Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #291: John Kenworthy-Brown University

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#291: John Kenworthy-Brown University · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

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  Track and field world juvenile tuned in to a humble servant,
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  Mike Cunningham, for another extraordinary message for Guild
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  Athletics connections. And here we go, we're back here
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  on the Guild Athletics Connections Track and Field
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  podcast. So you know, you hear me say
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  this every week, but it's the truth.
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  I'm just so blessed, so honored that you'd press play today to
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  listen to this podcast, this episode and just excited, man.
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  You know, we continue to roll through season 5.
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  Season 5 is getting close to the end.
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  I never thought I would see a season 5 S to start having the
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  switch over to 2025 and Season 6.
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  It's coming up. We've got some amazing guests
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  coming up still, you know, everyone's amazing.
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  I just have such a good time and I'm glad you're along for the
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  ride. Speaking of, all right, let's
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  get into today's episode. This is going to be interesting.
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  I don't know much. It's a distance runner.
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  You guys know me. I'm not a distance guy.
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  So I don't know a lot about what they're what they do on that
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  side. I kind of oversimplify, but I'm
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  keen to learn today and learn this journey.
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  Help me welcome from Brown University the wise and
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  wonderful Mr. John Kenworthy. John, how are you, Sir?
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  Great. How are you doing, Mike?
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  I had to catch myself, you know, you have, John Ken.
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  And I wanted to go into Kennedy and I was like, no, Worthy, not
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  identity. I know especially now that I'm
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  out here in Rhode Island, it's I'm getting close to to that
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  territory. That's right.
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  I'm sure you're making Kennedy money now that you're out there
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  and you're close to Kennedy Kenworthy, right?
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  You're probably, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  You've been around long enough to know that's that's a very
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  good joke. I just saw this morning a coach
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  made a tweet and he said something about he was really
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  happy that he got out of coaching for a bit to do.
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  I think he, he went into the accounting world and now he
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  wants to get back and he goes and I understand, you know,
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  coming back. I, you know, probably have to do
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  small school or something like that to work my way up,
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  whatever, etcetera, etcetera. He goes, but can I get more than
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  28 K? And I was like, oh man, we're
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  still paying entry level coach. Yeah, I say entry level.
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  You know, First off, 28. Like it's so sad.
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  It really does. It's not right.
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  I literally responded, it was like, you deserve more than 28.
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  Like, I mean, come on, why are we not paying our coaches more
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  than $28,000 a year? For crying out loud?
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  It's yeah, I shake my head. I shake my head.
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  We got to do better. We got to do better.
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  Well, John, let's talk about you, man.
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  I'm I'm super excited, super interest in this.
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  You were nominated to be here on the podcast.
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  And I absolutely love that because that shows the impact
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  that you're making that someone else thought so worthy of what
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  you do and how you do it, that they would reach out to me to
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  have you on the show. That like that's a that's a
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  really cool thing. Like maybe just under being a
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  Hall of Famer one day. I think that's the number 2 Hall
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  of Fame first nominated to be here on the podcast.
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  So I want to give a shout out to Marty Ogden my sports
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  results.idontthinkits.com. I think it's dot TV.
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  Do you know? I don't know actually.
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  Sorry, I'm so sorry. He's he's he's yelling at me
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  right now. I just know.
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  Yeah. But, Marty, thank you, brother.
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  I appreciate you nominating John.
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  And we're excited to to dive in. So, John, let's get started
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  here. You know, somewhere, assuming
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  you were a track athlete, track had to come into your life.
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  Where does track and field start for you?
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  Yeah, middle school it was it was cross country in 8th grade I
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  think is when I really first decided like that running was a
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  thing. I did run, I ran spring track in
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  7th grade, but it was sort of just like, you know, you're a
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  7th grader, you just found something to do.
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  And, and I think maybe like that's where the seed got
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  planted because obviously I ended up in cross country in 8th
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  grade as well. And I went to a school that
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  didn't really have a lot going on on on track or cross country
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  distant side. But we had a, we had a coach who
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  was really enthusiastic at the high school level.
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  And because our school was pretty small and the program is
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  pretty small that the middle schoolers and the high schoolers
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  sort of ended up together a lot. We, we had a track over at an
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  elementary school. So there wasn't a, you know, it
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  wasn't just one or the other. We sort of all had to go to this
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  place together and, you know, just ended up sort of meeting
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  the high school kids and our and our coach that was there.
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  And obviously somehow through the track season got convinced
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  to do cross country and then through the cross country season
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  got convinced to stick with it. And then by the time I was a
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  freshman, I was doing all three seasons and, you know, was
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  really excited uniquely that that coach left after my
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  freshman year. So sort of the the groundwork
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  got laid, but then, you know, had a very different experience
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  for the next few years. So.
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  Where? Where are we growing up at?
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  Where's all this taking place? Yeah, it's in Gloversville, NY
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  It's it's upstate New York sort of between Utica and Albany,
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  foothills of the Adirondacks. Yeah, right along the the
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  three-way there. So what did you think?
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  And maybe you didn't think at all because you're, you know, a
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  freshman, Like when, when we talk about a college athlete, we
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  talk about, oh, we got a new coach.
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  You know, like that's usually a, this may be too little bit too
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  strong of a word, traumatic experience, but it's, it's an
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  event like, oh, we got new coaches.
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  I had to learn the new style, yadda, yadda.
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  I thought about transferring or I did or whatever.
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  I never really heard that in high school.
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  So I, I went through the same, but after junior year, so in my
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  senior year, we got all new coaches and, and it was kind of
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  an event because it was a whole new training style for, for one,
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  but never one that we were like, Oh, well, maybe I shouldn't do
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  track now. Like, it wasn't that traumatic.
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  What? What did you even think about as
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  a freshman? Going to sophomore year was
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  like, man, I'm still so new. I barely learned the first guy's
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  name, you know? Yeah, yeah, No, I, I definitely
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  thought about it. We are are the coaches that I
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  had been working with in the one of them in middle school was,
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  was a woman who was a really successful runner.
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  And then the one that was the high school coach was her
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  husband. So it was a husband and wife
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  team. And so there was that sort of
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  connection was there and I had, I was fortunate when I came in,
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  there was a girl on a team who was very good and very
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  accomplished. And then my freshman year was
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  her senior year, so she graduated, she went to Dartmouth
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  and, and you know, we were very even at the time, she was a 5
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  minute mile or I was a 5 minute mile.
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  All right, so, and so she left and we knew that, but then he
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  left as well. So there was definitely a big
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  void to fill. And there was a school next the
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  school district next to mine that had a really good coach and
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  was much smaller, but had like a good little program going and
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  thought about going to that school and and trying to just
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  keep something, you know, growing, I guess.
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  And there was a lot of uncertainty about what was going
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  to happen at our school, but ended up staying.
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  And, you know, one of one of the, the parents in the area
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  whose kid was in middle school at the time, you know, decided
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  to step in and, you know, he did a good job in the fall.
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  He didn't do anything in in for track.
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  So then I sort of got bounced around a bunch for the for the
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  next few years in track with different coaches and, you know,
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  people just sort of taking over the distance group.
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  And but it it's certainly laid a big groundwork, you know, for me
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  figuring out what I wanted out of the sport and knowing what to
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  look for when I when I did decide to run in college, like
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  that was something that, you know, some continuity, some
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  stability, something more than I had in high school was a big
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  part of what I was looking for. And it also forced me like I was
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  really lucky when I was in high school, like the Saratoga
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  Springs girls were the best team in the nation pretty much every
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  year they had, you know, Nicole Blood was the best athlete in
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  the nation. She was faster than me through
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  high school. Like I never, I would have never
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  won a girls race in my area. So, and then we had some really,
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  really amazing boys in the area too.
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  The Saratoga Springs boys were really good at different points.
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  The Shenandoah boys were really good.
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  And then we had a lot of individuals that sort of just
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  like we're in a situation like me, they just didn't quite have
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  a team or a program, but we found each other.
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  And between the successful programs, sprinkling in with
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  some successful individuals like we, we definitely made a friend
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  group that we trained together in the summers or we would run
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  together on the weekends or we would cool down together or we'd
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  hang out and just like, you know, watch a track meet or
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  whatever, if we could find something on TV.
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  So I think that also like in, in one way it really shaped my
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  experience in the sport to find that community because maybe if
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  I had like more at my school, I never would have really looked
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  outwards to find another part of the sport so.
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  That's really cool. What year to graduate high
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  school? That's probably the easiest way
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  to ask it. I was a 2005 grad from.
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  So that's really cool cuz I'm thinking I'm a little bit older.
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  I was a 94 grad in high school and when you talked about like
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  meeting up with other kids that were, you know, of like mind in
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  the area, like that takes technology, right.
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  So there was text and social media probably played into it.
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  And I'm thinking like, man, back in 94, I had no clue who the
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  other good kids are. And I don't even mean to say
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  good, like I was good, but other like minded kids, like I had no
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  like they'd come to our meet. We we had a whole recycled tire
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  track that was the best around. So we we hosted a lot of meets
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  and so we had a lot of kids. We had a team that was really
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  good Smith Station high school. So we knew those kids like, Oh,
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  that's the team that's going to whip our butt and and stuff, but
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  would never have had a clue of like, well, hey, maybe we should
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  call them up and go for a run this week.
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  Like I would have no clue, like if they weren't going to be in
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  the phone book. So I have idea.
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  That's really that's really interesting.
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  Did did you? So you had a lot, it sounds like
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  you had a lot of different coaches in, in high school we
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  had, and I wish I could remember, you know, forgive me,
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  give me grace. You know, we're getting close to
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  300 episodes. So I don't remember every
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  subject with their, with the, the coach with it.
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  But one of the people we had on the podcast a while ago in
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  college had a similar experience like every year.
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  And I think it was literally for their four years of school.
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  They had a different coach all four years.
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  And I was like, oh man, Cuz when you were describing that, I
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  immediately want to say, well, how did that?
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  I mean, you know, different styles and not, not only
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  different like how you coach, like, you know, 100 mile per
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  week versus 40 and, you know, those kind of things.
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  But even the style like authoritarian versus, you know,
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  I don't know the other ones, but you, you know what I'm saying,
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  right? And I remember this the the, the
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  coach, this college coach, I asked him that question like,
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  well, how did you deal with a different coach?
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  And it was really remarkable. His experience, I believe it was
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  him, was yeah, it helped me become a better coach though.
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  Like I knew I wanted to be a coach.
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  So they were, they were describing like I learned from
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  year 1 coach. Oh, I liked how they did this,
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  but not this year 2. Totally different coach.
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  Oh, I got a little bit from this one and not what to do in this
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  one. Were you even in the mind space
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  of becoming a track coach in high school though?
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  Like was it even like all these different coaches?
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  You're like, oh, OK, I can all right, I'll take here and there.
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  Or is it just like, all right, now we got John, now we got
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  Sally, now Timmy's our coach, and now Tina's our coach?
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  It's like you kind of get bounced around like a pinball.
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  Yeah, yeah, no, I definitely had no thoughts of how the sport
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  would, you know, be in my life past high school or college or
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  whatever. But I definitely can look back
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  on it and understand that experience.
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  I think we had a core group of coaches that had various
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  experiences. We had a coach that, you know,
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  was like, I'm more of a high jump field events coach.
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  We've been around for a long, long time.
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  And we had a woman who was a little bit younger but was a
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  successful hurdler, was an alumni from our program.
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  And, you know, so she would do some sprints and hurdles, but
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  she also took over some seasons and did distance.
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  We had a throws coach that was younger and a couple of seasons.
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  I know he was in charge of us and he didn't really have any
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  experience on that side. So he he was definitely learning
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  as we went. And so it was definitely like
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  being passed around a little bit or someone would come in for a
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  season or two but couldn't keep doing it.
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  And so I definitely understand that experience of like feeling
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  out different personalities, different styles.
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  I mean, it forced me. I think the big like linchpin or
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  like the big like thing that brought a lot of this together
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  was like, I was lucky that I was in high school, like rate when
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  the Internet started being a daily thing.
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  And so I like you had mentioned, like how do you get in touch
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  with these people to like have a community?
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  It was like, you know, like the the die stat message board was
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  like blowing up when I was in high school.
