6:29
I remember stay up on that balcony at the, I think it was
6:32
the Bowerman building at that point, the older Hayward and
6:35
watching that happened, I believe it was on the 4th of
6:37
July it happened. It was just unbelievable.
6:39
I remember that vividly. One of the things that blew me
6:42
away, that was actually the first time I'd ever been to
6:44
Hayward when when I was coaching and none of my nationals were in
6:47
Oregon, so I never got to go. So this is my first time and you
6:49
know, the way the trials are, it's like a week, two days off
6:52
and then a week. And you know, I'm there for the
6:54
whole time for 2 1/2 weeks or whatnot.
6:56
And so during the two days off, you know, we don't really have
6:58
anything to do. I had to go to the track for
7:00
something, I can't remember what, but I'm walking to to the
7:02
track. I'm almost in Hayward and I hear
7:04
the announcer and they're doing like a kids like hesitate to say
7:09
attract me, but like they were doing kids races and I hear him
7:12
say this blew my mind. OK, up next is the five year old
7:17
100 meter dash. First of all, I was like, wow,
7:18
they got so many like 5 year old.
7:20
That's crazy. But you know, it's one heat and
7:21
that's 6, maybe it's 10 years old, whatever.
7:24
The first heat of five five year olds and then there were so many
7:28
6 year old heat and seven and so many kids.
7:31
It blew me away. Were you that kid?
7:33
Were you doing all the Hayward kid races and stuff?
7:36
This is why everyone loves Eugene OR right?
7:39
It's just the Mecca. They call it Tracktown USA for a
7:42
reason. It's huge with the community.
7:43
I mean, it's one of the reasons Hayward is what it is.
7:45
They rope the community into that area.
7:48
I know that they had all comers meets.
7:49
I don't know what day a week, but I know every week they had
7:52
all comers meets for the community and we would go.
7:54
I have, I have home videos and pictures of me running these all
7:57
comers meets the 100, the 200. I know there was long jump and I
8:02
actually vividly remember too. I know at a certain age group, I
8:07
want to say maybe it was when you're 10 or 12, they went away
8:10
from giving participation ribbons to actually like first,
8:12
second and third place. And I remember my sister who's
8:15
two years older than me, she there was a point when she was
8:18
getting the 1st place ribbons and mine were purple and they
8:21
were, you know, the participation all cover ribbons.
8:24
And I was always so mad. I'd wind my heat and I wouldn't
8:27
get the colored ribbon saying I want and my sister would always
8:29
rub it in my face. But I still have those ribbons.
8:32
Actually I was going through trophies not that long ago and I
8:34
still have them in a box. People thought we were crazy and
8:37
my dad would have us run in those all comers meets.
8:40
We would run the 200 and everyone would be in their
8:43
shoes. We always ran barefoot on the
8:45
track really. So growing up, we only raced
8:48
barefoot. That was something my dad had us
8:51
do just from a foot strengthening thing.
8:53
We felt fast, but kids would look at us like we were crazy.
8:57
And you know, my dad, he's a serious, intense man.
8:59
He's actually gotten a lot softer as the years have come.
9:02
But I mean, he would tell us, get on that track.
9:04
Put your blinders. I mean, there's videos.
9:06
Mike, this is crazy. I wish I could.
9:08
I might have to send to you and cut it into this if you want.
9:11
There's a video of a kid coming up to me on the track trying to
9:14
ask me questions. OK, I'm in lane 4 lane 5 on
9:17
Hayward Field about to run a 200 all comers race, barefoot about
9:21
to ask me a question. You see me look at the kid and
9:24
go I'm focused. Leave me alone because my dad
9:28
told me, hey, don't talk to me when you're up there.
9:30
You stay focused and the video's hilarious, but that's awesome.
9:34
We took those meats serious, man.
9:35
That was the real deal. Now, you mentioned, I love how
9:38
you put this, that you grew up in track and field.
9:40
You didn't necessarily consider it your number one sport because
9:42
it was just, it was life. It wasn't just sport.
9:43
It was like, did you do other sports in high school?
9:46
Yeah, high school, I did. Basketball, I would say at one
9:50
point was my main sport. I was really into basketball.
9:53
I didn't really ever get fully into track, I'd say until I
9:57
would consider, I definitely never ran organized track until
10:00
my freshman year of high school. There wasn't much club track
10:03
around us, but I did cross country a little bit, which was
10:07
a fun time. That was more just kind of
10:09
conditioning into basketball season and then into track
10:12
season. And then I've always been a big
10:13
golfer, never played competitively with a high school
10:17
team, but it's something my dad and I have always done and we're
10:19
pretty competitive out there so. And for you guys and guys that
10:22
don't know TJ or haven't seen him in person, what are you like
10:26
710? I don't know what you're not
10:28
quite that tall, but you're. Tall, I always tell people that
10:31
pull the tape on me right now I'd be 6 foot 8, but if it was
10:35
like a basketball roster, right I'm.
10:36
Definitely. Yeah, yeah.
10:38
Yeah, you exaggerate a little bit, like because I know there's
10:41
kids even walking around the campus where I work here that
10:43
claim they're 7 foot and like they're not. 7.
10:46
Foot. But no, I'm 68.
10:48
I don't know where my height came from.
10:50
My mom's probably 5, My mom's probably 5859.
10:54
That one point was 64. He's definitely shrunk now so I
10:59
don't know where I got my height.
11:00
The Super long leg 6 foot 8 just continued to grow through high
11:04
school. Really.
11:04
Were you always the tall guy or did?
11:06
No, no. Even in basketball, moving from
11:08
8th grade to freshman year of high school, sophomore year, I
11:12
was more of a forward, like to play from the wing.
11:14
I was never considered a big man, right?
11:17
And I know it's kind of a hard point of contention with
11:19
basketball coaches like, Hey, we want you to play in the center.
11:21
You're the five man. Like I can't play with my back
11:24
to the basket. I want to be on the move and
11:26
drive into the hole. And no, I think I had my growth
11:29
spurt. I want to say was my sophomore
11:32
year to junior year. I I, I sprouted up like 6
11:36
inches, I want to say in one summer, caused a bunch of
11:39
growing pains and injuries. And I always kind of joke with
11:44
people that you don't want to be my height.
11:45
Like the amount of issues I'm having, my hips and my knees and
11:49
traveling on a plane. It's not a fun thing.
11:51
Yeah, that's a. Good point.
11:52
I, I feel like I've been 6 foot my whole life.
11:54
The other day I went to the doctor and they, they measured
11:56
my height or whatever and it was 61 cuz I got these big shoes on
11:59
or whatever. And I literally totally is like
12:00
look man, don't write down 61. Like just put six.
12:03
I was like, I don't want like, it feels like the doctor's going
12:05
to get, you know, they're going to try to diagnose me with their
12:07
stuff. I'm good at six foot.
12:09
I don't need to be more than that.
12:11
Yeah, yeah. Now you end up becoming a
12:13
decathlete and we'll talk about that here in a little bit.
12:15
Did you you do another sports, but were you in track?
12:19
Were you doing a bunch of different events or did you
12:21
stick to like the hurdles or something?
12:23
No, I was always just kind of bouncing around that there was a
12:26
meet I had. It was my junior year.
12:29
We were in the playoff season for high school basketball.
12:32
I remember going to my high school basketball coach and
12:36
saying something along the lines of, hey, this is indoor track
12:39
meet, I want to do it. It was at Kent State when my dad
12:42
was working. It was an indoor meet, just kind
12:44
of an all comers indoor meet. Went there and out of nowhere, I
12:47
think just finally, you know, I guess it was me growing into my
12:51
body. Puberty hit.
12:52
All of a sudden it's kind of figured some things out.
12:54
Had a big meet indoors and you know, decent jumps like I was, I
12:58
think I finally broke that 23 foot barrier in the long jump.
13:01
I jumped like 610 in the high jump, ran a decent 200 and like
13:05
pole bolted something average maybe 1011 feet.
13:08
And at that point my whole college recruiting thing
13:11
shifted. I went from like I'm going to go
13:13
play basketball, that's what I want to do to like whoa, I have
13:16
some big schools reaching out to me all of a sudden.
13:19
And that's kind of where my journey of recruiting the
13:21
college took off. But before then, no, man, I just
13:24
was, you know, I was just kind of doing.
13:27
Everyone thinks that with a dad that such a big coach in the
13:31
sport, I would just be all in on track.
13:33
But it feels like if my dad got home from work, the last thing
13:36
we were all in on was track. You know, it's like we're out
13:39
there playing golf and doing other things.
13:41
I mean, I I never hurdled a race that I never even went through a
13:44
hurdle race until the summer going into college.
13:47
I ran my first hurdle race. I never went over hurdles until
13:50
my first decathlon the morning of.
13:53
Yeah, my first ever decathlon was the summer going into
13:57
college. So I've been in the summer of
13:59
2015 for me, we got to the facility about 5:00 AM in was
14:05
it, is it Greensboro, NC, where they used to host the New
14:08
Balance National Championships for outdoors and that was my
14:11
first decathlon never heard before.
14:13
We put some hurdles in the grass practice that morning and went
14:15
for it. So I have to assume because you
14:19
were, you know, fairly athletic, it went OK though.
14:22
And you're tall like it was. It's not like some, you know,
14:25
freshman 52 kid, you know, not athletic.
14:28
It's like, oh, let's try the hurdle.
14:29
That's how I started the hurdle. I was like, I was unathletic and
14:31
it did not go well. You probably did OK.
14:33
I was. No for sure.
14:34
The hurdles have always been a love hate for me.
14:37
I mean most people may start hurdling.
14:39
It's like hey how can I three-step?
14:41
My problem has always been hey how the heck am I going to fit 3
14:44
steps? Right, right.
14:45
That's what I was thinking for that, Yeah, yeah.
14:48
No, I I believe the video went a lot like this is boom, Yeah.
14:51
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was there wasn't much
14:53
technique, but. That actually was.
14:55
That was. Kind of my path in in high
14:57
school, just, you know, realizing it tracks the path for
14:59
me and yeah. I'm always fascinated by these,
15:03
I'm gonna call them unique relationships, meaning, you
15:05
know, Dad's a coach, you become a track athlete.
15:08
We've had married couples that were both coaching, like,
15:11
because, you know, you brought it up, Like, how do you, how do
15:13
you leave it on the track? You both come home together.
15:15
Like that's always tough. What I'm curious about is like,
15:18
you know, I coached for 10 years at a pretty high level.
15:20
That's how I got to know your dad.
15:23
Your dad has is 1000 times. The coach I am, I struggle with
15:27
and I must say, luckily my kids are not going probably into the
15:30
Track World. I would struggle sitting in that
15:33
stands watching them practice or coach at the meet and not say
15:37
something, especially if it was like not safe or whatever.
15:40
But I'd be like, man, what are they doing?
15:42
I don't know if I could do that. What was your relationship with
15:45
your high school coaches and how did dad influence or not
15:49
influence? How did or or did did he coach
15:51
you separately and then you join the team on Saturday?
15:54
I've always, this is one thing, and now that I work at high
15:58
school athletics, like where I work at IMG, which we'll get
16:01
into at the, at the root of it, we're a middle school and a high
16:04
school delivering a product to students here.
16:06
And now that I work in the scene, I've never had more
16:08
respect for my dad than I do now.
16:11
Because looking back on it, my dad was so hands off in my high
16:15
school career with my track coaches, right?
16:18
He was more hands on in my basketball career than my high
16:20
school track. Career really, I mean.
16:22
Would there be times where there be some things going on like
16:26
Hey, TI walked over the long jumping that board, right?
16:30
Well, put it this way, it wasn't a Gill board, right?
16:32
It was it was, you know, some some rinky dink board.
16:36
It's 28° still basically winter in Ohio.
16:39
He'd be like, hey, T JS not TJ, you're not jumping.
16:42
Never ever would my dad cross that line, though, and go up to
16:45
a coach say hey, T JS not jumping right.
16:48
He always thought me be the adult in the situation.
16:51
He had the utmost respect from a high jump coach.
16:53
To this day, I'm still keep in touch with my high jump coach in
16:55
high school. And yeah, he never really
16:59
interfered. If anything, I think he created
17:00
an environment for my high school coaches to go to him and
17:04
they asked his opinion. Yeah, I was gonna ask, did they
17:06
take advantage or was there some for sure egos involved?
17:10
No, it was never a bad thing. He even opened up the indoor
17:15
facility at Kent State. He let our attracting come
17:17
practice there what I believe was a pretty discounted rate if
17:20
not nothing. I think the statue of
17:22
limitations are over on that, so we'll keep going.
17:24
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was good, though.
17:27
He makes sure there was track time and he paid 15 bucks a head
17:30
for a kid to come in and get indoor track time like stuff
17:33
that was just it was a good relationship.
17:36
That's. Good.
17:36
Yeah. I've always, it irks me when I
17:40
see our club coaches and high school coaches and college
17:43
coaches that are battling each other and it's like, guys, we
17:46
have the greatest sport in the world.
17:48
And at the end of the day, I think every coach would agree
17:50
with the statement. I'm doing it for the kids.
17:52
Well, if that's true, then we need to have better
17:53
communication amongst each other and less bad egos.
17:57
And so I'm glad to hear because you know, I just know your dad
17:59
and you know, he's larger than life for many reasons.
18:01
Personally, he's larger than life.
18:03
I'll tell my Bill Lawson story next week when we're sitting
18:06
down with him. But and I could see, like I
18:10
could see both ways actually. Like if you'd have told me your
18:12
dad was very involved, like that's law, I might get that.
18:15
But that's it seems like very healthy relationship and a great
18:17
model for you because you're taking all this.
18:19
In as a teenager, it's interesting.
18:21
I, I realize it more and more like every single day at IMG
18:24
Academy, I'm working with parents of kids who have
18:26
aspirations for their kids, which every parent does.
18:29
The more I'm realizing it, the higher level athlete that parent
18:33
was. It seems like their expectations
18:34
are more go with the flow. They understand the bigger
18:37
picture. Like now that I look at it
18:39
right, whether or not I cleared the 2M bar or not in high
18:42
school, it didn't matter, didn't matter, right?
18:44
As long as I was having a good time and understanding the
18:46
process and growing in the sport.
18:48
I think my dad always had that outlook and vision.
18:50
To me, it was life or death, right?
18:51
I knew down there on the hydro, bro, I gotta make this bar.
18:54
But in my dad's head, I think he had the maturity and the overall
18:57
like vision that, hey, it doesn't matter, right?
19:00
Whether you have pull vault teacher, whether you pull vault
19:01
10 feet in high school, 12 feet, it doesn't matter because we
19:04
know you're gonna pull vault high, right?
19:05
And I think that he was always really good at looking towards
19:08
the future with me in that. And for that reason, he never
19:10
micromanaged the current. Yeah, that, that could be hard.
19:14
I I'm just the other day on Twitter, someone was talking
19:17
about, you know, the freaks that we have sometime, you know, it's
19:20
the 1% of the 1%. And I made the comment as like I
19:23
think they said, you know, rarely do we coach.
19:26
Do we have freaks on our team? And I said, yeah, actually, full
19:29
stop right there. It's like they're called freaks
19:31
for a reason. They're not normal.
19:33
That's not your normal. 99% of the kids you coach are average
19:36
at best. But yet we always talk about the
19:39
1%. That's all we ever talk about is
19:40
how do you train to the 1%? How do you help the 1% get to
19:43
the PP4 and all that kind of stuff.
19:45
It's like, bro, that's one out of 100 of your athletes.
19:47
Maybe it's like, why don't we focus on the 99 guys?
