Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #294: Shawn Siemers-Mayde Creek (TX) High School

Transcript

#294: Shawn Siemers-Mayde Creek (TX) High School · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

• 0:02
  You're listening to the Gil Athletics Connections podcast
• 0:05
  with host Mike Cunningham. Track and Field world tuned in
• 0:13
  to our humble servant Mike Cunningham for another
• 0:16
  extraordinary message for Gil Athletics Connections.
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  All right, welcome back to the Gil Athletics Connections
• 0:24
  podcast. Man, I'm so glad you guys are
• 0:26
  joining us. You know, it's a little bit of a
• 0:28
  milestone, right? We just started our sixth
• 0:31
  season, which again, going back to January of 2020 when we first
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  started this, I'm not sure I could envision six seasons going
• 0:39
  into our sixth year of doing this, but I can tell you that
• 0:42
  we're having an absolute blast. You know, each and every guest
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  is obviously extremely special and a lot of fun to get to know
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  them and share their journey with with you, our listener, but
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  also your feedback, you know, on the, the ratings and reviews
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  that you guys do on Apple Podcast, the emails, the DMS on
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  Twitter. I just get so much positive,
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  positive feedback. In fact, have not received.
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  And this seems maybe in today's era, but overall just seems like
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  it's not even possible. 0 negativity.
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  I'm just so blessed and honored that you know, Gil athletics
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  allows me to do this for you guys and for me.
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  I get to enjoy this as well. And so just excited and grateful
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  that you guys would be here for season 6.
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  We're going to continue bringing you amazing people that choose
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  to be track coaches. And we got 1 today.
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  So let's get started here. Help me welcome.
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  He's the head cross country coach.
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  He's, I'm gonna call him the former head coach of track and
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  field. He's now the assistant.
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  We're going to find out why that plays into a story.
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  Maid Creek down in beautiful Katy, TX.
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  If you haven't been down there, it's gorgeous.
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  I love that that area near Houston, it's a really special
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  place. Help me welcome the wise, the
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  wonderful Mr. Sean Senior. Sean, how are you, Sir?
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  Great. Good morning.
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  Good morning. That's right.
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  You know, with podcast time, you never know someone press and
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  play at 10:00 at night, 8:00 in the morning.
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  I don't know, man. So we'll just say a good morning
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  for us as we record here today. Sean, man, thanks for being
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  here. You know, it's not lost on me
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  that, you know, as a former coach myself, how busy coaches
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  are. I always feel a little bit more
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  that our high school coaches who are teachers are a little bit
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  more busier. You know, I was a college coach.
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  So I know, you know, there's some free time built in, if you
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  will. There.
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  Our teachers, man is a, you know, a husband of someone who
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  long term Subs how unbelievably busy life is just only being a
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  teacher. So you being a teacher and a
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  coach, man, I'm grateful for your time and I really
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  appreciate you, you being with us today, man.
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  Yeah. Thank you.
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  I'm looking forward to our conversation.
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  Absolutely, me too. We we've got some built in
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  topics we're going to make sure we talked about here today.
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  This is going to be, you know, not knowing the whole story.
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  As many of you know, I don't do a lot of pre research on our
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  guest that allows me to just kind of stay curious and ask the
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  questions that I think you guys are thinking about too as we
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  tell the story. But there are some things in
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  Sean's story that drew me to him that I'm interested in learning
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  about personally. And so I think that'll, you
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  know, make for a pretty good story and a good experience for
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  you that chose to press play today.
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  So Sean, let's get started with you.
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  Assuming you were an athlete somewhere, track had to start
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  for you. Where does where does track
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  begin for you in your life? You know, I am kind of an
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  outlier. Track didn't start for me until
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  I started coaching. I actually growing up, I grew up
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  in in upstate New York and my main sport growing up was
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  hockey. And so I I played hockey, I
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  played soccer, I played lacrosse, which only one of them
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  is down here in Texas anyways. Yeah, I played that.
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  I played hockey. I was going to go play hockey in
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  college, but my mom was diagnosed with cancer and we
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  thought it was going to be terminal.
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  And at the time, I, we had moved to Texas by that by that point
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  and it just didn't make sense financially for me to go up to
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  New York again to go play hockey.
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  So I stayed down here, I went to Southwest Texas and, and
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  graduated from there. And then I actually went into
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  the business world and I was in the software business for about
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  17 years before I transitioned over to teaching and then
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  coaching as well. And so the way I got into track
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  is that I was a marathoner. Hold on there.
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  First of all, you already told me how crazy you are right
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  there. You're a marathoner.
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  That's just ridiculous. Let let's go back to high school
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  realizing that you don't have track experience and that's
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  fine. I, I hate I, I hate the strip
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  away outlier. But as we've learned, you know,
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  we're nearing 300 episodes here. There is no one path.
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  There is no majority path. We've had so many.
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  It's been really enlightening. We've had so many coaches, a
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  high level coaches like yourself that didn't do track or, you
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  know, didn't do track until college or or something like
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  that. So that's that's not necessarily
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  the most uncommon thing. But as you were growing up and,
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  you know, New York with hockey and lacrosse and moved to Texas,
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  where was track in your purview? And what I mean by that?
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  You didn't do track, but did you always watch the Olympic track
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  and feet? You know, it seems to be, you
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  know, persistent. Did you, I mean, I hate to say,
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  did you know about track because, you know, it's hard not
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  to at least know about, but what, what, where was track in
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  your life at all as far as even being nationed about it?
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  You know, it would have been watching the Olympics on TV,
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  watching coming. This is back before cable when I
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  was young because I'm an old guy.
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  And So what was it? World Championships, Olympics,
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  you know, just the just the highlight type events.
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  I honestly, I don't remember that my high school in New York
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  even had a track team. I know we did not have one in
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  junior high and I don't remember us even having a track on the
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  campus at all. So for me, it was, it was a
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  sport that I wondered how people got into it because obviously
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  they're in the Olympics, but I didn't really see it a whole lot
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  in in the area that I that I grew up in, yeah.
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  So it's a it's another sport, you know, of it, it exists.
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  It's not one that necessarily interest you.
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  You're, I mean, hockey. It's so funny.
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  You're the exact opposite. I grew up in Florida and
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  Alabama. Hockey wasn't even in my
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  vocabulary when I talked about sports, You know, it just didn't
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  exist. And then I moved to, you know,
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  Chicago Champaign area and married a a Chicago woman and
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  you know, their family love their Blackhawks fan.
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  I mean, you know, they're. Blackhawks.
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  And I'm like, oh, there's hockey.
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  That's right. Yeah, that's right.
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  Good. So you go to Southwest Texas
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  now? Texas State, right?
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  That's the same. One your your.
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  Bobcat Yeah. What did you go to school?
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  What was the vision as you were going into school to become
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  where you obviously not a teacher, but what did you think
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  about? No.
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  So I wanted to. My original goal was I wanted to
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  go and I wanted to be a teacher and be a coach, but I let other
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  people talk to me out of it. Sure.
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  And I ended up getting a business degree.
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  I had a double major in finance and economics.
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  So what? And took that path.
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  You're kind of, I'm going to call it your passion.
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  You wanted to become teacher coach in that, in that.
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  Amazing how it actually circles back around.
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  And worked out. What?
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  What did you want to coach though?
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  Was it hockey? Yes, I wanted to coach hockey.
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  Yes, I, I wanted to go back up north and I wanted to coach
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  hockey. That was that was the dream for
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  me. Oh.
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  That's so cool. Well, that's cool.
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  I like that. All right.
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  So you go through, you get business and finance and then
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  you went into the business world, you said?
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  I went into the business world. I ended up in the software
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  world. I worked for an accounting
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  software company who said like, hey, we don't.
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  I knew nothing about computers. They said, that's great.
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  We don't need you to know about computers.
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  We need you to know accounting, and we'll teach you the computer
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  side of it. And from there, I went in.
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  I had a friend of a buddy of mine that we'd go play
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  basketball after work. And he was a programmer.
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  And I saw him just typing in this nonsense.
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  And you click a button, all of a sudden the program was there.
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  And I was like, whoa, what is that?
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  And so from there, I self-taught myself how to program, and I
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  ended up what? Language were you using?
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  Back then it was CI. First what I learned was C and
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  C++, and then I eventually when I left software, I worked for a
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  company called Rational that's now owned by IBM.
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  And what we did is we built software for people who build
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  software. So we were a very nerdy company.
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  I was AI was a computer science major for a short time and we
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  studied C++, that's why. But yeah, it's funny how it all
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  develops because I guess now C++ is, which I guess has gone
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  through a lot of iterations, but that's not even like the chosen
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  language really anymore like people are.
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  No, I would say right now it's it's it's, it's kind of like
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  Latin, where if you know C++, you know everything else derives
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  from it. Because then it went to be.
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  Right now it depend kind of Java, Python are sort of a split
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  and then you end up with other JavaScript and other things that
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  are out there now. You know, I appreciate you
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  saying it's kind of like Latin because I always tell people the
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  reason why I didn't continue down that path of programming
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  languages is C++. You know, we learned BASIC 1st
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  and then C++ and it was like math and we've already probably
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  will get into it again. You already know my feelings on
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  math, but it was like math in a foreign language together that
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  that's how I. It's a good way to put it, yeah.
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  That's how I explain programming to people.
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  And and that just did not click for me.
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  So I think you kind of validate me a little bit when you say,
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  yeah, it's like Latin. It's like, oh, OK, see, I was
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  kind of right with this. Yeah, language math.
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  Exactly right it is. OK, so you're, you're doing
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  that, you're making programs for people who program, which, yeah,
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  that's, that's another level of nerddom.
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  I appreciate you. Saying that a little bit, yeah.
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  And anyways, from that point I was, I was in my late 30s and
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  mid 30s, late 30s and I had risen to a point where I was
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  very well off. I was making a lot of money that
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  kind of had achieved the dream that everybody wanted and I
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  realized it. It was the wrong dream.
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  It wasn't what I wanted to be doing the the things that were
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  the motivators for the company, you know, making money, you
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  know, shareholder earnings, all that kind.
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  Just I didn't care What I really liked doing was on my Sundays, I
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  would, I would teach Sunday school in the youth group at our
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  church. And I really liked working with
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  the teenagers and, you know, teaching.
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  And I always had that in the back of my head, like you made
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  the wrong turn. You should have stuck with you
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  should have stuck with teaching and coaching.
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  And by that time, my kids were old enough doing youth sports
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  and I was coaching my son's hockey team.
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  And it just, I was like, God, this is what I'm made to do.
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  And I just decided that that's what I'm going to do.
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  And I I literally quit and took a massive pay cut and moved over
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  to doing what I'm doing right now and couldn't be happier.
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  So interestingly, when we're recording this, we are the the
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  episode for the weeks is we're actually recording this in
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  Thanksgiving week of 2024. You're listening to this in
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  2025. This week is a panel of three
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  former college track coaches who are now coaching high school.
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  And because one of the things I really enjoy doing with the
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  podcast is what I call myth busting.
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  Like, you know, Oh, you're not a air quotes here, a real coach
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  unless you coach college or, you know, all this kind of BS stuff.
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  So I kind of wanted to show. Oh, and like, you can't make it
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  into coaching if you don't coach college and all this kind of
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  stuff. So I wanted to show here's
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  three, you know, they were highly successful head coach of
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  Division One Texas, AM them, Mississippi State.
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  These are, you know, air quotes again, big time coaches who
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  decided to move to the high school level.
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  So we wanted to explore why. And one of the questions I asked
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  them was, well, how do you even if you don't have an education
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  degree, how do you even coach high school?
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  You know, if you want to go, I know there's coaches.
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  I was one of those coaches who coached high school, who didn't
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  teach in the high school. I was, you know, outsider or
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  whatever. How did you with a business, not
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  only a business finance degree type area, but now years removed
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  from that education, what did you have to do to to to become a
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  teacher? So the way I came in was the I
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  kind of came in through the back door.
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  So in my job I was called the product manager, which was a
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  blend of, you know, designing software but also doing
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  marketing involved. And So what I was able to do was
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  come in through an alternative certification program and I was
• 13:27
  able to teach marketing education because the, the one
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  requirement for that certification is that you have
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  to have at least two years of real, real world experience.
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  If you don't have that, you can't get it.
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  So I was, I was living in West TX at the time and Odessa
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  Permian had an opening for marketing education and doing
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  the Co-op program where the kids would come to school for the
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  first part of the day and then go work other places.
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  And I would go visit the workplaces and help the kids
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  find jobs and all of that. And so that's how I came in and
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  I would do an alternative certification class every
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  Tuesday and Thursday evening I would go to classes and I did
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  that for two years, then take my PPR exam and as soon as and my
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  marketing certification. What's PPR?
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  Oh, PPR, that's the, I don't know what it stands for, but
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  that's the generic teacher testing certification that
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  everybody takes. And then after that you, you
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  certify in your in your discipline math.
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  You're going to work that? Sure, yeah.
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  Right, exactly. Where does you mentioned earlier
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  and I'd cut you off so you're, are you running marathons at
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  this point? Where does that come in?
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  And I was and. How does that come into play?
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  This is just. Crazy.
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  So the way marathons came into play for me is I played hockey
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  till I was about 30-4 years. Old.
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  Oh wow, really? Oh, so you kept that passion?
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  I just kept at it. I love, I love it.
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  When you lived in Texas, because I feel like the opportunities
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  would be much. Slimmer.
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  Yes, I did. Actually.
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  I lived in Dallas at the time and so if you know anything
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  about Dallas, once the Stars moved into town, there were more
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  Rakes in Dallas than I had anywhere else.
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  I also, I also spent some time in Seattle.
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  I was in Seattle for 2 1/2 years and I played while I was up
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  there. So I was fortunate when I was an
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  adult, I actually had more ice opportunities than I did growing
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  up when I was in New York, thanks to the Stars.
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  But I finally quit because I have both of my shoulders.
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  I have rotator cuff tears. And it got to the point where I
• 15:36
  would play a game and for 36 hours afterwards, I couldn't
• 15:39
  lift my arms up. And I finally was like, you
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  know, at some point you got to just, you know, hang them up.
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  And I quit playing. And for about a year, I tried to
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  do all the regular, the, you know, the rec league softball,
• 15:57
  tried to do basketball, which I'm terrible at.
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  Yeah. And I just nothing was like
• 16:05
  challenging enough to engage me because hockey's hard.
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  So you have to be engaged to play.
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  My, my, my brother-in-law, you know, grew up in Chicago, did
• 16:14
  not, did not play, you know, high school rec league hockey.
• 16:18
  But after he graduated college, started playing in rec league.
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  And now good for him. That's been, I mean, gosh, he's,
• 16:25
  he's going to be 38 right now. So we're 1415 years now.
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  He has played and he lives in California now and has found a
• 16:33
  love for hockey as a post high school, you know, post high
• 16:37
  schooler in college and loves it, Loves it, loves it.
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  Yeah. Yeah, it's an amazing sport.
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  It's challenging, but So what I was, I was, I need something
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  that's that's hard, that's going to keep me engaged.
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  And literally my whole entire decision process happened like
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  this. I was in Barnes and Noble one
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  night and I was looking through the sports section and I saw a
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  book. It was titled something like How
• 17:02
  to run a Marathon. And I was like, that sounds
• 17:05
  hard. It was like, that's what I'm
• 17:07
  doing. And that's literally it.
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  Did you? Know what?
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  A marathon. Was meaning Oh I know what a.
• 17:12
  Marathon was because that's kind of in our public I.
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  Remember watching it, you know, again, going back to the
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  Olympics, I can remember watching 76 was my first, you
• 17:22
  know, one of my first sports memories was yeah, yeah,
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  watching the Olympics back then and so so you.
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  Get a literal book of how to run marathoning.
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  Yeah, and that's kind of like my way of learning because this way
• 17:36
  I learn programming is through. I've always self-taught.
• 17:39
  So I was like, OK, well I'm going to learn how to run a
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  marathon. And that's, that was, jeez, 20
• 17:50
  plus years ago now that that happened.
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  So I'm still going at it, yeah. How How long after you got that
• 17:56
  book did you run your first marathon?
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  I bet it was a year and a half afterwards and IDNFDI was going
• 18:03
  to say how did. It how did it go?
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  I think I got I, I, I finished, I went into it and my training
• 18:11
  because I was, I didn't know what I was doing.
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  I went into the marathon. I was really injured.
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  I shouldn't have run. I shouldn't have even started.
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  But yeah, being a newbie, I didn't know that you could defer
• 18:22
  an entry or anything like that. And I was like, well, I've
• 18:24
  already paid all this money, I'm just going to go as far as I can
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  go. And I think I got 14 miles in or
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  something. And I just, it was hurting too
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  bad and I had to stop. But that didn't deter you.
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  No, it, it got me angry and more focused and I was and then I was
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  thinking like, OK, what do I, I did something, I've got to
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  change something here. This is the message to me that I
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  got to change something. And at that point I had just
• 18:52
  moved to Katy. So this this is about 17 years
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  ago now and. So.
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  So Odessa starts the teaching career right?
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  You don't coach track. No, I didn't coach anything in
• 19:06
  Odessa because I hadn't. I wasn't fully certified.
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  Yet. And then so from there, you
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  moved to Katie. I moved to Katie.
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  Yeah, Got. It OK, keep going.
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  And, and I found a running group, Katie Fitz, without one
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  of my fraternity brothers who I hooked up with again, I hadn't
• 19:24
  seen for 15 years. And he had totally transformed.
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  He had gone from sort of a chubby guy to I mean, he was,
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  she was old. He looked like your prototypical
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  runner and, and it's like, whoa, what did you do?
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  And and he introduced me and through there I got some.
• 19:42
  That was actually my first exposure to training that
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  there's a, there's a way to do this.
• 19:47
  You don't just go out and go run because that's what I was
• 19:50
  thinking before. I was just like, I'm going to
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  go. Out and just run.
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  Yeah. It's just, you know what?
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  What? What's a pace?
• 19:56
  We just, we just go, yeah. Many of bad stories have started
• 20:01
  with What's a pace? We just, we just start and we
• 20:05
  hopefully finish, yeah, when we're supposed to.