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  It was like the you'd spend an hour or two every night, just
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  three things. And then I'm really lucky that
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  in my area in, in New York, if you don't know, in New York,
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  they divide the state up into sections.
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  So, and they're all numbered and in the Albany area generally is,
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  is Section 2. And there's obviously there's
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  like rivalries and you know, you're proud of where you're
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  from if you're a New York distance runner, New York runner
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  in general. But but like the, the really
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  interesting part was that pretty early on, there was a website
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  for our area called the Section 2 Harrier.
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  And the guy that runs his name is John Broderick.
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  He, he still does it today. He, he's amazing just getting
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  results up and, you know, having a place where you can go look at
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  everything for the, the week, you know, and league meets or
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  even just like the, the section would start to put announcements
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  up and, you know, put things up for people to see.
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  And, but the really cool part was he threw a message board up
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  on the website. And so all the local kids were
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  able to go on the message board and talk and chitchat about
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  results and ask questions about racing.
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  And, you know, so I think that that was a big connection for
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  me. But something that came out of
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  it was there, you know, people were talking about training and
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  people were talking about what they're doing or what they're
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  hearing or, you know, current coaches, high school coaches
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  were getting on there and having coaching conversations and
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  eating a coach consistently. You know, I guess not
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  consistently having that fact, that continuity, but also not
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  having someone who's consistently getting getting us
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  workouts that, you know, that were in their wheelhouse.
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  That really gave me an opportunity to start to poke
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  around and look at what what people are doing and how does
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  training work. And, you know, do you, where do
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  you start? You know, what's the Daniels
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  running formula, right like? And I think that's probably
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  where coaching started for me because I started becoming a
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  little bit more of an advocate and doing a little bit more
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  communication with our coaches. But I never really thought much
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  about it. I just went to went to college
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  and started to figure out what I wanted to do.
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  I thought I just wanted to teach.
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  So I figured maybe coaching would be a part of that formula.
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  But it was always just like I was going to be a history
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  teacher or something. And it it evolved over time.
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  It's not uncommon we hear the the experience that you know, a
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  coach when they're a kid in high school has the same coach or
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  group of coaches for for the mic.
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  Yeah, no worries. Can you, can you still hear me
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  though? You're all good.
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So not uncommon that they have
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  the same coach or coaching staff for their four years.
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  And because of how that coach treated them, their experience
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  with that coach, like that's a core memory for them of like, I
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  wanted to become a track coach. Because of that, having these
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  different coaches throughout your high school, you maybe had
• 15:47
  a little bit less of an experience of being able to like
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  connect, not just like training to the side here, but connecting
• 15:54
  like with coach So. And so really, you know, for two
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  years believed in me and when I had a bad race, picked me up.
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  It's like, well, you, you kind of had different personalities
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  the whole way through. So you maybe you had less of a a
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  connection with coaches throughout your high school
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  career. Yeah, that I think, I mean, I, I
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  appreciated the coaches that I worked with, even if we felt
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  like maybe there was more there, you know, in terms of culture or
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  knowledge or program. I think having outside
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  connections really helped, you know, so I could bounce a lot of
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  ideas and experiences off of other people who maybe were
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  going through it in a different way or going through it in the
• 16:30
  same way. But my coach that I had up
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  through freshman year continued to be a big influence for me.
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  I would stay and stay in touch with him through e-mail.
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  He stayed in the area, so I saw him.
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  He's actually still at, his name is Jason Deraco.
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  He's still at Niskayuna High School, which is where he moved
• 16:47
  from Gloversville. So, you know, I stayed in touch
• 16:51
  with him and saw him at Meats and he was always like the most
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  encouraging person. I think he understood that there
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  was a lot less stability there. And so he just, you know, always
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  kept a good word, you know, kept an eye on me.
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  And, you know, so as much as maybe there was a lot going on,
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  on a lot of different levels, I, I never felt like I was without
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  something, you know, there was stuff there so.
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  That's a great example he set because, you know, he could have
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  been excused of like, Hey, you're at a new school, he's got
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  things going on. Stay focused on your new
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  community and your new program and you know, good luck, guys.
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  I don't, I don't want ill will on you, but I I'm not going to
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  invest time into you because I got this and go and and still
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  invested time. That's that's what a great
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  example there. All right, so you go through
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  high school. You mentioned as you were
• 17:38
  looking to go to college. My favorite question is always
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  to ask like, so when you're going to college, what were you
• 17:42
  thinking? And you talked about education,
• 17:44
  maybe being a teacher. So you kind of run that teaching
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  path and sounds like coaching was the like, oh, because I'm
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  going to become a teacher, maybe I'll become a coach, but doesn't
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  sound like you were going to become a teacher so that you can
• 17:54
  become a coach. No, no, I yeah, I, I never
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  really quite knew what I wanted to do, but I, I figured teaching
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  was, you know, it was it was a simple destination, right?
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  Why teaching? Any family members, teachers or
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  anything? No, I think, I think it's just
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  I, I had some teachers in high school that I, that I really
• 18:18
  looked up to. I think it just seemed natural.
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  I don't know if it's just something in my personality that
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  I felt like that would be an interesting, you know, that
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  gravity sort of into that space was interesting to me.
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  But yeah, a couple of my like social studies history teachers
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  were were really, I was really close with and really gravitated
• 18:38
  into the social sciences and, you know, felt that was like a
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  space that I was good at and I liked.
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  And so I went to college sort of thinking maybe history, maybe
• 18:50
  something like that. I ended up being a political
• 18:52
  science major very, very similarly.
• 18:55
  I I found a professor that I really liked and I ended up
• 18:59
  taking most semesters of class with with him and his style of
• 19:03
  teaching and, and the content he was teaching really just
• 19:06
  appealed to me. So I ended up being political
• 19:10
  science over history, which was great.
• 19:11
  A little bit less writing. And then sometime in college, I
• 19:16
  don't even really know. I couldn't tell you when, but at
• 19:19
  some point I realized, like, college coaching was a real
• 19:21
  profession. You know, people did this for a
• 19:23
  living. Where?
• 19:24
  So where where'd you go to college?
• 19:26
  I went to Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.
• 19:29
  And did it occur and and maybe it did as you're starting to
• 19:34
  tell that story there. Did it occur as you're going
• 19:36
  through and you're, you know, you're finally going towards a
• 19:38
  major political science, still think, still thinking about
• 19:41
  teaching. I I think yeah.
• 19:43
  And did it ever flip of like, oh, yeah, I do want to coach.
• 19:48
  And you even mentioned like, oh, like there's actually a college
• 19:50
  coaching. It's so interesting.
• 19:53
  We hear this is a very common story where we'll hear coaches
• 19:57
  who when they were athletes, never thought that coaching was
• 20:00
  a career. Like you could become a coach
• 20:01
  and get paid, even though the example is right in front of
• 20:04
  you, you're being coached. It's like, oh, I never thought
• 20:06
  about, you know, Coach Thomas. Well, she was right in front of
• 20:09
  me and. She's getting paid.
• 20:11
  She's not coming out here just to, you know, to have fun.
• 20:13
  She's getting paid by the college or whatever.
• 20:14
  Wait a minute, maybe I could do that.
• 20:15
  Did that ever flip during college or does that occur after
• 20:18
  college? No, that was definitely at some
• 20:21
  point, I don't know when it was, but at some point I realized
• 20:24
  like, oh, I don't need to be a teacher and coach.
• 20:26
  I think coaching probably grew and it's importance and the
• 20:29
  sport grew and it's importance in my mind and how I wanted to
• 20:32
  be involved in it. And then there was a point where
• 20:34
  I would be exactly that. It was like I don't need to be a
• 20:36
  teacher in coach high school. I could try and just be a
• 20:39
  college coach and not have to do anything else.
• 20:41
  And definitely by the time I was probably probably a junior,
• 20:47
  definitely by the time I was a senior, I I had set my mind
• 20:51
  towards can I be in in college athletics?
• 20:55
  I know because I, I had, I was using a fifth year of
• 20:58
  eligibility at Sacred Heart. And before I got to my senior
• 21:03
  year and I was thinking about how that was going to happen.
• 21:07
  I, I'd set my eyes more on like an MBA or something in the
• 21:13
  administrative side of things and not going to getting my
• 21:15
  teaching degree. So somewhere before senior year,
• 21:18
  things flipped and I said I'm going to try to be more oriented
• 21:20
  towards, you know, that that idea that maybe an MBA is more
• 21:24
  applicable for college coach than a teaching degree.
• 21:28
  I used to think that thought process was like a light switch.
• 21:31
  You keep using the word, the term flip of like, oh, it's off
• 21:33
  or on. It's like, oh, I don't really
• 21:34
  think about coaching. Boom, it's on.
• 21:35
  Yeah, I think I'm and it's actually more of that that fader
• 21:38
  light. It's like, Oh yeah, you know,
• 21:40
  coach is pretty cool. It moves up a little bit and
• 21:42
  then, you know, maybe halfway up it's like, wait, that actually
• 21:44
  could be a career. What if that would be for me?
• 21:46
  And then, you know, then it goes Fulbright and you become a track
• 21:48
  coach. Do you?
• 21:50
  Here's another place I'm really fascinated when you started, I'm
• 21:54
  going to call it warming up instead of flipping too.
• 21:56
  So as you're warming up of like, oh, wait a minute, yeah, maybe
• 21:58
  coaching is where I should be going.
• 22:00
  And maybe it's collegiate coaching.
• 22:02
  And you already are expressing some like bend towards like
• 22:07
  paying attention to training. Many of us, probably the
• 22:09
  majority of our athletes and us as athletes go through as an
• 22:13
  athlete of just you tell me what to do and I do.
• 22:15
  And I don't think much of it, like I don't like, well, why did
• 22:18
  we do these repeats today? Or why did we do these block
• 22:20
  stars today? Or, you know, we, we really
• 22:21
  don't think about what the reasoning, but a but a coach
• 22:25
  does. Did you, can you remember back
• 22:28
  when, as you started kind of warming up and like, oh, I'm
• 22:30
  gonna be, maybe I'm gonna become a coach and oh, maybe I'm, I can
• 22:33
  be a college coach. I'll have to teach.
• 22:35
  Did you start paying attention? You're already what kind of
• 22:38
  paying attention to, to workouts and stuff.
• 22:40
  But did you find yourself starting to pay attention more
• 22:42
  of like, well, coach made us do this?
• 22:45
  Let me ask coach, why? Why are we doing this today?
• 22:48
  And after we did this yesterday, did you start kind of thinking
• 22:51
  about the training differently at all?
• 22:53
  Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think even back into
• 22:55
  high school, just helping out my coaches, you know, that was
• 22:59
  always part of like, oh, let's answer these questions together
• 23:02
  or let me let me do some work because I know my my coach is
• 23:06
  just getting into this and they're a thrower or they're a
• 23:08
  hurdle or whatever. And they're they're certainly
• 23:09
  going to think about those programs, but maybe they're not
• 23:12
  going to put as much time into the distance side.
• 23:14
  They're just going to have, you know, I can remember we would
• 23:17
  train indoors in our school hallways and I could remember we
• 23:21
  would do the same for workouts, you know, Monday through
• 23:25
  Thursday for weeks on end. You know, it was just so, you
• 23:29
  know, that definitely started back in high school and then,
• 23:32
  yeah, I mean, I, I think my coach in college, Christian
• 23:35
  Morrison, was, he's very foundational, very simple.
• 23:40
  We did a very simple pattern of, you know, workouts and you could
• 23:44
  figure it out really quickly. And, and, and for better or
• 23:47
  worse, you know, I guess it, I think it was nice to know what
• 23:50
  was coming. But.
• 23:52
  And I was, I wasn't a very good athlete.
• 23:54
  So it was really beneficial for me to just have very simple
• 23:57
  stuff that I could grow in. And but I think there was also
• 24:02
  an element of that was like we had a big team and our goal was
• 24:05
  always to have a big team. And his approach was certainly
• 24:11
  like a little bit more open-ended.
• 24:13
  I think that, you know, we we had the space to have the
• 24:17
  conversations with him about, you know, running a tempo a
• 24:21
  little harder or taking something a little easier or
• 24:23
  cutting back on mileage or cutting back on a long run or
• 24:27
  running a long run a little harder.