19:51
I feel like the 1% are going to be OK in the future as they
19:53
continue to grow anyway. How so you, you had that one
19:57
indoor meet that like, OK, things are changing a little
20:00
bit. Maybe it's not basketball, maybe
20:01
it's track. You said some big name schools
20:04
were reaching out. TJ, you were going to Kent State
20:09
with your dad the whole time, right?
20:11
You didn't seriously think about other schools?
20:13
Well, it's funny. I mean, I think deep down I
20:16
always knew it. I also felt like my dad was, if
20:20
I was going to go somewhere, he's going to have me go to a
20:21
coach that you trusted, which is why I visited certain schools.
20:25
I mean, I was talking with, you know, with Geffy over at
20:28
Arkansas at the time. It's just a school he trusts in.
20:31
But still, he knew that. I think he deep down knew that
20:34
Kent State, there was a little bit of a lack of facilities on
20:37
the outdoor trackside. There was a lack of weather.
20:40
It's Ohio, right? It wasn't down in the warm
20:42
South. So he's trying to always on be
20:44
on that fence of, you know, would I be better off staying
20:47
with him under his philosophy or maybe someone with better
20:49
resources? Ultimately, I never felt pressed
20:53
by him. But the schools that came down
20:54
to for me were it really came down to Arkansas, Indiana and
20:57
Kent State were my top three. Absolutely loved it at Indiana.
21:01
I think that if my dad was in the picture, I would have been a
21:04
Hoosier for sure. There's a school that I just
21:06
absolutely love. The coaching staff there were
21:08
great guys, great people. So, yeah.
21:12
But deep down, you're right. I mean, I don't want to say I
21:14
wasted anyone's time. I really tried to give myself an
21:17
open mind, but I never, there's no way I was ever going to, you
21:22
know, sway away from Dad. I felt like you just things we
21:25
were doing together worked so well.
21:27
You know, we were, we were already meshing and it was
21:29
perfect. You know, I had a lot of respect
21:32
for your dad for a long time. You're giving me even more
21:35
respect that he like, it really did feel like he was like, OK,
21:38
you know, sure, probably he's coming to conceive, but I could
21:40
see him also. I'll have to ask him this next
21:42
week. It also feels like he had some
21:44
like thoughts of like, yeah. Is it what's best for TJ though,
21:48
that a he comes to Kent State because of the things you
21:50
mentioned, but also like, am I the right?
21:52
Is the father son thing going to continue as it becomes 18/19/20?
21:55
Like that's really. Yeah, boy, that's.
21:58
Tough, he really did give me a good experience.
22:00
If I remember correctly too, he stayed out of the recruiting
22:03
process completely for Kent State.
22:05
He had the assistant coach come to an in house.
22:07
Really. I'm sure he went into a movie by
22:09
himself somewhere so that the coach could talk to me
22:11
individually and that was awesome.
22:13
Like. And it was easy, too, for him
22:15
because I was getting offers, you know, from other schools.
22:17
So it's easy to justify an offer to that school.
22:20
And it all really lined up. And I think on paper, it was a
22:23
great deal for Kent. There was already some financial
22:25
things in place because he worked there and all that.
22:27
So I mean, for me, financially, it made sense.
22:29
Also, like, I love my family. I was close to home.
22:33
I love the area and I would not turn in my time for Kent State
22:37
of anything. I absolutely loved it there.
22:39
Our track team was great. We had some high level track as
22:42
you can. You know, it's a pockety school
22:44
in that sense. And we always had representation
22:46
at the NCAA championships in all events.
22:48
We had sprinters, throwers, jumpers.
22:50
Our throws program there is historically really, really
22:52
good. Yeah.
22:54
So yeah, I wouldn't change it for anything, but I loved it
22:56
there. Yeah, I love that intentionality
22:59
of your dad too. Like the other coach will
23:00
recruit you. I'm not even going to be I know
23:02
what he's going to say. So I don't even need to be here.
23:04
You need to figure out if you that's that's amazing, dude.
23:07
I love that. And yeah, Ken State, great track
23:10
program for a long time. The Matt conference, you know, I
23:13
coached 2 years at Ball State in that conference.
23:14
I have a lot of respect for the coaches that in that conference
23:19
and now finger at Ken State doing a great job.
23:21
So a lot of love, a lot of respect for that.
23:25
OK Was I assume it was a given you were going to become a
23:28
decathlete. That sounds for, yeah.
23:31
You know that right? There was innate inside me.
23:35
I never wanted to. There's no way I'd ever want to
23:38
just like run a straight line. Do want it then, right?
23:40
Like I always, I've always been busy.
23:43
Just yeah, I just, I don't, I want to be doing different
23:46
things. Like if you, I look at some of
23:48
the programming, I'll write for kids I coach.
23:49
Now say I have a kid that's a high jumper only it's just like
23:53
I, I it looks fun on paper maybe.
23:55
But I look at it, I'm like, I don't know.
23:56
I don't want to do plyos and speed work, then jump plyos,
23:59
speed work, jump. Like there's a point where
24:01
there's something in me that I can't sit still.
24:04
I like being outside. I like, you know, that's just
24:06
who I am. Like I like doing multiple
24:08
different things. I'm my wife always claims I'll
24:10
pick up a random hobby and drop it in two weeks.
24:12
Like that's kind of who I am. You know, I'll kind of be on
24:14
some random hobby and all of a sudden I'm all in.
24:17
I ordered the stuff, I'm Youtubing it and I'm like, I'm
24:19
on to the next thing. Like I've always been kind of
24:21
the guy to, you know, just want to do multiple things.
24:24
And I think with my body type, we already kind of mentioned
24:26
that I'm super tall. I was pretty coordinated for how
24:30
tall I was. So a lot of people in my height
24:32
are kind of like this. Not the most coordinated people.
24:35
They're boats for feet and they kind of just a waddle around.
24:38
For me, I was more of a coordinated taller person.
24:40
So decathlon just made sense for me.
24:43
Yeah, I also had the vision of knowing how hard it is to make
24:48
it to the next level, right. That was an experience my dad
24:50
gave me. Like like in high school, you
24:52
jump 2 meters, jump 66, and people think you're a freak.
24:54
But in reality, you know, you're barely scoring at the Mac Mac
24:58
Championships, jumping 66, just a different level at the V1
25:01
level. And you know that.
25:03
I think there was a reality hit that, hey, if I'm not going to
25:05
be a 73 high jumper and a 27 foot long jumper right now, I
25:09
gotta do something to to make myself stand out.
25:11
And that was Decathlon. Yeah, that makes sense.
25:13
What, as a 18 year old going to Kent, what are you you thinking
25:17
about majoring in? And what is 18 year old TJ
25:20
thinking he's going to become when he grows up?
25:21
Yeah. You know, I always told people
25:24
my dream job was, this is funny because I'm not even that far
25:28
from it right now. My dream job growing up was
25:30
always, I want to work in sports and merge it with technology and
25:34
do something in sales. That's why I used to think so.
25:36
Really, Somehow I was told, like, what does that mean?
25:39
Does that mean I sell scoreboards to football
25:42
stadiums? I don't even know.
25:43
That's where I wanted to go. So I knew I wanted to do
25:45
business at Kent and I went along and that's why I was dead.
25:48
I was exploratory my first year, making sure that's what I wanted
25:51
to do. Ended up majoring.
25:53
I did a sport admin major and then I went on to get a business
25:56
major as well. So I did 2 majors while I can't.
25:59
Yeah, now I'm working in it too. I mean, I'm coaching.
26:02
Yeah, down. I'd always coach in some fashion
26:04
right lately where I'm at, we'll get into it, but I'm I'm doing a
26:07
little bit more the business side and the sales.
26:09
Side yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, that's what I'm saying.
26:11
When you said that, I was like, yeah, dude, you're doing it.
26:14
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
26:15
Wow, that's really. Cool.
26:16
I I've said that statement since I was in high school.
26:18
That's what I wanted to do and I think I'm getting closer to it
26:21
every day. And what I do right now doesn't
26:23
really feel like work, so I love it.
26:24
I love that that's awesome Well, you talk about IMG, so how in
26:28
the world do you go from you? You were almost an 8000 point
26:31
decathlete, which is just amazing.
26:33
I, I think we sometimes, first of all, we put these sometimes
26:37
too big of a title onto these round numbers, right?
26:40
10 flat in the 104 flat in the mile, 8000 in the decathlon.
26:44
And we sometimes forget like, you know, 8000 is actually a
26:47
random number as well. It just happens to have more
26:48
zeros in it, right? But you know, you were.
26:51
Were you 79 something? Yeah, 7980, hold on a SEC.
26:55
That's Oh my God, you were, you were one bar away.
26:59
Oh my God, what was it like as you you're you're pushing
27:05
towards 8000, you're coming towards graduation.
27:08
You're not 7000, which is like, oh man, you had a great career.
27:12
Boy, you score 7000. Trust me, guys, you are
27:15
unbelievable. You actually have like shot of
27:18
like, oh man, they're like, maybe I should continue going.
27:21
Is that how you got to IMG or how how in the world did you
27:23
make that decision? Yeah, it, it wasn't a hard
27:25
decision for me because, you know, a lot of people will say
27:28
this, I, I was so untapped with what I scored.
27:31
I mean, my 7900 or 7980 run was there were so many points on the
27:37
board, you would say. And for me, I had a lot.
27:41
Of hold on, hold on. So I've I've learned to love the
27:43
decap fund because my mentor, now retired, Fred Dixon, was 2
27:47
town Olympic, you know, good friends with your dad.
27:50
So I certainly love and I have gained the what's the word I
27:54
would use here. I do think decathletes are
27:56
better than like when someone applies for a job here.
27:59
If they were decathlete, I don't care if they scored 4000, I'd be
28:01
like, I bet they could do a lot here.
28:03
I mean, they're decathlete. They're it's a special breed
28:06
when you just said, you know, when you went 7980.
28:10
I left a few. Doesn't every decathlete say, I
28:12
mean, literally, if I were to have had Ashton Eaton on the
28:15
podcast before, he's an amazing man now.
28:17
Got into coaching, by the way, I love that.
28:19
I bet you when I talked to Ashton and said, hey, the first
28:21
time you scored 9000, he'd go, yeah, but we left a lot of
28:23
points before. Don't all the Catholics say
28:25
that? Well, it is.
28:27
That's, and that's the idea of, you know, of course you can do.
28:30
If you ever would have finished a decathlon and said, hey, it
28:32
was perfect. I always tell the kids I coach,
28:34
you're never going to have a perfect decathlon.
28:36
If you do, that means you're settling, right.
28:38
It means you, you no longer should be doing this.
28:40
You've lost the flame. But yeah, I mean, I had a lot of
28:42
injuries. I just battled my body over and
28:45
over and over again. If I could click my fingers
28:47
right now and have healthy hips and healthy adductors and knees
28:54
and you gave me 10 leaves to train, I think I could be I
28:57
could be right up there at another level with anyone in the
28:59
world. And I just there, there was a
29:01
point out of college I knew I had potential to eventually be a
29:05
9000 point guy. I really thought it could be
29:07
that. I know I could have been there.
29:09
And then it came throughout the, I think it was more reality
29:12
hitting me in the face of holy cow, how do you, what does it
29:16
look like to be a pro track athlete in the States?
29:19
Right. And that's when I was like,
29:20
well, basically people just hang around at their colleges and
29:23
just keep turning up the home facility and hope to God, every
29:26
four years it times up and they make a team.
29:28
Unfortunately, that's what it is.
29:30
Unless you're a gold medalist, like unless you're the Ashtons
29:33
of the world, that's what it's like for most people.
29:35
And there's not much support from any anyone.
29:39
I mean, USATF needs to probably, you know, rethink a lot of this
29:42
stuff and how they're funding people because.
29:44
And decathletes have it. I'll say there is one group that
29:47
has a little bit worse than decathlete that's raised
29:49
walkers. We won't bring that up.
29:51
But decathletes, because you don't first of all, you're not
29:53
competing at every, you're not doing your your marquee event
29:56
decathlon at every meet like 100m guy or.
29:58
Mile, there's no pro money to win in Diamond League, right?
30:02
It's really, really hard and and I think America in general is
30:09
almost shooting themselves on the foot because we're so damn
30:11
good in the United States, right?
30:13
We can continue to not fund anything and we do nothing but
30:16
produce gold medals, right? If all of a sudden we are
30:19
getting smacked in every Olympic Games and we are 5th on the
30:21
medal count, I would assume honestly from the top government
30:25
down, they say, hey, we should probably change this.
30:27
I think we could just track and field.
30:29
People are so resilient. They will go work their butts
30:32
off and make a penny and be happy, right?
30:35
And I don't know if that's a good thing or bad thing.
30:37
Like I'm not sure. For me, you know, it was kind of
30:40
that points like where do I train?
30:41
I need to move down South, what do I do?
30:44
I'll shortly tell the story. I was in the stands.
30:46
I just got done competing at the Olympic trials.
30:48
The decathlon in 2021, which I think was a 2020 trial, was
30:53
delayed because of COVID. It was a whole thing.
30:56
My whole senior year was all diced up from COVID.
30:58
I know that indoor nationals, it's supposed to be in
31:00
Albuquerque that year. That was your senior year.
31:04
I was seeded second in the meet and I was by far in the most top
31:09
peak physical shape I've ever had been.
31:11
I just got done pre meeting at the, I think it's a Convention
31:14
Center there in Albuquerque. I felt amazing.
31:16
And that's when all the news dropped.
31:18
March man just cancelled. Yeah, and Fast forward to the
31:21
trials. I was sitting in the stands,
31:23
just got done competing. Honestly didn't have that good
31:25
on me. Kind of bummed it in the stands,
31:27
heads down. I'm watching the rounds of the
31:29
100 go. That's my first time I ever
31:31
heard of IMG Academy. I was sitting there and the
31:34
announcer at Hayward said, hey, you know, in lane 8 right there,
31:37
that's high school senior Jalen Slade running for IMG Academy
31:41
High School. And me knowing track and field,
31:44
just about everyone in the crowd, especially on the male
31:47
side, and thinking, what high school male athlete made it into
31:50
the man's man's race, right? I mean, that's under me.
31:53
That's a man's race right there. I mean, you don't see high
31:55
school boys making it there. And sure enough, IMG at the
31:58
time, which I had no affiliation with, they had sent Jalen Slade,
32:01
who's now a pro athlete for Adidas to run at the Olympic
32:05
trials in high school. And he had that big white
32:07
uniform IMG across the chest. Didn't I never heard of it.
32:11
I wasn't one to follow things online.
32:13
I didn't really know much with the high school football scene.
32:15
So right there in the stands, I get on my phone, I type it in,
32:18
What's IMG Academy? Boom, I'm getting sold now by
32:21
the website. I see the pictures.
32:23
I'm like, Oh my gosh, it's the Disney World of sports.
32:25
I need to go. And that's kind of wow, how it
32:28
all trickled into my mind of hey, I could go down the IMGI
32:31
should go train at this place looks beautiful.
32:33
And, you know, Long story short, my dad knew some people gave
32:36
some calls around and we came down for, I guess, a visit just
32:39
to see what the place was like. And I loved it.
32:41
So I had to talk with my wife and said, hey, like, if I'm
32:45
gonna try to, you know, really push, become a true, true
32:47
decathlete to me, what should be that 9000 point range you gotta
32:50
get to if you ever want to make it big S for 9000 points.
32:53
And nothing was unreachable in my mind at that point.
32:56
I thought I could do it. I'm gonna move to Florida.
32:58
I'm gonna train. I'm gonna, you know, full on
33:00
just go all in on it. At that point.
33:03
My wife was supportive and, well, we actually weren't even
33:05
married. She was my fiance at the time.