• 20:09
  I love it. So you kept going.
• 20:13
  What was the first successful? And by successful for marathon
• 20:17
  means you finished in my book. So what did you finish the?
• 20:20
  Next one, right. So I went from well, my second
• 20:22
  one that I did, I learned that you don't run marathons in May
• 20:28
  in Texas, I ran one yeah, I learned that the hard way.
• 20:32
  And I think my first finishing time was 4 hours, 44 minutes.
• 20:37
  So wasn't super great. I remember when I came in,
• 20:40
  they're already taking things down because it was kind of a
• 20:42
  small marathon. I was way in the back and, and
• 20:45
  anyways, my first marathon after getting training, I actually ran
• 20:49
  359. I broke 4 hours and, and felt
• 20:56
  semi decent, you know, I didn't feel like I was dying like I was
• 20:59
  the first one. And that was when I realized
• 21:01
  that, you know, training works. I was exposed to a lot of very
• 21:05
  successful runners who would qualify for Boston multiple
• 21:08
  times. And it's the first time you,
• 21:10
  when you start to integrate with the community and you learn that
• 21:13
  there's, there's a number of paths to get to where you want
• 21:18
  to go, but they all share common, you know, I guess what
• 21:25
  you said foundation foundational pieces to make it work.
• 21:29
  And then from there, I just started going, you know, getting
• 21:33
  better and better from that point.
• 21:36
  You seem like the kind of guy that would set goals.
• 21:38
  So did you start when you first broke?
• 21:40
  4 Was was it then goals of like, OK, well I want to break, I'll
• 21:44
  make up a #330 that may have been too much, but 3:30 or I
• 21:48
  want to qualify for Boston. That's a big marathon thing.
• 21:51
  Did you start and did you and, and was there ever a goal?
• 21:54
  Because these, you know, as much as I like to make fun of
• 21:56
  marathoners and and I make fun out of as out of complete
• 21:59
  jealousy, by the way, that I just can't do it.
• 22:02
  Did you ever start looking or have you done?
• 22:04
  Because this is real crazy talk. These ultra marathons, these 50,
• 22:08
  Miller 50 KS, 100 Millers, things like that.
• 22:12
  No, those people are insane. I've never.
• 22:17
  I've never, I think I, I might like to do a 50 Miller one day
• 22:22
  just to see what it's like. But the people doing the 100
• 22:27
  Millers, I have friends that do that and I just, I'm like,
• 22:32
  there's, there's nothing here. It seems like it's fun to me.
• 22:35
  You know, it's just insanity. All of this sounds like talking
• 22:39
  to someone who has an addiction to drugs and you're already on
• 22:42
  one bad drug, the marathon. And then what did you say?
• 22:45
  You know, I'd like to sample. I'd like to just try the 50
• 22:49
  Miller. And that's that meth talking to
• 22:50
  you. And then you get hooked on meth.
• 22:52
  The next thing you know, you got to go to fentanyl and go to the
• 22:54
  100 mile. Yeah, it's just all it's all
• 22:57
  sounds like bad. So where you're in Katy, you're
• 23:01
  running marathons, you're starting to understand and learn
• 23:04
  that there's training for, for for that event.
• 23:08
  Where does coaching? We're just teaching where, Where
• 23:11
  are we at in that area? OK, so, yeah, good question.
• 23:14
  So where that started was when I, when I came here to Katie, I
• 23:18
  originally started at Morton Ranch High School.
• 23:21
  So when I came in for the interview, I, I, I, because I
• 23:26
  just got my math certification as soon as I, as soon as I
• 23:29
  achieved my, my PPR, the generic certification, you can then go
• 23:34
  take whatever subject matter test you want to take.
• 23:37
  And so the plan all along for me was to do math, because that had
• 23:41
  always been my favorite subject. Yeah, I was going to say, why
• 23:43
  math? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 23:44
  Yeah, yeah, That was my that was my thing.
• 23:47
  I hated English. I hated English and anything to
• 23:49
  do with writing and I loved math and anything to do with numbers
• 23:53
  and problem solving. So I always wanted to, I wanted
• 23:56
  to do math. And I had that certification and
• 23:59
  I came in and I said, hey, I want to coach too.
• 24:03
  I said, I don't know what I can do here.
• 24:05
  I told them, you know, my my experiences with my sports that
• 24:08
  I did. And they actually had an open
• 24:11
  intern as an assistant tennis job.
• 24:14
  And I had never played. I mean, I played tennis, but I
• 24:20
  don't know how to serve or, you know, it's like that, you know,
• 24:23
  the tennis where you play with friends where you're like, yeah,
• 24:25
  I can bounce three times and we'll count it.
• 24:30
  And so I that's how it started. I was in assistant tennis coach
• 24:34
  and but I got my foot in the door.
• 24:37
  So you you walked into interview for this math job, which my
• 24:42
  understanding is pretty highly cut.
• 24:43
  There's not a lot of math like math and history.
• 24:45
  I think like, you know, boy, if you got one of those degrees to
• 24:47
  teach, there's always a spot for you.
• 24:49
  There's a ton of English teachers and things like that.
• 24:52
  Not not putting those down, just saying there's less people who
• 24:54
  want to do math teaching versus English right teaching as an
• 24:58
  example. But you walk in and say, hey, by
• 25:01
  the way, I also want to coach, but I'm pretty much like a
• 25:05
  hockey guy and you don't have hockey like that.
• 25:09
  That seem there's a little bit of, I don't know, it seems like
• 25:13
  it borders on a little bit of audacity, but also a little bit
• 25:16
  of naivety of like, what do you mean you want to coach?
• 25:18
  You have not done any of our sport, you know, but what I like
• 25:21
  about that, first of all, you know, we talk a lot about with
• 25:23
  our athletes, but you know, my my audience, who I work towards
• 25:28
  as the coaches, I'm the coach of coaches so that you guys can
• 25:31
  coach the athletes. We always talk about our
• 25:34
  athletes of like, hey, try stuff like put yourself out there,
• 25:36
  take a risk, right? And so it's a little bit of
• 25:39
  like, OK, well, you wanna become a coach, you don't know what
• 25:43
  that actually means. You kind of have an idea, put
• 25:46
  yourself out there and see if if at one area, do you really want
• 25:50
  to do it. When you get into the muck,
• 25:52
  sometimes you realize, oh, this wasn't what I wanted to do and
• 25:54
  how do you actually learn how to teach it?
• 25:56
  So your first one was tennis? Tennis, yes.
• 25:59
  How did you, and I'm noticing a theme here, but how did you
• 26:03
  figure out how to coach tennis? So.
• 26:06
  Did you go to the Barnes and Nobles and get the how to coach?
• 26:08
  Tennis I, you know what I I did and I actually, actually I did
• 26:12
  like a deep dive and I found some.
• 26:16
  They were books that were only sold over the Internet.
• 26:19
  You couldn't find them in barn. Yeah, I bought it directly from
• 26:21
  the author that were really good, had tons of drills.
• 26:25
  I mean, I did all kinds of research.
• 26:28
  I'm a I'm an over researcher on everything.
• 26:32
  And and of course, I went in with my with the person who was
• 26:35
  the head coach and I told her, look, I haven't done this
• 26:39
  before, but whatever you show me like or you want me to do like,
• 26:42
  I will learn it. And I'm really good at
• 26:44
  explaining. I'm athletic.
• 26:46
  I can I can teach movement and patterns.
• 26:50
  All sports are the same to me. It's just you have to learn
• 26:53
  patterns of movement and when to apply them.
• 26:56
  And if you comprehend that, it's real easy to take that skill and
• 27:00
  then translate it across. And until I'm not until I'm
• 27:04
  like, I'm really good with balance.
• 27:05
  I'm really good with with running with quickness because
• 27:09
  those are all things that I've always had translated over and
• 27:13
  how to accelerate off that first step.
• 27:14
  I know the way you should be positioning your feet so you can
• 27:17
  move whichever way. I just when you say like we're
• 27:21
  doing a continental grip, I don't know what that means, so
• 27:23
  show me but. You didn't know those things
• 27:27
  then. Oh, I knew them then.
• 27:29
  Because it's the same thing as that you would do in hockey and
• 27:31
  soccer. OK, that's.
• 27:33
  What I was trying to yeah, there's, I just translated what
• 27:35
  I knew from other sports, got it and brought it over.
• 27:38
  There's a way that you have to hold your body that you can.
• 27:41
  You don't know which way you're going to go in hockey, which way
• 27:43
  the puck is going to go. So you have to be able to.
• 27:46
  There's a way to hold yourself on your skates that you can go
• 27:50
  360° like that. And it's same with tennis.
• 27:54
  You know when the ball come in and you don't know where it's
• 27:56
  going to go, so you need to be ready.
• 27:57
  In track, we could be accused of, we don't like outsiders.
• 28:05
  We don't think that, you know, an SNC coach can come in and
• 28:09
  work with our, you know, make a hurdler faster or whatever we
• 28:12
  want. We can be accused of being a
• 28:14
  little protective of our bubble of being a coach and coaching
• 28:17
  track and field. How were you treated in because
• 28:20
  you're an outsider into the tennis world?
• 28:22
  How did was head coaches like roll in his or her eyes Like
• 28:25
  whatever hockey? Dude, yeah, there was a lot of
• 28:30
  because they would all talk about they would play in their,
• 28:32
  in their leagues afterwards. And I, you know, I, no, in fact,
• 28:40
  one of the instructions was that I was not allowed to demonstrate
• 28:43
  serves to the to the athletes because it was, I just didn't
• 28:47
  know how to, you know, and, and my coach was younger and I think
• 28:51
  kind of like I worry about what the kids think about me or think
• 28:55
  about the coach and all that. So I was like, that's fine.
• 28:59
  I'll, you know, I'll do what I need to do.
• 29:02
  And I and I mostly work with the lower level kids.
• 29:04
  I didn't really work with the varsity level kids at all.
• 29:08
  It was the kids who were, you know, happy to be out there and
• 29:11
  participating. And you know, a lot of it.
• 29:16
  I just learned and helped develop some kids and we had
• 29:19
  some, some success. And, and that was my first taste
• 29:23
  of coaching that I was like, OK, I like this because it's a, it's
• 29:26
  a problem to solve. Every kid has a problem to solve
• 29:29
  and you can, you can do it. They've all got different, like
• 29:34
  deficiencies or strengths, and you have to.
• 29:37
  You can't just throw a generic thing at them.
• 29:39
  You've got to work with them individually and find out where
• 29:42
  they go. So how did, how long did you do
• 29:45
  coaching tennis and did that translate directly into track
• 29:49
  and how did that do it? Did actually, yeah.
• 29:51
  So I did that for a year and a half.
• 29:53
  And at the time the guy who was the distance coach, he, he goes
• 29:59
  cross in distance at Morton Ranch.
• 30:02
  He, he came up to me in October of my second year.
• 30:06
  It was right after they had district and he said, hey, I'm
• 30:09
  leaving at the end of December. I've got an opportunity to do a
• 30:14
  job in North Carolina and I'm going to take it.
• 30:17
  And he said, I'm recommending that you take over for me.
• 30:20
  He goes, you know, more about running than I do because he and
• 30:24
  I would always talk. He'd come in after.
• 30:26
  That's how I got my introduction.
• 30:27
  I'd be like, hey, how does your race go?
• 30:29
  And yeah, yeah, tell me about this.
• 30:31
  And I, I would call him, but the night after a race to go and
• 30:35
  talk to me about it. What's going on?
• 30:37
  And so, and at that point, everybody knew I'd been, you
• 30:41
  know, training for marathons, you know, a lot of coaches that
• 30:44
  asked me about what would you do for endurance, for, you know,
• 30:48
  the kids here and all that. And so when he left, my
• 30:51
  principal came to me and he said, hey, you're not you're not
• 30:54
  coaching tennis anymore. You're going to do you're going
• 30:57
  to do cross country and track. And this was December and yeah,
• 31:03
  you know, the season starts in January, so.
• 31:07
  And while while you may have some experience at this point of
• 31:13
  truly long distance running the marathon and maybe there's some
• 31:18
  translation to cross country, that could be debatable, right,
• 31:21
  Because of the distances. But now you're going into track,
• 31:25
  so the distances get cut in half, if you will, you know,
• 31:28
  miles and two miles and you have zero.
• 31:31
  I haven't heard any track experience Besides, I watched
• 31:34
  some Olympics. OK, This sounds like another
• 31:37
  problem to solve. What did what did you do?
• 31:39
  Yeah. So wow, we were really bad.
• 31:42
  That's one thing we did. We, we, we lost a lot.
• 31:44
  The first because I didn't know, because I mean coaching, you
• 31:47
  know, the 816 and 32 coming from a marathon background, we ran, I
• 31:54
  mean long runs was where we kind of overlapped on that.
• 31:57
  But I didn't really know how to build a a Myler.
• 32:05
  And So what I did is again, I went out, I found I went out on
• 32:11
  Lex run. I searched every PDFI could find
• 32:16
  about, you know, training 1600. I have, I have boxes like this.
• 32:22
  I have about 6 boxes full of papers that I downloaded in
• 32:26
  binders that are the, the four inch binders like that full of
• 32:30
  threads and, and things like that on Lex run that I would
• 32:33
  pull. Like I can remember I, I pulled
• 32:35
  all the threads on Renato Canova because I would always be in
• 32:38
  fascinated with the fact that the way that he would jump in,
• 32:41
  if you remember, like people would be talking and then he
• 32:44
  would just pop into the thread and start talking.
• 32:47
  And there was something about the way that he described
• 32:49
  things, I was incredibly confusing, but at the same time
• 32:52
  made sense. And so I, I, I downloaded all
• 32:58
  those and I, and I basically treated training for what I did
• 33:03
  is I realized I need to do what I do best and I need to treat
• 33:06
  this like a software project. And so in software projects,
• 33:10
  what happens is we'd come in and we're going to build software
• 33:14
  for somebody. Like when I was in Seattle, we
• 33:16
  built software for Boeing. I didn't know the first thing
• 33:19
  about what the business was that they were doing.
• 33:21
  And I couldn't really understand why they needed to do it.
• 33:24
  But I had to build software that did exactly what they wanted.
• 33:28
  And so I just used my process for for doing that, which is I
• 33:32
  have to get a big picture, you know, just, OK, just tell me if
• 33:36
  I'm on the right planet, basically.
• 33:38
  And then I go down to the, to the smallest detail and I have
• 33:41
  to build things up from there. And so there were coaches that I
• 33:47
  followed that I looked around that I was like, you know, I
• 33:49
  really like what they're doing. High school coaches, like, I
• 33:52
  mean, Steve Tulaneous, who was at Flower Mound, Marcus with a
• 33:55
  huge influence on me and others. And I, I would take their, their
• 34:03
  training that I could find from their presentations that they
• 34:05
  would give and I would just copy it by hand.
• 34:08
  I was like, what are, what are we doing here?
• 34:12
  And I would write down all of my questions that I had on those
• 34:15
  and I would go in and just, it was just a massive deep dive
• 34:19
  project for me. And from there I realized I
• 34:24
  started to put together in my philosophy of what needed to
• 34:27
  happen. And I basically came up with the
• 34:31
  philosophy of that training needs to be one, one cycle all
• 34:34
  year long where we, we focus on the 5K for the summer and the
• 34:39
  fall months. And then we focus on the 1600
• 34:43
  after that. Because then after that you
• 34:44
  could spoke off to go whatever the 32 or 8 or what have you.
• 34:50
  And I, my first, the my first year with cross country, we
• 34:57
  didn't finish last. We finished second to last in
• 34:59
  district. And it was, it was a real
• 35:01
  struggle. My kids were so invested.
• 35:03
  And I mean, boy, I was just like flying blind making notes.
• 35:11
  But I would also talk to other coaches.
• 35:13
  I would always. On that cross country, take
• 35:16
  their brains. I'm glad I'm glad you went there
• 35:19
  because that's where I want to question next too.
• 35:20
  But yeah, on cross country, did you, was there any instinctual
• 35:27
  or maybe you got it from your, your study in of this?
• 35:30
  You know, cross country is not won or lost in September or
• 35:37
  October. It's June and July.
• 35:39
  Like if you don't have a summer, you don't have a season.
• 35:42
  Yeah, yeah, you take your summer off as the coach.
• 35:44
  Don't complain. Where your team, Yeah, for
• 35:46
  Cross, right? Yeah.
• 35:47
  I mean, you're not going to get make up two months worth guys
• 35:51
  and gals have been doing four months worth of of building
• 35:54
  mileage, etcetera. Did you did you know that
• 35:56
  instinct like in that first cross country?
• 35:58
  So you started in December, So you didn't have cross country.
• 36:01
  You you go through track season, June hits, you know, the state
• 36:05
  meets over or whatnot. It's June.
• 36:06
  Did you have a training program for the summer or did you start
• 36:10
  when started and learned? Oh crap, we needed a summer.
• 36:13
  I did have one. I didn't realize the importance
• 36:17
  of the kids coming out in the summer, so I did have.
• 36:20
  I had a core group of about eight that showed up every day,
• 36:27
  but there was about 2025 that I would see once a week, once
• 36:31
  every two weeks. First time was the, you know,
• 36:34
  first day of practice. And as the season, when the
• 36:38
  season started, I realized, wow, those kids who ran all summer
• 36:43
  are so much better. Eight of them are doing a lot
• 36:46
  better. Yeah, yeah.
• 36:47
  And so I I figured that out really quickly.
• 36:50
  So yeah, good, good. So that the second summer I was
• 36:53
  able to say like, hey, we all have to be out here.
• 36:55
  Perfect as you are downloading these white papers, reading
• 36:59
  books, things like that, and you started alluding into this.
• 37:04
  How much of peer-to-peer did you you know, you're kind of doing
• 37:07
  peer-to-peer. You're reading about, you know,
• 37:09
  flower mounds coaches what he prescribes, he or she
• 37:14
  prescribes. So that's that's a peer-to-peer
• 37:17
  without. That's pier one way without
• 37:19
  directly talking. Yeah, yeah.