• 24:28
  And he was always really open to those things and, and honestly,
• 24:31
  let us play with that on our own a little bit too.
• 24:34
  He was never going to micromanage us.
• 24:36
  So we were always really responsible for how things went.
• 24:42
  And I think that always keeps you on your toes and keeps you
• 24:45
  thinking when when you know, you've got to really be in tune
• 24:47
  with how you're feeling and make some decisions or have some
• 24:50
  conversations that your coach isn't always just going to give
• 24:53
  you every amounts of detail all the way through every single
• 24:57
  day. You've got to have a little bit
• 24:58
  of autonomy. I think that really like primed
• 25:01
  me to to think about, you know, how does how does this work?
• 25:05
  What decisions are you making to make things better?
• 25:08
  And it's a big part of I think the coach I am today is I really
• 25:11
  try to get feedback from the athletes and trying to be sort
• 25:15
  of a two way St. to to understand what's the best thing
• 25:18
  that we can do. And but yeah, I think that all
• 25:22
  of that sort of goes into that idea of at some point realizing
• 25:25
  that I I enjoy the aspect of coaching without ever being
• 25:28
  formally coaching. Yeah, I think it's a good thing
• 25:31
  for coaches to remember about those kids that are asking
• 25:35
  questions. Some it's sometimes we get a
• 25:37
  little defensive of like, oh, they're, they're, they're,
• 25:40
  they're asking those questions defensively of like, you know,
• 25:43
  why are we doing this? Why do we have to do that?
• 25:45
  And I think maybe a lot of times it's those curious kids that are
• 25:48
  asking because they, they genuinely want to know more.
• 25:51
  Those are maybe your prime suspects of future coaches or
• 25:54
  future teachers. Or even if they don't go into
• 25:56
  that, just being curious helps you in any career path that you
• 26:00
  may you may go to. So I think that's something good
• 26:02
  for for coaches to to be thinking of.
• 26:05
  When you look back at it now, did you have Coach Richardson
• 26:07
  the whole time at Sacred Heart? Yeah, yeah.
• 26:11
  He, yeah. He'd been there since the 90s.
• 26:14
  He founded the track program and still there today.
• 26:16
  So that's a huge contrast to your high school career in
• 26:21
  regards to coaches when you look back at it now, because there's
• 26:23
  positives and negatives to both. By the way, I'm not saying like
• 26:26
  your high school career was thrown away because you had 456
• 26:30
  coaches. Nothing necessarily tells me
• 26:33
  that if you'd had the same coach the whole way through that you
• 26:36
  would have had any better experience or that you would
• 26:38
  have been any better as an athlete.
• 26:41
  I don't know. It's not an automatic to me, you
• 26:43
  know that you have that stability.
• 26:45
  You would be. It feels like it because of
• 26:47
  stability, but there's no guarantees in that.
• 26:50
  When you look back at the two different careers, high school
• 26:52
  with multiple coaches and college with a single coach,
• 26:56
  which one did? I don't know if I want to ask
• 26:58
  which one did you prefer because maybe that's a little bit of a
• 27:01
  duh question, but can you see the contrast and how did maybe
• 27:04
  this is a better question. When you look at your coaching
• 27:07
  today, how did each affect the way you coached today because
• 27:11
  you had the experience of both. So how did how did those affect
• 27:13
  you to your style today? Yeah, you're right.
• 27:17
  I I definitely don't take for granted either experience.
• 27:21
  I think I ended up at Sacred Heart for a lot of reasons.
• 27:23
  If if you made me run through a list of them, I think stability
• 27:29
  of coaching and certainty of coaching was, was one of them,
• 27:32
  right. So I think, you know, that's a
• 27:35
  big part of, you know, I think on the recruiting side as a
• 27:38
  college coach, I think about that idea of, of trying to, you
• 27:42
  know, people ask, I would say 50% of the families I work with
• 27:44
  ask, you know, do you plan on being here for, you know, the
• 27:49
  foreseeable future? And it's like, you know, being
• 27:50
  honest about. Isn't that a terrible question
• 27:53
  though, because I would bet that you said 50%.
• 27:56
  I'm shocked it's not. Maybe in today's transfer portal
• 28:00
  world, maybe that is a less asked question.
• 28:04
  But I remember, you know, when I coached, you know, way back in
• 28:06
  the day now I I stopped coaching when you graduated high school.
• 28:10
  That's how old I am, John. That was a very common question.
• 28:14
  And I remember, and by the way, this is a guy here pointing the
• 28:16
  thumb, by the way, coached for 10 years and it was at 5
• 28:19
  different institutions. So nothing like you.
• 28:22
  You didn't even need to ask me that question.
• 28:23
  You knew. Oh, yeah, Mike's not going to
• 28:25
  be. Yeah, one or two years.
• 28:26
  He shows he's showing it in his career path.
• 28:28
  Right. But they always asked it.
• 28:29
  And I always thought, what a dumb question.
• 28:31
  What do you think I'm going to say?
• 28:33
  I am going to say yeah, but as far as I can tell, I want to.
• 28:38
  I love this school, you know, cuz you're selling your the
• 28:40
  school. It's just a crazy question.
• 28:45
  I think it feels like you have to ask, but it's like why are
• 28:47
  you asking that? Yeah.
• 28:49
  And I think that the the value in it and the way I approach
• 28:53
  answering it comes from the idea that like it's probably how you
• 28:57
  answer it more than what your answer is.
• 28:58
  Cuz you know I was. Thinking about that.
• 29:01
  I don't think you're wrong at all.
• 29:02
  I think most kids just know. It's the same thing when you say
• 29:05
  like, can you, you know, can you tell me if your team is close,
• 29:08
  right? It's like I'm going to tell you
• 29:10
  my teams close. I bet you every coach in the
• 29:13
  world says that their team's a family in the 1st 2 sentences
• 29:16
  that answer. But it's more about just like
• 29:18
  how you answer it and the conversation that comes with it.
• 29:21
  So when kids ask that or, or parents, a lot of times they'll
• 29:23
  ask that. I definitely approach it from
• 29:26
  an, from the idea of like you're not asking me for a specific,
• 29:29
  you're not asking me for my life plan.
• 29:31
  You're asking me because you want to see what my response
• 29:34
  would be in less detail of what it is, yes or no, but just how I
• 29:39
  approach the answer. And that's a good point, you
• 29:41
  know, so I, I think that that answer comes from a place of
• 29:46
  knowing in early on in my career, how, how it was to deal
• 29:50
  with that change. And then in contrast, how it is
• 29:55
  to, to, to value personally myself, to value the consistency
• 29:58
  I had in college, you know, so I understand the root of that
• 30:01
  question and the worry or the stress that can come from it.
• 30:05
  And then, you know, I'm in my second year at Brown, so I also
• 30:08
  understand the, the scars that come with some transitions.
• 30:13
  I, I think brown had a, a quick, couple quick turnovers in
• 30:18
  coaching before I arrived. It was a big concern on with the
• 30:22
  women that were here when I got here of like, are you going to
• 30:25
  stay? Like, can can we trust you to be
• 30:27
  here? Different product.
• 30:30
  It's a different, you know, feeling day-to-day than it was
• 30:33
  in year 1, you know, So that's, there's a lot in that
• 30:38
  instability, there's a lot in continuity and you see it in a
• 30:43
  lot of different places. But I think it definitely it
• 30:46
  affects who I am as a coach today, you know, just making
• 30:50
  sure that whatever is the situation is, is that we're, you
• 30:53
  know, we're clear about how things are going to go.
• 30:56
  Yeah, I think a lot of people search for stability.
• 30:59
  I think it's a vast, vast minority of people who search
• 31:02
  for Is it disability? What would the opposite of?
• 31:07
  On instability. Yeah, that's probably better.
• 31:10
  Yeah. I, I went to the Ivy League of
• 31:12
  the S Troy University. So sometimes my language is a
• 31:14
  little, a little higher than you might be able to perceive.
• 31:18
  And those people who seek out instability, you, you might want
• 31:22
  to steer clear of them, to be real frank.
• 31:24
  I mean, you know, it's just not a normal human thing to do to
• 31:26
  look for instability. So I think you're right.
• 31:29
  People look for stability. And so we ask those questions
• 31:31
  because, well, you're supposed to say the right.
• 31:35
  We know what we want to hear. And I and I, I think you hit the
• 31:37
  nail on the head. It's more on how you answer
• 31:41
  that, like, are you evasive? You break eye contact?
• 31:45
  You're like, yeah, I plan on being here a long time.
• 31:48
  Let's go to the dining hall. And it's like, oh, pretty quick
• 31:50
  to get awful. Now it's up.
• 31:52
  Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
• 31:53
  All right. So Sacred Heart, you got
• 31:56
  stability, you got a coach stays with the whole time you start
• 32:00
  career pathing starts coming closer now to tracks like are
• 32:03
  into coaching. It's like, OK, Yep, this is this
• 32:05
  is where I want to go. You graduate.
• 32:08
  What's the first step you take to become an attract coach?
• 32:14
  So I I graduate and I have a fifth year.
• 32:16
  So I I stuck around and finished my eligibility the fall of my
• 32:21
  fifth year. I did not have cross country, so
• 32:23
  I was, I was still, you know, competing.
• 32:26
  I hop into some races and stuff, but I definitely was more of a,
• 32:31
  you know, training and just around practice and, you know,
• 32:35
  helping in workouts and and doing some things that when you
• 32:39
  can't race, you know, you move over a role a little bit,
• 32:42
  whether it's intentional or not, you know, so that gave me a
• 32:45
  little bit of experience. I'm just like watching the
• 32:47
  season unfold without any, I can't do anything about it on
• 32:50
  the course. So how can I help?
• 32:52
  How can I be a leader and then finished my eligibility, got
• 32:57
  connected with the track club in New York City, Central Park
• 33:01
  track club and kept competing. But knowing that I, you know, I
• 33:06
  guess a part of the story that that we haven't really talked
• 33:08
  about. I wasn't very good in high
• 33:09
  school. I was, you know, at 10342
• 33:13
  Miller. I mentioned earlier that like
• 33:16
  Nicole Blood was faster than me in high school.
• 33:18
  So, you know, that puts into context some things.
• 33:21
  And one of the one of the other reasons I ended up at Sacred
• 33:23
  Heart was because they, they did have, you know, Christian had a,
• 33:27
  a pretty loose open-ended roster opportunity policy, just like,
• 33:32
  hey, kids that that he likes and he that show a lot of interest
• 33:37
  in that, that feel like they're fitted Sacred Heart are going to
• 33:39
  have an opportunity. And that was really the only
• 33:42
  guaranteed Division One opportunity I had.
• 33:45
  So I, I, for a lot of reasons, took that and, you know, and so
• 33:49
  I showed up and I was like one of the worst kids on a team that
• 33:51
  wasn't very good. We were second to last or
• 33:53
  something like that my first year in cross country in our
• 33:55
  conference. And then by the time I was a
• 33:59
  fifth year and I, you know, I had, we had won a couple track
• 34:02
  titles as a team. We had a couple really good
• 34:04
  sprinters that that helped us get to that place.
• 34:07
  And then, you know, but I ended up winning 2 conference titles
• 34:10
  on the track and I was second in our cross country meet and, you
• 34:16
  know, got an opportunity to sort of keep training after college.
• 34:19
  And I knew that going from like a 1720 guy to a 1510 guy, I just
• 34:25
  felt like I wasn't done, you know?
• 34:27
  So I kept running and, you know, kept running pretty well and
• 34:32
  then ran some big PRS in a couple years after, but really
• 34:35
  made a conscious decision to try to like prioritize finishing
• 34:38
  that out because it just felt like a chapter that had hadn't
• 34:42
  really finished. I, I was still writing it.
• 34:44
  I wasn't sure where it was going to go.
• 34:45
  And it was also new still. Like the last few years of
• 34:49
  college felt like a whole different thing than being not
• 34:52
  great or being mediocre or just struggling to get opportunities.
• 34:54
  And now I was like, you know, scoring and winning things and
• 34:58
  breaking school records and things like that.
• 35:00
  So, so just having that balance for a few years after I finished
• 35:04
  my eligibility, it led me into like, OK, how can I make some
• 35:07
  money and how can I keep involved in the sport in other
• 35:10
  ways that will allow me to keep training?