33:06
And we moved down and did the whole thing and I gave it a good
33:10
year and a half, two year run. And like I said, I think
33:12
injuries and all that just kind of kept me from ever like fully
33:16
putting it together, which is unfortunate.
33:18
I definitely have some regress there.
33:19
But track's a hard sport to make it if you're not making it, you
33:23
know? I think injuries are the number
33:26
one like beyond coaching, beyond even like buy in from the
33:31
athlete. I, I think injuries are the
33:33
number one predictor of like, oh, they'll get as close as
33:36
possible to whatever their Max is supposed to be or not.
33:39
And some of that is honestly, I know there's a lot of things you
33:42
can do and there's a lot of prehab and sleep and diet and
33:46
all that kind of stuff. But some of it we forget to
33:48
chalk up. There's some percentage and I'm
33:50
not, I'm not sure it's 1% that luck is, is involved.
33:54
You know, you stop the wrong way, you do the wrong event at
33:56
the wrong day, the hamstring goes and it's never the same
34:00
after you. You unluckily get 6-8 instead of
34:03
6/6. And now your hips and abductors.
34:06
You know, some of it's just luck and it sucks because you got no
34:10
control over. That and especially in
34:12
decathlon, it's all about staying healthy.
34:13
I mean, I, I remember warming up the Olympic tribe, maybe it was
34:18
NCA championships one year, Is that Eugene?
34:20
I remember kind of going by it was an athlete.
34:22
I forget who it was. We're all jogging, warming up.
34:24
Decathlete's kind of have this little bond to them, little
34:26
brotherhood. We're all talking.
34:28
We know we're about to go through for two days and
34:30
everyone's like, how you feeling?
34:31
It's funny because I feel 85%, which is good.
34:34
You feel 85%, you feel good. And in decathlon, like if you
34:37
got to 90% feeling good, healthy, you're ready to roll.
34:41
Like, you know, I feel like I never felt healthy healthy.
34:46
The healthiest ever felt was probably in Albuquerque before
34:48
that meat was cancelled. But yeah, it, it was a battle,
34:50
but I'm so thankful for it cuz I got down the IMGI did that pro
34:55
training stint. I'd learned a ton.
34:56
I think I became a better coach from it, better athlete from it.
35:00
And yeah. And then after that, I kind of
35:02
just, I realized what IMG was and I could maybe get into some
35:06
youth coaching here. And before you know it, I was
35:08
coaching a group of, I want to say I start with like 6 young
35:12
decathletes. I had a kid in 8th grade that
35:14
want to be a decathlete. It's like, hey, let's do it.
35:16
And actually, that same kid now, he's about to graduate and he's
35:19
about to go be a decathlon, be a decathlete at Duke.
35:23
No way. Oh, that's cool.
35:26
I love that. How do you, you know, we've had
35:30
some amazing athletes in the same caliber view.
35:34
Joanna Hayes, Dwayne Wright, you know, guys that you know it, it
35:37
didn't end after. First of all, if you go to
35:38
college, to me, you're an elite athlete.
35:40
It's just unbelievable. If you have any opportunity to
35:43
do it after college, holy cow, you're on a fraternity of, of no
35:46
one to be real frank with you. How do you know like how do you
35:50
like? I'm always amazed.
35:51
I, I went through this with Fred Dixon actually.
35:53
So on Friday he worked for Gil and he, you know, took customer
35:56
calls and all that stuff. And when he retired that
35:58
weekend, on Monday, he just didn't, he didn't, you know, he
36:01
probably, hopefully he slept in. It's like, how do you, you know,
36:04
I don't know how you do that. How do you, how do you on Friday
36:07
have your last workout, whatever you're doing, and then on Monday
36:11
you are, you decide You're not a decathlete.
36:13
You're you're done as an athlete at that level anyway because
36:17
you're still golfing. I know you're still an athlete.
36:19
For me, I called it at a really good time.
36:22
It wasn't like a hard stop. It was just more of a reality
36:24
check and I thought I'm a realistic person.
36:26
I was able to look in the mirrors like, man, I got XYZ
36:29
surgery. I still don't feel healthy.
36:31
Didn't work right. By the time this comes around, I
36:34
have a wife waiting to get married.
36:35
We want to start our family. We want to do all these things
36:38
financially it's just nothing but digging a hole, right?
36:41
If you want to do it right, if you want to fly to Europe with
36:44
a, you know, APT with you and a coach, I mean, there's not
36:48
having a prize pool big enough to cover it, right?
36:50
There was lack of funding from USATF on the medical side and
36:53
all this stuff. It was just, it was just a hard
36:55
world to live in for someone like me.
36:58
That was so advantageous against the business world too, right?
37:02
I wanted to start my career. And there was a point I forget
37:05
when it was, but at IMG I found myself thinking more about the
37:08
business side and the coaching side.
37:10
I was getting more invested in getting the kids.
37:12
I was coaching better than myself.
37:14
And that's when I was able to say, you know what, that's fine.
37:16
I'm gonna go coach these kids to be the best they can be.
37:19
I'll keep doing my thing, but I don't need to go compete.
37:21
I'm OK with it. I still have track.
37:23
I realize that the thing I was attached to wasn't competing
37:26
myself. It was just the sport of track.
37:28
Right, so. It really wasn't a transition to
37:30
me. It's not like I thought about
37:31
track any less. I'm just doing it with other
37:33
kids now, not. Different.
37:34
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you describe something
37:37
there we learned now, I don't know. 200 and 5300 episodes ago
37:41
with Cameron Babb. He's the head coach of Washburn
37:44
University. He was a cathlete as well.
37:46
And the way you just described that what we, it was kind of an
37:49
aha moment. We kind of both got there at the
37:50
same time. When you're an athlete, an
37:53
athlete is a very selfish pursuit.
37:55
And that's not negative. Don't think just because I
37:58
called it selfish, but you're always like, how do I, how do I
38:01
eat so that I become a better decathlete?
38:03
How do I rest? I'll become, it's all about how
38:05
do I become a better athlete? When you turn into coaching, it
38:09
turns more into selflessness. And now when you when someone
38:12
tells you a workout or sleeping or you're like, OK, so how do I
38:16
process that and now push it out to my athletes?
38:19
So I love how you were like, you know, it became I was concerned
38:23
less about how what was my long jump going to be that weekend
38:25
and more of like, how are those kids going to do in the long
38:26
jump over there? You know, so you turn from
38:28
selfish again, that's I know it typically is deemed a negative
38:31
word there, but like, oh, how do I do better in my activities?
38:35
And it turned like I'm thinking more about how do I help them?
38:38
That's a great, great example. And there was a point, Mike,
38:41
where I knew I couldn't be as selfish as you need to be to be.
38:46
A great, Yeah, that's a great point.
38:48
I trust me, I understand. To be a good athlete you have to
38:51
be selfish. You have to make time for them
38:52
to dedicate this. You need to go.
38:54
I need this. You have to vouch for yourself,
38:56
especially in the Track World. And there was a point when I was
38:58
trying to make a paycheck and do that at the same time.
39:01
And I know there's hundreds of people in the States doing it
39:03
right now and I commend them. It's not easy to try to work a
39:06
full time corporate and then come out 5:00 PM and train on
39:09
the local track and all the people that are doing it and
39:11
there's people every single year and every single Olympic cycle
39:15
that do it. That's fucking awesome.
39:17
I think for me it was just more of a, it was a reality check and
39:21
just me being realistic with things and saying, hey, I could
39:24
delay my career two years and maybe not make it still, but I'm
39:27
still in the sport that I love. Let me go down this path and be
39:30
just as happy. So that's what I did and it
39:33
worked out. So when you were coaching those
39:35
kids, was that were you working for IMG or was that separate?
39:38
Yeah, So that's why I first got into IMG actually.
39:41
Yeah, I was working for IMG and I was still training full time
39:43
too, so there would be points in that first group.
39:45
I was sometimes training with the older kids.
39:47
There's some 18 year olds here that are pretty high level.
39:50
One of them's currently at Louisville right now.
39:52
There's some higher level kids that were able to train around.
39:54
I basically coach in the mornings, train in the
39:56
afternoon. And like I said, there was a
39:58
point when I think that the coaching consumed me to the
40:00
point where I was like, you know what, I like this.
40:03
I never. Wanted to vocally say out loud
40:05
I'm going to be a coach because I thought it was just me falling
40:08
in dad's footsteps and but I I wanted to do it man.
40:11
It was fun. And I remember taking the first
40:13
group of kids I ever coached their first decathlon.
40:16
There was a couple kids there. Their first ever time doing a
40:19
track meet was a decathlon. What an intro to track.
40:22
The one that I was talking about, he was in 8th grade.
40:25
I took him over to meet on the East Coast of Florida, and he's
40:29
never done a track meet before. I was like, hey, well, your
40:31
first one's gonna be at Decathlon.
40:32
Let's see, it was in November. I mean, who does it?
40:34
Decathlon in November. Yeah.
40:36
And we were over there and I remember watching these kids,
40:39
and we're talking about 8th graders, right?
40:41
Doing long jump run throughs. I'm trying to coach them.
40:44
I'm coming from the world of like we're talking about
40:46
penultimate steps and mid steps and making sure we're perfect
40:49
and I'm in. I'm now just like, holy cow, are
40:51
they on the right leg and they're hitting the board right?
40:53
It was a way down step for me. It was really cool.
40:56
I found myself more nervous coaching these kids that I was
41:00
my whole career myself. Did you did you that's
41:03
interesting. Did you struggle with that?
41:05
And what I mean by is, you know, I know you're dad has an
41:09
influence over you from the day you were born.
41:11
So you hear him, you were at practice and you hear him
41:14
yelling about penultimate stuff. You hear him yelling about this
41:17
and that in arm positions. And now you're at a stage where
41:20
you when you first get into coaching, the kids are your
41:22
coaching. You realize like, Oh yeah,
41:23
they're not there. But that's kind of all, you
41:26
know. Did you struggle with?
41:28
For sure. Not the wrong term is dumbing it
41:30
down. The real term is getting to
41:32
basics like how do I communicate to this 8th grader because it
41:35
ain't the same as how dad communicated to me as a 22 year
41:38
old. Did you struggle with that at
41:40
all or how did? You.
41:40
I did, yeah. It was definitely a learning
41:42
lesson for me. I mean, like if you put someone
41:47
in front of the ring and say I was just helping someone with
41:48
the discus throw, right? And they're a 65 meter discus
41:51
thrower, a lot easier to watch and pick out one little thing
41:54
than to have a group of kids in front of you and you get to
41:56
teach them how to hold the discus.
41:58
Right. It's like I have to go way back
42:01
in my mind here to figure this out, how to explain it.
42:03
But yeah, it was a full learning curve.
42:05
Now, I've gotten really good at taking people from ground up in
42:07
all 10 events. Yeah.
42:09
Yeah. That's like when I kind of pride
42:10
myself in. Now I've had a system of all 10
42:13
events in decathlon, and how do I teach someone from ground up
42:16
that way? When I call a college coach and
42:17
be like, hey, I got a kid for you, by the way, all the
42:21
headaches you don't want to deal with, How do you grip this and
42:23
do that? What's the hurdle?
42:24
three-step, seven step, all this stuff.
42:27
Usually an IMG will teach it to them so when they get to college
42:30
they're ready just to train and be with the college roster I.
42:33
Can't remember who it was, someone kind of recently my
42:36
memory tells me. That said, I feel like it was
42:38
one of our women guest said something to the fact like all
42:42
coaches should have to coach middle school for at least a
42:45
year. No matter what.
42:46
If you want to become a college coach, elite coach, high school
42:48
doesn't matter. And and I was like, Oh, really
42:50
What I thought more of like, oh, just to kind of herd the cats.
42:53
And they were like, no, more just like you have to explain
42:56
things differently to 1/6 grader than you do a 21 year old.
42:58
And and but you probably need to explain to the 21 year old just
43:02
like you did the 6th grader and you've forgotten that point or
43:04
you think because they're 21, they're in college.
43:06
You don't have to talk to them. Like, no, you sometimes you got
43:08
to go basics. A lot of times we got to go
43:11
basics with these. And it's something that a lot of
43:14
high level athletes, high level coaches, they have it in their
43:16
brain. It's just having the cue to say
43:18
it right. I can't tell you how many times
43:20
I've done like a higher level highs obsession.
43:22
Last year I coached a girl, her name was Julia Massilskaya.
43:25
She's from Belarus, brought to IMG or junior year.
43:28
She ended up being, she's now currently, I think #2 heptathlon
43:31
in U.S. history at the high school level.
43:33
The only girl that scored higher than her is Anna Hall.
43:36
It's pretty good. And she jumped last year at the
43:38
her her capstone meat froze. She jumped 181 in the high jump
43:41
for high school. That's unreal.
43:43
I mean, she's killing it. And amazing girl, amazing
43:46
athlete, really coachable. I can't tell you how many times
43:49
we've done a high jump session out there and we got all these
43:52
cues. You know, eventually it's like
43:53
you're too deep and you got cones on the runway apron and
43:56
you know, you got this mark, that mark.
43:58
And like it goes a full circle, circle moment.
44:01
All of a sudden an hour later I'm like, hey, you know what,
44:02
You should just stay away from the bar like the most basic cue
44:05
possible and it works. So I'm like, man, we should have
44:07
just started there. You know, you should just run
44:09
your curve like something super basic.
44:12
It's crazy how much that happens though.
44:14
You go in this whole depth thing of cones and markings and angles
44:18
and vectors, and then you go back to, you know what, when
44:20
you're running on the curve, just maybe lean away, you know,
44:22
maybe let physics do the thing it wants to.
44:24
But that happens to us a lot as coaches. 100%.
44:27
And it's important to have that basic knowledge of, you know,
44:30
teaching a high jumper from the ground up.
44:32
And that's something I've learned at IMGI.
44:34
Kind of have like AI have a three.
44:36
I don't want to get into specifics of it, but I have a
44:38
three lesson breakdown for each decathlon event, haptathlon
44:42
event of what you should give to someone from ground up, right?
44:45
So like discus everything for the basicness of rolling a
44:49
discus on the ground and how to grip it all the way to what does
44:52
it look like to do a South African do a full and kind of
44:55
goes through all the events and what I have found works the best
44:58
with youth kids. And it's crazy because I feel
45:00
like some of this stuff would probably work really good with a
45:03
professional athlete, right? Things that you almost got
45:05
missed when you were getting taught the decathlon.
45:07
A lot of decathletes, they get taught by 20 different coaches
45:12
in high school. They go to the high jump coach
45:13
here, pole ball coach here, hurdles here, their weight coach
45:16
does this. But that's something we do here
45:18
at IM GS. We teach a kid from the ground
45:19
up, 1 coach, one voice. This is how you do it and.
45:23
I mean, it's, it's hard to do when you're a coach of a person
45:26
who does one event or, you know, very similar 100 and 200 things
45:29
like that. When you're talking about the
45:31
same person has to do the high jump, the javelin, the launch.
45:35
I mean, that's just, it's almost like, you know, what, if you're
45:39
a combined events coach, you actually need to stay in the
45:42
basics because you don't have much time to even get to any
45:44
kind of advanced, advanced level.
45:46
You got to be really good at the basics, which again, I think
45:48
probably more of our events should be that way to be real.
45:53
How did you, so you're coaching? How did you get deeper in IMG?
45:57
How do you like start getting into this type of position?
46:00
How do you get to that business itch that you have?
46:03
Yeah, so my first year official on contract IMG, like I said, I
46:09
coached that smaller group at the Catholics was kind of set
46:11
out to like, hey, go start a youth multi program.
46:14
What a dream job at the time. I'm like, OK, that's awesome.