• 37:20
  Did you call or e-mail other coaches?
• 37:23
  Did you go to any clinics, any anything like that?
• 37:26
  At this point I I did go to some clinics, I did reach out to a
• 37:30
  few coaches and was pretty much given the cold shoulder.
• 37:35
  See you you allude right into what my next questions are.
• 37:38
  That's perfect. Keep.
• 37:38
  Going, yeah, I was I, I realized I had to figure it.
• 37:42
  I really found alone like I had to figure it out on myself.
• 37:45
  You're the outsider again. Here's this guy.
• 37:48
  Sure, you run marathons, buddy, but that ain't coaching track
• 37:52
  and field and cross country. And you're doing it at a later
• 37:58
  stage of life. It's it's one thing if you're a
• 38:00
  23 year old kid that just graduated college, you didn't do
• 38:03
  track. You got a new teaching job and
• 38:05
  you're like, I don't know, I like track.
• 38:06
  Let me coach it. You know, there's going to be a
• 38:08
  little bit of like, hey, man, this is our sport, but you're
• 38:10
  young. Maybe we can teach into hear you
• 38:13
  as a 30 something, maybe 40 something year old guy who
• 38:16
  you're a hockey guy. Maybe some people are accusing
• 38:19
  you of being the tennis guy because you've done that in.
• 38:20
  The last they knew me as the tennis guy.
• 38:23
  So I was going to ask, how were you initially received?
• 38:27
  Because again, we can be accused right or wrong, and it's
• 38:30
  probably wrong guys of being very exclusive to what we do is
• 38:34
  track coaches. That's a high skill, buddy.
• 38:37
  Not everybody can do it. That part's true, by the way, as
• 38:42
  you start calling around or asking for help and you're at a
• 38:44
  clinic, right? And you know, there's a lot of
• 38:46
  other peers, Hey, how do you do something?
• 38:48
  How were you initially received? You said kind of cold shoulder a
• 38:51
  little. Bit yeah, it was kind of cold
• 38:52
  shouldered. I realized that it reminded me a
• 38:56
  lot of high school in the sense that that's not a good move
• 39:00
  here. I moved into a high school when
• 39:02
  I was, you know, at the end of my high school years, I moved to
• 39:06
  Dallas and sort of like there's the cool kids and the, you know,
• 39:11
  the loser kids by themselves and the in between kids.
• 39:14
  And you were The New Yorker for crying.
• 39:15
  Out loud, I was the brand, I was the new kid that I didn't know
• 39:19
  anything. I didn't, you know a lot of
• 39:21
  them. And as I've gotten to know
• 39:23
  everybody, I realize that isn't intentional.
• 39:25
  A lot of it is just people are comfortable with who they know.
• 39:28
  You realize that there are a lot of these coaches have they ran
• 39:30
  against each other in high school and they go to these
• 39:32
  conferences and so they go see their friends and it wasn't.
• 39:35
  I end up learning. Nobody's trying to shut you out.
• 39:39
  They're just focused on on the people that they already know,
• 39:43
  which makes sense. Great point.
• 39:45
  That's right. We have our own.
• 39:47
  We, we are comfortable around the people we know no matter who
• 39:50
  it is. You're a little bit of an
• 39:51
  outsider. Yeah, yeah, it's.
• 39:53
  And it wasn't their, it wasn't their job to make me feel
• 39:56
  welcome. It was, you know, it's my job to
• 39:59
  earn my way in. It really was the way I looked
• 40:01
  at it. And maybe as I'm kind of
• 40:03
  thinking this out, maybe it's less of, oh, we're trying to
• 40:05
  protect our, our status as track coaches.
• 40:08
  Actually, maybe it's a, a whole another kind of evolutionary
• 40:11
  scale down where it's more like, oh, we just don't know this guy.
• 40:14
  I don't know. How?
• 40:15
  Regardless of whether he's a track coach, I just don't know
• 40:17
  this guy. So he's not in my in my group.
• 40:19
  So you have to earn into that. That's that's a great point.
• 40:22
  I feel better. I feel better that that's the
• 40:24
  reason then like this exclusionary, you can't come
• 40:27
  into our club because we're track coaches.
• 40:29
  No, because I found it in. So the way that I started
• 40:32
  working my way in is I realized like because I've been in
• 40:34
  business and you have to, you go to things and you have to talk
• 40:37
  to people. And one of the things that I
• 40:40
  started to do is to get to build relationships with after meets
• 40:44
  were over, I would go up to the coaches that won and I would
• 40:46
  congratulate and and I would point out some like what
• 40:52
  outstanding, like the way this kid did that.
• 40:54
  I'd love to hear from you how you do that.
• 40:57
  And one of the things I found out like one of my very good
• 41:01
  friends right now, he told me I was the first coach that ever
• 41:04
  came up to and he could graduated.
• 41:06
  And he and I have been really close ever since then.
• 41:08
  We run together, we do all kinds of things, you know, and I made
• 41:13
  I made a few good friends that way, like so one of them was Amy
• 41:15
  Pitzel when she was still at Taylor at the time.
• 41:20
  And she was very giving, like she's willing to share.
• 41:25
  And so with her, I kind of felt like that was like a life lights
• 41:28
  news, like, Oh, I've got someone I can talk to.
• 41:31
  And she was complimentary. She was, I had two kids that
• 41:35
  were both coming around, you know, and she was like, wow,
• 41:39
  you're doing a real like there's, they've really improved
• 41:41
  from last year. You're doing the right thing.
• 41:43
  And that was like, I was like water in a desert to, you know,
• 41:47
  to hear that from, from someone else.
• 41:50
  And, and really from there, as I, as I started doing that, I
• 41:53
  started to meet more people because if you're nice and
• 42:00
  you're authentic to people and you tell them that you really
• 42:02
  like, they'll, they'll reciprocate and talk back with
• 42:06
  you. And so from there, I just
• 42:08
  started, you know, building up a friend group from there.
• 42:11
  And then I found that there was one of my good friends at the
• 42:16
  time is, and still is, is Walt Yarrow.
• 42:19
  And we started at about the same time he was at Langham Creek and
• 42:23
  inside Fair. And we ended up, we had one
• 42:26
  track season. We had the exact same schedule
• 42:28
  for like our first five meets. And we were joking like, well,
• 42:31
  here we are again. And and we would start talking.
• 42:34
  And he had also, he was a second career coach and he was a
• 42:39
  triathlete and marathoner coming over.
• 42:41
  And so there was common ground. And then he and I could talk
• 42:44
  shop and, and then and it just kind of starts from there where
• 42:48
  you have more people that you like to talk with.
• 42:51
  And now I have all kinds of coaches that we just, I love our
• 42:55
  sport because we share everything.
• 42:57
  Yeah. Openly.
• 42:58
  Isn't it interesting you you said when you you know, you're
• 43:02
  authentic and you're positive, you know, people will, yeah,
• 43:06
  I'll say open their themselves up to you.
• 43:08
  Like, OK, maybe you come in our group.
• 43:10
  You know, it's interesting when you said that, I was like, oh,
• 43:12
  but sometimes we don't believe that.
• 43:14
  Like we we have this like this distrust of positivity.
• 43:17
  It's like, well, you got to prove that this is actually
• 43:19
  authentic that you're not putting on, you know, putting on
• 43:22
  this fake positive mask, if you will.
• 43:24
  The opposite's not true. If you if you are having a bad
• 43:27
  day and you snap at someone or you're gruff with someone,
• 43:30
  there's no more proof needed. It's automatic.
• 43:32
  You're the bad. We don't give people the grace
• 43:36
  of like, you know what, right, They're just having a bad day.
• 43:38
  Maybe I should give them another chance.
• 43:39
  It's it was just interest. You said that I was like,
• 43:41
  because, you know, I experienced that.
• 43:43
  And we'll get to this topic probably here pretty soon on
• 43:45
  Twitter. You know, I'm the like, I love
• 43:48
  to be on Twitter, track Twitter to be the positive guy because I
• 43:51
  want to like expel the negatives side of life, right?
• 43:55
  So there's so much negativity on Twitter.
• 43:58
  My choice is I can either add to that, which I don't want to do
• 44:00
  that I can just leave like I can, I can cut that out that
• 44:03
  that's that's a viable option. I can just not be there for all
• 44:06
  the negativity or I can be a part of the solution.
• 44:10
  This is my thought process of, of battling back the negativity
• 44:14
  by being over indexed on the positivity.
• 44:17
  But I know for the first couple of, I don't know, months or
• 44:20
  years maybe he's still, to this day, I'm still meeting new
• 44:21
  people on Twitter that people think like, what's his angle?
• 44:26
  Especially since I work for, you know, Gil Athletics and I'm in
• 44:28
  right? Like, oh, he's doing that for,
• 44:32
  you know, to try to get to sell me something or whatever, blah,
• 44:34
  blah. Blah.
• 44:35
  And so I have to like continue to prove like, oh, certainly I
• 44:38
  do want you to buy stuff from us.
• 44:40
  You know, I have a job. I have, you know, hundreds of
• 44:42
  other teammates here that I'd like to keep them employed as
• 44:44
  well. So he certainly I do want that.
• 44:47
  However, my, my passion for coaching is like, like there you
• 44:53
  don't become, you don't get on my naughty list because you
• 44:56
  don't buy from me. Like I don't say, oh, you know
• 44:58
  what, Sean? Yeah, good luck, I guess.
• 45:02
  But you don't really buy from me, so I don't really care.
• 45:04
  It's like, oh man, there are plenty of coaches who don't
• 45:06
  choose products for me that I still love.
• 45:09
  Like that to me, you're coach first, you're customer second.
• 45:13
  But my bosses are OK with that. They've heard me say that
• 45:15
  enough. So it's all good, but I have to
• 45:18
  continually prove like, oh, like the sales pitch is never coming,
• 45:22
  guys. You know, the next positive
• 45:24
  thing is coming, not the next sales pitch.
• 45:26
  Anyway. So you're at Morton Ranch.
• 45:30
  How long at Morton Ranch and where and why do you go to
• 45:33
  another place? So I was at Morton Ranch for
• 45:36
  nine years. So I was there for a long time,
• 45:40
  loved my time. They're fantastic kids,
• 45:45
  everything. And then from Morton I got an
• 45:48
  opportunity to move over to Stratford.
• 45:51
  And when? You left Morton.
• 45:55
  Did you consider yourself a, a track coach now?
• 45:59
  Like like I always ask, this is like with athletes that go on to
• 46:02
  become graduate assistants, that go on to become assistants, It's
• 46:04
  like, you know, when you're even going through grad assistant
• 46:07
  work, you still have an out. Like you can get your grad work
• 46:09
  done and you can be coaching. But when you get your master's
• 46:12
  degree, you can still go to business, you can still go
• 46:15
  marketing, whatever that you don't have to go into track
• 46:18
  coaching at that point. And so like one of my favorite
• 46:21
  questions like, oh, is this now when you decided, Yep, I'm, you
• 46:24
  know, there's a fork in the road and I am going this route, which
• 46:27
  is a track coaching. Are you now when you after nine
• 46:30
  years, so eight seasons, I think because you did tennis.
• 46:33
  Yeah, like that. Yeah, so let's call it eight
• 46:35
  seasons. 7 1/2 I guess you'd call it.
• 46:37
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you like, Oh yeah.
• 46:40
  Like is that part of your identity now?
• 46:41
  Like, Oh yeah, I'm yeah, I'm track coach Siemers now at this.
• 46:44
  Point yes, yeah, yeah. I had invested so much time and
• 46:48
  had I figured it out where I'd had athletes make it to state
• 46:54
  and cross country, I had. I had a kid one year in 2015.
• 47:00
  He won the region, the 16 and 32, and went to state.
• 47:05
  I started coaching the 400 because the 400 to me is a I
• 47:09
  know it's a Sprint event, but I feel it more as a hybrid.
• 47:12
  I kind of feel like that's where we need some speed come
• 47:14
  together, not. Going to get into that argument.
• 47:17
  Yeah. All right, we'll just.
• 47:18
  That's how he feels. We're going to move.
• 47:20
  On yeah, you can't just go out and run a 400 to be good.
• 47:24
  You got to, I got to have some endurance, but I had I'd had a
• 47:27
  kid that I coached that made it to stay 400 and so I was.
• 47:31
  No, no, I, I was gaining. Traction, I guess you would say.
• 47:35
  No, I over at the tennis courts, like man, maybe I should go back
• 47:37
  to coach. No, no, I I don't even know
• 47:40
  where my tennis racket was at at this.
• 47:43
  Point and Morton didn't create a hockey team.
• 47:45
  But what? What?
• 47:46
  No, there's no hockey team, unfortunately.
• 47:48
  What if Morton had? What if they had started a
• 47:50
  hockey team? Would you have like jumped ship
• 47:53
  in a heartbeat to go back to no? Is that right now I'm 100% in?
• 47:56
  No, No, not, not now. No, back then.
• 47:59
  I'm not talking about now because I figured now though
• 48:01
  would be the answer. One time on your first four 5-6
• 48:03
  years coaching, they're like, hey Sean, we know about your
• 48:06
  hockey background. We're actually starting hockey.
• 48:08
  We want you to be on staff, but that means you can't coach
• 48:11
  track. Yeah, no, I'd say after about
• 48:13
  two to three years of tracking cross country, I was totally
• 48:17
  indoctrinated and that is where I want our.
• 48:20
  Sport, I love that we took you away from your passion.
• 48:23
  You grew up a hockey player, let's be real here, and we
• 48:26
  converted you to the light side of track and field.
• 48:28
  I love that it's a great. I always tell people hockey is
• 48:31
  my team sport passion, but coaching runners and and field
• 48:38
  athletes that's just love it. That one to one, yeah.
• 48:42
  It's just there's nothing like it.
• 48:44
  That's cool. There's nothing like it.
• 48:46
  So yeah, that's cool. It didn't take.
• 48:48
  It didn't take long for me to to convert.
• 48:51
  So then you go to Stratford. I'm not familiar with Stratford.
• 48:54
  Is that in? Katy.
• 48:54
  So Stratford, it's in Houston, it's in Spring Branch School
• 48:59
  District, and I went there. My good friend Tony Berlin had
• 49:03
  been at Stratford for. Oh, boy, a lot of years.
• 49:07
  He had won a state title there when they were five, AI want to
• 49:10
  say in 2012, thirteen, sometime in the early part of the decade.
• 49:15
  And he was transitioning over to do.
• 49:18
  Yeah, He felt like he had kind of done everything he could do
• 49:20
  at Stratford and he wanted to move or but he wanted to see the
• 49:23
  program continue on. And he was one of those people I
• 49:27
  became friends with by going up to him and telling him
• 49:30
  congratulations because he beat me a lot when I started off.
• 49:36
  And, and I think he saw that I was authentic and I really
• 49:40
  wasn't vying for an angle. I just was like, that's great,
• 49:44
  you earned it. Like, congratulations.
• 49:47
  And so he contacted me and he'd recommended me as the head
• 49:52
  coach. And for me, it was a boy.
• 49:57
  It was hard to leave Morton Ranch.
• 49:59
  It came. It was a, when I had the offer,
• 50:05
  my wife and I went to Florida. We were going to Disney World
• 50:08
  for a few days. And I remember that whole trip I
• 50:10
  was just, yeah, I'd go on one ride.
• 50:13
  I'm like, I'm staying. I'd come off the ride.
• 50:15
  I'm like, I'm going I'm, you know, and, and, and really when
• 50:22
  it came down to was, it was a different opportunity.
• 50:25
  It's a different, it's a school that had running tradition, like
• 50:30
  distance running tradition already.
• 50:34
  Not a whole lot on the track side.
• 50:35
  But you know, cross country, they were a staple at the time.
• 50:40
  I think his last year there, his girls had won the region at
• 50:44
  Region 36A, you know, and that that whole group was graduating.
• 50:49
  So it was kind of a rebuild, but it was a rebuild of something
• 50:51
  that was already good, if that makes sense.
• 50:56
  And I just really when it comes down to these things, I always
• 51:02
  do a thing where I do a mental exercise and say, hey, 25 years
• 51:05
  from now, am I going to regret not taking this opportunity and
• 51:10
  and learning something? And I was like, yeah, I think
• 51:11
  so. And so that really was why I
• 51:13
  left. Like I I just think for my
• 51:16
  growth, this is this is a good opportunity.
• 51:19
  Doesn't sound. Like, that could be very easy.
• 51:21
  I mean, you know, Morton Ranch is where track coach Siemers was
• 51:26
  born. Right, yeah.
• 51:29
  And my and I have really, I get very close with my athletes.
• 51:32
  It's AI kind of we build a family, not a team.
• 51:37
  And so there was a lot of that type of thing.
• 51:43
  And one of one of my coaches that I was friends with, I was
• 51:46
  talking with, he said, I think he said Gary Dirks told him this
• 51:50
  of all people who we talked about earlier was saying never
• 51:55
  leave a program because of a kid and never stay at a program
• 51:59
  because of a kid, because you're going to have all new kids in
• 52:02
  four years. And and I was like, OK, so if we
• 52:06
  got rid of all the. If I took all that.
• 52:08
  That out, yeah, this is a great opportunity for me.
• 52:11
  I'm going to learn. I'm going to become better by
• 52:13
  doing this. Our number one most listened to
• 52:17
  podcast is from Boo Scheck. Snyder is that name, Yeah.
• 52:21
  Yeah. Boo was a mentor of mine when I
• 52:23
  coached. And one of the things that he
• 52:25
  said that was really kind of like, like a gut punch, like,
• 52:30
  oh, Boo, you're not supposed to say that out loud.
• 52:33
  And he was talking, talking a little bit about egos and things
• 52:35
  like that, about leaving. And he he echoed similar
• 52:39
  statements about you don't leave or stay for a kid.
• 52:42
  But his his way of saying it was, you know, if you truly are
• 52:45
  about the kids, like that's your your mission.
• 52:47
  Well, how do you know that when you leave a coach that's better
• 52:51
  for them? He did not say a better coach, a
• 52:55
  coach that is better for them comes in their place.