• 35:13
  So I worked during the day and then I left the time in the in
• 35:18
  the afternoons to come back to practice at Sacred Heart.
• 35:20
  I volunteered, stayed involved with the program, allowed me to
• 35:24
  keep training when I wasn't at practice with Central Park, and
• 35:27
  then just gave me an opportunity to stay involved in the sport.
• 35:30
  And that's really when I started actively looking for coaching
• 35:34
  jobs and was like, OK, like I'm running and I'm running well,
• 35:37
  but this is eventually going to have to end.
• 35:39
  So I really want to get a coaching job.
• 35:41
  And I coached a little bit of high school just cross country
• 35:45
  so that I could stay a little bit more flexible for track.
• 35:49
  And then within a couple years, you know, was able to get my
• 35:52
  first job in college coaching, first paid job in college
• 35:55
  coaching, so. All right, pause there.
• 35:56
  We'll pick, we'll pick back up there because what is
• 35:59
  interesting, so you are at 1032 Miller out of high school.
• 36:05
  No one's going to pretend that that's very good.
• 36:07
  I appreciate your, you know, I love the stats are stats.
• 36:11
  So you're like, well, I can be truthful or not, but it's easy
• 36:12
  to go find, right, But but I so I appreciate you, you know,
• 36:16
  being open and and authentic with that.
• 36:18
  So 1034, no one's going to say that's very good.
• 36:22
  There's a but, but you continued on and got.
• 36:25
  So what would end up being like? What would end up being in your
• 36:27
  event in the college like 5K or 10K?
• 36:31
  Yeah, so I ran everything from like the mile through cross
• 36:34
  country. Like what's your best mark?
• 36:36
  Something like, I don't really know 10K marks real well.
• 36:38
  I know 5K marks pretty well, so in obviously.
• 36:41
  Yeah, in college my fastest 5K was like 1510 or 15 O nine.
• 36:46
  It was actually in a back end of a double at our conference
• 36:49
  meeting on a flat 200 meter track, which is weird.
• 36:51
  So wow. But that that was probably a
• 36:56
  little bit was left on the table.
• 36:57
  I was a steeplechaser so I ran 915 in college that year that I
• 37:04
  ran 9/15 was still the the regional still had an auto
• 37:06
  standard and it was nine O 7. So I thought like, you know, all
• 37:10
  spring I thought maybe I could get there and I just never quite
• 37:12
  got it. We had a really good DMR.
• 37:15
  We had a couple of really good mid distance athletes.
• 37:17
  So we ran right under 10 minutes and I was the anchor leg of
• 37:20
  that. I ran 4/4/14 a couple times and
• 37:23
  that solid solid. Did you get you kept running?
• 37:26
  Did you get better as a post collegiate?
• 37:29
  Yeah, yeah, I ended up running well, I mostly it was like 3K5K
• 37:36
  steeple post collegiately I ran a couple like mile PRS, but I
• 37:39
  ended up running 820 for 3K9 O 5 for the steeple in 1437, yeah.
• 37:47
  Dude, solid, super, super solid. I mean, the number of people
• 37:50
  who've run under 15 and a 5K, it seems like everybody does it.
• 37:53
  That's not true. There's still a, you know,
• 37:55
  that's a heck of a fraternity to be in.
• 37:57
  What, what I'm getting at is what I love about this is
• 38:00
  there's this, it's really based out of fear.
• 38:03
  In my, my opinion. There's this fear now because
• 38:06
  the transfer portal power for all this kind of thing that like
• 38:10
  there's, there's a, there's a lot of discussion going on that,
• 38:12
  you know, coaches don't want to develop and, and they're really
• 38:15
  pointing when people say that they're pointing their fingers
• 38:17
  at the power for coaches. You know that, you know, a good
• 38:20
  friend of mine, former roommate is Houston Franks at he's now at
• 38:23
  LSU and it's like, Ah, Houston doesn't want to develop.
• 38:25
  He only wants, you know, 2 minute half Miller women right
• 38:28
  out the gate and that kind of stuff.
• 38:30
  And the the fear, like when I hear from high school coaches is
• 38:33
  like, Oh, these coaches aren't giving 1034 a, a, a chance to
• 38:37
  develop. Like look like you could have
• 38:39
  had a solid 15 flat 5K guy. That's you know, I'm not sure.
• 38:42
  I'm not sure that plays in the power 4 world.
• 38:44
  I get it. But but certainly there's some
• 38:45
  cross country teams in the power 4 world.
• 38:47
  Like you'd have been the 4th, 5th 6 runner, which those are
• 38:49
  important, right? And it's like, oh, these kids
• 38:52
  aren't getting a chance to develop.
• 38:53
  And what I love about your story that you went to Sacred Heart
• 38:57
  is, well, look, you did develop because you don't have to go to
• 39:01
  a power 4 to develop. They do develop.
• 39:04
  This is, I'm a huge advocate. I, I, I do not like the
• 39:07
  discussion that Mouse Holloway at Florida only wants 10 flat
• 39:11
  kids so that they're ready made. I'm like, well, first of all, 10
• 39:14
  flat doesn't even make the 100m final into the blaze.
• 39:17
  So that argument doesn't work. And by the way, the number of 10
• 39:19
  flat high schoolers is pretty much Nils like one or two a
• 39:22
  year, right? So he's taking ten 10/10/20
• 39:25
  10:30 kids and making them 1099. And that is development.
• 39:30
  We, we tend to get into this headspace in the like using this
• 39:32
  100 meter example that if you take an 11 flat boy and you make
• 39:36
  them a 10/20, that's development and that's correct.
• 39:39
  But taking a 10/20 kid and making the 10 flat or 990 is
• 39:42
  also development. Where I'm getting at is that
• 39:46
  even, and you know, we got roster caps coming and things
• 39:49
  like that. Even with those and even with,
• 39:52
  you know, these super conferences is what's really
• 39:54
  killing a walk on opportunities in the power 4.
• 39:57
  You know, you got 18 schools. It's like, man, I don't have
• 39:59
  time to take a a 1034 down to a 15 five guy.
• 40:03
  I just don't, you know, it takes a year took five years.
• 40:05
  I don't have time that I need that.
• 40:07
  I need that 934 kid. Maybe that can become a 14 flat
• 40:11
  in score. That's that's still development,
• 40:13
  by the way. But there's so many of this is
• 40:17
  what in this is a really a long rambling way of saying I love
• 40:21
  coach coach Christensen, right? Sacred Heart Morrison, Morrison
• 40:25
  Morrison that there are a bunch of amazing coach Morrison's at
• 40:30
  Sacred Heart, at Slippery Rock, at Fairfield, at Cal Poly, Morro
• 40:37
  Bay. Like there is place to, to
• 40:40
  develop and become really good. I mean like really good.
• 40:44
  Like there are 13 something 5K kids that were 10 something out
• 40:48
  of high school at division 2IN NAIA and things like like
• 40:52
  there's so many places development.
• 40:53
  So I love that story of like, here's a 10/30 kid.
• 40:55
  I, I, I love it more that you were a 10/30 kid and not some
• 40:58
  prodigy 9 flat kid. Like honestly, I love that so
• 41:00
  much better. It's like, oh man, here's a kid
• 41:02
  who didn't give up on himself. By the way, here's a coach who
• 41:05
  had AAI. Don't even want to call it a
• 41:08
  liberal policy of walk on. And but it's like, oh, OK, I I
• 41:11
  like to have a big roster. That was that was their style.
• 41:14
  And, and and you, you worked your butt off and made the team
• 41:16
  and then kept working your butt off and then contributed to
• 41:19
  conference championships and runner ups.
• 41:22
  And I mean, that's so awesome. That happens every day.
• 41:25
  And we only talk about we mainly talk about the 9 flat kid, the
• 41:29
  the Galen rubs out of high school.
• 41:30
  And we should those are Nicole bloods out of high school.
• 41:33
  Those are amazing people love to watch their careers too.
• 41:35
  But man, what you did is happening 99% of the time and is
• 41:40
  the bulk of what we do. And that's so cool to me, man, I
• 41:43
  love that. Shout out to Mortensen for doing
• 41:46
  that. Shout out to you for believing
• 41:48
  in yourself. That's so cool, man.
• 41:50
  I love it. I love it.
• 41:51
  I. Mean and I certainly wasn't the
• 41:54
  only one. I mean, we, we had, you know, in
• 41:57
  the five or six years in my class and for the next 5 or 6
• 42:00
  years, we had kids, you know, maybe not all of them were 1030
• 42:03
  kids. We had some 955 kids or we had
• 42:06
  some 430 milers or, you know, whatever it was.
• 42:09
  And we got better recruits too. We had, you know, I remember
• 42:11
  having a kid three years below me that ran like 916 and in high
• 42:15
  school and he showed up and did a great job for us.
• 42:17
  But we had a lot of kids that were really unheralded in that
• 42:20
  like Sacred Heart. And you know, by the time I was
• 42:23
  done with my whole journey at Sacred Heart coaching and all,
• 42:26
  you know, we had kids running four O 7 and you know, 152 and
• 42:30
  151. You know, we had a, we had a
• 42:34
  bunch of kids running, you know, sub 25 minutes for 8K that you
• 42:38
  know, we're right around 10 minutes 2 milers in high school
• 42:40
  and you know, so I think. It's a new one.
• 42:43
  I know it happens every day because go look at take Division
• 42:47
  One out. But by the way, you can still
• 42:48
  look inside of Division One and find it as well.
• 42:50
  If you go look at, you know, who made finals in the mile and
• 42:52
  there's certainly one or two kids who were not, we didn't
• 42:55
  know who they were out of high school, But go look at the D2
• 42:57
  championships, go look at the D3 championships, NAIA, JUCO, go
• 43:01
  look at the PSAC conference, the Mid Lakes conference and see
• 43:06
  like really fast kids and throwing things far.
• 43:09
  And and there wasn't that many out of high school.
• 43:11
  They were not all studs. There's this many studs out of
• 43:14
  high school, man. So I love development and all
• 43:17
  the levels, man. I just think that's a really
• 43:18
  cool, that's a cool example, man.
• 43:20
  I love that. I love that.
• 43:22
  All right, we said put a pin in it.
• 43:23
  So you're running, you're running post collegiately and
• 43:26
  you're also trying to figure out, well, I do need to eat, I
• 43:28
  need to make some money here. You're helping out, you're
• 43:30
  coaching some high school cross countries, keeping things very
• 43:33
  keeping things very open so that you can kind of still come back
• 43:35
  to Sacred Heart and help out. And then you're like, yeah, I
• 43:38
  think I need AI, need a full time, I need to get a paycheck
• 43:40
  here. So what was the?
• 43:41
  What was the first place? Yeah, I I pieced together a
• 43:45
  couple things. I was coaching a high school
• 43:48
  girls team in Laurelton. Hall was the school that I was
• 43:53
  at. So I was working with them in
• 43:56
  the fall and then not doing anything coaching wise paid.
• 43:59
  I was working at Sacred Heart as a volunteer in the spring.
• 44:02
  So what I started I had the opportunity to start doing was
• 44:05
  working as like an assistant AD at the high school and just
• 44:10
  helping the AD with some more administrative things and event
• 44:13
  setups and things like that. So, you know, just getting an
• 44:17
  hourly wage to, you know, help manage some admin stuff and then
• 44:22
  help do setups and help, you know, that department a little
• 44:25
  bit. I did that for a couple years
• 44:27
  and then was applying for college shops the whole time.
• 44:31
  And then in the fall of 2012, Siena College had an opening for
• 44:38
  a cross country coach. They were cross country only
• 44:41
  program. They were one of the final
• 44:43
  schools on my list and it was a school sort of in my home area.
• 44:48
  Like they had a big basketball team and everybody sort of knew
• 44:51
  who they were and also a very good school.
• 44:53
  And I didn't end up going there, obviously, but it was one of the
• 44:56
  other few schools that was interested in me in any way.
• 44:59
  And so I applied just thinking I could go home and live with
• 45:03
  family. It was part time.
• 45:04
  It was like, I think it was like, you know, less than
• 45:07
  $20,000 a year and it was supposed to be hourly.