46:17
I was given some resources to say hey, go compile.
46:21
I don't know the the The Avengers of Maltese in high
46:23
school and I'm thinking I didn't even do a decathlon until
46:26
college. This is crazy.
46:27
Let's do it. Yeah, they're not out there,
46:29
right? No.
46:30
And I found that, you know, it's not like you're gonna go online
46:32
and find a decathlete with numbers.
46:34
It's more so you're looking for the body, you're looking for the
46:36
right kid. We, we do a thing in IMG summer
46:39
camp and we do 10 weeks of summer camp basically.
46:42
So every week we have rotations of kids from around the world
46:45
that come to our campus to do track and field camps.
46:47
And that first summer I was kind of just using those camps as
46:50
kind of like a recruiting tool. I would say to say who in this
46:54
camp cohort can actually be a good decathlete?
46:57
And it wouldn't be what you think.
46:58
It's me grabbing a football during warm ups and just tossing
47:01
to the kids, right? If I feel a football team, you
47:04
drop it, probably not a decathlete.
47:06
It's just the bottom line. It's the truth, right?
47:07
Maybe you're not coordinated enough to catch a football.
47:09
Doesn't mean you can't be a world class sprinter.
47:11
You might be able to, but baseline athleticism is needed
47:15
to be a high level decathlete. Even like we play a kickball
47:19
game at the summer camp. I look for the kid who was just
47:22
competitive, had that nature to him and wanted to win.
47:24
He wasn't afraid to pitch the ball, kick it and be outfield,
47:27
right? I like the kid that's versatile.
47:30
Use that model applied to a lot of kids and before you knew it,
47:34
last year we had a capstone year of my official coaching, I would
47:37
say, and we won the heptathlon and decathlon title at the
47:41
national level for high school. So IMG was able to crown the
47:44
decathlon national champion, heptathlon national champion.
47:46
That was a big win for us. That was kind of my goal all
47:48
along. And now we're to the point where
47:50
we bought and we now have another coach and assistant
47:53
Maltese coach, my dad's on staff with us, our director, Mark
47:56
Napier's on staff. We have four people on this
47:58
staff that are highly, highly dedicated to the multis and, and
48:02
coach the coach high level multis throughout the board.
48:05
So I I've been able to have more help in the coaching realm.
48:09
That means less time on the track for me, more time in the
48:11
business world. And I've gotten the kind of this
48:14
bench around IMG and, and see what they do from business side
48:17
of things. And hopefully for me, the
48:20
ultimate goal is just to to help this track program grow as big
48:23
as it can grow, whether that means talent level numbers,
48:27
events that we host, which I'm sure we'll get into.
48:29
But yeah, the jump made sense for me because we have so many
48:34
people in place now at this Academy to help the actual on
48:37
site coaching to go right. And I can focus on the holistic
48:40
view of this program and and how we're gonna make IMG just
48:43
continue doing IMG things. So tell us more about IMG and
48:47
then I think that'll help us get into.
48:48
So like what does a day-to-day look like for you inside of
48:51
that? Because I think there's a lot of
48:54
misconceptions, by the way, starting with this guy.
48:58
When I first learned of IMG when I the first, I'd always heard of
49:01
IMG because of football. But you know, I did have time to
49:04
look at the USA TODAY rankings and all that kind of stuff.
49:06
And so I knew like a little bit of its history in regards to the
49:09
Bulletary Academy and things like that.
49:10
But my first time actually being on campus was for a site visit
49:14
for 2017 or 18, one of those two, incidentally, division two
49:18
national championships. That was my first time beating
49:21
coach and and touring the campus and everything.
49:23
And I was just like, oh, this is kind of crazy.
49:26
And then Fast forward, you know, when I had my tour this past
49:28
fall, it's like, holy crap, this guy, this has gone even more.
49:31
It's crazy. Tell us a little bit about IMG.
49:33
What is it? You know, there's again, there's
49:35
so many myths and misunderstandings maybe, and I
49:37
know you know, some of them. Clear those up.
49:39
Tell us a little bit about IMG for sure.
49:40
I mean, back back in the day in 1978 started as Bulletary Tennis
49:46
Academy. Nick Military was basically the
49:49
founder of everything here at IMG and he was a world renowned
49:52
tennis coach and he coached big names in tennis.
49:54
Andre Agassi and the Williams sisters were here at one point,
49:58
Maria Sharpova, all these people were here at our tennis Academy
50:02
and that's what IMG was originally known for.
50:04
And I think that Nick as a creative mind that he was, he
50:07
said, hey, like this model is working for tennis.
50:10
This live in boarding model is working for tennis.
50:12
Let's try it with a different sport.
50:14
Let's try it with soccer. Golf before you know it, IMG
50:17
starts adding sports and you know, mid 2000s track and field
50:21
is added. You got, we've just added
50:24
softball, volleyball where we just announced our swimming
50:26
program. We're building a brand new
50:28
swimming pool on campus. Wrestling is going basketballs.
50:33
Baseball is a huge program here. We have all these sports at IMG.
50:37
And when I say have sports, they're all high school teams.
50:39
We have middle school and high school teams here.
50:41
And at its essence, the on site IMG Academy is a boarding school
50:44
or a youth boarding school. And we have 6th graders all the
50:49
way through, I like to call them 13th graders, right, the gap
50:52
year kids. So we have all the way through
50:54
high school and we even do the post grad thing here where kids
50:56
can have another year to develop with us until they go off to the
50:59
NCAA, which nowadays with the transfer portal, really valuable
51:03
product that we offer. Yeah.
51:04
Does that, sorry, little bit of tangent here, looks like they're
51:08
going to pass that five year thing.
51:09
Does that hurt this 13th year? I think.
51:13
I don't think so. The NCAA is so it's so crazy
51:19
right now. You know this, right?
51:21
At the end of the day, the transfer portal's still gonna be
51:23
there, right? I mean, when you look at a
51:26
college coach recruiting high school athletes, be the last
51:29
person to get looked at now is a high school athlete, right?
51:32
If I, if I'm a coach at I'll talk about your own.
51:35
If I'm a coach at Illinois, I'm not going to go online and try
51:38
to find the high school spring That's around 10:22.
51:40
There's probably 995 guys on a transfer portal right now,
51:44
right? So I don't know.
51:45
I mean, it's a model. We'll see how it works.
51:47
I think our whole PG model here has been up and down in general,
51:50
just because of the way the NCAA has been up and down for track
51:53
and field. It makes sense.
51:55
And technical events. A lot of times you get a kid
51:57
that's like a really raw athlete.
51:58
They want to be a pole vaulter or maybe it makes sense to train
52:01
under us for, you know, the nine month period, learn how to plan
52:04
a pole and swing to the top of it and eventually become a 515
52:08
guy. And now you can get recruits at
52:09
Division One university you want to be at.
52:11
So the PG mile's interesting. It works for us.
52:14
I'd say we've had really good success with it and sometimes it
52:16
doesn't work. It's just that's the reality of
52:18
sports. The combined events are one of
52:21
the and there's a few events I was concerned about and maybe
52:24
still am with the roster limits. The roster limits concern me
52:27
more for development than transfer portals and things like
52:31
that because I don't get too caught up in like transfer
52:33
portal and things like that because of I think we sometimes
52:37
discount or forget that there are really amazing, awesome
52:41
coaches at the mid major level. There are really amazing coaches
52:44
at D2, junior college, NAI, D3, etcetera.
52:48
So that kid that needs developing can go to Southeast
52:52
Louisiana, Grand Valley State, yeah.
52:54
Lindsay Wilson and still run 4443.
52:58
You know, so I don't really worry about that.
52:59
I do worry about, you know, SEC has a rush limit of 35 and the
53:04
rest of the Division One has a rush limit of 45.
53:07
I do worry about my decathletes that typically because you you
53:09
were spot on, right? There are no and that's air
53:12
quotes decathletes in high school, meaning, you know, very,
53:14
very few, most of them are coming out of high school not
53:17
having done a decathlon. You need some years of
53:19
maturation in decathlon. It's a brand new event.
53:21
You're learning 2345 new events when you go to college with our
53:25
roster limits, I'm not sure how many of our D ones are going to
53:29
be able to carry that one or two or three or four guys or gals
53:34
that need that. So I'm concerned about them.
53:35
Hammer javelin you again. The ones that we do a little bit
53:38
less in high school that I'm concerned about don't care about
53:40
the. But it depends on the level too,
53:42
Mike. I mean, it's like if you think
53:43
about it with how competitive the Decathlon's gotten at the
53:47
NCAA, break off those guys and girls and put them in their
53:51
individual events. Like example, the girl I coached
53:53
last year jumping 181, the high jump bull, that was a top high
53:56
jump open for high school last year and she was also
54:00
heptathlete, right? The high high level is always
54:02
going to succeed, right? For that mid range, Yeah.
54:05
I mean, everyone I coach, I kind of we always talk about how they
54:08
need to have their banger events.
54:09
You need to have an event. If you're a 7000 point
54:12
decathlete in high school, that's really good, but you
54:14
better have that one off event, either the long jump or the
54:17
hurdles of the pole vault where you know you can score on that
54:19
roster year one. That's.
54:22
Then you better look in the mirror and expect something
54:24
different, right? You can't expect the school to
54:26
give you money. If you can't produce a single
54:28
point for that coach, you're one that's.
54:30
How I teach our kids that's a good point.
54:31
Maybe this starts separating the multis a little bit and it's
54:35
like, OK, you can't be above average in every event you
54:39
better be very good at one event as well because you need to be
54:43
able to. Yeah, that's a great that's I
54:45
didn't think about that because I just think about the combined
54:47
as the total, you know, the 10 or 7 events.
54:49
That's interesting that that because you're right, I'm not
54:53
concerned about the 1%. I'm not concerned about the the
54:55
kid who did do the decathlon in high school and scored 7400.
54:58
Like yeah, you're fine. Colleges will pick you up.
55:01
The athlete that scores. I'm not really good at my scores
55:03
there maybe 5000 in high school. It's like, yeah, yeah, you're
55:06
fine, you're going to be fine. I'm concerned about that girl
55:08
who does the hurdles and high jump really well, was on the
55:11
relays, but never didn't you know, that was her event.
55:14
So she couldn't long jump and she never shot put it of course,
55:16
and never javelin. It's like, man, she could be a
55:18
5000 plus, but what school is going to take her because they
55:23
only get five years now and they got to score, run up the bats
55:26
and you only have 45 and. That's the fair point and that's
55:29
you got to find the right person.
55:30
I mean, college coaches, I don't want to use the word.
55:34
Lazy is not the word. It's like there's so many good
55:37
athletes coming to these coaches now you have to find the right
55:40
coach that's willing to develop someone because that's where the
55:42
bread and butter is, right? If you find a high school
55:44
athlete and you know they got that something in them and
55:47
you're willing to take the time to develop them, it's going to
55:50
be a good fit. But.
55:51
It's harder to line them. I think that word time is the
55:54
important part of that sentence though.
55:55
I've got 45 slots, TJ. I've got now five years coming
56:00
up and that's it there's no more once this five year thing
56:05
there's more red shirts you can do five years of competing.
56:08
So I mean it's and I'm kind of concerned, but then I'm also
56:11
because the very first thing I said was, you know what, there
56:14
are a lot of D2 coaches that are amazing combined event coaches.
56:16
There's a lot of any IA, JUCO, etcetera.
56:18
So. I think there is.
56:19
Space for them. I think we'll start to see these
56:21
bigger, what is it Power 4 schools now they'll start to
56:25
have their known feeder schools is what I think will happen.
56:28
You know, kind of like a think of like out in Oregon, like a
56:31
lane community called feeder to Oregon, to Eugene.
56:35
It's like, and maybe some of these bigger schools will have
56:38
their known feeder programs and that'll be what you go, you
56:41
maybe you go to a grand valley, an amazing program, amazing
56:44
facilities, right? And you use that.
56:47
And if you get to that next level, maybe that's when you
56:49
jump to Arkansas. I don't know.
56:50
I mean, it's against what I believe in.
56:52
I always tell my kids, I've had kids sit in my office before
56:55
that are thinking about going to college and they go, I'm gonna
56:57
go here and transfer. I go, no, you're not.
56:59
You're going to go there. You're going to meet your best
57:01
friend, you might meet your wife.
57:02
You're not transferring. I never understood the whole
57:04
transfer thing. It's not something I ever would
57:06
want to do. I'm a very loyal, loyal person.
57:09
Like once I get stuck on something, I'm on it.
57:11
That's who, that's who I ride and die for.
57:13
But with the model it might become seen become seen as
57:17
normal to transfer, which is crazy.
57:19
I know the transfer transfer portal, the numbers and all that
57:22
stuff is always a good big topic, but I'm still and I
57:25
haven't seen, you know, I don't get access to transfer.
57:27
So I don't know the actual numbers.
57:28
But when I look at rosters, it's still not the majority.
57:32
To your point, the the majority 50 plus percent go to a school
57:36
and they stay there even if track doesn't work out, by the
57:38
way, after a year or two injuries or they just they stay
57:41
on as a student. So it's not it's not an epidemic
57:45
in my point. I know it's frustrating.
57:46
I've I've had conversations with mid major schools that have lost
57:50
kids up to the power 4. I don't ever see that happening.
57:54
Scenario you said, TJ, they don't want to lose those kids
57:57
because they they developed them.
57:58
They went, you know, from the girls quarter, they took a 55
58:01
second girl and made her a 51 and then she goes to Arkansas.
58:03
They they don't they want to keep that 51.
58:05
That is never happening. They're not going to go to the
58:08
junior college mentality of like, hey, I really need to get
58:11
these kids moved off to four year.
58:12
That ain't never happening in my opinion.
58:14
And I don't like to use the word never, and I still never would.
58:18
See that? Well, it's.
58:20
Interesting though, we say we do it for the kids.
58:22
If that's what's best for the kid, we should be blessing.
58:24
And I know some coaches aren't, They are about the kids and
58:26
they're like, hey, man, if, if, if now that you're running, like
58:29
said, using that female 400m runner, you're now running 51.
58:32
You need to be at XYZ big university.
58:35
I know some coaches are like that.
58:36
And those are the ones. I'm like, God bless you.
58:39
You are putting word to action, action to word there.
58:43
You do care about the kid. Like maybe that is better for
58:45
you. That amazes.
58:46
Me. I don't know that I could have
58:47
done that. But how with how competitive the
58:49
NCAA is, though, that's where this is where the devil's
58:51
advocate me says, like, you know, all Division One schools
58:55
end up at the same show. They all end up at the NCA
58:57
championships. Whether you represent, you know,
58:59
a school in the West Coast, East Coast, SN, it doesn't matter.
59:02
You all can get to the same place.
59:04
So as long as where you're at, you have a coach that believes
59:06
in you. Yeah, right.
59:08
You have some sort of facility to train on and you got some
59:10
training partners. To me, those are the three
59:12
things. You're fine there.
59:14
You can get to any. Level you want.
59:15
That's a great point. The only.
59:17
Time it would come into an issue is when you graduate, does that
59:21
current college facility, if you're really that level, if
59:23
you're the 1%, does that facility have a home for you?
59:26
Right. There's certain places that are
59:27
home to pros around here. Maybe you should think about
59:30
that, right? You might need to make a move
59:32
then because of the way, you know, the, the Olympic training
59:35
set up in the States is not much of a place to go after college.
59:38
It's not a set system. So I mean, but you can, you can
59:42
make it from anywhere in the States, man, at any, any NCA
59:44
level you can make it. And again, when you talk about
59:47
making it, you're talking about 1%.
59:49
I, I had a not an argument because he didn't respond back.