• 52:58
  Like, maybe you're holding back a better coach for them because
• 53:00
  you won't leave. And it was like, oh, wait a
• 53:02
  minute, Boo. The ego.
• 53:04
  Yeah. The ego tells us that we're the
• 53:06
  best coach for our. Kids, what do you mean?
• 53:09
  There's someone else out that could be better, you know, as it
• 53:11
  was just interesting statement that I believe is makes a lot of
• 53:15
  sense. And then I love your you know, I
• 53:17
  think what I took from that story that I wish more people in
• 53:21
  general, but certainly track coaches would think this way is
• 53:26
  long term versus short term. Your statement of I did this
• 53:31
  exercise of like 25 years from now, well, I regret leaving or
• 53:35
  not leaving this position here. That's a long term like you
• 53:39
  start you, you kind of put yourself out.
• 53:40
  You start looking at, well, what is 25 years from now, Sean
• 53:43
  doing, thinking, acting, feeling based on this, you know, again
• 53:47
  that that split in the road stay go.
• 53:51
  And I wish more coaches. I think a lot of us and it's
• 53:53
  easy when we're younger. I mean, you remember your
• 53:55
  younger self. I remember my younger self.
• 53:57
  It's easy as a 25 year old to be caught up in, well, what's how's
• 54:00
  this going to help today and or literally tomorrow, the very
• 54:03
  next day, tomorrow, whether it's paycheck, whether it's feelings
• 54:06
  of relationships or really athletes, you know, I've got
• 54:09
  stud athletes here, etcetera, etcetera.
• 54:11
  I remember when I was coaching junior College in 2001 season,
• 54:16
  we didn't have a lot of kids. So all I did all year was
• 54:19
  recruit and I ended up signing what I thought was, you know,
• 54:23
  maybe the number one recruiting class in the in the nation
• 54:26
  regardless, Division One division, it didn't matter.
• 54:28
  JUCO. And I was talking to a coach at
• 54:33
  Oregon. I had applied for a job there
• 54:35
  and and didn't get it, but I had another job offer and I asked
• 54:38
  that coach, hey, what would you do?
• 54:41
  I've got, you know, he knew what I had idea, but I'd listed off
• 54:44
  that, you know, 20 just stuck, you know #1 or #2 in the nation
• 54:48
  out of high school. And I was like, what would you
• 54:50
  do? And he was like, hey, Mike.
• 54:52
  Because if you want to coach Division One, maybe you need to
• 54:55
  get back under that that rule book.
• 54:57
  There'll be other kids. If you if you're you're good
• 54:59
  enough and worthy enough and recruiting good enough, there'll
• 55:02
  be other kids like that as well. And it made me think about long
• 55:07
  term like, oh, what is my, is my long term goal to stay here at
• 55:10
  this junior college or is my long term to be in the SEC?
• 55:12
  That was my long term goal. And I remember I literally I
• 55:17
  didn't even hang up the phone. I you know, I pressed the
• 55:19
  receiver, came back up and called the coach at Ball State,
• 55:22
  Sue Parks and said, Hey, I'll, I'm take, I'll take the job.
• 55:26
  I'll I'll be there Labor Day or whatnot.
• 55:28
  So, but I but I think that long now, I'm not saying that, that I
• 55:32
  didn't make a lot of short term decisions, but I love that that
• 55:36
  part of your story. I think that's a good lesson for
• 55:38
  people is you know, what you what you do, what you do today
• 55:42
  effects tomorrow. Don't let that be in a negative
• 55:45
  as much as you can, you know, think about that long term,
• 55:47
  those long term goals you have not just professional goals,
• 55:50
  right? Not just, you know, for mine it
• 55:51
  was coaching the SEC, but the family goals and financial
• 55:56
  goals. That's the one that kills me the
• 55:57
  most. You know, all of our coaches,
• 55:59
  even down to high schools for sure need to be paid more.
• 56:02
  So how do you do that? Well, you've got to sometimes
• 56:04
  you got to you got to move. You know, I don't I don't fault
• 56:07
  coaches that move to a lot of different institutions as long
• 56:09
  as they're getting paid more each way.
• 56:12
  OK, Stratford. So how long at Stratford?
• 56:16
  So I was at Stratford for three years.
• 56:18
  OK, we had a great run. Cross country was very
• 56:23
  successful. The girls team went to state
• 56:27
  twice. We had individuals go to state.
• 56:30
  We had. How did you I'm curious, you
• 56:32
  mentioned Stratford had a success in cross country, right?
• 56:37
  You come in, I'm always interested in this when the
• 56:43
  descriptor high-powered, when a high-powered an established
• 56:45
  coach comes in of an already established program, something
• 56:49
  tells me the way you could not only the way you coach, but you
• 56:52
  know how you prescribe workouts is different than what they were
• 56:54
  used. To right 100%.
• 56:57
  And they were used to success off of that.
• 56:58
  How did you handle that transition that I feel like that
• 57:01
  could be tricky. Yeah.
• 57:03
  So when I came in, so the girls when I came in the the previous
• 57:08
  years leading up, the girls team had been phenomenal.
• 57:11
  I mean, they were just a superpower.
• 57:14
  And the boys team was, you know, they would get to the regional
• 57:17
  meet, but they kind of a middle level team at that level.
• 57:24
  And all of almost all of those girls, the great girls left.
• 57:28
  And it was so it's kind of funny when I came in, all the parents
• 57:32
  were apologizing to me going like, oh, we're so sorry.
• 57:34
  We're not going to be any good this year.
• 57:35
  We lost everybody. And I was like, I don't know
• 57:39
  what you're looking at, but we're going to state.
• 57:41
  And they're like, Oh no. And well, there were two girls
• 57:45
  that had run JB that had run JB the year before.
• 57:48
  And I saw him training and I was like, Oh no, these girls have
• 57:53
  like two more levels that they can get to.
• 57:56
  I mean, we only have 5. We're not running a deep team,
• 58:00
  but we're going to be good. We're not going to win the
• 58:02
  region, but we're going to be good enough to go top four and
• 58:06
  get to stay in. And we had two freshman girls
• 58:09
  come in who were who were pretty good runners, but more important
• 58:12
  were very team oriented and very focused and determined
• 58:17
  individuals. And so it was kind of funny.
• 58:20
  They were telling me like, oh, we're sorry.
• 58:22
  And I was like, no, we're going to keep it going, you know.
• 58:24
  So it was it was an interesting conversation and and I told to
• 58:30
  us that and the boys are going to be good too.
• 58:31
  And they parents were like, ah, the boys, you know, they're,
• 58:34
  they're really good. And I was like, no, we've got,
• 58:35
  we've got. One, this guy's so naive.
• 58:38
  Yeah, exactly. But there was a lot of pushback
• 58:41
  on on workouts and how we do things because I'm very
• 58:46
  methodical. I always tell people like my
• 58:50
  training plan is a story I can explain.
• 58:53
  If you go like October 12th, I can look at my plan and go like,
• 58:56
  OK, here's why we're doing what we're doing here.
• 58:58
  It's because we've been here before and we're going here and
• 59:02
  This is why we're doing this right now.
• 59:04
  And, and so, and they weren't used to that.
• 59:09
  It was a different approach that obviously worked because, you
• 59:13
  know, they've been winning. My approach was just was just
• 59:17
  different. And there were some parents that
• 59:19
  were pushing back and, and the way I did meets, like I didn't
• 59:25
  try, I don't try and win every meet.
• 59:28
  I don't ask my kids to go all in for me until district when it
• 59:32
  counts before then we're working at we're rehearsing kind of like
• 59:36
  in theater, right? Have dress rehearsals, You know,
• 59:38
  we got to get, we got to get act one right before we can worry
• 59:41
  about nailing act 2 type of thing.
• 59:44
  And, and we did, I remember at one point we did a training, we
• 59:48
  did a race. It was actually our home course
• 59:50
  race, which is probably my mistake doing it here, but
• 59:52
  because everybody was watching, but I called it a team run.
• 59:55
  And what I told everybody I needed to do was I realized we
• 59:58
  were only as good as our #5 runner.
• 1:00:00
  And she was a freshman and she had no idea what she and she had
• 1:00:06
  to run, I want to say. We targeted her for like a 630
• 1:00:12
  pace or something, and she just didn't know how to do that
• 1:00:14
  because she would always be, you know #5 runners usually by
• 1:00:16
  themselves. Right.
• 1:00:18
  Right. And the top runners can run with
• 1:00:20
  each other and So what I had everybody on the team do the
• 1:00:24
  top, the four runners before that everybody ran 6:30 for the
• 1:00:28
  1st 2 miles. And then I said at the two mile
• 1:00:31
  mark, like, go, go, do your thing.
• 1:00:34
  Or you could stay with her and bring her in.
• 1:00:36
  And, and I told this girl, I said, I just want you to go out
• 1:00:40
  at 6:30. I just want you to feel what
• 1:00:41
  it's like and prove to yourself that you can finish like that.
• 1:00:45
  And I remember at the 800 mark of the race, we were in so last
• 1:00:50
  place, you know, like we were the favorite to win it.
• 1:00:53
  Everybody else is sprinting up and I've got my whole, my whole
• 1:00:56
  group of 10 girls just trotting along at a 630 pace in the back.
• 1:01:00
  And I had parents coming up to me.
• 1:01:02
  This is not working. This is not working, you know,
• 1:01:05
  and, and I was like just to be patient, we have 4200 meters to
• 1:01:09
  go, you know, a long way. And and you know, by the one
• 1:01:14
  mile mark we were, you know, we caught up to the trailers at the
• 1:01:19
  two mile mark. We were in the lead and we ended
• 1:01:23
  up winning the meet. We dominated the meet.
• 1:01:26
  And yeah, I think we had girls that went like 1, 134 or
• 1:01:34
  something like that on the total thing.
• 1:01:36
  But more importantly that that freshman girl, she ran her 630
• 1:01:41
  all the way through. And actually my number one girl
• 1:01:44
  ran with her the whole way and she came off like that was so
• 1:01:47
  fun. I've never done anything like
• 1:01:48
  that for a teammate before. This was so great.
• 1:01:50
  And and after that, the parents came up to me and they're like,
• 1:01:54
  oh wow, we are sorry we didn't see that.
• 1:01:56
  And I was like, guys, it's math like it.
• 1:02:00
  If Hasting doesn't lie, if these other girls could all run
• 1:02:02
  sixteens, we would know who they were at the time, you know, So
• 1:02:07
  you know, you can't. You've got to be, you got to be
• 1:02:09
  smart. And it ended up paying off
• 1:02:12
  because that #5 girl was the one who put us through in the fourth
• 1:02:15
  place spot and put us into state.
• 1:02:17
  She passed like 20 people in the last one K at the regional meet.
• 1:02:21
  And it was because she learned how to pace from that day and
• 1:02:25
  stuff. I'm curious, you know, you
• 1:02:26
  didn't grow up professionally as a teacher.
• 1:02:30
  You know, you came to that late and therefore coaching late.
• 1:02:33
  How have you learned to deal with parental feedback?
• 1:02:41
  That's probably the nicest way I could say that criticism, right?
• 1:02:44
  You know, how have you learned to deal with that as you've, you
• 1:02:49
  know, call it second career, learned how to teach and how to
• 1:02:52
  coach so. I think with me it came.
• 1:02:57
  So The thing is, I'll listen to you, but you're not going to
• 1:03:00
  change my mind. I'm convinced that I'm doing it
• 1:03:02
  the right way. Like I'll listen to your
• 1:03:04
  concerns, but your concerns carry no weight on what I'm
• 1:03:09
  going to do because you haven't put in the preparation that I
• 1:03:12
  have. If you're someone that is like a
• 1:03:15
  fellow coach who comes up to me that I know knows my athletes,
• 1:03:20
  you know, like on our coaching staff and you're like, hey, how
• 1:03:23
  about this? I'm like, I'll listen to that,
• 1:03:27
  but live it. I'll just, I'll just, I'll just
• 1:03:29
  listen to him. I'll let him vent, get out what
• 1:03:34
  they want to say. And then I'll go, OK, well, but
• 1:03:36
  this is what we're doing and here's why.
• 1:03:37
  And I'll explain what I'm doing. And I think I learned that when
• 1:03:41
  I was in software because because I was self-taught in
• 1:03:45
  software when I came in and software was sort of when the
• 1:03:51
  client server world started happening and the Internet was
• 1:03:53
  starting to be birthed. So there's a lot of programmers
• 1:03:56
  that were stuck in the old procedural type languages and
• 1:04:02
  the new IT was very different. And I knew both of them.
• 1:04:05
  And since I was self-taught, I created my own unique analogies
• 1:04:13
  to the real world to say how things worked.
• 1:04:16
  And it just made sense to me and I knew I was right.
• 1:04:18
  And So what I would and in business to get a lot of people
• 1:04:22
  with pushing back on like we shouldn't be doing this.
• 1:04:25
  But I knew I was right. And so I would just, I just
• 1:04:27
  learned how to let people vent and, and then just ask questions
• 1:04:33
  and try and gently steer them along.
• 1:04:37
  But at the same time, I know if you if you know that you've put
• 1:04:39
  in the work and you're on the right path, you can't be
• 1:04:42
  emotional unless someone bully you off of it.
• 1:04:46
  We, we know from our own experiences as as humans first
• 1:04:50
  that sometimes we just like to, to vent.
• 1:04:52
  We, we want someone to hear us out.
• 1:04:56
  So what I'm hearing you say is, OK, let the parents and I'll say
• 1:05:01
  parents and there may be other, you know, the AD things like
• 1:05:04
  that, but let the parents have their speak like, like if
• 1:05:08
  whether they agree, disagree, I'll hear them out.
• 1:05:11
  But I have to trust in my system.
• 1:05:13
  So and because I I know the system, you don't, by the way.
• 1:05:16
  I mean, maybe it's different if you know someone's parent is
• 1:05:20
  Dothan Ritzenhai. Maybe it's like, Oh well, I'll,
• 1:05:22
  maybe I'll listen to you. I got some experience, but when?
• 1:05:25
  It's like, all right, Dad, you know, you threw the shot put in
• 1:05:28
  high school, Now your daughter's running cross country.
• 1:05:31
  I'm sorry, I'm not. I don't care that you read some
• 1:05:34
  article at Runners World. I hear you appreciate that and
• 1:05:39
  maybe you'll explain like, well, here's why we do that.
• 1:05:41
  And ultimately at the end of the day, here's why we're going to
• 1:05:45
  continue to do that. So you hear them out.
• 1:05:47
  So your advice would be hear them out, but have trust and
• 1:05:50
  faith in your preparation. Yeah, it helps.
• 1:05:54
  You know what, if you want to know if you're, if you've
• 1:05:56
  convinced yourself that what you're doing through your
• 1:05:58
  preparation is the thing to do, you can handle it.
• 1:06:02
  Well, the thing I see people that struggle with it is they
• 1:06:05
  don't know why they're doing it. They're just, they're doing it
• 1:06:07
  because they read something or they just, they're just throwing
• 1:06:11
  something at a wall. And then if you get pushed back,
• 1:06:14
  it's really hard to defend that. Yeah, I think, yeah, that last
• 1:06:17
  part is what you better have prepared though, meaning you
• 1:06:20
  better have studied. But yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree
• 1:06:22
  with that. Did you do that same?
• 1:06:24
  Did you have an instance where when you took over the new job
• 1:06:29
  and this one girl was used to the old coach?
• 1:06:32
  I'm making up stories here for for the for the sake of the
• 1:06:35
  question, she was used to doing 30 miles per week.
• 1:06:39
  And here you come, you're 100 miles per week.
• 1:06:41
  I don't know if that's true or not.
• 1:06:42
  I don't really care to be, but I'm, I'm given a dramatic, you
• 1:06:45
  know, change in. And so she comes to you and
• 1:06:47
  says, hey, coach, I'm used to this and here's why.
• 1:06:49
  And you, you know, like, OK, I'll hear you out, but here's my
• 1:06:52
  philosophy and here's why we're going to do it and we're going
• 1:06:55
  to do it the right way. We're not going to go from 30 to
• 1:06:56
  whatever, blah, blah, blah. Do you have that kind of same
• 1:06:59
  philosophy with the athletes that, you know, are new to your
• 1:07:01
  system? They don't know your system,
• 1:07:02
  which. Yeah, this example is because
• 1:07:04
  you went to new program by the way, we have to remember you get
• 1:07:07
  new athletes every year. They're called freshmen or
• 1:07:09
  they're called people who come to our sport late.
• 1:07:11
  So you're you have to kind of continually.
• 1:07:13
  Yeah, you have to always sell, yeah.
• 1:07:14
  Yeah, yeah. Sell.
• 1:07:15
  I was going to say, I don't want to say defend yourself.
• 1:07:18
  You always have to to sell to the athlete to get them to buy
• 1:07:20
  in, right. Yeah, OK.
• 1:07:21
  Right. No, I did.
• 1:07:25
  I've had that happen and and in fact, there there was an athlete
• 1:07:29
  who both the athlete and the parents both pushed back heavily
• 1:07:34
  on me and it ended up that at the end of the track season, she
• 1:07:41
  there's a girl she end up running APR And the parents
• 1:07:45
  ended up after that because of some of my biggest proponents
• 1:07:48
  for people, you know, because I did, I was explained why and I
• 1:07:53
  said, look, this is and they they a lot of it, they came to
• 1:07:58
  it false. You know, like people are
• 1:08:00
  thinking like, Oh my gosh, if my kid does bad in this race, the
• 1:08:03
  colleges are going to, you know, not recruit me.
• 1:08:06
  And I was like, look, they're in their season right now.
• 1:08:09
  They are not watching, they are not sitting there waiting for
• 1:08:12
  this. And I would explain they're
• 1:08:13
  looking for a body of work, you know, if you're.
• 1:08:16
  Yeah. And I and I would say like times
• 1:08:18
  don't matter in cross country. It's it's where are you
• 1:08:21
  finishing in position times in track?
• 1:08:23
  Yeah, we all know that you're running on a six.