• 45:09
  You know, it was just like it was just, you know, they said it
• 45:11
  was cross country only. So I.
• 45:13
  I wish schools would pay coaches hourly.
• 45:16
  Yeah. Seriously.
• 45:17
  Yeah, it was hourly. You'd make a lot more money if
• 45:20
  it was truly hourly, you know what I'm saying?
• 45:22
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so in August of 2012, I, I
• 45:28
  interviewed and applied and they actually hired somebody else.
• 45:31
  And that was the first time I'd ever have any exposure to, to
• 45:34
  the process. And I was like, OK, like, that's
• 45:39
  good. That's it, you know, start
• 45:40
  getting the ball rolling. And then went back and coached
• 45:44
  another year of high school, kept working.
• 45:46
  And then in I guess it's probably March, maybe late
• 45:50
  February, I found out that the coach that they had hired left.
• 45:54
  So I reached back out and just said, Hey, I'm still interested.
• 45:59
  And they said, can you, can you come to campus?
• 46:01
  Like we'd love to like finish interviewing you basically.
• 46:05
  So yeah, on April 1st in 2013, it was my first day at Siena and
• 46:13
  I always remember it because it's the same week that one of
• 46:15
  our basketball coaches got hired.
• 46:16
  So it was like, you know, my 10 year started with their 10 year
• 46:19
  and basketball coaches tend to have more notable and
• 46:23
  knowledgeable 10 years, right? You know, when they come and go
• 46:25
  a little more so So yeah. So from April 2013 until August
• 46:32
  of a little over a year ago, I was at Sienna and spent, Yeah,
• 46:37
  it was a little over 10 years there.
• 46:39
  Oh wow, Yeah. I don't know why in my head I
• 46:43
  was like, OK, after a year or two you moved.
• 46:46
  So I'm curious. This will tell us even more
• 46:49
  about you here, John. So you get the, the incorrect
• 46:55
  way to say this is you get passed over the first time
• 46:58
  around. They hired someone else, you
• 46:59
  didn't get the job. It's not passed over.
• 47:01
  It's not like they purposely said we're not hiring this guy.
• 47:03
  We just said we're hiring this person.
• 47:06
  So you didn't get the job though.
• 47:07
  And there's, you know, when we're looking for jobs
• 47:09
  especially. I've said this a million times.
• 47:14
  This may be my next tattoo. Ego is not bad.
• 47:16
  Bad ego is bad, we can get some chip on our shoulders.
• 47:21
  Bad ego of like they passed me over.
• 47:24
  They chose, you know, we almost we because we're competitive
• 47:26
  people typically in coaching, right, because, you know, from,
• 47:29
  from a lot of things in our background.
• 47:31
  So we get we tend to think like, oh, they chose that person, you
• 47:33
  know, and you've heard the stories of like you've heard
• 47:36
  this from actors and directors and I've heard this from coaches
• 47:38
  of like, oh, I took every rejection letter and pinned it
• 47:41
  on my wall. I'm I'm gonna make Sienna pay
• 47:43
  for this, you know, those kind of things.
• 47:45
  And then, you know, short 6-7 months later, you find out that
• 47:50
  position is back open. That person chose to to go
• 47:52
  somewhere else. It it's easy to have the
• 47:57
  attitude of like, oh, I'm going to show them like I'm going to
• 48:01
  go in and just do a bang out job and then I'm going to leave.
• 48:04
  You know, there's some animosity there now.
• 48:07
  You kind of ruined you kind of spoiler alerted you're there for
• 48:09
  10 years. So you don't really live long
• 48:11
  with that type of attitude. What kept you from having that
• 48:13
  attitude? What?
• 48:15
  That's a very humble attitude of like, oh, it didn't work out for
• 48:18
  whatever reason with the other person while I'm still
• 48:19
  interested. Like I'm like, I'm I'm OK to
• 48:22
  come in and start working now and stay for 10 years.
• 48:25
  Yeah, Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think of what I would
• 48:27
  say is I, I'm very familiar with the attitude you're describing.
• 48:31
  I feel like that was the athlete I was, you know, felt like I
• 48:35
  didn't get a great shot in high school to run what I thought I
• 48:38
  was capable of. Found a place that wanted to say
• 48:40
  yes, went there and a lot of other places weren't.
• 48:44
  You know, I can remember going to open houses and talking to
• 48:46
  coaches at, at, you know, a little, you know, they'd stand
• 48:50
  at the table and they'd say cross country and track and I'd
• 48:52
  go to say, introduce myself. And I can remember culture
• 48:54
  saying like, Hey, you're just, you're not quite fast enough.
• 48:56
  But, you know, if you end up at our school, like, you know, you
• 49:00
  can always follow up and try and try out if you improve, you
• 49:02
  know, whatever. And just getting rejected in
• 49:04
  that way. So I lived a lot of my athletic
• 49:06
  career with the idea of like, I'm going to show people that
• 49:09
  wouldn't take a chance on me that it's worth it.
• 49:11
  Was it was, you know, I was worth it.
• 49:13
  It was a decision that they should regret.
• 49:16
  And I think that the difference when I was getting into coaching
• 49:20
  was the like, there wasn't anything for me to say, like,
• 49:25
  oh, I should be a head coach at Division One level.
• 49:29
  I've never been paid to coach in college.
• 49:31
  I'm a volunteer. Yeah.
• 49:33
  This is a cross country only program that's, you know, at the
• 49:35
  bottom of the region right now. And it's part time.
• 49:38
  And there's a lot of reasons that this would be an entry
• 49:40
  level job. But at the same time, like when
• 49:42
  I did end up getting it to Sienna, like I was the youngest
• 49:45
  Division One head coach in the nation.
• 49:47
  So like I don't there was just AI think an honesty or like just
• 49:51
  a this is the reality. Like I don't I should be just
• 49:54
  getting like a an assistant assistant job and being happy
• 49:58
  that I'm making some money and then go from there.
• 50:01
  And the fact that I even had an opportunity to interview for
• 50:04
  head coaching job, I felt was probably like a step or two down
• 50:08
  the road. So just continuing to shoot my
• 50:10
  shot for whatever that opportunity was felt like the
• 50:15
  right move and just call back and say, hey, like, I'm still
• 50:18
  interested. I, I, you, you have no business
• 50:20
  hiring me. I don't know why you called me
• 50:22
  the first time, but I'm still interested.
• 50:24
  And you know, I guess something obviously connected where, where
• 50:27
  I got the job the second time. But yeah, I, I definitely live
• 50:30
  on both sides of that spectrum. But I, I think this situation
• 50:33
  was just the reality was I was way under experience.
• 50:36
  I was young. I just needed something.
• 50:38
  And maybe being a head coach at the Division One level wasn't
• 50:41
  the thing I thought I I earned yet, you know.
• 50:44
  Yeah, I struggle with it because now at this age and stage, you
• 50:48
  know what, I what I really counsel when I hear if you were
• 50:51
  saying I was going to make them pay.
• 50:52
  And like when you talk about when you're a kid, I'm going to
• 50:54
  make all those other programs pay.
• 50:56
  And I think like, John, look at your life today, like if you're
• 50:59
  happy, if you're truly happy with your life today, well,
• 51:01
  thank God Sienna didn't get you out of high school.
• 51:04
  And then whatever other schools, because you wouldn't have landed
• 51:07
  where you are today. And thank God, John, you are
• 51:10
  where you are today. If you're truly happy.
• 51:12
  Well, thank goodness they didn't hire you the first time around
• 51:15
  and they did the second time like that.
• 51:16
  The all those things led to where you are today.
• 51:20
  And so when I hear the, you know, the athlete or the likes
• 51:24
  of the actor that puts all the reject, you know, the musical
• 51:26
  artist puts up all the rejections.
• 51:28
  It's like on one hand, I think like, oh, if that's what you
• 51:31
  need to motivate yourself now I'm a little yeah, there's,
• 51:35
  there's extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, which, you know,
• 51:37
  hopefully we all know we need to be more intrinsically and that's
• 51:39
  a more extrinsic. So it's a little bit like if
• 51:41
  that's what you need, I guess. But then I'm like, but thank God
• 51:45
  they rejected you because now you're doing whatever you're
• 51:48
  doing, you're doing today, you know, and I wonder if it's
• 51:51
  really more about age and stage. So like you talked about like at
• 51:56
  18, you're like, I was, I might be paraphrasing here, so correct
• 52:00
  me where appropriate here that you felt a little jaded, just
• 52:05
  rejected that these other schools didn't give you a chance
• 52:07
  and you thought you had earned it.
• 52:08
  And it's like, well, you know, John, you were 1034.
• 52:11
  I mean, let's let's be a little a little honest here with
• 52:14
  ourselves. You know, not that that's
• 52:15
  terrible, but you know, it's 10:34.
• 52:17
  There's a lot of 1030 fours out there.
• 52:19
  What do you mean? You think you earned, you know,
• 52:22
  but that's, that is a very common 18 year old attitude.
• 52:26
  Like I, it's hard for me to be like, wow, 18 year olds, you're
• 52:29
  impulsive and don't understand the whole, you know, the whole
• 52:32
  world what's going on. Like that's what every 18 year
• 52:35
  old you know? I think there's an older, I
• 52:40
  think there's an element there too where like, and I don't know
• 52:44
  if I knew this at the time and maybe it's just hindsight that I
• 52:47
  can say this. But also it's like to be a good
• 52:50
  athlete, you kind of have to make a story for yourself.
• 52:54
  Like you have to like convince yourself of some things live in
• 52:58
  a place that maybe isn't quite 100% real.
• 53:02
  Like whether it's the confidence you have to win something.
• 53:05
  Like you got to imagine anybody on an Olympic final or anybody
• 53:10
  in an NCAA final, like they've convinced themselves that
• 53:14
  they're good enough to win or good enough to do something
• 53:17
  that's like a plus plus day level, you know, and, and maybe
• 53:21
  there's a realistic version of that in the back of their head.
• 53:23
  But like good athletes figure out a way to make the story
• 53:26
  apply to them. And I think, you know, that was
• 53:30
  a big part of of my narrative too.
• 53:33
  It was like I knew that I wasn't good, but I knew that people
• 53:36
  brushed me off and that they could have seen more of my story
• 53:39
  or whatever. So I sort of lived in that.
• 53:41
  Like I got to build a story that gives me some purpose, that
• 53:46
  gives me some passion that that pushes me forward in different
• 53:49
  ways. And you know, whether I can say
• 53:52
  that a little clearer now than I I could have in college.
• 53:54
  Like I understood I wasn't very good, but I definitely lived a
• 53:58
  lot of those days, like in that idea of like I'm on a mission to
• 54:01
  prove people wrong because you know, the the mean satisfy the
• 54:05
  ends in that in that way, I guess.
• 54:07
  I think it's a great, that's a really great point.
• 54:10
  It reminds me, we learned, and I do remember this one because it
• 54:13
  was Cameron Babb, the head coach of Washburn University.
• 54:15
  He was talking about when he was an athlete, he had this coach
• 54:20
  that he was, he was like athlete and he had this throws coach
• 54:23
  that they didn't, they just didn't.
• 54:25
  There was friction for, for whatever, you know, many
• 54:27
  reasons. And then he tells, you know, as
• 54:29
  he's continuing on his journey, talks about when he becomes a
• 54:32
  coach, he sits down with this coach at USTFCCCA, this throws
• 54:35
  coach and was talking about, well, you know, now he's a
• 54:37
  coach. He's like, well, how do you work
• 54:39
  with spinners and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.
• 54:40
  And he's like, oh man, she helped me out tremendously.
• 54:42
  And then he drops this little nugget and goes it, it was kind
• 54:44
  of funny because that's who the coach was when I was an
• 54:46
  undergrad that I had friction and I was like, wait a minute,
• 54:50
  how interesting as an athlete you had friction, but when
• 54:52
  you're a coach and I was like, oh, maybe this is kind of where
• 54:55
  we kind of learned together here in the podcast.
• 54:57
  It was like, oh, you know, as an athlete, athlete is a very
• 55:01
  selfish endeavor. Like when coach tells you what
• 55:04
  to do, you're taking it inside and OK, well, how's that going
• 55:06
  to make me a better 5K person? Whatever.