59:52
But I, I, I like to take people's tweets and then and
59:55
quote them and then put my own, you know, I like, I'll take
59:57
their, their exact tweet and I'll just change my, to my
59:59
wording. He was, he said something like
1:00:02
parents don't, don't follow. What he was really saying in my
1:00:06
opinion was, Hey, parents don't do all these summer clubs and
1:00:10
AAU and all this stuff trying to chase a, a scholarship because
1:00:13
it's so few and far between the amount of scholarships out
1:00:16
there. I twisted it a little bit and
1:00:18
said I absolutely. Absolutely think you should be
1:00:20
taking scholarship. I was like, first of all, none
1:00:22
of you again air quotes there are going to GoPro, so don't get
1:00:26
saddled with debt. If school if again air quotes
1:00:29
small school X is going to offer you a full ride and big school Y
1:00:32
is going to offer you 10% bump that get the 100%.
1:00:37
You're not going pro go have a great college career.
1:00:41
You still need to choose the right coach, right system so
1:00:43
that you know, those four or five years are not just, you
1:00:46
know, death knell because you're, you know, the golden
1:00:48
parachute. You can't leave.
1:00:49
You have 100% scholarship. You should still enjoy, but
1:00:51
that's the thing. Enjoy athletics, enjoy your
1:00:54
track career while you're there and get your degree and and move
1:00:56
on. No, and that's hey, that's what
1:00:58
we do at IMG. We help people earn and find
1:01:03
scholarships. The reason I I use those two
1:01:05
earn means, I mean, just cuz you come to IMG and walk on campus
1:01:08
doesn't mean you become a good athlete here, right.
1:01:10
Our whole model and and mission statement, vision statement is
1:01:14
to help student athletes win their future.
1:01:17
So if a kid comes to my office and says, hey, say I'm a junior
1:01:20
this year, I want to run D1 track, OK, well, you got to earn
1:01:24
it First off. You got to go work, you got to
1:01:25
get better, you got to go to your trainings and you're, you
1:01:28
know, you got to treat your body right.
1:01:29
You have to see the nutritionist, see the athletic
1:01:31
trainers, all those things. But sometimes there is the right
1:01:35
way to do things and the wrong way to do things for
1:01:37
scholarships and a lot of things we've, I bet you every year
1:01:39
actually in the States, I would argue thousands of scholarships
1:01:43
go unhanded out because someone chose the wrong event path.
1:01:48
I think that is by far our biggest thing here.
1:01:50
We're. Doing Tell me more about that.
1:01:51
Hold on, that's I haven't heard this.
1:01:52
Tell me more about what you mean there.
1:01:53
I can't. We've had people come to IMG and
1:01:56
they say, hey, I'm a hurdler, I'm a sprinter.
1:01:58
Example. I'll use a a real example,
1:02:00
someone in your backyard. Her name is Jordan Cuscondy.
1:02:03
She's the U20 national champion in the hammer.
1:02:05
She currently is at the University of Illinois All
1:02:09
American. She came to IMG as a sprinter,
1:02:11
jumper, multi. There was a point looking at
1:02:14
her, me, our director Mark Napier, and mainly our throws
1:02:19
coach Mark Stevens is like, Hey, I think Jordan can throw the
1:02:22
hammer. Let's try this.
1:02:24
Before you know it, in in five months time, she completely
1:02:27
switches out of the multis and she was a high level multi, an
1:02:29
absolute app, right? This is a girl that we all still
1:02:33
talk about to this day. Just a freak athlete could jump,
1:02:36
run, Sprint. Mark teaches her how to just
1:02:39
turn the hammer. What is the hammer, how to grip
1:02:41
it, how to do this got her on this movement, got her a new
1:02:43
weight plan. Before you know it, she goes
1:02:45
from a pretty solidly recruited athlete to a highly recruited
1:02:49
athlete. Fast forward that summer, she's
1:02:51
now the U20 champion and now she's a multi time All American
1:02:55
for Illinois, right? And we've had that same thing
1:02:58
happen multiple times. We've had quarter milers come in
1:03:01
at IMG and you have to have that conversation like, hey,
1:03:04
Congrats, you ran 48 mid. There's a lot of people running
1:03:07
48 point, right? A lot of people in high school
1:03:10
not afraid to grab a stick in a four by four and split 46 high
1:03:15
even. What?
1:03:16
What was that young Lee's name? Jordan Koskondi.
1:03:21
That's her SO. Illinois just had a home meet
1:03:24
this weekend and I thought those were so cool.
1:03:26
They gave out collectors cards. That's the meat.
1:03:30
And so I was, I just got in and I was looking through this
1:03:32
morning. I was like, wait a minute, I
1:03:34
think I remember her. She has her own card Bro, isn't
1:03:36
that cool? That's so cool, the IMG about 3
1:03:39
years ago she actually was just on campus.
1:03:40
Not that long ago I got to see her again.
1:03:42
She loves she loves cotton candy grapes, but which we just bought
1:03:46
in our house today it's my wife and kids love.
1:03:48
Them, they're great. They're great.
1:03:49
Not a big fan, so she said. Jordan's an amazing girl and she
1:03:53
has an amazing family and we actually, I was talking about
1:03:57
that first meet I ever went to where I coached kids in the
1:04:00
multi. I took that 8th grader first
1:04:03
meet ever actually. That's where I met Jordan and
1:04:05
her family is at Ponte Vedra Beach in Florida over near
1:04:09
Jacksonville area. And there she's from Eugene
1:04:11
actually, and her dad took her to the meet there to try
1:04:15
heptathlon. It's so hard to find high school
1:04:17
molten. Oh, wow.
1:04:18
And she did the heptathlon there.
1:04:19
I remember watching her and she was just, she's just an athlete,
1:04:22
man. And and that's what I mean to be
1:04:24
a high level thrower, you have to be an athlete.
1:04:26
You know this, it's it's like an NFL lineman.
1:04:28
You got to be crazy athletic. So I get what you're saying now.
1:04:32
There's a lot of kids who are missing the boat and what your
1:04:34
real event is, and therefore you're not getting a scholarship
1:04:37
or as much of A scholarship. I got you.
1:04:39
The the pretty typical one is the 100 meter kid who really is
1:04:41
a 400 meter guy. I hate that because that's kind
1:04:43
of the trope. But I I see what you're saying
1:04:45
there. Yeah, yeah.
1:04:46
We're doing the bigger shifts here.
1:04:47
We're taking a hurdler who just doesn't.
1:04:49
We're teaching the three phase of the triple jump right.
1:04:52
We're looking at areas that the NCAA could be weakened.
1:04:55
We're looking at areas where it could actually make an impact.
1:04:57
Like I said, we have a kid. You're running 47 mid, 48 mid.
1:05:00
That's a good quarter miler. But if you can be a 780 long
1:05:03
jumper, that's a different world now.
1:05:05
Now I build up your resume and all of a sudden you're a long
1:05:08
jumper sprinter for a coach. So you're not doing what I'm
1:05:11
going to call the easy one and nothing's easy.
1:05:13
But like when you said that 400 meter guy, I was like, oh,
1:05:16
you're moving him up to the 800. That's what we always do with
1:05:19
every quarter of mile. We had Jeremy Warner on the
1:05:21
podcast and I was like, Jeremy, you know, there's always the
1:05:23
Internet said you would have been a great.
1:05:24
Did you ever even try or think the 800?
1:05:26
He was like, hell no, because I did 1800 in a race as it was
1:05:31
training only he goes would never try to move that up in the
1:05:35
pros. So you're not doing like I said
1:05:36
that the obvious ones, 400, you're looking at a kid going
1:05:39
all right, first of all, you're pretty athletic.
1:05:41
So maybe we try to teach you this and you're also looking at,
1:05:44
well, if you want to go to the NCAA, well here we can look at
1:05:47
grades that kids are in and when they're scoring and when they're
1:05:50
graduating. This might actually be a weak
1:05:51
event. That's an interest that's a
1:05:53
little bit of a different level here now.
1:05:56
Yeah, obviously we're making the shift from one to two, 4 to 8,
1:05:59
you know, You know, we're making those shifts too, all day, every
1:06:02
day. But it's, I think sometimes
1:06:04
having the vision to take a kid, sit them down and be like, hey,
1:06:08
have you ever heard of the triple jump?
1:06:10
Have you ever heard of the hammer throw?
1:06:12
A lot of people have no clue what the hammer is and you saw
1:06:14
when you were down, you're practicing.
1:06:15
We have a really big throws team here that we have all of them
1:06:19
throwing hammer and they're doing really good.
1:06:20
I think we're sitting US number two and three.
1:06:23
I believe in the hammer right now.
1:06:24
I. Had to pinch myself because I
1:06:27
remember we were on the golf cart and I was like, oh, wait a
1:06:29
minute, TJ, this is a high school.
1:06:30
Wait a minute. Because you were doing, not only
1:06:31
were you doing the hammer, you had a hammer cage, but you had
1:06:34
several hammer. And I was like, oh, yeah, this
1:06:36
is what I see every day when I visit Notre Dame and Illinois
1:06:38
and Alabama, whatever. And it's like, wait a minute,
1:06:41
these are high scores. I love that.
1:06:43
We need more of that. Also, we're realizing you have a
1:06:46
coaching staff. We have a huge coaching staff
1:06:48
here. We have 12 plus coaches here on
1:06:50
our campus for track only and their full time job as a coach.
1:06:54
These aren't like people teaching in the morning coach.
1:06:56
These are full time coaches. Similar to how a college would
1:06:58
be set up. But you might as well utilize
1:07:01
these coaches to coach a technical event, right?
1:07:03
If you get a kid to come in his senior year and he's 100m
1:07:06
runner, that's all he does. 100 meter dash.
1:07:09
You can't take a kid that's run 11 flat and they're running
1:07:12
track for say he's been running track for 10 years.
1:07:14
He's run 11 flat by his senior year.
1:07:16
He's not going to come to IMG and run 1020.
1:07:18
That's a misconception. You can't just give someone foot
1:07:21
speed like that. But maybe I put that 11 flat
1:07:24
kid, I put an aerobic base on him.
1:07:27
I teach him how to hurdle an alternate.
1:07:29
All sudden he's a foreigner hurdler, right?
1:07:31
You can coach that. You can coach step pattern.
1:07:33
You can coach lead leg, trail leg.
1:07:35
You can coach someone to teach them how to hurt and what it
1:07:37
feels like to actually have some pain and push through it.
1:07:40
You can train them aerobically up.
1:07:42
Those are the things I think we're getting creative with here
1:07:44
and getting kids in the right area.
1:07:46
A lot of times kids just never want to try it.
1:07:48
They don't know it. What is the triple jump?
1:07:50
What is the steeplechase? So right, those are things that
1:07:52
kids don't do. I think it's an important
1:07:54
distinction because one of the things, you know, in my role in
1:07:58
track and field coaches is, you know, helping to increase
1:08:00
communication and to, you know, give grace and help other people
1:08:04
see grace. Sometimes our college coaches
1:08:06
will show lack of grace to our high school coaches and say,
1:08:10
hey, you know, in today's coaching education world, right?
1:08:13
I can go on YouTube right now. There's level ones everywhere,
1:08:15
USTFCA, Altus, etcetera. There's no excuse not to be able
1:08:19
to coach a kid excellently. And I'm like, brother, they're
1:08:22
teachers. They they teach English from
1:08:25
8:00 till three and then coach for two hours and then have a
1:08:27
family and passions and charities etcetera, etcetera.
1:08:30
This is a little different. Your guys are coaching, you are
1:08:32
college coaches in the sense of, and I know a lot of them are
1:08:35
former college coaches in the sense of they're not teaching
1:08:38
there are they're thinking how do we get these kids better?
1:08:41
How do we get them to college? What do we need to do
1:08:42
differently with the facilities, etcetera. 24, I'd say 24 hours a
1:08:45
day, seven days a week. Some of them are because I know
1:08:47
them, but they are full time coaches there.
1:08:51
Yeah, yeah, which is a huge advantage for us.
1:08:53
I mean, we know that I I commend all the local coaches that are
1:08:57
teaching lesson plans and they're coming out and giving
1:09:00
their time, but we know pretty much no money, right, Right.
1:09:04
Yeah. Those are the, those are the
1:09:05
people making the sport go. It's easy.
1:09:07
To 100 percent, 100% I look more at a college coach I'm like,
1:09:11
brother, from 8:00 to 5:00 you you're supposed to be doing but
1:09:15
nothing but track and field. You should be making sure you
1:09:16
know how to coach every event and all that kind of stuff.
1:09:19
Hey, talk to us. You know, there's a little bit
1:09:20
of misinformation or jealousy or whatever about IMGA and it's a
1:09:26
diploma. What do they call them?
1:09:28
A diploma factory? You know, they're not real
1:09:31
education. But when I was there, this was
1:09:33
so funny. This was actually really fun.
1:09:35
I'm going to tell the story we pulled up to.
1:09:37
There was four or five of the athletes and you went over and
1:09:40
introduced me, which always because, you know, an athlete
1:09:42
doesn't, they don't care about me.
1:09:44
But it's always nice. I appreciate that.
1:09:46
And you the signing ceremony was the next, you know, for college.
1:09:49
Was the next week. And you said, hey, tell them
1:09:51
where you're signing and you, Mick, because the only thing I
1:09:54
care about, I was like, oh, where are you signing?
1:09:55
Like what school? Because I'm, I'm automatically
1:09:57
going to think, oh, that coach is there.
1:09:58
I know this one, right? And she's so sweet.
1:10:00
She goes, oh, yeah, in that building over there.
1:10:03
And I was like, and you both looked at like, honey, but
1:10:07
school. And what's funny is if I
1:10:09
remember correctly, that was the kid that was signing with
1:10:11
Princeton. I just thought that added to it
1:10:12
was like, oh, you're so smart and yet you did not make the
1:10:15
connection. I don't care about building.
1:10:16
But your kids were signing with with Princeton and Georgetown.
1:10:20
So a diploma meal, that's what the word I was looking for.
1:10:22
So this isn't a diploma like these kids are going to school
1:10:26
and like real school. Yeah, yeah.
1:10:28
It's a huge misconception of IMG, though.
1:10:31
We're just sports, sports, sports.
1:10:32
And if anyone understands it more than anyone, it's the
1:10:35
sports department. We're creating student athletes,
1:10:38
all right? Everyone of this staff has seen
1:10:40
first hand that if you're not a student first, you cannot be an
1:10:42
athlete. I've had teammates right in
1:10:44
front of me cut from the team before and cost us, you know,
1:10:48
Mac titles and conference titles because they didn't get their
1:10:50
grades together. So no, this place is not a
1:10:53
diploma mill, right? That we have every class you
1:10:56
could offer holistically. Even as a track team.
1:10:59
We send kids to the Ivy League every single year.
1:11:01
So impressed. Yeah, I can promise you one
1:11:03
thing the Ivy League does not is not biased because you're from
1:11:06
IMG the game, right. Getting into those schools is no
1:11:11
joke. Last year, I want to say we had
1:11:13
two kids go to Upenn, We had a Georgetown in there, Princeton,
1:11:18
we've had every Ivy, Harvard. And it's not easy to get to
1:11:21
those schools. And we have the coursework here
1:11:23
to support it. I mean, is every single kid here
1:11:25
going to the Ivy League? Heck no.
1:11:26
But we have the the the classes here, the set up here, the
1:11:30
advisors here. I think the one reason people
1:11:32
think that we don't have just crazy academic rigors because of
1:11:36
the time frame. But we do cut out some of the
1:11:38
fluff at IMG, right? Like a lot of our kids aren't
1:11:40
required to take a music class per SE.