• 1:08:25
  You know, a 1600 is a 1600. We don't know that you ran an
• 1:08:28
  actual 5K or not. Yeah, and you know, but that's
• 1:08:33
  why I said position is what matters.
• 1:08:34
  Yeah, that's a great example. What you just described there,
• 1:08:37
  though, of sometimes we assume why the other person is doing
• 1:08:42
  what they're doing. Meaning in this example, we're
• 1:08:45
  assuming why the parent is upset with us because of blah, blah.
• 1:08:48
  The kid is upset because they think they should be low mileage
• 1:08:50
  versus high, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:08:53
  Listening to that person peeling that onion back, peeling one
• 1:08:56
  more layer and it's like, oh, they're actually concerned about
• 1:08:59
  college. That's what this is really
• 1:09:01
  about. So now this gives me an
• 1:09:02
  opportunity to educate on that side.
• 1:09:04
  I think that's a that's a really good lesson of take a second to
• 1:09:10
  breathe, listen to the other person go, go a layer deeper to
• 1:09:14
  find out what is the root cause of their actions, their
• 1:09:17
  upsetness or whatever at that time.
• 1:09:20
  Yeah, it's real simple. All you have to do is ask them
• 1:09:23
  and say like, hey, why? Why do you think that she needs
• 1:09:26
  to run 30 miles a week? Why do you think that she had to
• 1:09:29
  win this race? And they'll give you clues.
• 1:09:31
  They'll let you know exactly. And then you're like, OK, the
• 1:09:34
  problem isn't my training. And the problem is you're you're
• 1:09:37
  stressed out about, you know, about college and you want you
• 1:09:42
  want to run in college. And then you're like, OK, this
• 1:09:44
  is the re education thing. Let me show you how this works.
• 1:09:47
  And by the way, I have a lot of people that follow me in it and
• 1:09:50
  I'll say, OK, that's why I tweet things out.
• 1:09:52
  And then she knows I started Twitter initially was, you know,
• 1:09:55
  I'm going to hype your kid up. Like people are going to know
• 1:09:58
  who your kid is. Makes sense.
• 1:09:59
  Makes sense. All right, So three years at
• 1:10:01
  Stratford. Do we go to Mate Creek after
• 1:10:04
  that? I did I went to Mate Creek from
• 1:10:06
  Stratford and what you did and sorry, go ahead.
• 1:10:10
  So this is my third year, I'm in my third year at Mate Creek
• 1:10:12
  right now. So this would have been whatever
• 1:10:15
  three years ago would have been was when I came over and.
• 1:10:18
  When we when we were interviewing college coaches and
• 1:10:21
  I and I have this experience as a former college coach, when we
• 1:10:24
  talk about going from this program to that program, it
• 1:10:27
  seems like a pretty duh question in regards to like, oh, so why
• 1:10:30
  did you leave here? Like it's easy.
• 1:10:31
  Like it's another job. Like you go from maybe you know,
• 1:10:33
  for me, I went from Ball State to Mississippi State.
• 1:10:35
  Like, oh, I, I interviewed like because I didn't have family
• 1:10:39
  concerns about location. That didn't matter.
• 1:10:40
  You know, it was, it was a job for teachers.
• 1:10:43
  It's a little bit or for high school coaches a little bit
• 1:10:45
  different because you teach, that's the actual job that
• 1:10:48
  you're interviewing for the coaching secondary.
• 1:10:51
  But if I, if I remember right, so we had June Villers on the
• 1:10:55
  podcast as well from now at Waxahachie High School in Texas.
• 1:10:59
  And I asked her that same question, 'cause I was like,
• 1:11:01
  well, how do you? And I think, if I remember
• 1:11:03
  correctly, I think she also was a math teacher.
• 1:11:06
  And her response was like, oh, Mike, I'm a math teacher.
• 1:11:08
  There's like, everybody's always looking for me for math.
• 1:11:12
  That's the easy. Part.
• 1:11:13
  So as you're moving, are you do you follow that kind of same
• 1:11:16
  thing June would have said like when when you're looking at May
• 1:11:18
  Creek, it's like, Oh yeah, you need math to like that.
• 1:11:21
  That's quote UN quote the easy part of the equation like.
• 1:11:25
  It's. Easier because you're a math.
• 1:11:27
  Teacher. Yeah, OK.
• 1:11:28
  Yeah. Being a math teacher, having an
• 1:11:32
  opening is not a problem. Yeah.
• 1:11:35
  Less competition. Yeah.
• 1:11:38
  I mean, they're, they're always wanting.
• 1:11:39
  Yeah. Math teachers.
• 1:11:40
  And it helps to the principal, Gina Cobb, who was the principal
• 1:11:45
  at Maid Creek at that time. I worked with her at Morgan
• 1:11:47
  Ranch. She had been an AP so I had
• 1:11:50
  known her. For that, that, that always
• 1:11:52
  helps no matter 12 years profession year in.
• 1:11:54
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right.
• 1:11:55
  OK, let's talk about Maid Creek now.
• 1:11:57
  So you you mentioned one of my favorite words, Twitter.
• 1:12:03
  When and why did you start on Twitter?
• 1:12:07
  OK, so I originally started on Twitter probably, I guess it's
• 1:12:12
  probably 2017 or so. And really all that I did with
• 1:12:17
  it was to hype my kids up. I've been to a conference or
• 1:12:22
  heard a podcast, heard somewhere that that college coach like it
• 1:12:28
  was transitioning to college coaches were spending time on
• 1:12:30
  Twitter and in it. And one of them said that if you
• 1:12:35
  can tag your kids who are doing really well, it it's all like a
• 1:12:39
  resume for that kid and it makes it much easier to recruit.
• 1:12:43
  And that's sort of where recruiting is going in that way.
• 1:12:46
  And they can just drop Adm to the kid and, you know, not do
• 1:12:49
  that, not do the old school way like when you and I were kids
• 1:12:52
  where they had to actually like pick up the phone and call, you
• 1:12:54
  know, get your contact info. And so that's why I started
• 1:12:58
  doing it wasn't just. That initially started to help
• 1:13:02
  the kids that you have go to college for, for whatever they
• 1:13:07
  want to do. Yeah.
• 1:13:07
  And I did that for years. I mean my, my Twitter account,
• 1:13:10
  if you look at my timeline, would be super busy in the fall,
• 1:13:13
  super busy in the spring and be dormant.
• 1:13:17
  So. So there was a lot of meat.
• 1:13:20
  Good. Yeah, it was just hyping up the
• 1:13:21
  kids. Yeah, so there was there wasn't
• 1:13:23
  like today we ran a 10 mile you, you it was all about hey, Z
• 1:13:27
  brand XY and Z that's APR and Johnny did the IT was it was
• 1:13:31
  that. Yeah, there might be like
• 1:13:33
  something, something funny that happened, you know, I mean,
• 1:13:36
  yeah, there was no, there was no plan or, you know, outside of
• 1:13:40
  just just hyping up the kids. That's all that I was using it
• 1:13:42
  for. And I did that for, boy, I bet I
• 1:13:45
  did that for six years, seven years.
• 1:13:48
  I mean a long time. How successful was that?
• 1:13:51
  It was pretty good. I mean, it depended on, you
• 1:13:55
  know, you get the waves where you'd have the school following.
• 1:13:58
  When I was at Stratford, there was a little bit more of a
• 1:14:01
  larger following because social media had grown by that time and
• 1:14:05
  parents were more involved in following than they had been at
• 1:14:09
  Morton Ranch. So I got to like 600 people, 700
• 1:14:13
  people. But it was, it was sort of like
• 1:14:15
  as soon as the seniors graduated, like fifty of those
• 1:14:17
  people would peel off and they, they were, and I get 50 new ones
• 1:14:21
  coming in that were freshmen. And don't dismiss 600 followers,
• 1:14:25
  by the way, if you said, hey, I'm going to be at such and such
• 1:14:30
  school to talk about training for the two mile and half of
• 1:14:35
  that showed up, 300, yeah, you'd be like, holy.
• 1:14:38
  Yeah, right. Extremely nervous, right?
• 1:14:40
  It's interesting how we get how social media, you know, we
• 1:14:44
  always talk about follower counts and all this kind of
• 1:14:46
  stuff and we kind of like I've only got 600 or I've only got
• 1:14:48
  100 and it's like 100 people are interested in what you say.
• 1:14:54
  That is a big if you showed up anywhere there's not 100 kids in
• 1:14:57
  your classroom that made career. I'm assuming that's a big
• 1:15:01
  number. So 600 don't Pooh Pooh that
• 1:15:03
  that's a that's a tremendous, tremendous amount.
• 1:15:05
  I have a lot of respect for that.
• 1:15:07
  Did it work in regards to, you know, your initial reasoning for
• 1:15:11
  being on was to, you know, hype up the kids for college coaches
• 1:15:14
  and things like that? Did college coaches reach out to
• 1:15:17
  you? Did you?
• 1:15:18
  Have those yeah, they were it it absolutely were I had I had kids
• 1:15:22
  that we're doing they they there's nothing better than a
• 1:15:26
  kid that comes running up to you at practice with their phone
• 1:15:29
  out. Coach, I got Adm from university
• 1:15:33
  of, you know, fill in the blank who said that they've been
• 1:15:37
  following me on following me on Twitter and they and they want
• 1:15:40
  me to fill out, you know, the questionnaire or, or what have
• 1:15:43
  you. And I'm like, that's awesome.
• 1:15:45
  I love, you know, that's cool. That's why I would do it.
• 1:15:48
  Yeah. That's cool.
• 1:15:49
  I I love that you, you know, your initial reasoning for being
• 1:15:51
  on and that it actually was successful.
• 1:15:53
  I'd be, you know, it's, you know, we set these goals and
• 1:15:55
  plans. It would have been, you know, a
• 1:15:57
  little fall flat if you'd be like, yeah, that's what I did it
• 1:15:59
  for. And you know, yeah.
• 1:16:00
  Well, did anybody reach out? Not at all.
• 1:16:02
  I was like, oh crap. Yeah, I love that too.
• 1:16:05
  Is, you know, the thing that's great about the coaching
• 1:16:07
  community is I think we're all united and wanting to help
• 1:16:10
  everybody's kids. And so I would have coaches that
• 1:16:13
  were from another school saying, hey, this coach was asking
• 1:16:18
  about, you know, 1600, you know, kids that can run the 16.
• 1:16:22
  I recommended your boy. I gave him his Twitter thing and
• 1:16:25
  I gave him a year so that you could see.
• 1:16:26
  And so there's that that synergy that goes on the coaching
• 1:16:31
  community. That's amazing.
• 1:16:32
  Yeah, I. Agree with that we differ in
• 1:16:36
  especially in today's age of recruiting, college track of
• 1:16:42
  level for the kid and also at the same time the desire of the
• 1:16:47
  program to develop or not develop.
• 1:16:50
  I'm 100% against the word not developing because there's not a
• 1:16:53
  single program from the highest highest who just won.
• 1:16:56
  BYU just won men's and women's cross country.
• 1:17:00
  They develop kids just like Maid Creek develops.
• 1:17:04
  It's just a different level where they start from.
• 1:17:06
  So I can't stand that. So anyway, OK, so that's why you
• 1:17:11
  started Twitter. Now you came onto my radar
• 1:17:15
  because you are one today's world here in 2024-2025.
• 1:17:21
  You're prolific, but there doesn't seem to be a downtime.
• 1:17:24
  Now, Sean, you might rival me for the number of tweets in a in
• 1:17:28
  a week, and that's saying something.
• 1:17:30
  But your tone of your tweets is unique to me as well.
• 1:17:36
  You like, I love people like, you know, every time I start to
• 1:17:41
  say someone's name, it just blanks.
• 1:17:43
  I'm not that age, Sean. Where they they just?
• 1:17:45
  Like oh I'm the same. Way yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:47
  Oh my God. Steve Magnus.
• 1:17:49
  Steve Magnus, you know, does. I love his tweets.
• 1:17:52
  They're, you know, almost always uplifting.
• 1:17:55
  If they're negative, it's because he's negative against
• 1:17:57
  something that's negative. So yeah.
• 1:17:59
  Wait, you're math guy. Negative.
• 1:18:00
  And negative is a positive. Right, he's found.
• 1:18:02
  He's found the collective enemy and he's going against.
• 1:18:04
  Him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:07
  You know, so I love like Steve's and there's other people, you
• 1:18:09
  know, there's a couple of great, you know, Adam Kege out in New
• 1:18:12
  Mexico and those guys that, you know, it's not just positive
• 1:18:15
  about their program, which I love that love when people shout
• 1:18:20
  out the other programs and their kids and their Staffs.
• 1:18:23
  That's awesome. It's another step for me when
• 1:18:26
  someone starts shouting out other people or shouting out
• 1:18:30
  stuff that would help other people.
• 1:18:32
  When, where and why did that shift happen for you that you
• 1:18:38
  you started? Here's maybe the better way of
• 1:18:40
  putting it, Sean, when you started, you started tweeting
• 1:18:44
  for a selfish reason. Hold, don't don't get mad at me,
• 1:18:47
  but it was to help your kids that that's selfish.
• 1:18:50
  Selfish is not necessarily bad, by the way, somewhere you turn
• 1:18:54
  to where like, oh, my tweets maybe could have impact on other
• 1:18:57
  people, meaning selfless, right? Where, why, How did that
• 1:19:02
  transform for you? So it happened in June and I
• 1:19:06
  remembered it clearly. And June of this year, June of
• 1:19:11
  this year is when I started. Yeah.
• 1:19:13
  So it's been approximately 6 months, you know, 5 1/2 months
• 1:19:16
  that I've been doing this. And it tied in with a huge
• 1:19:20
  change that happened in my life with a phone call that I got
• 1:19:23
  after I'd gone to my dermatologist where got a phone
• 1:19:26
  call and it said, hey, the test results came back and you have
• 1:19:28
  cancer. And that is, boy, that is a
• 1:19:35
  punch inside of your head. I mean it, I mean, in a, in a
• 1:19:42
  moment like that, all of your values just explode and you see
• 1:19:48
  what's leftover. It really is.
• 1:19:51
  It's one of those those things where your life changes in the
• 1:19:56
  blink of an eye. And after I'd kind of recovered
• 1:20:01
  from that, it took about 24 hours to kind of stagger and,
• 1:20:04
  you know. You know, spend time with my
• 1:20:07
  wife where we were like, what do we do now?
• 1:20:10
  And one of the things I told my wife when I got diagnosed was I
• 1:20:16
  said one, I'm never going to complain about this.
• 1:20:19
  I'm just I'm not going to let it own me in any way.
• 1:20:23
  I'm not going to let it change who I am or what I do.
• 1:20:29
  But I did say, you know, like I could die from this.
• 1:20:32
  I mean, that's straight up what's going to happen.
• 1:20:35
  And immediately you think of legacy, what do I, what do I
• 1:20:41
  really stand for? And at that point, like you
• 1:20:46
  said, a lot of it was very selfish.
• 1:20:49
  Yeah, I dumped a lot into my kids, but they were my kids,
• 1:20:53
  right? You know, I wanted to, I wanted
• 1:20:55
  to win. And, and I, and I genuinely was
• 1:20:57
  excited whenever friends of mine, you know, won something,
• 1:21:02
  but they were my friends. You know, there's a lot of mine
• 1:21:04
  on there. And I realized that, you know,
• 1:21:09
  one day it just kind of hit me when I was out for a run.
• 1:21:11
  And I said, you know, if I'm not here a year from now, did I
• 1:21:15
  leave track and cross country in a better place than it was when
• 1:21:18
  I found it? And, and I remember I was
• 1:21:22
  running and I stopped when I was running and I just got very
• 1:21:26
  emotional. Like I'm kind of getting
• 1:21:28
  emotional thinking of it right now.
• 1:21:31
  And I was like, no, I have it like everything I've learned,
• 1:21:34
  I've hoarded. Yeah, to make me better.
• 1:21:38
  And yeah, you know, after some thought, I was like, you know,
• 1:21:43
  who I really want to help is who I was 15 years ago when I
• 1:21:48
  started off, when I was that guy that just I really, I had, I had
• 1:21:53
  great intentions. I wanted what was best for my
• 1:21:55
  kids. I didn't know what to do.
• 1:21:58
  I didn't know where to turn. I didn't have anybody telling me
• 1:22:01
  like, hey, what's your feeling right now?
• 1:22:03
  Totally normal. You're not, you're not a freak.
• 1:22:06
  You're feeling like a complete and total failure.
• 1:22:10
  And I know like, it's going to take time and there are
• 1:22:14
  resources out there. If you go up to like, I can
• 1:22:16
  remember at one point on a tweet, I think you may have even
• 1:22:20
  asked the question saying like, what would you recommend to a
• 1:22:23
  new coach you want? And I and I said, I'm like, find
• 1:22:27
  a coach that you respect and go up and go like, Hey, I love what
• 1:22:30
  you're doing. Do you mind if I, you know, like
• 1:22:33
  if you like mentor me or if you ask me some questions?
• 1:22:35
  I said, I don't know any coach in the world that would say no
• 1:22:39
  to that. If you approach him in the right
• 1:22:41
  way, you know, you might get too much information.
• 1:22:47
  And, and so that was really, that was what changed it for me.
• 1:22:53
  And so I started really my idea was I just want to put things
• 1:22:58
  out there that I wish I knew back in the day.
• 1:23:03
  And yeah, there's so many things like training, building a team,
• 1:23:08
  you know, and as and as you and as you know, as you post, you
• 1:23:13
  become, you become more focused on what you're trying to say.
• 1:23:17
  Yeah, it sort of starts off and it's just you're just vomiting
• 1:23:20
  things out there and then you're like, what am I really doing?
• 1:23:23
  And because I've gone through, I've gone through that process
• 1:23:25
  and I've, you know, narrowed the funnel down on what I'm really
• 1:23:31
  trying to say and contribute. So really that's my goal when
• 1:23:35
  I'm putting it out there. I just want to those coaches who
• 1:23:39
  are out there struggling, you know, you don't have to be new.