• 55:08
  Steeplechaser. By the way, I always have to say
• 55:10
  steeplechase is my favorite event in the whole world.
• 55:13
  That's where the distance on the track should stop, though.
• 55:15
  Age steeple we're done 5K10K keep that on the roads and cross
• 55:21
  country. I know I just made every
• 55:22
  distance coach, including yourself John upset, but I love
• 55:26
  the I mean the steeple is Primo love love love that event
• 55:30
  anyway. I just always said whenever
• 55:31
  someone says steeple, I was like I got it.
• 55:32
  I'm going to tell you my opinion athlete athlete so selfish coach
• 55:37
  tells you what to do you're internalizing and how does that
• 55:40
  going to make me a better athlete when you're a coach,
• 55:42
  it's a very unselfish role. It's oh, when I learn something,
• 55:45
  well, how do I digest that in push it out towards my athlete
• 55:49
  to help them to to be better? And I wonder if there's a an add
• 55:53
  on piece now of, oh, when you're an athlete, you've got to live
• 55:56
  in your own sometimes fantasy world to become better.
• 56:01
  Where when you get out of that and now, because you'd said it
• 56:04
  about reality set in, you know, and that's like, oh, well, now I
• 56:07
  live in reality. Reality creates paychecks.
• 56:09
  OK, that's a whole different world.
• 56:11
  And that's a great little like asterisk addition to that, you
• 56:14
  know, athlete, selfish coach, unselfish athlete needs to live
• 56:18
  in some form. You know, there's different
• 56:20
  levels of fantasy worlds, but maybe there is some form of
• 56:23
  fantasy world that needs to live there, which could be that chip
• 56:25
  on the shoulder for the rejections that that's that is a
• 56:27
  fantasy world because we get rejected every day, by the way,
• 56:30
  for for a lot of different things, right.
• 56:32
  So that it really is reality. That's a great.
• 56:34
  That's a great add on, John, really good.
• 56:36
  Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, I, I think I still, I still live like
• 56:40
  that in different ways, you know, like I, I still view, you
• 56:44
  know, at the end of the day, like, and I'm skipping forward
• 56:47
  and skipping around a little bit on the timeline.
• 56:48
  But like everything that I feel like I've done has been sort of
• 56:51
  a developmental thing. I've never really, I've never
• 56:55
  gone into a place that was like ready to go put together and I
• 56:59
  just had to keep the car on the road, whether it was high
• 57:03
  school, whether it was, you know, my college experience, you
• 57:07
  know, the high school coaching I did and Sienna and, and now
• 57:09
  Brown, it's, it's always been building something.
• 57:11
  And so I, I definitely lean into that idea of like, we're going
• 57:16
  to build this. People aren't going to give us
• 57:18
  the respect or we haven't earned the respect yet.
• 57:21
  And we're going to show people that we're better or we're going
• 57:24
  to prove them wrong or we're going to, you know, build this
• 57:26
  thing that maybe people say you can't do there.
• 57:29
  You can't, you know, you can't turn these athletes into
• 57:32
  conference champions or you can't make that program better.
• 57:34
  It was doomed to be at the bottom of the region, you know,
• 57:37
  So I still sort of live in that space and I feel like my, my
• 57:40
  narratives throughout the stops and my coaching have definitely
• 57:42
  played that side out. But you're right, like in my
• 57:45
  day-to-day, I'm not trying to prove something to my athletes
• 57:49
  like I'm, you know, I, you're right.
• 57:51
  I'm trying to give as much as I can to them, but I, I definitely
• 57:55
  connect really well. I won't say better because I've
• 57:58
  learned to, you know, styles matter, but I connect really
• 58:02
  well naturally and natively to those people that feel like
• 58:05
  they've got a chip on their shoulder, you know, and those
• 58:07
  athletes definitely live in my, my natural world.
• 58:11
  It it's a fine line you have to live in right as a coach.
• 58:14
  Like I think about, I was listening to one of the podcasts
• 58:17
  I listen to is hey dude, what's up man?
• 58:19
  It's a good friend of mine, Wendell Mcraven and his former
• 58:22
  athlete Julie Abel. So if you if you like pocket,
• 58:24
  you got to go listen to it's great.
• 58:25
  They do a great job. We shared their first episode as
• 58:28
  a bonus episode here in season 5 and we're actually got another
• 58:32
  one coming up. They did an amazing job about
• 58:34
  the emotional water bottle that I thought was fantastic.
• 58:37
  So we're going to have that as bonus material here soon as
• 58:39
  well. But Wendell went to North
• 58:42
  Central College up in here in Naperville, IL, and he said they
• 58:46
  won something like 30 out of 32 conference championships or
• 58:49
  something like that. And, you know, 15 or so, I don't
• 58:52
  remember what it was. We just so much success, right?
• 58:55
  And I started thinking as like, you know, it's, it's hard for
• 58:58
  sure to build up. You mentioned Sienna when he got
• 59:02
  there, you know, last in regions or something like that.
• 59:04
  You know, they're not not a very good team.
• 59:06
  It's hard to take a team, you know, bottom of your conference
• 59:09
  and move it to the top and and win it or if you get that far
• 59:12
  that that's hard, no questions asked.
• 59:15
  I wonder, and I wonder because I've never been involved in a
• 59:17
  program like this. If you have won, I'm sure there
• 59:22
  had to be some streaks, the math maths out at North Central that
• 59:26
  they had won, you know, 1516 conference championships in a
• 59:30
  row. How do you keep the kid?
• 59:32
  We're talking about kids here, 18 to 22 year olds in this
• 59:35
  example. How do you keep the kids
• 59:37
  motivated to win the 17th? And I know it's like, oh, well,
• 59:41
  they're not they they didn't win 17.
• 59:42
  It's like, well, that's correct. But they all won one or two or
• 59:45
  three up to this. So and they know what, what
• 59:48
  tailed them. They know they won the other 10
• 59:50
  as a how do you keep them motivated to to come to practice
• 59:53
  every day, to work hard every day to do all the things that
• 59:55
  you have to do to win the the 16th or 7th?
• 59:57
  You know, the next one that is also hard.
• 1:00:02
  I think about McDonnell at Arkansas when they were winning
• 1:00:05
  all those titles, and it's like. How did you a bunch of 18 and 22
• 1:00:09
  year olds that could easily think, oh, coach, we're good.
• 1:00:13
  We just got to show up and we'll win.
• 1:00:15
  It's like, well, that's not that's not true there.
• 1:00:16
  There's so many good people. So you have to keep them
• 1:00:18
  motivated. That is hard as well.
• 1:00:22
  And so you may have to create this fantasy land.
• 1:00:27
  You know, there's probably a better term to it, but of like,
• 1:00:29
  hey, they're coming for us. Hey, they don't respect you.
• 1:00:31
  It's like we've won 17 in a row. I'm pretty sure they respect
• 1:00:33
  you. You know all these things that
• 1:00:34
  like keep the troops and Adam and motivated to to work hard
• 1:00:39
  and hurt at practice to to go win the next one.
• 1:00:41
  That's that seems hard, man. I, I don't know, that's a
• 1:00:44
  special. I've never been involved in that
• 1:00:48
  specifically. So I and I definitely err
• 1:00:51
  towards the the other side and in my experience lives there.
• 1:00:54
  But in my time at Siena, we were in the the Metro Atlantic and
• 1:00:58
  that's where Iona College is. I guess they're Iona University
• 1:01:03
  now, but they we know when I got there they had like the longest
• 1:01:08
  streak of call of top 10s at NCAA's going while I was there.
• 1:01:12
  They are still currently on like a 27 or 28 year men's Mac
• 1:01:18
  championship streak. And so I've seen that pretty up
• 1:01:23
  close and personal and it's really interesting and really
• 1:01:25
  neat to see how, you know what it was Mick at first and then
• 1:01:30
  Ricardo and now Joe, how they instill the value of Mac
• 1:01:35
  championships into the program and how, you know, and I've seen
• 1:01:38
  it like I've seen there's varying degrees.
• 1:01:39
  You know, you can tell some, some guys individually don't
• 1:01:42
  quite get it, but they're there and they're doing their job.
• 1:01:45
  And then some guys really believe in in that idea that
• 1:01:47
  it's important. And the thing that's that was
• 1:01:51
  always really impressive to me about the Ayanna tradition was
• 1:01:55
  they, it was very clear that as a program that they valued the,
• 1:01:59
  the opportunity to win. And it was really even some of
• 1:02:01
  the kids that maybe they didn't take it quite as seriously.
• 1:02:04
  You know, they, they checked the box for the team.
• 1:02:07
  They always felt, it always felt like from the outside that they
• 1:02:10
  respected the conference so much, even though they were
• 1:02:13
  dominating every year. And I always really respected
• 1:02:17
  the the coaches and the program at Iona for that, because it's
• 1:02:21
  really hard for a team that's trying to come through a
• 1:02:23
  conference and working really hard to beat anybody to like
• 1:02:26
  tell a story that this is important when another team
• 1:02:29
  shows up and makes it feel like it's not important to them, you
• 1:02:35
  know, So I, I always really respected them for a lot of
• 1:02:37
  reasons, and that was one of them.
• 1:02:38
  But we saw that really, really up close and personal.
• 1:02:41
  Like there were times when they were just going to win.
• 1:02:43
  You know, it wasn't even they, they were mad.
• 1:02:46
  The few times that we broke them up and ruined their 15 points,
• 1:02:49
  you know, they were mad, you know, and but that's like a
• 1:02:53
  testament to to Joe and, and the the coaches there to say like,
• 1:02:57
  you know, maybe we want to win. Maybe we want to put perfect 15
• 1:03:01
  points up. And you, you know, there's a
• 1:03:03
  there's an importance on more than just winning and going
• 1:03:06
  home. It's like, let's do this in a
• 1:03:08
  certain way. So yeah, I, like I said, never
• 1:03:11
  lived it day-to-day, but I've seen some, some of those moments
• 1:03:15
  and and I don't know, yeah, I just don't know if if how it is,
• 1:03:20
  you know, how it would connect to me.
• 1:03:22
  I, I've always chosen development and progress and,
• 1:03:26
  and I really enjoy that, but it's uniquely hard to, you know,
• 1:03:30
  and we talked about that on the recruiting trail too, is, you
• 1:03:32
  know, because I sell the story of we're going to build
• 1:03:35
  something and, and, you know, we're, we're making a new thing,
• 1:03:40
  but we also contrast it with like, oh, you're looking at this
• 1:03:43
  other school that's very good and they've been very good.
• 1:03:45
  And I want to make sure you understand that like both those
• 1:03:48
  things will be hard, but you're going to be asked to do
• 1:03:50
  something very different at both schools.
• 1:03:51
  You know, continuing a tradition versus building something.
• 1:03:55
  It has to appeal to you. That has to be a delineator in
• 1:03:58
  your, in your experience. Like if you show up to, to your
• 1:04:02
  last three schools and they all have very different, you know,
• 1:04:06
  competitive arcs right now, then you, where are you at?
• 1:04:08
  Like you're really not. You didn't make a decision.
• 1:04:10
  You, you have 3 completely different experiences in front
• 1:04:13
  of you. How are you going to make a
• 1:04:14
  choice on a college that way? You know so.
• 1:04:17
  Yeah, that makes sense that that gets into something we've
• 1:04:19
  discussed before that and it's easy for us as coaches to not
• 1:04:24
  believe this, but not every recruit is your recruit.
• 1:04:28
  And that isn't take away the athletics like what their PR is.
• 1:04:31
  I'm talking about school size, school location, program.
• 1:04:35
  To your point, where where are you?
• 1:04:36
  Are you the are you the Iona or are you the underdog?
• 1:04:39
  And you know, there's a kid that fits in the underdog team better
• 1:04:42
  than they do the the Iona example and vice versa, by the
• 1:04:46
  way as as well. So it's it's cool that you've
• 1:04:48
  like learned that in in a pretty early time because like I said,
• 1:04:52
  there's a lot of coaches that, you know, I'm a recruiting
• 1:04:54
  machine. I can sign anybody anywhere.
• 1:04:55
  It doesn't matter where I work. It's like it's not it's really
• 1:04:58
  early too, because every school's a little different.