1:11:44
Maybe during that music class time they're able to be in the
1:11:46
training room learning about the body with Johns Hopkins PT,
1:11:50
right? There is some tailored things to
1:11:52
help with the sports side. But no, we have a full school
1:11:55
here. There's no paper classes.
1:11:58
I've heard people say that, right?
1:12:00
It's a full on school. Florida regulated.
1:12:03
It's a great institution, really good teacher to student ratio.
1:12:09
It's great. It's funny you mentioned the
1:12:11
music class. So, you know, I went to the
1:12:12
greatest university in the world, Troy State University.
1:12:15
My wife went to University of Illinois.
1:12:16
So it's always a battle. Like, you know, we basically had
1:12:19
the same kind of major. We're both in communications.
1:12:21
My GPA is just 110th higher than hers, but she goes, well, I was
1:12:24
in Big 10 education, whatever, blah, blah.
1:12:26
Well, this past week, one of the big, you know, we just went to
1:12:29
the did we go to the championship or final four,
1:12:31
Final four for basketball. So everybody's basketball,
1:12:34
which, you know, we're basketball school first and
1:12:36
foremost anyway, So the whole town's all about basketball.
1:12:38
One of the stud basketball players just did his DJ class
1:12:43
final at like the student hub or whatever.
1:12:45
Like he got he set up and all the and I was like, that's kind
1:12:48
of cool. And I was like, Amy, so your
1:12:50
school has DJ class for their degree.
1:12:53
I didn't have that. It's like we were more academic
1:12:56
rigorous than Illinois, your Big 10 education.
1:12:59
Yeah, it's funny you said that music.
1:13:00
I was like, although honestly, if they'd had a DJ class when I
1:13:03
was a Troy, I 100% would have taken that.
1:13:05
That's. You were within that.
1:13:06
No, that sounds kind of awesome, actually.
1:13:08
I was a little jealous of what I really It's all about jealousy.
1:13:10
It's all I really want at. At Kent State there was a class,
1:13:14
it was called the Adam Sandler class.
1:13:16
He went to Kent State. And is that right?
1:13:19
The whole class, you just learn about Adam Sandler, and I never
1:13:23
took it. This is just kind of, you know,
1:13:24
hearsay. But I do know at the end of it,
1:13:26
I believe he hopped on a Zoom call with the students and
1:13:28
talked with them. It was the whole thing.
1:13:30
So I think all these colleges have like these niche classes.
1:13:34
Hey Troy University, you need a Mike Cunningham class.
1:13:37
I will zoom in at the. Yeah, well, we'll do.
1:13:40
He'll do a live podcast at the. End they'll they'll come back
1:13:42
and say, Mike, we have to have more than one person a semester
1:13:44
sign up for that class. It's not academically viable for
1:13:49
us. So you got the academics, you
1:13:50
have the athletics, you started coaching.
1:13:53
Now you're in this assistant director role.
1:13:55
So what is a day-to-day look like for you?
1:13:58
What how much is about coaching? How much of it is talking to
1:14:01
Yahoo sales guys like me? How much of it is trying to set
1:14:03
up, you know, as we move to our next topic, the Under Armour
1:14:06
Championships here, what do you do on a daily base basis?
1:14:09
Yeah, I mean, every, every day I'm driving in, you'll be on
1:14:12
campus. It's it's like pulling into
1:14:13
Disney World here, man. I love it.
1:14:14
Pretty nice palm trees and it's kind of a resort style living
1:14:18
down here. But I pull in and go to the
1:14:20
track and, you know, maybe do some small coaching sessions,
1:14:23
check out what's going on. I'm I'm now at the point where
1:14:27
I'm more flexible to I don't have to be working with one
1:14:29
specific group. I get to kind of go around to
1:14:30
all event groups, which I absolutely love to see what the
1:14:33
vaulters are doing. Go check out the hammer practice
1:14:35
today. We had some youth athletes
1:14:37
learning what the steeplechase was and how to, you know, get
1:14:40
over the water barrier. That's a fun one to always go
1:14:41
watch. I know all of us coaches are out
1:14:43
there trying to watch that today.
1:14:45
It's just fun to watch. But no, I'll check the track out
1:14:48
and then a lot of it is dependent on the year.
1:14:50
But like this time of year, I'm really just kind of in prep
1:14:53
mode. We have a lot of home events
1:14:54
coming up. We'll talk about it.
1:14:56
But you know, through the summer it's a lot of like balancing
1:14:59
camp and what that looks like. This whole IMG Academy machine
1:15:02
just completely flips a switch. Come June, like I said, we do
1:15:05
camps every week, which is really a cool thing.
1:15:08
I mean, kids can come in for a summer camp, they board on
1:15:10
campus and our whole shift kind of happens in the summer.
1:15:14
And then come August, we kind of refresh and my day becomes, you
1:15:17
know, onboarding the students and getting to know the kids and
1:15:20
speaking with the parents and just making sure our track teams
1:15:23
on the right direction. I'm glad you mentioned that
1:15:25
before we turn our attention to Under Armour Championships,
1:15:30
describe to us you guys did something.
1:15:31
I thought this was so cool. When you talk about culture,
1:15:34
this is a culture thing though. I think the day after I had to
1:15:38
leave, but maybe the week after you guys did like this time
1:15:41
trial where in a lot of our schools.
1:15:45
The reason I want you to describe this because I know
1:15:46
there's going to be a coach who hears this and goes, wait a
1:15:48
minute, we could and should be doing this because I just
1:15:51
thought about culture here. You were doing some kind of time
1:15:54
trial and like I said, all of our programs out there do time
1:15:58
trials. You were utilizing the board.
1:16:01
You were utilizing like a walk out, like it was an event.
1:16:05
It wasn't just a time trial. Tell us a little bit about that
1:16:07
and how that. Goes So here's a philosophy that
1:16:10
I believe in this time trial is something I brought to IMG.
1:16:15
I believe in the preseason training, doing up these events
1:16:18
almost like almost like high level meat production.
1:16:22
I'm a big believer in this one because it gets kids a little
1:16:25
nervous, right? So you can kind of see there's
1:16:27
true shell come out and see who's a competitor.
1:16:29
Sometimes you put the lights on at night, get the board going to
1:16:32
music, the announcer, kids fold. And honestly, as a coach, I have
1:16:35
to figure out who can we trust on a relay, right?
1:16:37
Who's not going to fold? But we do this thing.
1:16:40
It's very common at the college level.
1:16:42
Pretty much all Sprint coaches will do it.
1:16:44
But there'll be a 45 second test for the men and a 52nd test for
1:16:48
the women, right? Well, we had to sit down and
1:16:50
figure out what do we want to do at the high school level?
1:16:52
It doesn't make sense to do a 45 second test.
1:16:54
I mean, at that point you're, you're not really tapping into
1:16:56
all the energy systems over 400. So what makes sense?
1:17:00
Well, what for the boys, we do a 52nd test for boys and for the
1:17:03
girls we do a 56 second test. So the, the college men do 45,
1:17:07
we do 50. The college women do 50, we do
1:17:10
56 and what we do is we hype it up to the point that it's a full
1:17:15
of that. We have everyone go one at a
1:17:17
time under the lights, lane one by themselves.
1:17:20
We have, you know, we have hurdles lining the the track.
1:17:24
We have the board come up with their picture, their hometown,
1:17:27
the kids through their own lockout song.
1:17:29
It's the whole thing. And they get out there and for
1:17:32
us as a coach, it kind of gets to show you where the fitness
1:17:34
is, right? We all kind of give them a
1:17:36
little mini peek, not too much, but enough to get them excited
1:17:39
about the year and we just try to see who can go around the
1:17:42
track. If you make it all 400 meters in
1:17:44
50 seconds, you get a ring the bell and the whole team kind of
1:17:47
rallies around you. If you make it 56 seconds as a
1:17:50
girl athlete, you get a ring the bell and we have a live
1:17:53
leaderboard going that you can scan the QR code and watch.
1:17:56
We really make it up. We're bringing food at the end,
1:17:58
but I challenge all high school coaches to start doing this
1:18:01
test. If you do reach out to me, I
1:18:03
have the data on all of it. We have a predictive scale.
1:18:05
It's really accurate. We have a Excel formula that
1:18:08
goes, hey, if you run 390 meters and you're 50 seconds, your
1:18:12
predicted current 400 is X, predicted by end of the year is
1:18:17
Y, and then maybe a four year cycle is Z.
1:18:19
And we have a whole predictor chart going.
1:18:21
I would love more data points to come in.
1:18:23
So yeah, yeah, yeah. Away.
1:18:25
But we love it. So is this all like, so who's
1:18:28
doing this? Your throwers are not doing this
1:18:30
test. Who's all doing the test?
1:18:31
The only event group that doesn't do it is the throwers.
1:18:34
OK, so this is. They do our quadrathlon.
1:18:37
We do a quadrathlon similar to this where we kind of test jump,
1:18:41
triple jump, overhead, throw in 30m run.
1:18:43
But every event group does it jumpers, distance.
1:18:47
The only distance people that don't do it for us are the ones
1:18:50
that are kind of in their postseason going to NXR, NX and
1:18:54
these. Right, because you're doing this
1:18:54
in the fall. Yeah, Yeah.
1:18:56
If they're in season, we won't. We won't tax your system, but
1:18:58
everyone else doesn't. And the rest of the kids and,
1:19:02
you know, program adjacent people, they're in the stands
1:19:05
watching and cheering and we. Open the facility up, you can
1:19:08
line lane one. This year we had a staff
1:19:11
challenge, so every department basketball foot, they all
1:19:14
nominated one staff member. To run.
1:19:16
And we had golf coaches trying to, I mean, they were making it.
1:19:19
They were making a 250 meters. It was hilarious.
1:19:22
No way. Yeah, and then our jumps coach,
1:19:24
Quinton Harley, popped in and he won it for the coaches.
1:19:28
He better. I was about to say a trek.
1:19:29
I better win this. Yeah, You know, I was getting,
1:19:31
everyone was kind of getting pressured.
1:19:33
Who's going to run it? Dude, yeah, TJ is like, not
1:19:36
hips. I'm out I guess.
1:19:37
Well, it's funny. Our new thing is the newest
1:19:40
staff on our team, the newest staff member has to do it.
1:19:43
So we got a new younger coach. Now he's got to do it next.
1:19:45
Year and he better start training yeah here's what I love
1:19:48
about that you you kind of touched on two things culturally
1:19:51
1 is about your team and getting people like we've seen and you
1:19:55
know Kent was really good at this back in the day too you
1:19:58
know the 4x4 at the end of the meet and everybody is up and
1:20:01
they're if it's indoor you know they're banging on the.
1:20:03
Wall, I mean it's. We always want that.
1:20:05
We always want, you know, it's, it's a, it's a special story
1:20:08
when people talk about, oh, our distance runners were done.
1:20:10
So they went over to the shot put and was cheering on our shot
1:20:13
put. And that's a, that's a track and
1:20:14
field team. So one, you're really pumping
1:20:19
that up. Two, you're pumping up.
1:20:20
I love this. I did not think about this
1:20:22
aspect. One of the things that we don't
1:20:25
have in practice that we do have at meets is that adrenaline,
1:20:28
right? That stress that comes up and
1:20:30
it's hard to read to do that at practice, right?
1:20:33
We tried with, you know, we'll actually shoot the gun at
1:20:35
practice and things like that. This really does.
1:20:39
I mean, there's a little bit like, oh crap, my pictures up
1:20:41
there. Oh, crap.
1:20:42
All right, Johnny and Tommy's already gone, and they ran 390.
1:20:47
There's a it protect competitive juice.
1:20:50
We strategically choose the order.
1:20:52
Could we know this? Person.
1:20:53
Might like this person up. I mean, we build it up and yeah,
1:20:56
it's, I mean. And the other thing I like, the
1:20:59
other thing I like. So that's culturally for your
1:21:01
team, that's Uber important, that's that's amazing.
1:21:04
But you're inviting the other department.
1:21:07
So now you talk about if you're, this is what I think hearing
1:21:11
that story, I did not know that part.
1:21:13
If you are struggling to get volunteers for your home meets,
1:21:17
you know you need that English teacher to come out and run the
1:21:19
long jump. You need the math teacher to run
1:21:21
the timer. I bet if you start doing some
1:21:24
form of this event and maybe not look the exact same, but some
1:21:27
form this event that reaches out to other departments, I think
1:21:30
you can build a culture of volunteers to help with your
1:21:34
home meets and and just cheering on your kids in math class when
1:21:37
that math teacher goes. Oh, man, hey, I saw you run your
1:21:40
your 56 second test. What meet you got this weekend?
1:21:42
Oh, man, that's really good. You know, I just think, yeah.
1:21:45
That's no I I recommend it for everyone.
1:21:47
Steal the idea. Do.
1:21:49
It. I love that.
1:21:50
I mean. It's hard to define culture, but
1:21:53
I feel like that just defined it like that is part of building
1:21:55
positive culture. I, I love that it's awesome.
1:21:58
OK, so let's turn our attention at the end of this month.
1:22:02
So when you're listening to this, probably another week or
1:22:04
two is the Under Armour, it's the inaugural, the first time
1:22:08
the Under Armour National High School Championships.
1:22:11
Now I'm going to have two questions.
1:22:13
I'm pretty candid and I probably should have prepped you, but I
1:22:15
know you're smart enough and smart enough kid here.
1:22:19
You're still a kid because when you said you were 11, when you
1:22:22
said you're 11 years old in 2008, I was like, bro, I was
1:22:23
there working my you were some 11 year old.
1:22:25
I probably ran into you and was like get out of here kid.
1:22:27
I don't know. Yeah, I was probably running at.
1:22:29
Your ankle probably more. I was like get out of here, man.
1:22:32
1 is and I am not in. I don't agree with this
1:22:36
statement, but here's the number one statement I've heard and it
1:22:41
was before Under Armour even decided they were going to do
1:22:42
high school national championships.
1:22:43
By the way, you know, New Balance earlier, Nike Outdoor
1:22:45
Nationals, Adidas, etcetera. Do we need all these high school
1:22:49
national championships now? Let me tell you my side of it
1:22:52
first, TJ, then I want to get your opinion.
1:22:55
I think that's just a bub kiss statement because first of all,
1:22:58
who cares? What I mean by that is if you're
1:23:02
a college coach complaining that someone is the Nike All American
1:23:06
and the Adidas All American and the New Balance and the Under
1:23:08
Armour, what's it matter? It does not change your
1:23:11
evaluation of them, does not change how much scholarship you
1:23:13
may or may not give them or what events you put into.
1:23:15
Did the kid have fun? Awesome.
1:23:18
And we talk about our sport. A great, great aspect of our
1:23:21
sport is it gives young people a lot of times an opportunity to
1:23:24
see outside of their 100 meter, 100 miles from their school,
1:23:28
their their hometown. They get to go to Oregon for the
1:23:30
first time in their life. They get to go to Florida, et
1:23:32
cetera. They get to go to all these,
1:23:33
they get to meet all these kids from other states, some that are
1:23:38
they may have thought they were the best kid.
1:23:39
I'm the best kid in Florida. I'm probably the best kid in the
1:23:41
nation. And then they run into a kid
1:23:42
from North Carolina. It's like, oh crap, that kid was
1:23:44
faster than me. Wait a minute.
1:23:45
So I, I say have as many as because by the way, why do we
1:23:49
have incidentally Division One in division two in Division
1:23:52
Three in any AI and no one's complaining about those?
1:23:56
Right. It's funny you say that, Mike.
1:23:57
That's my first comeback. First off, there has been
1:23:59
multiple times where the market took to win.
1:24:01
D1 was worst and then the market took during the D2.