• 1:23:42
  You could been someone that's coaching for 20 years and you're
• 1:23:45
  just like, why can't I breakthrough to like I really
• 1:23:49
  want I've been to the state meet.
• 1:23:50
  Why can't I get back? Or I've never been or just
• 1:23:53
  whatever your goal is, you want to.
• 1:23:57
  I just want to throw out what I've I've learned and I try and
• 1:24:00
  share that, you know, my way is not the way.
• 1:24:04
  It is a way. I've I've found a path that will
• 1:24:07
  take me to where I want to go. But there's other coaches you
• 1:24:12
  can talk to too, who've also found pathways.
• 1:24:15
  You know, there's not just one way to get there.
• 1:24:17
  And I want to kind of take down that.
• 1:24:20
  I call it the Let's Run message board rhetoric where anybody
• 1:24:24
  goes out there and says anything like, I like to do this, they're
• 1:24:27
  going to have four people come on, you're an idiot.
• 1:24:29
  You're stupid for doing it. I hate that about our
• 1:24:32
  profession. And I want to, you know, be a
• 1:24:36
  voice against that. OK, a little bit unpacked there.
• 1:24:39
  1 You said, you know, some people's favorite words.
• 1:24:42
  Let's run. Funny that you would say that
• 1:24:44
  for a guy who, when you said you first got into coaching, one of
• 1:24:47
  the first things you said you went to learn from was from
• 1:24:49
  letsrun.com. Yeah, I just thought that was
• 1:24:51
  funny. Kind of full circle there.
• 1:24:53
  Yeah. That.
• 1:24:54
  Now I will say there's very few things in life that I have found
• 1:24:58
  to be 100%. One of those is 100% of the
• 1:25:03
  coaches I ever asked when I was a coach for help, insight,
• 1:25:07
  advice, etcetera, have been extremely positive to answer
• 1:25:10
  back. I, I literally, I can't even
• 1:25:12
  say, you know, there's been a couple of coaches, but the
• 1:25:15
  majority have helped. I cannot think of a single one
• 1:25:18
  that I ever, ever asked that did not volunteer to help me with
• 1:25:22
  my, my question or my, my problem at the time.
• 1:25:26
  I think there are, there's probably more than two, but two
• 1:25:29
  ways of being selfless for our for our profession. 1 is being
• 1:25:34
  very open. Hey, if anybody ever asked me,
• 1:25:36
  tweets me, calls me, emails me, sees me at a clinic and asked me
• 1:25:40
  a question, I'm an open book. Of course I'll answer.
• 1:25:42
  That's one way that's extremely valuable That that, that, that's
• 1:25:45
  awesome. And then there is being active
• 1:25:49
  on it and saying, hey, I'm going to no one's asked.
• 1:25:52
  I get that, but I know people have these questions.
• 1:25:55
  I'm going to help them by tweeting, volunteering to speak
• 1:25:59
  at clinics, it's etcetera. Both of them are extremely
• 1:26:03
  there's not a right or wrong on this one that both of them are
• 1:26:05
  extremely valuable. I personally wish more coaches
• 1:26:08
  who were on the, you know, hey, I'm an open book.
• 1:26:10
  Come ask me would be more active because I because I tend to be
• 1:26:13
  on the active side. So I wish they would, but that's
• 1:26:15
  not their style and that's OK. As long as they're being open,
• 1:26:18
  they're they're contributing. So so I love that very much.
• 1:26:24
  What? Yeah.
• 1:26:26
  First of all, Sean, thank you for being so open and honest
• 1:26:28
  about your cancer diagnosis. You know, that's something that
• 1:26:32
  I'm very grateful that I have no experience with personally in my
• 1:26:36
  family. I'm very grateful for that.
• 1:26:39
  So I appreciate you being open with that.
• 1:26:41
  You talked about it. So I can't imagine, like when
• 1:26:44
  you talk about that phone call. Yeah, I've had what I thought
• 1:26:47
  were pretty bad phone calls. Takes the cake on that one, my
• 1:26:50
  friend. On pretty bad phone calls there.
• 1:26:55
  You know, again, you know, we talked a few times today about
• 1:26:57
  this, you know, split in the road.
• 1:27:00
  When you get a phone call like that, it would be easier, not
• 1:27:05
  just as easy. It would have been easier for
• 1:27:07
  you to curl up, insulate. Hey family, we don't know how
• 1:27:14
  long, so screw everything. Be angry at the world, at God
• 1:27:20
  and whatever or the other side would be to OK, Well then I
• 1:27:26
  don't know how much. By the way, we're all in limited
• 1:27:28
  time. By the way, some of us may get a
• 1:27:33
  little bit faster on that limited time, unfortunately, but
• 1:27:35
  you don't know how much time. So OK, your immediate thought
• 1:27:38
  was or I shouldn't say immediate, your thought process
• 1:27:41
  ended up with being OK, what's my legacy going to be?
• 1:27:43
  How can I help this sport which has helped me late in life?
• 1:27:47
  By the way, I I love that part of your story and you begin OK,
• 1:27:51
  I have an outlet called Twitter. I'm just gonna go for it.
• 1:27:55
  I love that man. I mean, I think that's just,
• 1:27:57
  again, we've talked about lessons, but I think that's a
• 1:28:00
  great lesson for people out there.
• 1:28:03
  You have value. And This is why on this podcast,
• 1:28:07
  we made a very conscious decision from the get go.
• 1:28:11
  But one, we were not going to focus on just Division One
• 1:28:14
  coaches. That's where we tend to think,
• 1:28:16
  you know, the best coaches are, by the way, amazing coaches
• 1:28:19
  there. I'm not taking away from those
• 1:28:20
  coaches, but but but what they what value they give is not
• 1:28:24
  based because they're on a Division One campus, division
• 1:28:28
  two coaches, Division 3, high school, middle school,
• 1:28:31
  professional club, everything in between.
• 1:28:33
  Your your value is the positive impact that you make on young
• 1:28:36
  people. So we made a very conscious
• 1:28:38
  decision there on that. And also we made a conscious
• 1:28:40
  decision not to just seek out coaches who've had 1050,
• 1:28:43
  whatever arbitrary number you want to put out there.
• 1:28:46
  Years of experience. Now, certainly those guys and
• 1:28:49
  gals who have 10/15/2020 five years of experience have amazing
• 1:28:52
  stories, amazing experiences, amazing lessons that we can
• 1:28:55
  learn from. But I kind of had an inkling
• 1:28:58
  that, you know, that person who is in their first year, we have
• 1:29:02
  something to learn from that. Why, why?
• 1:29:04
  You know, you're, you're at the, you're a babe at this thing.
• 1:29:07
  What are you, why did you get into this?
• 1:29:08
  What was your, and maybe somebody who's been doing this
• 1:29:10
  for 15 years goes, oh man, I heard that person in their first
• 1:29:14
  year and how much enthusiasm and love they had for the sport.
• 1:29:16
  And maybe I've lost that, you know, help things like that.
• 1:29:19
  So we wanted to make sure we were very cognizant about that.
• 1:29:23
  And so where I'm getting at with that is that you have value,
• 1:29:26
  whether it's your first day of coaching or if it's your last
• 1:29:29
  day, you're about to retire, you have value for others.
• 1:29:32
  I appreciate that you, I hate that it had to come from that
• 1:29:37
  phone call to be real, frankly. But we all have to have
• 1:29:39
  something that finally kicks us in the end, if you will, to do
• 1:29:41
  it. I'm so grateful that you
• 1:29:43
  channeled that negative news and energy into something positive
• 1:29:48
  because I've seen your tweets and they're very, like I said,
• 1:29:52
  you know, I think Steve Magnus does a great job.
• 1:29:54
  I always use as an example and there's others out there, Auntie
• 1:29:56
  throw something, she's amazing. Leah, the throws coach is
• 1:30:00
  amazing. There's something of value to
• 1:30:03
  give and your tweets have value. I'm not a track coach at all
• 1:30:07
  anymore at all. I have no interest in coaching
• 1:30:09
  anymore. I have interest in coaching
• 1:30:10
  coaches and I read them going, oh man, that's pretty cool.
• 1:30:13
  Like I like I could see someone needing that or wanting that or
• 1:30:15
  desiring that or learning from that.
• 1:30:17
  So I'm just so grateful that instead of taking energy away
• 1:30:21
  from the world, you decided, OK, well, I'm going to put as much
• 1:30:24
  energy into the world, specifically our world of track
• 1:30:26
  coaching out there. I'm just really grateful that
• 1:30:29
  that's the decision that you made.
• 1:30:31
  Yeah, that was really my, it was my conscious decision that I'm
• 1:30:38
  not going to let cancer rob me of.
• 1:30:40
  I mean, if I take my life, it's not going to rob a minute from
• 1:30:43
  me that I have left. That's.
• 1:30:44
  Right. I love.
• 1:30:44
  That basically what that what you know, the turn was that I
• 1:30:48
  said. Well, give us an update because
• 1:30:49
  the cool thing is you are here. Yes, right.
• 1:30:53
  So far, we're moving forward. I love.
• 1:30:55
  That so far is good. Would you mind give us a quick
• 1:30:58
  update? So this happened in June, right?
• 1:31:00
  You. Said June.
• 1:31:00
  June, yeah. And they, yeah.
• 1:31:03
  So they did surgery really quickly on me because when my
• 1:31:08
  dermatologist thought it was a cyst that I had grown on my hip
• 1:31:12
  and they, they sent it in and then I to be checked.
• 1:31:16
  And then that's when I got my phone call back and in the, and
• 1:31:21
  then I got recommended to MD Anderson.
• 1:31:23
  And I want to say those people, that is the most professional,
• 1:31:25
  competent organization of anybody I've ever been around.
• 1:31:29
  And those people move like you get in and boom, the ball is
• 1:31:34
  rolling. And they, they got me into
• 1:31:36
  surgery really quickly because my tumor had grown back and the,
• 1:31:40
  the form of cancer I had was very aggressive.
• 1:31:43
  And so they had that, they had to go in and dig it out
• 1:31:47
  basically. And then I recovered from
• 1:31:50
  surgery for about, you know, 5 weeks or so.
• 1:31:52
  And then I started radiation, which I just finished about 10
• 1:31:56
  days ago. I I had six weeks of radiation,
• 1:31:58
  five days a week. In my in my understanding,
• 1:32:00
  that's really tough. Yeah, it's one of those things
• 1:32:04
  that you go in and it's like getting an X-ray.
• 1:32:06
  You don't feel anything when you're getting radiation, but as
• 1:32:09
  you go through your skin, what it does to your skin is just
• 1:32:15
  crazy. It looks like it looks like
• 1:32:19
  something from a from a science fiction movie, like, you know,
• 1:32:21
  where people like they survive the atomic bomb or they're
• 1:32:24
  living and you know, they got there like their faces are
• 1:32:25
  melting off. That's literally what my skin on
• 1:32:28
  my hip looks like right now. And it had reopened the incision
• 1:32:34
  from my surgery. So right now I'm still unable to
• 1:32:37
  run because I've, I've, I've got a heel on my hip.
• 1:32:42
  But anyways, I go in, I'm not out of the woods yet.
• 1:32:45
  I did get to ring the bell, but that just meant that I was done
• 1:32:48
  with radiation, which was a, you know, a huge chapter to finish.
• 1:32:52
  I do have another procedure tomorrow.
• 1:32:55
  There's another spot that I need to check out in my stomach.
• 1:32:59
  And then I've got 2 CT scans and two doctor's appointments on the
• 1:33:02
  on the radar for right now. And I think after those, that's
• 1:33:06
  when they give me like thumbs up or comes down.
• 1:33:11
  Let's take another lap around here.
• 1:33:12
  So I'm, I'm through. It's the hardest part.
• 1:33:15
  I feel like you you. Have surgery tomorrow.
• 1:33:18
  Yes, dude, yes. I talk about how busy people are
• 1:33:22
  and, you know, so thankful you give me time.
• 1:33:24
  You easily could have said no, right?
• 1:33:26
  You know that, OK, You could have said, hey, maybe December
• 1:33:30
  or January, My, you know, you had that wrong, right?
• 1:33:33
  This is in my my thing again. I'm not going to let, I'm not
• 1:33:35
  going to let cancer like stop me from doing what I want to do so.
• 1:33:38
  I love that. I want to make sure no one out
• 1:33:40
  there thought I'd like bow, bow you into like, no, no, we got to
• 1:33:44
  get this in. Well, Sean, we're praying for
• 1:33:47
  you. I know people.
• 1:33:48
  Listening to those. Who believe in the power of
• 1:33:50
  prayer or praying for you as well.
• 1:33:51
  So really, again, boy, I mean, you talk about being grateful
• 1:33:55
  for, you know, having time and you spending it with me, man,
• 1:33:57
  that makes it, I'd say, even more special.
• 1:34:00
  But it does, man. I really do appreciate that on
• 1:34:03
  those. This may be a terrible joke,
• 1:34:05
  Sean. I am so sorry.
• 1:34:07
  And I don't edit out anything. So this is going to make it out
• 1:34:09
  there. So if you get mad at me, we're
• 1:34:11
  going to have to work through this live here on the podcast.
• 1:34:14
  I'm thankful that it wasn't thumb cancer because that means
• 1:34:16
  you can still tweet. OK, good.
• 1:34:18
  That's pretty funny. Yeah, I thought.
• 1:34:20
  I was thinking about that. I was like, boy, he that you.
• 1:34:23
  Know I like avatar sense of. Humor.
• 1:34:25
  So thank you. Good, good, good, OK, good.
• 1:34:29
  I feel I was, I was a little nervous about telling that joke,
• 1:34:31
  but but I'm, I made it. OK good.
• 1:34:34
  So another thing on your tweets that is super interesting to me
• 1:34:39
  because you know, it's it's it's interesting.
• 1:34:42
  We have a lot of parallels with education with each other, you
• 1:34:44
  and I, as far as the interest and things like that.
• 1:34:47
  You talk a lot and I don't know, again, I don't go through your
• 1:34:51
  timelines. What comes what your tweets come
• 1:34:53
  into my time. So I don't necessarily see like,
• 1:34:55
  oh, today he did this and that, you know, he did that.
• 1:34:57
  So I don't know if it's this is recent as well, but you talk a
• 1:35:02
  lot about AI utilizing AI, artificial intelligence and
• 1:35:06
  GPTS, LLMS and stuff like that for coaching.
• 1:35:12
  I'm A, and we're still, you know, I'm a big I, I use GPT
• 1:35:17
  almost daily for, for work here and for the podcast.
• 1:35:21
  Like it writes all my podcast descriptions and things like
• 1:35:24
  that. It creates all my thumbnails,
• 1:35:27
  which, you know, people laugh at my thumbnails because I'm like,
• 1:35:29
  like I will tell you it is AI generate.
• 1:35:31
  I don't make any qualms about it.
• 1:35:33
  I'm like, and I let it do its mistakes.
• 1:35:36
  I, I have fun with it anyway, But we're still pretty early
• 1:35:39
  adopters here in 2024 doing this.
• 1:35:42
  There's a lot of people who, you know, we're in the early stages
• 1:35:45
  of the, of Google search engine for, for, for those who have
• 1:35:48
  that experience. Tell me more about that.
• 1:35:52
  Why, what A, how did you get into it?
• 1:35:54
  And B, how are you using it? Because I, I, I also think other
• 1:35:58
  coaches could utilize it. And so I want to kind of like
• 1:36:01
  help, maybe use this as a help of like, you know, if you've
• 1:36:04
  thought about stepping into GPTS, maybe this might help them
• 1:36:09
  nudge into a little bit. So how did you discover it and
• 1:36:11
  how do you use it? So I discovered it because of,
• 1:36:14
  again, my software background. I still program, I still keep up
• 1:36:18
  with learning new languages. And like as new technology comes
• 1:36:22
  in, I want to know how it works because I like it, not because
• 1:36:26
  I'm trying to do anything in a career.
• 1:36:27
  But I'm really fascinated by it. And when ChatGPT first came out,
• 1:36:33
  has it been three years now? Two years.
• 1:36:35
  It's hard to somewhere in that area.
• 1:36:37
  Oh no. No, no, February of not this
• 1:36:43
  year. Because remember it came out
• 1:36:44
  like it came out like in October, November and January,
• 1:36:48
  February. And I think February was the
• 1:36:50
  month it exploded. And I'm trying.
• 1:36:52
  I don't feel like that was 2023. I feel like that was 2024.
• 1:36:57
  I could be my my time is all screwed up.
• 1:36:59
  Maybe it was 20 but. It's still I've I've been using
• 1:37:03
  it since at first like they first rolled it out.
• 1:37:05
  I I follow a bunch of newsletters on the tech industry
• 1:37:08
  and when it first came out and, and the hype that was going into
• 1:37:12
  it, I went in and I was like, what is this thing do?
• 1:37:15
  And honestly, when I first did it, I was like, well, this is
• 1:37:18
  pretty underwhelming. And I started and then I, I
• 1:37:27
  somebody, I read an article somewhere that said, you know,
• 1:37:33
  you've got to treat it like it's not as smart as you think it is.
• 1:37:36
  It's not magic. It, it's, it's like an intern
• 1:37:39
  who knows nothing. And you have to give very
• 1:37:41
  explicit instructions on what you want.
• 1:37:44
  And then they can go dig up all the research that you
• 1:37:47
  specifically tell it. You were right.
• 1:37:49
  So I had to, I had to Google it. I should have checked GPD to
• 1:37:53
  it's it came out officially the end of November.
• 1:37:56
  So we're recording this basically on its two year
• 1:37:58
  birthday, OK, at the end of November 2022.
• 1:38:01
  It exploded publicly in February.
• 1:38:05
  That's when it. Was like spring, I remember
• 1:38:07
  that. People started talking a lot
• 1:38:08
  about it. Yeah, OK, sorry.
• 1:38:09
  Go ahead. So I, I started playing with it,
• 1:38:14
  not thinking at all with tracking cross country.
• 1:38:18
  But at one point I remember like, I'm just going to, I was
• 1:38:21
  reading a book and I just, I'm just going to have a
• 1:38:23
  conversation with it about this book.