• 1:05:00
  Let's work our way up to today with Brown.
• 1:05:03
  Talk to me. So you were 10 years at Siena.
• 1:05:07
  Tell me what you learned and how that go, how that went, and why
• 1:05:11
  at the 10th year was there a impetus to change?
• 1:05:15
  Yeah, yeah. Like I like I said, when I got
• 1:05:18
  to Sienna, it was cross country only the men and the women were
• 1:05:23
  both in the last couple of teams in the region.
• 1:05:25
  There was a huge building, you know, sort of project.
• 1:05:29
  And so I took that on a few years in.
• 1:05:33
  I worked with our administration to add track and field.
• 1:05:35
  So we added men's, women's indoor and outdoor, which was
• 1:05:40
  really, I would, I would say I had an element that was
• 1:05:43
  self-serving because it made me full time.
• 1:05:46
  So I always say like my first job was seeing a cross country.
• 1:05:49
  My second job was seeing a cross country and track and I didn't
• 1:05:54
  have to leave luckily, But I got that promotion, I got that new
• 1:05:57
  job and we kept building that gave us an opportunity to
• 1:06:02
  recruit on a little bit higher level gave obviously
• 1:06:06
  developmentally, you know, you're racing at a better level
• 1:06:08
  year round, got some recruits that you know, we're
• 1:06:14
  contributing at the conference level and and you know, we're
• 1:06:17
  winning conference titles for the first time.
• 1:06:18
  And so we we just kept growing through there and the cross
• 1:06:23
  country program was, you know, up near the top of the league.
• 1:06:26
  Now we were getting second, third on both sides
• 1:06:29
  consistently. I own it was still Iona.
• 1:06:32
  So that was the the big impediment to winning.
• 1:06:36
  And, you know, and then then the program grew enough where I was
• 1:06:40
  able to get a full time assistant and, you know, felt
• 1:06:43
  like we were really off and running for, you know, the the
• 1:06:47
  next steps of what we wanted. And yeah, had some athletes
• 1:06:51
  making NCAA's. You know, my last couple years
• 1:06:54
  there, we we had some really great, really great teams that
• 1:06:57
  were led by athletes that were on the national stage.
• 1:06:59
  You know, we talked about development.
• 1:07:01
  I had, I had an athlete, Brandon Olden, who just finished up his
• 1:07:04
  eligibility at Tennessee and now he's coaching in Eastern
• 1:07:07
  Kentucky with another one of my alumni.
• 1:07:10
  So he, he came in, he was, his school was cross country only
• 1:07:15
  they didn't have track. He was up from like the Lake
• 1:07:18
  George area in the Adirondack Mountains.
• 1:07:21
  And I, I think I gave him a little bit of money to come in.
• 1:07:24
  But you know, we're talking like books level scholarship and he
• 1:07:28
  had never broken 16. You know, he was a 430 guy that
• 1:07:32
  couple of track races he had run and you know, he turned into a
• 1:07:35
  he for a, for a Sienna for me. He was a 1345 guy in his senior
• 1:07:42
  year at Siena. He he was a couple spots away
• 1:07:44
  from making the final round outdoors.
• 1:07:47
  He made the first round about 500 meters to go.
• 1:07:51
  He was in a great spot and just didn't quite have the gear that
• 1:07:53
  a couple other guys had, but you know, was in it all the way.
• 1:07:56
  And, you know, he was, he was off to Tennessee last year and
• 1:08:02
  had a great year with them and, and made some big strides with
• 1:08:04
  them too. So, you know, we had athletes
• 1:08:06
  like that that were right at the top of the, you know, anybody's
• 1:08:11
  roster basically. You know, I had a woman who made
• 1:08:13
  the NCAA meet that year and I had another woman who's
• 1:08:16
  finishing up our eligibility at Loyola, who is another great
• 1:08:19
  development story. And it felt like that was like
• 1:08:24
  the the the narrative and the level that we could continue to
• 1:08:28
  build on. And I was really exciting and
• 1:08:31
  feeling like, OK, you know, we've got these this exposure to
• 1:08:34
  this level now. What can we recruit?
• 1:08:36
  Like can we recruit better and, and can we keep up in the level
• 1:08:39
  and, and, you know, so I, I was really, you know, excited for
• 1:08:44
  what we had built there and, and how that the arc of the program
• 1:08:47
  and then the athletes as within the program we're going and I
• 1:08:53
  yeah, I, I there's a 1,000,000 reasons why you you end up
• 1:08:57
  making a decision like leaving a lot of it was personal stuff.
• 1:09:02
  I I've moved to back basically home.
• 1:09:05
  I moved back to the Albany area when I was young and, you know,
• 1:09:09
  lived with parents and I had family around.
• 1:09:11
  And by the time 10 years had gone by, both my parents were no
• 1:09:16
  longer in the area. So it was like one of those
• 1:09:19
  things like coming home and, and being with family and then, OK,
• 1:09:22
  like people's lives move on. And there's not that tie.
• 1:09:26
  There wasn't that like grounding of like, this is where my rest
• 1:09:28
  of my family is. You know, I had felt like I had
• 1:09:32
  built a lot. I had great athletes at the top
• 1:09:36
  of the game in our league and, and making nationals.
• 1:09:38
  And I'm always drawn to that development.
• 1:09:42
  I'm always drawn to the, you know, building.
• 1:09:44
  And not to say that I didn't think we could continue to
• 1:09:46
  build. I think that and and I think
• 1:09:48
  they still can. I'm I'm a huge fan of Sienna was
• 1:09:51
  the team I rooted for when I was a kid for basketball.
• 1:09:53
  And I'm still a huge Sienna fan and I still think that there's a
• 1:09:56
  lot ahead of them. But it also felt like, OK, I had
• 1:10:00
  like three of the best four or five athletes I've coached in 10
• 1:10:03
  years all leaving in the same year.
• 1:10:06
  You know, should I think about what opportunities
• 1:10:09
  professionally this gave me, right?
• 1:10:11
  Like, and nothing was like, I have to leave.
• 1:10:16
  Like I'm going to go look for jobs.
• 1:10:18
  It was more of just like, OK, this is a chapter change and
• 1:10:21
  I've got to continue to replace high level athletes and see what
• 1:10:26
  what we're going to do. But also maybe this is a you
• 1:10:29
  know, this feels as things are coming to me, feels like a
• 1:10:32
  different place in my life. And I I didn't apply for the
• 1:10:38
  brown job intentionally didn't see it somewhere and go and
• 1:10:42
  reach out at you know, I had some.
• 1:10:44
  I have a good group of friends that live in the Providence area
• 1:10:48
  that in different ways were connected with the program and
• 1:10:50
  let me know that there was an opening and put in a word for
• 1:10:53
  me. And the next thing you know,
• 1:10:55
  I'm, you know, on the phone talking with with Coach Ken, our
• 1:10:58
  director, and sort of was like, oh, how did I get here?
• 1:11:01
  You know, like sitting down with, you know, at one point
• 1:11:04
  with an offer on my on my lap, like, man, like, OK, I like have
• 1:11:09
  a big life decision to make after feeling like I was doing a
• 1:11:12
  lot of things at Sienna that we're really sustainable.
• 1:11:15
  But you know, now I'm here and what do I do and thought about
• 1:11:20
  it, you know, and like I said, the laundry list of pros and
• 1:11:23
  cons started going and it just seemed like it was a good time
• 1:11:27
  to, to make a change and both personally and professionally
• 1:11:32
  and definitely not, you know, where my heart was like it was a
• 1:11:37
  really, really tough decision. And you know, I, I won't, I
• 1:11:42
  don't like hide that from people.
• 1:11:43
  I think people don't talk about that enough.
• 1:11:45
  But like, it was a really, really emotional couple weeks.
• 1:11:48
  And I think people will say like they'll put a face on and say
• 1:11:54
  like, I'm really excited to be at a new job.
• 1:11:56
  And it's, and I was, I certainly was excited for the opportunity.
• 1:11:59
  I wouldn't have taken it if I didn't think it was something
• 1:12:01
  that meant something. But when I left and packed my
• 1:12:05
  stuff and, and left that program, you know, it was really
• 1:12:08
  sad. Like I was, I was really
• 1:12:10
  heartbroken. I was doing something that felt
• 1:12:13
  right, but I was leaving something that felt right, you
• 1:12:15
  know, and we can't do both. So, yeah, I, I think I
• 1:12:21
  ultimately did a thing that felt very selfish in a, in, as you
• 1:12:24
  really put it, put it pretty well earlier in a field that
• 1:12:28
  you're naturally supposed to be unselfish.
• 1:12:31
  And, you know, within a few weeks of being here in
• 1:12:35
  Providence, like was getting really excited and, you know,
• 1:12:37
  got my feet planted and saw all the good that I thought could
• 1:12:41
  come of the program and, and started seeing the details flesh
• 1:12:43
  out and put my roots down and, and now it really feels like
• 1:12:47
  home and I'm really excited about the future here.
• 1:12:49
  But it's, you know, like I said, I don't think people talk enough
• 1:12:52
  about how tough it can be to do something that you feel is
• 1:12:56
  really right for you, but, you know, has an impact on the
• 1:12:59
  people that you you love and care about in a program that,
• 1:13:01
  you know, I spent 10 years building and put a lot of my
• 1:13:04
  heart and soul and made a lot of sacrifices for.
• 1:13:06
  So, you know, it's, it's really fun.
• 1:13:09
  I will say to be on the other side now because I can just be a
• 1:13:13
  fan. Like I can just enjoy, like the
• 1:13:16
  the athletes at Sienna are running well and, and luckily my
• 1:13:19
  assistant that was there for a long time with me is still an
• 1:13:22
  assistant there. So I can root for him.
• 1:13:25
  And, and the head coach was somebody who I had known really
• 1:13:28
  well, Liz de Ball and you know, we she was somebody who I
• 1:13:34
  recommended should apply for that job.
• 1:13:36
  And so I can root for their success because they're people
• 1:13:39
  that that I really want to see do well.
• 1:13:41
  And I can root for the kids still and and not the the stress
• 1:13:45
  of having, you know, that program be successful is off my
• 1:13:48
  plate. So I can just be a fan now.
• 1:13:50
  I would say I have my own stress now, but it's from that side of
• 1:13:53
  it. It is.
• 1:13:54
  It's fun to be back to being a fan of of Sienna.
• 1:13:57
  Yeah, Yeah. It's interesting job changes and
• 1:14:02
  maybe you hit the nail on the head again here, John.
• 1:14:06
  It's one of the few professions that I can think of that when we
• 1:14:09
  change jobs, it is like it's typically a pretty life jarring
• 1:14:16
  occurrence when I don't even want to put that in the in the
• 1:14:25
  universe when a a CEO, like they didn't the CEO of Panera just
• 1:14:32
  become the CEO of Starbucks or something?
• 1:14:33
  I don't know. Yeah.
• 1:14:35
  There's no like, you know, Panera, like, oh, Joe's leaving.
• 1:14:40
  Oh my God, what are we all going to do?
• 1:14:42
  Who's going to come in? It's like, oh man,
• 1:14:43
  congratulations, man, it sucked. I love to work in with you,
• 1:14:46
  John. And maybe there's some tears
• 1:14:47
  shed, but it's like, oh, well, they'll, they'll be the next
• 1:14:49
  CEO. We'll come in and we'll be fine
• 1:14:51
  with coaching and coaches. It's like, oh, these are my kids
• 1:14:55
  And, and like, so maybe hit the nail on head because it's a,
• 1:14:57
  it's a very unselfish pursuit of coaching.
• 1:14:59
  It's like, oh, I poured into these kids.
• 1:15:01
  I made promises to these kids and their families, and it's
• 1:15:05
  hard to see that. Oh, well, there's another group
• 1:15:08
  of kids on the other side, in your case, the Brown kids, the
• 1:15:12
  kids at Brown University. That sounded terrible.
• 1:15:14
  I think actually the kids at Brown University and I, it makes
• 1:15:18
  me remember, you know, our number one episode ever by a
• 1:15:20
  mile is a Boo Scheck Schneider, which he deserves.