1:24:05
Are you really a national champion?
1:24:06
That's question one. Question 2 is or a .2 for me is
1:24:12
do I think it's a bit saturated? You got this Then what's next?
1:24:15
Are we going to have, you know, the root loops national
1:24:17
championships, a different I don't know what it's going to be
1:24:19
right? Do I wish he was all under one
1:24:22
umbrella? I, I, I do deep down, yeah, I.
1:24:25
That'd be cool. Thing.
1:24:26
But here's the issue, right? We don't have a governing body
1:24:29
that could ever make it happen. Also, it's really unfair if you
1:24:33
think about it. You got say you have a random
1:24:34
family down in Louisiana, right right now with the geographical
1:24:39
location of these national championships.
1:24:40
You have Adidas, which is still a little bit of a drive over
1:24:42
there. You have Philly hosting New
1:24:44
Balance, You have Oregon, which is Hayward Field hoaching Nike.
1:24:47
Where is the zone for these? Because not everyone has the
1:24:49
financials to travel up to the West Coast.
1:24:51
You know it flying into Portland to Eugene polls, it's not easy.
1:24:56
So one, we want to give this region a chance to have a true
1:24:59
national caliber experience. That's one.
1:25:01
Two, I think and maybe I'm biased, I think we can produce a
1:25:05
better product than the other meet out there and I know that
1:25:08
could we have the knowledge on board to do it.
1:25:10
OK, so that brings up question #2 in your spot on, by the way,
1:25:15
did not think about the regional act because I'm, I'm, I'm
1:25:17
privileged, right? I'm, I'm blessed.
1:25:19
It is expensive for me to get out to Oregon.
1:25:21
And guess what? It's not coming out of my
1:25:22
pocket. Exactly.
1:25:23
I work for this. Is coming out of the.
1:25:24
Kids this is coming out of their yeah yeah yeah yeah that's AI
1:25:27
mean that actually might be the full period stop right there
1:25:29
that that's. Well, think about it's not like
1:25:31
you can qualify and have shorts travel give you a call.
1:25:34
Hey, here's your travel. It's not going to work.
1:25:36
Not Anthony, not Anthony. So the second question then is,
1:25:41
and again, maybe so help me settle, help me figure out why
1:25:45
did we settle On this date? Because I've heard like, oh,
1:25:46
it's so early in their state meets and I get it.
1:25:48
And maybe like, well, that was the only date available, so
1:25:50
we're going to do it. How do you what's the answer?
1:25:52
So the school, First off, there's about 34 states roughly
1:25:56
depending on divisions, 34 to 36 different states that are
1:25:59
completely done with the state series.
1:26:01
Are you serious? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:26:03
I would have thought like 5 the way people.
1:26:05
Are Oh no, no, no. A lot of the southern states,
1:26:08
Midwest states completely done just hanging around waiting for
1:26:11
season to start. So for those states, really good
1:26:14
date for states like Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina,
1:26:17
Texas, Colorado, Mississippi, Louisiana, these schools are
1:26:21
done with their state series, wait to find a place to compete
1:26:24
and we're going to. Hold for that. 2nd, the question
1:26:28
is from a business side of things, do you really want us to
1:26:31
host a meet on the same weekend as Nike and New Bounds?
1:26:32
We just right, never we wanna take on a meet that by the way,
1:26:37
we're huge supporters of. I mean at IMG we go to New
1:26:40
Balance to meet, we go, we have a great time there.
1:26:43
This to us is a really good date to bridge the gap between state
1:26:47
series competition and the Nike national meet, a new bounce
1:26:50
national meet. I'm not trying to put other ones
1:26:52
out of business. This is a really good bridge gap
1:26:54
meet or find out really quickly. That is a lot of high level
1:26:57
athletes that wanna come. We have high, high kids come.
1:27:02
We have Andrew Jones, the number one high school hurdler in
1:27:04
history coming. We got Melanie Doggett, Nike Pro
1:27:07
athlete, coming down to race the Under Armour championships.
1:27:10
I think it's a cool storyline. We got Cameron Daly, 14 year old
1:27:14
world record holder, coming to run our facility.
1:27:17
She just ran 5140 something, 5140 as an eighth grade girl.
1:27:23
I mean, come on, you know, it's just it's insane marks.
1:27:25
We have US number one hammer thrower, US #1 discus, US number
1:27:29
one shot putter and CJ Williams. I mean, we got big names coming.
1:27:33
So clearly the date works, right?
1:27:35
There are kids that are kind of stuck in that middle ground
1:27:38
where they're not so high level to where they might not even do
1:27:40
their state series. We're finding out there's kids
1:27:42
that are so high level now and I don't I don't love it, but
1:27:46
they're not even like interested in their state series anymore.
1:27:48
They're they're willing to jump to a different meet because
1:27:50
there's now money on the line, There's nil deals on the line.
1:27:53
It seems like people's loyalty to the regional district state
1:27:57
series is becoming less and less.
1:27:59
That's just kind of the nature of the sport right now.
1:28:01
People are chasing, you know, social media clicks and likes
1:28:05
and they want to get these big meats.
1:28:07
So that's one. And and two, there's not going
1:28:11
to be a perfect date to make everyone happy.
1:28:13
But we know that if we pushed a week later, to me, it just
1:28:17
doesn't make sense for someone to do our meet and Nike and new
1:28:20
ballots. It doesn't make sense and we
1:28:21
don't want to interfere with that.
1:28:23
It doesn't make sense for us. It doesn't make sense for the
1:28:25
track community. You know, it must because
1:28:27
Illinois State meet, because we're we're the official
1:28:29
equipment sponsors for the Illinois State Meet.
1:28:31
There must be a bunch of Illinois coaches going, oh, it's
1:28:33
too early because you know, it's like, well, sorry, it's not for
1:28:37
here's the good news. There's other opportunities, but
1:28:39
that's awesome. I didn't know that many states.
1:28:41
That's pretty cool. So, yeah, how do you know?
1:28:44
We know the day feels early, by the way.
1:28:45
I'm aware of that. But for us, for Florida, for
1:28:48
Texas, Georgia, all these summer schools, it's like ideal,
1:28:51
perfect. I.
1:28:52
Love that I love that. How did this even come about?
1:28:55
I can't imagine it's hard enough to host a regular home meet.
1:28:59
How do you try to put together you, you, you got to be getting
1:29:03
phone calls, emails, smoke signals from a parent in Texas
1:29:07
one minute and then the next minute somebody from North
1:29:09
Carolina coach. And then how in the world do you
1:29:12
try to handle a whole meet of 30 something states?
1:29:15
Probably. I'm the meat director.
1:29:18
I'm the head of meat director. Oh boy, you got a nice hair, do
1:29:20
you? Haven't lost it yet.
1:29:21
No Gray hair. It's a lot, you know, I've been
1:29:23
trying to take my name off of it, but it it, it's fun to work.
1:29:27
I've enjoyed it. It's a process working with
1:29:29
corporate sponsors on top of, you know, the meat is presented
1:29:32
tile sponsor, Under Armour. On top of that, you know, I'm
1:29:35
trying to you got to have someone that's in house at IMG
1:29:37
that understands how our facilities work, how our
1:29:39
operations work, just the flow of athletes and coaches.
1:29:42
We've never done it before. So for full clarity, like we're
1:29:44
doing our best here too. I do know we have an amazing
1:29:48
team in place. This is not just another home
1:29:50
meet for us. We have already about 120
1:29:53
workers signed up ready to work this thing.
1:29:55
We're bringing a staff of 120 people.
1:29:57
We're bringing in, you know, around 60, some officials.
1:30:01
It's going to be a show. We're bringing in production
1:30:03
team. We're bringing in.
1:30:04
I want to say that the team we're bringing for production,
1:30:06
the same one that they run all production for the Tampa Bay
1:30:09
Lightning professional hockey team, what we're bringing in the
1:30:13
full kit and Coodle for this thing.
1:30:14
And I think it's important that people know this is not just
1:30:17
another IMG homie. This is Under Armour Nationals
1:30:20
and we're putting everything we can into it.
1:30:22
We're using our resources under Armours Resources.
1:30:24
We have other tile sponsors or other partners such as like
1:30:28
Therabody, Gatorade, Rakutan and Gil over in the Throes area.
1:30:32
Yeah, I was going to ask you. So you made a lot of good
1:30:35
decisions. I think this is going to be a
1:30:37
first Class A championship and it's inaugural year.
1:30:41
And then you guys got some crazy.
1:30:43
What do you you know? I know this is a terrible setup
1:30:46
from your host here. By the way, what are you doing
1:30:48
in the throes area? It feels like this could be.
1:30:52
You might need to to keep a clear eye on what's going on
1:30:55
over there. Well here I'll give a plug to
1:30:57
1st off. IMGI told you earlier we added
1:31:01
swimming OK to our our Academy here.
1:31:04
The new swimming complex is on site.
1:31:07
It was all our old throws field here.
1:31:09
Where the hammer cage was. Yeah, we had about a five month
1:31:12
turn around to take our current throws field, basically redo the
1:31:16
whole thing and put it to a different piece of campus ahead
1:31:19
of this meet. I'm happy to say we officially I
1:31:21
finished it. We're having our ribbon cutting
1:31:23
ceremony in four days now. OK, hold on.
1:31:26
Stop right there. I'm sorry.
1:31:27
I almost called this the Gill Tangent Podcast, to be honest
1:31:30
with you. Yes.
1:31:31
Tell us what this is so cool. Again, these are things that I
1:31:35
hope and and you're blessing it. So I love this that I want our
1:31:39
audience to to because our audience is 99% track and field
1:31:42
coaches. So you got this new throws
1:31:44
facility, which we'll talk about here in a second.
1:31:46
I've already interrupted you, but you're not just like, oh,
1:31:48
OK, so the first meet or we practice every day, whatever
1:31:50
you're doing, like this ribbon ceremony event, the middle
1:31:54
schoolers. I saw Mark's post and stuff,
1:31:57
where'd this idea come from? And this is so cool, I'd love
1:32:00
to. Celebrate tracking us as a
1:32:02
corporation sounds very corporate.
1:32:04
I'm going to say everything we do is one of one.
1:32:06
That's our whole goal here. So like if most people would
1:32:08
just open the facility, we're not going to do that.
1:32:10
We're going to have a ribbon cutting.
1:32:12
We have the construction team here.
1:32:13
We're going to have some of our ADS out there.
1:32:15
We ordered a custom ribbon with our new throws logo we made on
1:32:18
it. We got a new IMG Tammy Rose logo
1:32:22
and we're as excited to unveil the new the new facility.
1:32:25
Obviously every single thing out there is Gil.
1:32:27
We're excited about that. Thank you.
1:32:28
We just got my dad's actually out there today putting together
1:32:31
those performance indicators. I think it was.
1:32:33
I've got all our new indicators and shop put return rails.
1:32:36
The Coliseum is shining out my office window right now.
1:32:39
It's huge. I think it's massive yeah.
1:32:42
And we're excited, man it's it's we're going to try to do it off.
1:32:46
It's called. We had this meet last year.
1:32:48
It's our inaugural meet last year.
1:32:49
It's called the launch party, OK, And the reason it's called
1:32:52
the launch party is because you're launching implements in
1:32:54
the air. We bring a DJ in, so we have a
1:32:56
DJ coming, OK, it's on Fridays, our launch party.
1:32:59
It's under the lights. We have a professional DJ that
1:33:01
comes in this year. It's launch party 2 point O.
1:33:04
But instead of launching implements, we're launching new
1:33:06
facility. So we're excited about that.
1:33:08
The name just worked out I. I'd love that.
1:33:12
We sometimes and I and I get it, you know, we're not tracking
1:33:17
field is not football, basketball, etcetera.
1:33:20
And I understand when it comes to budgets and things like that
1:33:24
amongst our schools and our colleges where we sit in that
1:33:27
respect. However, we have to, as a body,
1:33:33
more of our of our body, our coaches, our parents, our
1:33:35
athletes, administrations, et cetera, have to understand how
1:33:38
important track and field is. It's typically the largest
1:33:41
roster. So you're affecting more student
1:33:44
athletes, more students than anybody else.
1:33:47
You know, we're the most inclusive sport.
1:33:49
So black, white, brown, tall, short, skinny, not skinny.
1:33:54
You can find success in our sport.
1:33:56
That doesn't mean you're going to be an Olympian, but you can
1:33:59
find success in our sport. So what I loved about that was
1:34:03
you make a segment of our sport, the throws here, you're making
1:34:07
it important. Not you're right.
1:34:09
If you would have just had the first meeting.
1:34:11
There you go throw. Look at our new cages.
1:34:13
They're amazing. All that kind of stuff.
1:34:14
That's been awesome. That's that's great, but you
1:34:16
made an event, you're making those athletes that facility,
1:34:20
all the work. I mean, you know this because
1:34:22
you and I did this together, all the facility directors, the
1:34:25
contract. There's so many people that go
1:34:27
into making this a success to celebrate that I think is
1:34:30
extremely important. And I would just encourage our
1:34:33
coaches when you I've seen some amazing that the throws are kind
1:34:36
of kind of going on so amazing. You know, different shot put
1:34:38
setups with discus cages. Make that a big deal.
1:34:42
Make that a launch party. I think that is I, I think what
1:34:45
you're doing there is good for our sport, not just IMG in the
1:34:49
facility. It's.
1:34:50
Something, it's actually something we're trying to do at
1:34:52
the Academy here in the month of May.
1:34:53
We're hosting a lot of one off meets, like example this
1:34:55
Wednesday. So on May 6th we're hosting a
1:34:58
meet here called Flight Night. That's all around the jumping
1:35:01
events. OK, it's just jumping events
1:35:03
only on Friday we have the launch party.
1:35:05
It's only throwing events. Our whole team will be there for
1:35:08
the throwing events. Right.
1:35:09
And it just so happened the word launch party, it was just
1:35:12
perfect. That's perfect.
1:35:13
It is perfect. Yeah, Yeah.
1:35:15
But yeah, it's something we do to just rally to around the
1:35:18
whole sport, like you said, building the culture.
1:35:21
We expect our distance runners on the team when someone goes
1:35:24
out there, right? There's nothing worse.
1:35:25
As an athlete, say you're a high level hammer thrower, right?
1:35:28
And your PR is 70 meters, OK, make up numbers and you go out
1:35:32
there and you throw 64 meters, right?
1:35:35
If you've never watched hammer throw before, 64 meters, 70
1:35:38
meters, it all looks cool. It's amazing just seeing that
1:35:41
thing fly out the case. It's amazing.
1:35:43
But as a high level athlete going to the next level, I don't
1:35:46
need my teammates saying good throw back to those 64.
1:35:50
We try to teach all of our kids and our team here everyone.
1:35:52
We need our 5K distance runners to know that Zane Beaver
1:35:56
throwing 67 deserves a clap if he has a bad throw and throws
1:36:00
59. Hey, all right, man, keep your
1:36:02
hand up, keep going. I want.
1:36:03
That knowledge? To be on our team and same thing
1:36:06
vice versa, right? If we have a kid go watch the
1:36:09
steeple chase and we're running the 2K steeple, a number a lot
1:36:11
of people don't know, well, you better know our kids are all
1:36:14
trying to break 7 at minimum. And if you don't know that, you
1:36:17
got to go do some research. So we're trying to get our kids
1:36:19
involved in the different events, like jumping events on
1:36:21
Wednesday, Friday. So yeah, we're launching a new
1:36:24
throws facility. It's going to be amazing.
1:36:26
It's all Gil out there. I know you know that.
1:36:27
We're excited. So you mentioned DJ and so at
1:36:30
the throws area for the Under Armour High School
1:36:32
Championships, we're doing a DJ and you have, I think I talked
1:36:36
myself into this, which is a little scary.