• 1:38:26
  And I hadn't just, it was like a fascinating conversation with a
• 1:38:31
  really intelligent friend, you know, while you're having coffee
• 1:38:33
  together. And it kind of opened it up for
• 1:38:36
  me. And at that time, Claude AI came
• 1:38:39
  out as well. And I started playing with
• 1:38:41
  Claude and I realized they had, it sounds weird to say, but they
• 1:38:44
  have different personalities, the way that they they
• 1:38:48
  communicate with you and what they know.
• 1:38:50
  Claude is a little more eloquent, not as rough around
• 1:38:54
  the edges, ChatGPT smarter. And and so I just, I would just
• 1:39:02
  go down to areas that interested me.
• 1:39:04
  I'd be like, hey, tell me about XY and Z had nothing to do with
• 1:39:08
  coaching, just side interests for me that I was fascinated by.
• 1:39:13
  And and Claude came out with a thing called projects where you
• 1:39:18
  could upload files and it would keep them that way.
• 1:39:22
  You don't have to keep, you know, you sometimes you have to
• 1:39:24
  upload files to it and it could read it, but then it forgets
• 1:39:27
  about it for the on the next conversation.
• 1:39:29
  And Claude created this thing called projects where you could
• 1:39:32
  upload just a ton of files on things.
• 1:39:36
  I was like, that's interesting. And some things I had written,
• 1:39:40
  you know, like going back to my grad school work and I put it in
• 1:39:43
  and I started adding conversations and like, wow,
• 1:39:45
  this is really interesting. Now it's like more informed.
• 1:39:48
  And at one point I thought, huh, what would it do if I put my
• 1:39:52
  training plan in here? And, and you always have to be
• 1:39:58
  very, it's not magic. I think the biggest mistake
• 1:40:01
  people think is that it's, it's like Terminator and it's coming
• 1:40:04
  for our jobs and it's going to make us obsolete.
• 1:40:08
  And it's 100% not going to do that.
• 1:40:11
  If you tell it like, Hey, build me a training plan.
• 1:40:14
  It's going to be the worst, most generic thing of all time.
• 1:40:19
  But. I just put in my training plan.
• 1:40:22
  I'll say, hey, tell me what you see here.
• 1:40:25
  And it gave me like a good description.
• 1:40:27
  I was like, OK. And then I said, you know, so I
• 1:40:31
  taught it like here's how I color code my tempo runs, you
• 1:40:34
  know, and here's, you know how you can read through and you
• 1:40:36
  could read the progression because again, you have to
• 1:40:39
  instruct it on everything. It doesn't know when you put the
• 1:40:42
  sheet in there. So just tell me about my
• 1:40:44
  progression, you know, does it seem good?
• 1:40:46
  I'm coaching, you know, you're coaching kids that are 12 to 18
• 1:40:52
  and and it caught it. There was on one of them that
• 1:40:57
  said that this is really good. But the progression, it seems to
• 1:41:00
  be aggressive going from here to here.
• 1:41:02
  And I was like, what do you mean?
• 1:41:04
  And we started talking and it caught it and I was like, Oh no,
• 1:41:08
  I did that on purpose is what I did right there.
• 1:41:11
  But it I was like, that's interesting that it caught that
• 1:41:16
  I was being too, I was being more aggressive than I was in,
• 1:41:19
  in the previous weeks. And so from there I just one day
• 1:41:25
  it hit me. I said like, what if this was my
• 1:41:27
  assistant coach, my super nerdy assistant coach that just could
• 1:41:31
  grind data for me. When I said, like, this is how I
• 1:41:35
  want you to do. This is what I'm looking for.
• 1:41:37
  Here's my data and I want you to just tell me any patterns that
• 1:41:41
  you see. And I started doing that and
• 1:41:45
  they would the thing that the number one story I always tell
• 1:41:49
  people is this year what it is, I found my number six girl on my
• 1:41:53
  cross country team this year because of ChatGPT.
• 1:41:57
  She was a girl who started running with us.
• 1:42:00
  She didn't start until the beginning of the school year.
• 1:42:02
  So she's kind of off my radar because in the summer, that's
• 1:42:05
  when I, you know, you're starting to formulate who's
• 1:42:07
  going to be on varsity, who's going to do whatever.
• 1:42:09
  And the kids that come in on the first day, you're just kind of
• 1:42:13
  like, well, we're just going to develop you.
• 1:42:15
  We'll see what happens during track season because you've
• 1:42:18
  missed 2 1/2 months. And this girl was really
• 1:42:21
  athletic. And in my head, I just thought
• 1:42:23
  her like, boy, she's going to do something in the 800 come track
• 1:42:26
  season. We just got to get her OK
• 1:42:28
  because she's coming over from a no distance background.
• 1:42:32
  And so my assistant would always work with the with the JV kids
• 1:42:36
  and write their times down. And I had the varsity kids in
• 1:42:38
  the upper level JV's, the ones who are in that Gray area and
• 1:42:41
  can go back and forth. And we always, I write down
• 1:42:47
  times for every Rep that the kids do.
• 1:42:50
  And I have a notebook that I keep that's still, you know,
• 1:42:52
  everything I need, I need that data to look at.
• 1:42:56
  And so one day I had, it was actually a test day at school
• 1:43:01
  and I was all caught up on my grading and everything.
• 1:43:04
  I was like, you know what I'm going to do?
• 1:43:05
  I'm just going to feed in all of this data that I have.
• 1:43:08
  And I'm just going to say, tell me what you find just.
• 1:43:12
  And, and I said like for every athlete go through tell me, you
• 1:43:17
  know, and I had color-coded like give me a green if they're on
• 1:43:20
  target, red if there's like they're overreaching.
• 1:43:25
  And if you see anybody that you think is like trending up, like
• 1:43:30
  make them stand out. And, and of course they they
• 1:43:34
  called, they called out some athletes.
• 1:43:36
  And I'm like, yeah, of course I knew that kid was doing great,
• 1:43:40
  but it called this girl out. And so like, she is really
• 1:43:43
  trending up. And it projected her 5K time.
• 1:43:46
  And I was like, wait, what? Because I'd only had to run at
• 1:43:49
  32 hundreds because she was JV. And I was like, why do you say
• 1:43:55
  this? And then it gives me, you know,
• 1:43:56
  gives you the data and says, look, this is her progression
• 1:43:59
  right here. She isn't falling off.
• 1:44:01
  She's getting stronger. She's, you know, doing her long
• 1:44:05
  runs in this time, like, and I was like, huh, I haven't asked
• 1:44:10
  her to like move up because I've, I've missed it because I
• 1:44:13
  haven't been working with her. You know, I haven't progressed
• 1:44:16
  her forward. I, she's been kind of back
• 1:44:18
  burner for me. And so the next day I was like,
• 1:44:21
  Hey, we're going to have you just kind of like run up with
• 1:44:23
  this next group on this next for the first part.
• 1:44:25
  If it's too much, we'll back you off.
• 1:44:27
  She's off to the races with them.
• 1:44:29
  And it was just a, you know, she's a very quiet person.
• 1:44:32
  So it was a confidence issue and and I was like, wow.
• 1:44:37
  And we moved her up to a race on the last and I just wanted to, I
• 1:44:42
  just wanted to go have fun. I'm not putting any pressure on
• 1:44:44
  you, just you be you. And she ran really well.
• 1:44:48
  And I was like, wow, she's she's my number six girl now.
• 1:44:51
  And I moved her in at, you know, at the regional meet and she was
• 1:44:56
  our number six girl. And I would have, I missed it,
• 1:45:02
  plain and simple. I miss, I knew she was on track
• 1:45:05
  to be something good, but I was thinking next year because I was
• 1:45:09
  so caught up on what I was seeing, I didn't know what I
• 1:45:13
  wasn't seeing. And so that's an example of of
• 1:45:19
  how it helped me to do that. Are there ways you can use it
• 1:45:23
  to, you know, especially, I don't necessarily say especially
• 1:45:26
  for distance running, but you know, I know in distance running
• 1:45:31
  because you're dealing with two miles on the track and 5K to 10K
• 1:45:34
  and cross country, depending on what level you're at, you, you
• 1:45:36
  have a lot of different ways to have variety in your training.
• 1:45:41
  You know, there's everything, I'm gonna call it everything
• 1:45:43
  from quarter mile repeats to mile repeats to ladders and all
• 1:45:47
  this stuff. And it's typically based off of
• 1:45:49
  a percentage. It's kind of like maybe I'm not
• 1:45:53
  a distance coach, so I might be talking on my butt here a little
• 1:45:55
  bit here, but there's kind of two percentages, right?
• 1:45:56
  There's the percentage of the PR and you decide if based on the
• 1:46:00
  workout, if it's the mile PR, the five KPR, 2 mile PR,
• 1:46:03
  whatever it's like, but also the percentage of effort that you
• 1:46:07
  want. You know, if you're, if you're
• 1:46:08
  going to do 10 mile repeats, 10/1 mile repeats, you know,
• 1:46:12
  that has to be at 70% effort versus if you do one mile, one,
• 1:46:16
  one mile repeat, that may be at 95 if you're a practice or
• 1:46:18
  whatever, right. So there's two percentage play
• 1:46:20
  with is there a so so you guys and maybe we get stuck as a
• 1:46:25
  distance coach because there's infinite amount of ways to make
• 1:46:28
  that variety. But because it's infinite, it's
• 1:46:30
  like, well, you know what? I know quarter repeats, mile
• 1:46:32
  repeats and 1K repeats or something.
• 1:46:34
  Or maybe you don't know one KS and you're like, I'd like to do
• 1:46:37
  1 KS but I don't know how do I convert that?
• 1:46:39
  You can. Is there a way to feed all that
• 1:46:41
  kind of data into Chechi, BT or Claude and ask it say hey if if
• 1:46:47
  my 6 athletes have PRS of XY and Z and I want to do 6 by 1 K
• 1:46:53
  repeats, what would my 1K target repeats be if I want them to be
• 1:46:58
  at 70% or or whatnot? Can can you?
• 1:47:00
  Yeah, you can and a lot of that too, like you can do a lot of
• 1:47:03
  that stuff with with Excel too. But you can, you can get chat
• 1:47:07
  CPT to do that. You just like, for example, I
• 1:47:10
  always use their, I always use their current 1600 as as the
• 1:47:16
  basis because it's it's long enough to be long distance.
• 1:47:19
  It's short enough that it's not going to, you know, destroy him
• 1:47:22
  to do that. And you could easily say, hey,
• 1:47:27
  we want to do 1K, repeat 70%. Here's everybody on my team.
• 1:47:32
  Here's the thing, will you quickly print out, say I want to
• 1:47:36
  do like 4 by 1K or five by one K will you put print out for me a
• 1:47:40
  sheet that says the target sign and leaves blanks so I can write
• 1:47:45
  those things in and it'll boom and put it in an excel file for
• 1:47:49
  your PDF and you can print it right out?
• 1:47:51
  You can have it give you a an Excel sheet to download that you
• 1:47:55
  don't have to paste some copy. You can say, hey, give it to me
• 1:47:57
  in Excel format. It'll give it to you in CSV,
• 1:47:59
  which is, you know, essentially the same thing.
• 1:48:00
  So what about can you? You want to do a?
• 1:48:07
  And again, I'm not a distance coach on so don't laugh too hard
• 1:48:09
  when I say terms. I want to do a lactate threshold
• 1:48:13
  type of workout. Does that still exist?
• 1:48:14
  I don't know. I know I've heard the word
• 1:48:17
  lactate right? Can you GBT?
• 1:48:22
  Can you give me 3 examples of workouts that would hit this
• 1:48:26
  type of modality and it'll give you examples?
• 1:48:29
  You could do that. It might give it to you kind of
• 1:48:32
  generic. You have to, you definitely want
• 1:48:35
  to, you don't want it to give you something that someone who
• 1:48:41
  is, you know, training for the Olympics in the marathon and is
• 1:48:44
  28 years old, you know their workout.
• 1:48:47
  So you've got to you've got to give it guidelines.
• 1:48:49
  Yeah, say like, OK, I've got I'm doing cross country.
• 1:48:52
  We're training for a 5K. These are girls, for example,
• 1:48:56
  where we've got some of them are first year runners, second year
• 1:49:00
  runners. Give it as much information as
• 1:49:02
  you can and then and then do something like what I'll do is a
• 1:49:06
  lot of times with my tempo runs, like I would love to do 1.
• 1:49:10
  I don't like to do anything on the track and cross country
• 1:49:13
  because we don't run on a track. I would love to do 1K repeats.
• 1:49:16
  I have no idea where I would do one KS around where I'm at, but
• 1:49:19
  I do have like we have a loop that we can do.
• 1:49:22
  We're lucky as a one mile loop, but we have another one that is
• 1:49:27
  1.67 miles. And I'll say like, and I've done
• 1:49:31
  this before where I'm like, hey, I want to do a workout where I'm
• 1:49:35
  going at 87% of the mile pace, you know, because that would put
• 1:49:40
  me in my tempo range. But our loop is one point.
• 1:49:44
  You know, we're going to do like a 1.64 mile loop within a walk
• 1:49:48
  in between per walk, a 32nd walk.
• 1:49:51
  What the heck are my times for 1.64 miles?
• 1:49:54
  And it'll do that for me really quickly instead of me having to
• 1:49:57
  go, OK, if I do the math and I do this and that, it'll give me
• 1:50:02
  that. The thing that I think is I
• 1:50:05
  think a lot of coaches know what they want to do.
• 1:50:08
  Where I think it's valuable for new coaches is if you feed it
• 1:50:13
  your workout and you start like this is what I'm doing.
• 1:50:15
  Tempo run. We're preparing for this event.
• 1:50:20
  I'm struggling to explain why we're doing this.
• 1:50:23
  Can you give it to me in language that a high school
• 1:50:27
  student can understand at like a fifth grade reading level?
• 1:50:31
  And it will give you, I mean, dead on, exactly why you're
• 1:50:36
  doing this workout with the recoveries in there.
• 1:50:39
  And then the more it knows, the better it is.
• 1:50:41
  So if you put in like last week, we did this, next week we're
• 1:50:44
  planning on doing this. So we're doing this right now.
• 1:50:47
  Will you tell me why I would do this?
• 1:50:50
  And I think that would help a lot of new coaches out because
• 1:50:55
  they know they're supposed to do tempos.
• 1:50:58
  But you're always going to have that kid going, coach, why
• 1:51:01
  aren't we running faster? Or why aren't we running slower?
• 1:51:04
  Why aren't we running longer? And I feel like, you know,
• 1:51:08
  experienced coaches can tell, like have that conversation off
• 1:51:11
  the cuff. But I know when I started off,
• 1:51:13
  if some kid asked me that, my answer probably would have been
• 1:51:16
  something along the lines of because I said.
• 1:51:17
  Because I told you so, I got written down.
• 1:51:20
  So I read a book, you know, that made me think about this.
• 1:51:24
  There is USTFCCCA puts out a great quarterly magazine called
• 1:51:29
  Techniques, has articles written by amazing coaches from around
• 1:51:33
  the country. And of course, I his name
• 1:51:36
  escapes me. There's a coach, I think he's at
• 1:51:37
  UTEP. I think he's the head coach
• 1:51:39
  there. I can't remember his name.
• 1:51:41
  He he's a throws coach and he writes really like, you know, I
• 1:51:47
  wasn't a throws coach so I don't get into them.
• 1:51:49
  But they're a smart article. Like there are articles that I'm
• 1:51:51
  like, man, he is, he's physics. He knows what he's talking
• 1:51:54
  about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:51:56
  And I was always like, man, if I'm a beginning throws coach, I
• 1:51:59
  don't know that I could have digested this.
• 1:52:01
  Now it makes me think about like, oh, I can.
• 1:52:03
  And here's the cool thing about this stuff, guys, you can
• 1:52:07
  literally just take pictures with your camera of the of the
• 1:52:09
  pages and load it into GPT and say, hey, so you could do that.
• 1:52:13
  If he's got another one of his great articles, four or five
• 1:52:15
  pages long with all his graphs and stuff, you could take
• 1:52:17
  pictures of it, put it into GPT and say, hey, I'm a beginning
• 1:52:22
  throws coach. Summarize this article as if I'm
• 1:52:28
  a fifth grader, you know, because you mentioned that.
• 1:52:31
  And that's why I think is really interesting about some of these
• 1:52:33
  GPTS. And it will quote, UN quote,
• 1:52:36
  redo that article for you as like it's trying to talk to you
• 1:52:39
  like a fifth grader and I think you'd be able to maybe
• 1:52:42
  understand it. Yeah.
• 1:52:44
  And then you can ask questions of it.
• 1:52:45
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk about this.
• 1:52:47
  What do you mean by this right here?
• 1:52:49
  And or can you give me a reference page to a web page
• 1:52:53
  that will demonstrate this technique that he's talking
• 1:52:56
  about right here and it gives it to you like that.
• 1:52:58
  It's, it's like, say it's an amazing intern that will give
• 1:53:01
  you everything that that you need.
• 1:53:02
  What do you Have you had any coaches talk to you?
• 1:53:06
  You're on the course and they're like, hey, so Sean, I see these
• 1:53:09
  tweets about this AI stuff, man, I don't want to get into it
• 1:53:13
  because I'm afraid of XYZ or I don't believe in it because of
• 1:53:18
  XYZ. What what's been some of the
• 1:53:20
  feedback that Y coaches haven't at least dipped their toe into
• 1:53:23
  it? So the thing that's really funny
• 1:53:25
  that I've noticed different unusual is, yeah, I'll put
• 1:53:31
  things out there about training, just running in general, put up
• 1:53:35
  something about culture buildings.
• 1:53:36
  I'm a big believer in culture 1st, and I'll put stuff out
• 1:53:39
  there about ChatGPT. And on the culture stuff and the
• 1:53:42
  training stuff, I'll get tons of likes and comments like I love
• 1:53:46
  it. And on the AI stuff I put out, I
• 1:53:51
  may have 1000 views or 1000 impressions, but three likes
• 1:53:56
  like nobody. But I get more DMS about AI than
• 1:54:03
  I do anything else or phone calls or coaches coming up to
• 1:54:07
  me, like you said at Damico, like, hey, I've seen you've been
• 1:54:09
  doing, what is it? And I think there's a, it's so
• 1:54:15
  new. We, I don't think we know the
• 1:54:20
  questions to even ask, you know what I'm saying?
• 1:54:22
  Like, OK, this is interesting. Should I be afraid of it?
• 1:54:26
  Should I be excited about it? Do I?
• 1:54:31
  I don't know enough about it to have an opinion, but I've had
• 1:54:37
  more people interact with me personally about AI than
• 1:54:41
  everything else combined. But it probably if you if you
• 1:54:45
  looked at it just based on likes and retweets and that it it's
• 1:54:48
  far and away people would say that's your least popular.
• 1:54:51
  You need to drop that as a as a subject.
• 1:54:53
  But actually I have the most human interaction as a result of
• 1:54:57
  it. What do you think coaches are
• 1:54:59
  afraid of? I think it's like everything
• 1:55:02
  else, it's the unknown. We all if it's unknown it it's
• 1:55:13
  or we think that it's for like techno nerds.
• 1:55:18
  It doesn't apply to real life what we're doing here.
• 1:55:22
  I've also had too, there's been some people that have commented
• 1:55:24
  back saying like AI will never replace me.
• 1:55:26
  I don't like this. It's not we're going to replace
• 1:55:29
  me. And my response is no, no, no,
• 1:55:32
  it can't do anything without you.
• 1:55:34
  There is no AI out there that you that you push the button,
• 1:55:37
  you say training plan like and it comes out of a training plan.
• 1:55:41
  It's it's going to be crap. It's going to be one of those
• 1:55:44
  generic ones that you would find on the Internet somewhere.
• 1:55:48
  But it's very good as a it doesn't tire, you know, like
• 1:55:52
  when you when you fatigue and you're analyzing things or if
• 1:55:55
  you're I teach math and I've got a grade four classes worth of
• 1:56:00
  tests and I've got a meat coming up and I've got all this, I'll
• 1:56:04
  make mistakes. And if I teach ChatGPT and you
• 1:56:10
  know, I'm still figuring it out to to check things for me or
• 1:56:13
  like what questions should I ask?
• 1:56:15
  Or it's caught kids who it's suspected who I taught it what
• 1:56:20
  to look for. That's suspected injuries.
• 1:56:23
  And that I went and talked to the kids afterwards and said,
• 1:56:26
  hey, what's going on? I've noticed 2 times they're
• 1:56:28
  going, I didn't say anything about chess GPT or anything.
• 1:56:32
  And they're like, yeah, I've got like, this is bugging me right
• 1:56:35
  here. But they're cross country kids
• 1:56:37
  and most cross country kids are going to push through.
• 1:56:39
  They're not going to say anything until it flares up to
• 1:56:42
  something big. And so that was like, hey, let's
• 1:56:44
  go into the trainer, let's get it looked at next time something
• 1:56:48
  like that happened, just let me know.
• 1:56:49
  It may be nothing, but I just need to know.
• 1:56:52
  So that was, I had two kids that had caught that with that I feel
• 1:56:57
  like prevented them from missing significant time because they
• 1:57:01
  didn't need to take a few days off and you know, go through
• 1:57:04
  some rehab on there. But it was caught because there
• 1:57:08
  are times where they were going down in a way that was
• 1:57:11
  insignificant to me if I was looking at them.
• 1:57:15
  But when she actually put a percentage on it, I was like,
• 1:57:17
  whoa, OK, this is happening four days in a row.
• 1:57:21
  What's happening that we're tailing off, and you weren't
• 1:57:23
  tailing off before that. So it just catches little things
• 1:57:28
  like that where you can have those conversations.
• 1:57:30
  And it makes me better, I feel like as a coach.
• 1:57:33
  Yeah, if you believe coaching is part science and part art, I
• 1:57:39
  don't think how GPT can replace you, it can enhance you.
• 1:57:42
  If you only believe, if you only believe coaching check and field
• 1:57:46
  is science, then you probably should be concerned that GPT
• 1:57:50
  could replace you. It it's better at it than you
• 1:57:53
  are, what it's not good at what it's non existent at.
• 1:57:57
  When you use that example of the young lady that moved up to your
• 1:58:00
  6th runner and you had to, you went to the practice that one
• 1:58:05
  day and were like, hey, I'm going to have you run up with
• 1:58:07
  this group I'm imagining. And if it wasn't her, I'm, I
• 1:58:11
  know I can see this with other individuals.
• 1:58:13
  You had to do a little bit of convincing her like, hey, you're
• 1:58:16
  ready for this. You'll do fine.
• 1:58:19
  I'll be right here. If we need to pull it after
• 1:58:21
  three reps, we'll pull it after three.
• 1:58:23
  That's what GPT is not doing. That's the art, that's the
• 1:58:26
  psychology, the leadership of a coach with your athletes.
• 1:58:31
  I believe it's happening with all of the athletes that GBT
• 1:58:36
  cannot replace you on that and enhance you on the science,
• 1:58:40
  technicality parts of it. And again, if you think that's
• 1:58:43
  all track is and that's how you coach, then I, I do think you
• 1:58:46
  could be replaced not necessarily by GBT, but by a
• 1:58:49
  coach who believes in the art and science part of it.
• 1:58:51
  So leave us with this, Sean, as we start to wrap up here.
• 1:58:56
  I think part of why some coaches maybe aren't using it is the
• 1:58:59
  same reason why when Yahoo search engine, Netscape,
• 1:59:02
  etcetera came out, people, you know, they, we didn't, they
• 1:59:05
  didn't flock overnight to everybody and their brother was
• 1:59:07
  using search engines or even the Internet.
• 1:59:10
  And it's because it is new. It's I don't know what to do
• 1:59:12
  with, I don't know how to do it. Maybe I feel inadequate to use
• 1:59:15
  it. So if there's coaches out there
• 1:59:18
  that are not using it, maybe they're curious, they're AI
• 1:59:23
  curious. That's a funny.
• 1:59:24
  Word. There we go.
• 1:59:26
  It's a new term, right? There.
• 1:59:27
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't know if I want to
• 1:59:30
  be known if the guy comes up with that word.
• 1:59:34
  What would you recommend? How do you give us a
• 1:59:37
  recommendation for a coach to to put their toe in the water?
• 1:59:40
  What's something they should go and search or you tell us what?
• 1:59:46
  What's some how to like get started?
• 1:59:48
  Someone who who hasn't done it, What would you recommend?
• 1:59:50
  How to get started? What I would do is, is, is think
• 1:59:52
  of a topic that really interests you that you already pretty
• 1:59:57
  knowledgeable about. And I would probably just don't
• 2:00:01
  go in with coaching to start off with.
• 2:00:03
  Find something, maybe you're a Star Wars fan, you know, or
• 2:00:07
  you're, you know, whatever you want to go into and just go in
• 2:00:13
  and have a conversation and just start off, you know, saying
• 2:00:17
  like, Hey, I'm really interested in.
• 2:00:20
  XYZ, this is my viewpoint. What do you think about that?
• 2:00:27
  Just like you're talking to a friend, because the skill is to
• 2:00:32
  learn to not talk to it. Like you're talking to a
• 2:00:34
  computer. The more the best, the best.
• 2:00:38
  It's, it's, you're actually having a conversation with
• 2:00:42
  intelligence that's, you know, it's just artificial and it's
• 2:00:46
  the, when you can stop thinking of the artificial, it's amazing
• 2:00:51
  what happens. But I would just say sit down
• 2:00:53
  and have a conversation, like a 20 minute conversation.
• 2:00:56
  Ask questions that you're really interested in.
• 2:01:00
  Ask it to like, hey, you said this, why do you say this?
• 2:01:03
  Yeah. And you'll start to see the
• 2:01:07
  capabilities that are there. And more importantly, you'll
• 2:01:11
  develop your skill because really the, the, the skill to
• 2:01:18
  have it's questions. If you go in and say like, Hey,
• 2:01:23
  will you create a training plan for me?
• 2:01:26
  It's junk. But if you will create a
• 2:01:28
  training plan for me, for this girl who ran this last year,
• 2:01:33
  she's this stage, she's had this history with this stuff.
• 2:01:36
  The more information you have and then it's like, Hey, this is
• 2:01:39
  what I'm thinking. Then you have this, this trade
• 2:01:42
  off of ideas because it you can't let it rob who you are,
• 2:01:47
  but it can let you know where, hey, you're on track with that.
• 2:01:51
  That makes sense with, with what you said, that makes sense what
• 2:01:54
  you're trying to do. Have you thought of this?
• 2:01:56
  It'll, it'll, it'll start to learn you as well.
• 2:02:00
  And then, but I would just say, yeah, to start with the subject
• 2:02:03
  they already know about that you're, you're not going into
• 2:02:08
  it, not knowing much about it. And you'll be amazed at what it
• 2:02:11
  what it can, what it can do for you.
• 2:02:15
  And then from there, start playing with it, like do it as a
• 2:02:19
  toy. Don't use it as a core part of
• 2:02:22
  your planning yet. Just do something little like I
• 2:02:26
  did, like, hey, look at my training plan.
• 2:02:27
  What do you think about it? And just have a conversation
• 2:02:31
  with it and you'll, you'll learn how to, how to how to do it.
• 2:02:35
  And just like anything else, it's a skill.
• 2:02:37
  It takes time, right? And you're never finished.
• 2:02:41
  I like that how how can tell us for those who are still on
• 2:02:46
  Twitter? Seems like there's an exodus
• 2:02:49
  every day of a track coach and it kills me with that.
• 2:02:51
  But where, where can people reach out to you on Twitter to,
• 2:02:54
  you know, maybe ask you a question of AI or training or
• 2:02:58
  May Creek in general? Sure.
• 2:03:00
  So you can look me up by my full name, which is Sean Shawn
• 2:03:04
  Siemers and it should bring you up.
• 2:03:08
  And my Twitter handle is at Siemers S i.e.
• 2:03:11
  MERS under score XC under score TF yeah and yeah you reach out
• 2:03:18
  to me to me there and send me Adm I'd love to I've already
• 2:03:24
  I've made so many friends on Twitter across the country that
• 2:03:27
  we get together and and we'll just talk like you and I are
• 2:03:30
  doing right here and just trade ideas and it's great yeah you're
• 2:03:33
  giving a great way to learn from each other you're.
• 2:03:35
  Giving me the idea maybe because I am a believer in GPTS and
• 2:03:39
  stuff, 'cause I know there's other coaches like you out there
• 2:03:42
  that are using it. Maybe I need to do for an
• 2:03:45
  episode here for the podcast a called a round table, if you
• 2:03:48
  will, about how people are using AI 'cause I think they're, I
• 2:03:52
  think the coaches that aren't using it are missing out on some
• 2:03:55
  things that would make their jobs more efficient.
• 2:03:59
  That there's some things that you do manually right now that
• 2:04:02
  you know, a little bit of grind work that you could put in there
• 2:04:05
  and it be done. I used to, you know, small
• 2:04:07
  example here, but when we finished up with a podcast
• 2:04:10
  recording, while it's rendering and downloading and converting
• 2:04:14
  over to the files I need, I used to go into the podcast app.
• 2:04:17
  And then from memory of, of that, you know, hour and a half,
• 2:04:21
  two hours conversation, write up a, a podcast description.
• 2:04:24
  I'm not a great writer, but you know, but I do that.
• 2:04:27
  And then I learned like, oh, well, when I put the file into
• 2:04:31
  YouTube, YouTube automatically transcribes it.
• 2:04:34
  So now what I do is I, I go back to my desk, I put this file into
• 2:04:38
  YouTube. The next day, YouTube's got the
• 2:04:41
  transcript. I paste and copy that transcript
• 2:04:43
  into ChatGPT and I say, hey, write me up a podcast
• 2:04:47
  description and I, you know, do some other ones there to make it
• 2:04:50
  a little bit more specific. And it spits it out.
• 2:04:53
  I mean like 20 seconds worth of work, by the way, or I should
• 2:04:57
  say it's minutes worth of work for me, 20 seconds for it to do
• 2:05:01
  it. And then I paste a copy into the
• 2:05:03
  podcast description, etcetera. It just, and it's and it's way
• 2:05:06
  better that the descriptions are way more about what we actually
• 2:05:10
  talked about than what I'm remembering of like, OK, then he
• 2:05:13
  went to Stratford. You already said it.
• 2:05:16
  It knows all that stuff and it writes so much better.
• 2:05:18
  So there's just some things out there for coaches that that I
• 2:05:21
  think could, could make their job easier and better and
• 2:05:24
  that's. No, I, I agree.
• 2:05:25
  I have two that I've met online, one in Indiana and one in
• 2:05:29
  Illinois and we've been getting together every week and talking
• 2:05:32
  about AI and we're all using in three completely.
• 2:05:36
  Different directions. Like I got more focused on the
• 2:05:40
  actual training and one is more on like, you know, building the
• 2:05:44
  program, doing the admin type stuff that we all have to do.
• 2:05:47
  And it's, it's a fascinating conversation because everybody's
• 2:05:51
  interests take them in a different way.
• 2:05:53
  And we're just, and we've been sharing, we shared scripts with
• 2:05:56
  each other and, and, and, and bang ideas off of each other's
• 2:06:01
  heads. And it is, it's, it's, it's
• 2:06:04
  going to be something five years from now, the people who jump on
• 2:06:06
  it now are going to be glad that they did because it's going to
• 2:06:09
  be standard. Not many people used Google when
• 2:06:13
  it first came out and now every now it's a verb for crying out
• 2:06:16
  loud. Yeah, exactly.
• 2:06:17
  It'll be similar. In fact, Google's in trouble
• 2:06:20
  because of ChatGPT. It's exactly.
• 2:06:22
  There's a lot of things that I would would have normally
• 2:06:24
  googled and now I just go into GPT.
• 2:06:26
  Yeah, I just go straight in. Yeah.
• 2:06:28
  Sean, my man, thank you so much. Thank you.
• 2:06:31
  Yeah, man, just so grateful for your time.
• 2:06:33
  I think they're, you know, your journey.
• 2:06:35
  I, I, you know, I wish on one hand selfishly that you had
• 2:06:39
  started coaching right out of college, you know, 2223 year
• 2:06:42
  old, whatever, because, you know, I just love that
• 2:06:44
  profession. But I love how unique your
• 2:06:47
  journey is. You know, there's people out
• 2:06:49
  there that means they're literally that means there's
• 2:06:50
  people, there's 30 year olds out there right now who are in
• 2:06:53
  marketing, advertising, law, whatever that are about to
• 2:06:57
  become really good tracking cross country coaches.
• 2:07:00
  Like that's a possibility. That's inside the realm of
• 2:07:04
  possibility. And I just think that's really
• 2:07:06
  stinking cool for our profession and for the young people that
• 2:07:10
  get to have the positive impact off of people like you.
• 2:07:12
  And obviously the different programs you've had, you've had
• 2:07:15
  a lot of kids that have, you know, they're better off because
• 2:07:18
  you were their coach, man. And I'm just grateful.
• 2:07:20
  That's the goal of. The journey absolutely I know so
• 2:07:23
  so you can say you think so I know so on that one so Sean,
• 2:07:26
  thank you so much man. I really do appreciate you and
• 2:07:28
  grateful for you and really thankful and grateful for you
• 2:07:30
  guys. You know, again, we're here in
• 2:07:32
  almost at episode 6, season 6. It's still kind of mind blowing.
• 2:07:37
  We've got a lot of great coaches coming up.
• 2:07:39
  It's going to be awesome. We're going to have a lot of
• 2:07:42
  fun. I want to continue to explore
• 2:07:44
  topics. You know, last last year to you
• 2:07:47
  for listening, we you know, we had the coaching panel on
• 2:07:50
  college to high school coaching. I've got other ideas out there
• 2:07:54
  for specific topics. This AIG PT1 is really
• 2:07:57
  interesting to me and since I'm the host, I get to, you know,
• 2:08:00
  put those things out there and you choose whether to listen or
• 2:08:02
  not. But if you have ideas for things
• 2:08:05
  that are involved in our sport, you know, again, there's a lot
• 2:08:07
  of stuff changing with NCAA, which effects high school
• 2:08:10
  recruiting and things like that. Send them my way.
• 2:08:12
  Of course, you can always follow me at Twitter when you're
• 2:08:14
  following Coach Singers here. You can also follow me at Mike
• 2:08:17
  Cunningham over on Twitter and always want to continue to have
• 2:08:20
  great and positive conversations over there to help the
• 2:08:23
  profession of coaching track and field.
• 2:08:25
  So thank you again for being here.
• 2:08:26
  Join us next week. We'll do it all over.
• 2:08:27
  Thanks guys. Appreciate.
• 2:08:32
  If it goes to appreciate the coach the ones that pour people
• 2:08:35
  most every season needs a voice of reason speaking the growth
• 2:08:39
  you got to prep before you carry the load.
• 2:08:41
  Ice coffee to the soul. For those of us stay on the go
• 2:08:44
  proper handoff to stay in the zone which you packing for the
• 2:08:47
  road. There's more than one way to go.
• 2:08:49
  Take notes that's paying your toe.
• 2:08:51
  It ain't practice if your purpose ain't clear.
• 2:08:53
  It can't happen until you listen With both is can't mentor
• 2:08:56
  without a mentor shares of experience you can reinvent
• 2:08:59
  those years. Every plan's got to stand to
• 2:09:01
  deliver to and the price sacrifice can you give up you.
• 2:09:05
  It's a choice and a fight, not a win or lose.
• 2:09:07
  It's not a ploy boy device. Y'all can make more moves.
• 2:09:10
  It's not about how to it's all about why you don't know till
• 2:09:13
  you know who you are inside 6,000,000 waste of time, choose
• 2:09:17
  none so we all cross the finish line.
• 2:09:18
  The work ain't done so we learn from the experts but y'all got
• 2:09:21
  to put in the network. Your athletics use the network.
• 2:09:25
  It's all about connections put together for the profession to
• 2:09:28
  every track.