1:36:39
I'm going to come in as the MC. I'm actually just kind of like
1:36:42
hype man is what I'm going to do.
1:36:45
So this throws event for the Under Armour Championships, this
1:36:48
ain't going to be just like, oh, the greatest athlete.
1:36:50
I mean there are some amazing athletes, number ones in the
1:36:52
country, things like that. It's going to be a great
1:36:53
competition. We're going to have a kind of a
1:36:55
party out there. For sure.
1:36:57
I think it, that's what throwers need.
1:37:00
I think it's going to be a good environment.
1:37:02
Yeah, we have a DJ, actually the DJ that's working this event on
1:37:05
Friday. This is his pilot run.
1:37:07
I don't know if he's going to see this, but we're seeing how
1:37:09
he does. We might have to make a choice.
1:37:11
Hopefully he's good, but yeah, we're gonna have DJ out there
1:37:15
playing music, keeping the vibes up.
1:37:16
We're gonna have you out there, which I'm excited about.
1:37:18
Michael, be our official like said MC, announcer, hype man for
1:37:21
the event. Someone that obviously in
1:37:23
yourself, you know the throw so well and you know how to uplift
1:37:26
kids. That's our goal is our our North
1:37:28
Star, the Under Armour National Championships has always been
1:37:31
athlete first. It's all we've been talking
1:37:33
about, right? Like we didn't make a decision
1:37:35
the other day on the meet committee.
1:37:37
Hey, do we put a shaded tent here for the spectators or do we
1:37:40
add it to the throws field for the athletes?
1:37:42
We are choosing the athlete first every time.
1:37:45
Sorry spectators, it's going to be great.
1:37:46
You can come to watch, bring your umbrella, but we're going
1:37:48
to bring in the best of the best for the kids, which is like,
1:37:51
we're not bringing in Mike here to get the spectator.
1:37:55
Do we want him to get the spectators involved?
1:37:57
Yeah. That way the athlete throws far
1:37:59
right, just use PRS. And our goal is kids to walk
1:38:03
away saying, Dang, I had fun at IMG.
1:38:06
The unarmored national meet was amazing.
1:38:07
And hey, I threw my best. I want to produce good marks.
1:38:10
And I think with the facility we just built out there, obviously
1:38:13
the new cages and all that in the environment and Under Armour
1:38:16
coming on board and just investing in this thing, it's
1:38:19
going to be unreal. We're excited about it.
1:38:21
I told you my goal. You know, I'm tired of turning
1:38:23
on ESPN and they show the latest dunk or the Grand Slam or, you
1:38:28
know, and let's be real, I don't watch ESPN.
1:38:30
So it's stupid When I go on Twitter, Instagram and I see
1:38:33
those kind of things, that's going to be my goal.
1:38:35
Because you're right. You hit the nail on head for the
1:38:38
average person. And that's I'm, I'm probably not
1:38:42
going to pinpoint to that 1% that guy who knows everything
1:38:44
about hammer. I'm going to pinpoint to that
1:38:46
person who threw the shot in high school and is sitting on
1:38:48
their couch watching this Under Armour Champions order is there
1:38:51
because their cousin is, is throwing.
1:38:53
You're right. A 70 meter hammer throw and a 60
1:38:55
meter hammer throw are both awesome.
1:38:58
I used to say we used to host a pole vault event here and we'd
1:39:00
always be getting all that. You know, Toby Stevenson and
1:39:02
Derek Miles, those guys jumped here and, and I'd be like, guys,
1:39:05
the average person has no understanding that that 1819
1:39:08
foot is, it's amazing. If you had someone jumping 15
1:39:11
feet, everybody in the spectator would be like wow, that's
1:39:13
amazing, 15 feet. So that's going to be my goal is
1:39:17
I am going to try with the crowd and the coaches and the spec to
1:39:22
everybody that's there is getting moments on social media.
1:39:25
I'm going to get something go viral at this Under Armour
1:39:27
Championships. We're going to get a throw that
1:39:29
is just out of this world or looks out of this world and
1:39:31
everybody's going to erupt and that someone's going to get a
1:39:33
video of that and get it on Instagram, TikTok, whatever all
1:39:35
the kids are using. We're going to make this thing
1:39:37
viral because the athletes deserve it, the sport deserves
1:39:41
it, those events deserve it, and we're just going to it.
1:39:43
It is going to be a party, man. We're going to have a fun time.
1:39:45
We're going to help with those kids and set some PRS out there.
1:39:48
I think that's one of the things we're trying to be different to
1:39:50
Mike, is we're trying to make sure this is a track and field
1:39:53
championships. We're trying to really include
1:39:55
the field in this. I mean, to the point where we
1:39:57
invested a lot of dollars and running underground fiber from
1:40:01
our throws field all the way to our track, which is about a 5600
1:40:05
meter stretch, I'd say. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:40:07
We ran underground Internet all the way that just so we could
1:40:09
always tap back into the throws field for streaming to the
1:40:12
stadium. We want to make sure that they
1:40:13
are included because such a huge part of our sport is the throws.
1:40:16
I mean, you got the multis going over there, you got the throwers
1:40:19
going over there. We might have US #1 marks,
1:40:21
national records going down. I want to make sure that the
1:40:24
stadium over here knows, hey, yeah, rake on the track, walk on
1:40:28
over here and watch the energy. That's the goal.
1:40:30
So we're excited for it. There's a lot of new right now
1:40:33
at IMG. It's a lot of new things going
1:40:35
on. We've never hosted a meet this
1:40:37
big before. This is our first time They I
1:40:39
will say I think we have the personnel here, the events team
1:40:42
and with Under Armour's help we we, we're going to have a good
1:40:44
event. I feel good about it.
1:40:46
Yeah, I, you know, again, this whole and I just, it's, it's
1:40:49
Bupkis to me, this whole there's too many championships.
1:40:51
I'm proud of New Balance and Nike and Adidas stepping up and
1:40:55
hosting these meets. Thank you so much for doing
1:40:56
that. They're great events for these
1:40:58
kids to see more of the world. And I'm proud of Under Armour
1:41:01
for stepping up in what they're doing as well.
1:41:04
They didn't have to. They could have, they could have
1:41:06
also had that same attitude by the way, and be like those guys
1:41:08
have already done it. Under Armour said, wait a
1:41:11
minute, this our sport is important.
1:41:13
We need to invest into it. I appreciate the investment.
1:41:15
It's easy to not get involved right?
1:41:17
I mean it's Under Armour has stepped up fully in the run
1:41:20
game. I mean on the distance side of
1:41:22
things they are just killing it. I mean, if you look at the last
1:41:25
two Boston Marathon champs with, with Sharon, she's won the
1:41:28
Boston Marathon 2 years in a row in the Under Armour.
1:41:31
They are just really on the rise in the track and field world
1:41:34
right now. And it's really cool to see
1:41:36
their leadership team jump on board and say, you know what
1:41:38
track and field is the most participated sport in America.
1:41:41
Let's fund it. You know, and I think there's
1:41:43
finally people starting to get that grip and this is all the
1:41:46
whole snowball effect to LA 28. And I think that everyone's seen
1:41:49
the vision of how big this home turf Olympics is gonna be.
1:41:53
I'm seen at IMG, Under Armour sees it and you know, we're
1:41:56
just, we're excited to host a meet at our campus That's a true
1:42:00
national caliber. It's going to give opportunity
1:42:02
to so many kids that haven't had it before in this area.
1:42:05
And if anyone is going to say, hey, why too many Under Armour
1:42:08
or too many national meets, I think the best thing to say back
1:42:11
to them is, hey, if I can give one more kid an opportunity to
1:42:14
be seen by a college coach, get APR.
1:42:17
Even if it's not the US number 11 more kid gets APR.
1:42:20
We've done our job, man. We provide the facility, the
1:42:23
event, the flow, the timing, the weather.
1:42:26
We've done all that. That's right.
1:42:28
And the PR, it's worth it. That's what we're trying to do.
1:42:30
Bradenton, FL, The IMG Academy, May 29th through the 31st.
1:42:33
Man, it's going to be amazing. I'm excited to be down.
1:42:35
It's actually, it's very inconvenient for me too, Jay,
1:42:37
because I'm actually going from Kentucky to your place.
1:42:39
I'm going to Austin immediately from Bradenton, going to Austin
1:42:42
for a couple days for an 80s show and then coming home.
1:42:44
But it's going to be 100% worth it.
1:42:46
Can you tell us, give us a little insider knowledge here?
1:42:50
Is this the first of many? Are we going to see Under Armour
1:42:52
High School Championships in 20272829?
1:42:55
That's the goal, that's the goal.
1:42:56
Obviously we got pilot year one, but with the commence it's our
1:42:59
registration so far, it's looking really promising.
1:43:02
So we should we should be hoping to have this be a set thing and
1:43:07
yeah, we just gotta kill it year one.
1:43:08
But we we look really good. Just we I didn't expect the
1:43:12
talent to blow up this fast as quick.
1:43:13
So yeah, we're doing really good.
1:43:16
Yeah, I thought that was a good time.
1:43:17
When I saw some of the kids, the hurdler and the throw, I was
1:43:19
like, oh man, that's like that's a good sign.
1:43:22
That tells you first of all, right there that there's not too
1:43:24
many by the way, these kids have the opportunity to go to any and
1:43:27
all of them and they realize like, I need to get some
1:43:29
competitions in here and they're signing up.
1:43:31
So I love that and can't wait. You know, as a, as a hurdler
1:43:34
guy, first and foremost, I want to meet that Texas kick.
1:43:36
And I'm like, dude, you are killing.
1:43:37
It's that's unbelievable. TJ, my friend, the most valuable
1:43:42
thing that you can give me as to your time, man, I know, I know
1:43:45
you're busy. I, I, you know, I feel bad when
1:43:47
I text you or call you and we talk about things.
1:43:49
I'm like, dude, you got so many things to do and I'm one of
1:43:52
those bugs in your ear about stuff.
1:43:54
So grateful for you and your staff.
1:43:56
I know you're for, for me. You're my face of it all.
1:43:58
But I know how many guys and gals are out there working and
1:44:00
busting their butt, not only coaches, but the administration.
1:44:03
You got amazing support there and amazing people that work
1:44:06
there at IMGA and just so grateful for you spending time
1:44:09
with us and sharing your journey with us today.
1:44:11
I appreciate it, Mike. I mean, hey, Gil, you know,
1:44:13
Gil's special to me. I, I was looking back at my
1:44:16
camera roll. I was on site with you guys
1:44:19
there and 2016 is last time I was there.
1:44:22
I, I, I remember I was looking through pictures today actually,
1:44:24
like what day? When did I go and come to
1:44:26
Champaign and do that? And that's right, I got to see
1:44:28
the wall there in your factory with all the old pole ball
1:44:30
poles. The history of the.
1:44:32
Poles. I got to see the blank I
1:44:34
remember getting to see the blank hurdles like that they
1:44:36
hadn't been painted yet. That was really cool so I I want
1:44:39
to get back I want to see I know you guys have done some
1:44:41
expansions. I want to see the place again,
1:44:42
so I'm. Excited I was about to say you'd
1:44:44
be it's different from when you there and literally I think
1:44:47
today it's they're building the the access Rd. we're building on
1:44:50
another I think another 200,000 square feet on over there.
1:44:53
It's it's really amazing. It's a lot of fun.
1:44:55
It's a lot of fun to work with these guys and gals and it's a
1:44:58
lot of fun. Sometimes we have to pinch
1:45:00
ourselves like man, this stuff is going for little Susie in
1:45:03
Florida and Tommy in Washington and you know Joe and Lincoln NE.
1:45:07
I mean, it's it's fun to be able to like.
1:45:09
The more I've done with you, the more my eye gets open.
1:45:12
It's like when you buy, you know, when you buy a new car and
1:45:14
then you always see that car on the road.
1:45:16
Yeah. Yeah.
1:45:17
It's same thing with Gill. Like I'm on a random high school
1:45:19
in Nancy County. I'm like, oh, they have a Gill
1:45:21
pad. I wonder who sold it to him.
1:45:22
You know, it's just, it's crazy. Your guys product is everywhere
1:45:26
and it's really cool for the track community.
1:45:27
But for us it's the people, man. It's the Fred Dixons.
1:45:30
It's you guys. I mean, Fred Dixon is the one
1:45:33
that got, I know my dad is so loyal to this company and it got
1:45:37
him to guillify everything. So we're excited, man.
1:45:40
That's my mentor right there. TJ.
1:45:43
Thank you so much, man. Again, really appreciate your
1:45:45
time. Thank you guys and gals for
1:45:46
being here. I hope this was, you know, I
1:45:48
like to, you know, of course we're going to 99% of our people
1:45:52
are going to be the traditional coaches out there, but I like
1:45:54
showing you different aspects. You know, we've had director of
1:45:57
OPS on here, we've had facility directors, things like that.
1:46:00
I like for you guys to see different aspects of our sport.
1:46:03
I think it's important because I think that's part of making the
1:46:06
sport as big as it. He had to.
1:46:08
He talked about participation rates.
1:46:10
You are more likely to, when you're grocery shopping
1:46:12
tomorrow, you are more likely to run into someone who did track
1:46:15
and field in high school or college than you did that play
1:46:17
football or basketball or volleyball.
1:46:20
And yet we can't get them to track meets.
1:46:21
And that is what we should all be working towards, to make our
1:46:24
sport for other people to see how great our sport is.
1:46:27
And sometimes that's going to take a lot of sacrifice and
1:46:29
thinking differently. And I thought TJ brought a lot
1:46:31
of great ideas. I know don't bother him.
1:46:34
Give him until and he's going to be busy with camps.
1:46:35
We give him until the summer, but I dare you to e-mail TJ.
1:46:40
First of all, he's a great responder, so he'll communicate
1:46:42
real well to pick his brain on that 52nd 56 second test, the
1:46:45
launch party. I want to see more of those out
1:46:48
there because your kids deserve it, your program deserve it and
1:46:51
you deserve it. Thank you so much for being here
1:46:52
guys, this week. Join us next week.
1:46:54
We're going to get the other side of the story.
1:46:55
We're going to get dad Bill Lawson, someone who literally, I
1:46:59
mean, you think he changed T JS life being his dad.
1:47:02
He changed my life with some advice that he gave me back in
1:47:05
the day. And I'm I'd be shocked at that
1:47:07
story. Come up next week to join us
1:47:09
next Monday and we'll bring Bill Lawson to the show.
1:47:11
Thanks for being here, guys. Join us next week.
1:47:13
We'll do it all. See you.
1:47:16
If it goes to appreciate the coach the ones that pour people
1:47:19
most every season needs a voice of reason speaking the growth
1:47:23
you got to prep before you carry the load ice coffee to the soul.
1:47:26
For those of us who stay on the go proper handoff to stay in the
1:47:29
zone which you packing for the road.
1:47:31
There's more than one way to go. Taking those sass paying you
1:47:34
told it ain't practice if you're perfect Saint Clair what
1:47:37
happened to you listen with both is you can't mentor without a
1:47:40
mentor of years of experience. You can reinvent those years.
1:47:44
Every plan's got to stand and deliver to and the price
1:47:47
sacrifice can you give up you. It's a choice and a fight not a
1:47:50
win or lose. It's not a ploy boy device y'all
1:47:53
can make more moves. It's not about how to it's all
1:47:55
about why you don't know till you know who you are inside 6
1:47:59
when you waste of time choose none.
1:48:01
So y'all cross the finish line. The work ain't done so we learn
1:48:04
from the experts but y'all got to put in the leg work you'll.