• 1:15:23
  That's my mentor when I coach. So I love that he's, you know #1
• 1:15:26
  by a mile. And he said something in our
• 1:15:29
  interview a couple years ago that really like, oh, like, I
• 1:15:34
  can't believe you said that part out loud.
• 1:15:36
  Boo. And we were talking about
• 1:15:38
  coaches and our pay and how we don't get paid enough.
• 1:15:41
  And we talked about that earlier.
• 1:15:43
  And, you know, we put a lot of things on the back burner which
• 1:15:46
  we shouldn't be doing. Guys and gals like our financial
• 1:15:50
  security, our retirement security, our personal
• 1:15:53
  relationship security. We put those a lot of those
• 1:15:56
  things on the back burner until it's too late.
• 1:15:58
  And so he was talking about how coaches should, you know, you're
• 1:16:04
  able to move up in the pay scale easier when you're younger
• 1:16:08
  because you can move before you get to to, you know, some harder
• 1:16:11
  decisions when you're a little bit older, maybe you have a
• 1:16:14
  family, etcetera for those roots can get a hold of you.
• 1:16:18
  And so he said, you know, you should because if a coach can
• 1:16:21
  make $1000 more, go to that next place that's going to build up
• 1:16:25
  in your retirement side of it, but also build up your salary
• 1:16:28
  requirements for the next position.
• 1:16:30
  And then he said that this is the part where I was like, oh,
• 1:16:32
  Boo, I don't know if you're supposed to say that part out
• 1:16:34
  loud. He said, you know, sometimes we
• 1:16:36
  don't leave because we think we and we should be thinking like
• 1:16:39
  we're the best, best coach for these kids.
• 1:16:42
  And he goes, well, if you truly believe that, well, what maybe
• 1:16:46
  what's best for those kids that you do leave?
• 1:16:48
  So the another coach who's better for them shows up and I
• 1:16:51
  was like, Oh, that's the ego part.
• 1:16:52
  You can't you're the best person for those kids.
• 1:16:54
  What are you talking about? There's not the better person
• 1:16:56
  for those kids. And it was just like, oh man,
• 1:16:58
  that's a hard thing to to do and say.
• 1:17:01
  And I was like, well, I appreciate Boo said it not not
• 1:17:03
  me. So so I appreciate that.
• 1:17:05
  Hey, before we get to brown, you know, something you did uniquely
• 1:17:07
  that I'd love to celebrate. You know, we it's easy for
• 1:17:11
  headlines and it's right for these headlines to go when we
• 1:17:14
  have programs that schools that drop programs.
• 1:17:18
  You know, we've had several guests, A lot of this happened
• 1:17:21
  during COVID time, but we had several guests on here who were
• 1:17:24
  fighting to save their universities.
• 1:17:25
  We had Clayton Murphy when Akron was doing their thing.
• 1:17:29
  We had Russell Dinkins who was a great advocate for Clemson and
• 1:17:33
  other places. I think Brown, you guys went
• 1:17:36
  through it as well, probably preview, I assume.
• 1:17:39
  So Brown had was dropping programs, UConn was trying to
• 1:17:46
  drop their program. We had Andrew Dubs on and it's
• 1:17:49
  right for us to point those out and to fight those because
• 1:17:51
  they're wrong. We rarely celebrate the other
• 1:17:55
  side that there are schools and universities that are adding
• 1:17:58
  programs. You added men's and women's
• 1:18:02
  indoor and outdoor. I mean, that's the the perfecta.
• 1:18:05
  That's all for right. Added that What what did that
• 1:18:09
  teach you in regards to it's it's one thing to have if you
• 1:18:12
  have a cross country only program, that's hard.
• 1:18:14
  Don't hear me saying that's easy when you add track and field,
• 1:18:17
  because not only your numbers are going up.
• 1:18:19
  Well, now you talk about facilities, whether you have one
• 1:18:21
  or borrow one equipment, many different disciplines.
• 1:18:24
  So hopefully you're getting coaching support.
• 1:18:26
  How was that process? Because that seems like, I mean,
• 1:18:29
  just a gigantic process to go from like, hey, I've got, you
• 1:18:32
  know, 40 kids, 20 guys, 20 gals on the cross country team.
• 1:18:35
  And we run. We run far to wait a minute, I
• 1:18:38
  got a javelin throw where I got a sprinter.
• 1:18:40
  I got whatever, you know, talk to us about that because I love
• 1:18:43
  that. Sienna added track and field.
• 1:18:45
  That's huge. We need more of that.
• 1:18:46
  Let's celebrate this. Yeah.
• 1:18:48
  Yeah, I mean, the blueprint was not my original idea.
• 1:18:53
  We had a school in our conference knishes where their
• 1:18:57
  head coach, Nate Huckle, had gone through the process to add
• 1:19:01
  track and field for them. And so we sort of saw that.
• 1:19:06
  And I said, you know, I, I think those principles apply.
• 1:19:08
  The unique thing was, is, is we were, you know, we're in upstate
• 1:19:12
  New York, It's cold climate. We don't have a track on campus.
• 1:19:15
  There's actually only two on campus tracks.
• 1:19:18
  Well, there there was. Now that there's a few extra
• 1:19:20
  schools, I'm not sure, but in the Metro Atlantic, there
• 1:19:22
  historically only been two on campus tracks.
• 1:19:26
  And so we, we added it with the premise that it was going to be
• 1:19:30
  a distance only track program. We weren't going to add, we were
• 1:19:34
  going to add kids to the roster to expand the width of, of
• 1:19:38
  enrollment opportunity. We used it as an enrollment
• 1:19:41
  driver. That philosophy actually spread
• 1:19:43
  out into the whole department. RAD sort of saw the success of
• 1:19:46
  the track project and then went out to like swim and what were
• 1:19:53
  some of the other ones? Softball, baseball.
• 1:19:57
  There was one or two more and basically said like, Hey, let's
• 1:19:59
  expand your roster by a few spots and we'll, we'll pivot
• 1:20:03
  those games in the in the university, as you know, well,
• 1:20:07
  we're recruiting these kids and now admissions and the school
• 1:20:09
  doesn't have to and it's an enrollment driver and.
• 1:20:12
  More opportunity and within athletics brings more kids in
• 1:20:15
  and so we sort of got that from Canisius and then used it for
• 1:20:19
  our program, kept our our cross country roster as our track
• 1:20:22
  roster focused on the 800 meters and up and had a really narrow
• 1:20:27
  focus on what we want to be successful in.
• 1:20:29
  We wanted to be a successful team in the fall and we wanted
• 1:20:32
  to have successful individuals at the conference level in in
• 1:20:35
  the winter and spring. And yeah, and I think that that
• 1:20:40
  was really sustainable. I think it was something that we
• 1:20:44
  were not going to be able to tackle If we took on field
• 1:20:46
  events, we weren't going to have the staff for that.
• 1:20:48
  We weren't going to have this roster space.
• 1:20:50
  We're at non football school. So our biggest roster was cross
• 1:20:54
  country and we didn't have, you know, we don't have like a
• 1:20:58
  weight room with 30 racks or a training room with 50 beds.
• 1:21:01
  We we have, you know, basketball, soccer, lacrosse
• 1:21:05
  sized facilities. So that was a big, you know, a
• 1:21:09
  big aspect of that project and it worked out well.
• 1:21:12
  And we've seen that I've had some coaches reach out to me
• 1:21:16
  that and they've replicated it at their schools and tried that,
• 1:21:18
  you know, adding track in that way.
• 1:21:21
  And I think it's really smart. You know, you look around some
• 1:21:23
  of the bigger programs and some of the bigger conferences and
• 1:21:26
  you see schools mean the way that makes sense for them.
• 1:21:29
  You, you, you see, you know, NAU is really good across country
• 1:21:33
  and they've, you know, they've, they've got a full roster of,
• 1:21:37
  you know, of athletes, but they, they've leaned in the cross
• 1:21:39
  country and they've leaned in this, you know, they get a
• 1:21:41
  couple of, you know, good field events or they get a, you know,
• 1:21:43
  some good throwers and they, they're leaning into spaces that
• 1:21:46
  make sense for their environment.
• 1:21:48
  You know, there's you're not going to find a a huge distance
• 1:21:52
  powerhouse, you know, in in the Deep South, you know, every
• 1:21:57
  around every corner like you are in the northeast, you know, so,
• 1:22:00
  or the West Coast or the mountain region.
• 1:22:02
  So I think it's sometimes people get really frustrated that
• 1:22:07
  schools don't sponsor everything and that this isn't this
• 1:22:10
  comprehensive sport that looks the same everywhere.
• 1:22:14
  But I really, I really appreciate the nuance to that
• 1:22:16
  and our school, it made sense to do it that way with the
• 1:22:20
  restrictions we had. The choice wasn't track and
• 1:22:23
  field as we see it at the Olympics or track and field as a
• 1:22:27
  distance program. It was track and field as a
• 1:22:28
  distance program or no track and field.
• 1:22:30
  So, you know, and I think that that's that's often not
• 1:22:34
  appreciated by, you know, people from the outside that just
• 1:22:37
  schools don't have the resources to carry 100 plus kids and they
• 1:22:42
  don't have the facilities to house those kids.
• 1:22:44
  And, and if we can get track and field to be presented as a, a
• 1:22:48
  throws program or a sprints program or a distance program
• 1:22:51
  or, you know, a hurdling program, like that's what we
• 1:22:54
  should do in in we should find ways to get track into every
• 1:22:58
  community and make it make sense and make it successful.
• 1:23:01
  I think, you know, right down the road from Siena to Syracuse
• 1:23:04
  University, and they've done really, really well on the cross
• 1:23:06
  country and distance side, But they've got an amazing hurdles
• 1:23:09
  group and, you know, their coaching staff there does a
• 1:23:13
  great job with creating world level hurdlers and they
• 1:23:17
  understand that that opportunity makes sense for them.
• 1:23:20
  And and they're not trying to be, you know, a throws
• 1:23:22
  powerhouse or a sprint's powerhouse.
• 1:23:24
  They're trying to do something very specific and they've done a
• 1:23:26
  really, really good job at it. And, you know, we thought that
• 1:23:30
  was sort of the way we wanted to approach it at Sienna.
• 1:23:32
  It's just let's be good at something and not overcomplicate
• 1:23:35
  it for the situation we were in. And you know, like I said, I
• 1:23:38
  think it was really successful. And I and we've seen other
• 1:23:40
  schools step into that space too and saying like, OK, let's add
• 1:23:44
  track and field on the basis of it helps enrollment for our
• 1:23:48
  school. We can show the value.
• 1:23:50
  It's a diverse sport, you know, and it's relatively cheap.
• 1:23:54
  You know, when the NCAA pays whatever they pay per
• 1:23:57
  championship, Now you can, you can almost run a track program
• 1:24:01
  on those, those payments. So you're not asking the school
• 1:24:05
  to to put up, you know, tons and tons of money for extra
• 1:24:09
  opportunities? Yeah, you make a good point.
• 1:24:11
  You know, the way the sport is constructed today, you can do
• 1:24:15
  that. You don't have to have every
• 1:24:16
  event. I I'd love for you to have every
• 1:24:18
  event, obviously, but I think it's if the choice is, well,
• 1:24:22
  don't have a track team if you can't do it all or have a track
• 1:24:25
  team that fits to your school's identity for today, by the way,
• 1:24:30
  because 10 years from now, so you know, it might have it all,
• 1:24:32
  you know, it may change in 10 years.
• 1:24:33
  So I think I'd much rather have the choice of like, oh, OK,
• 1:24:37
  we'll have a track team that focuses on 800 or not that,
• 1:24:39
  that's fine. I'd rather have that than
• 1:24:40
  nothing. If that's the two choices.
• 1:24:43
  Did you ever, you know, kids are, are hungry to, to compete
• 1:24:48
  collegiately, right? For many reasons.
• 1:24:50
  Some of them, that's the only way they'll get to college,
• 1:24:52
  right, Is if they're doing a sport.
• 1:24:53
  Did you ever have that thrower or jumper or sprinter reach out
• 1:24:58
  and say, Hey, I see you have a track team.
• 1:24:59
  Oh, I'd love to, to join. What did you do with that?
• 1:25:02
  And then did you ever have an example where they were like,
• 1:25:04
  oh, just give me a chance. Like I, I know you have a coach.
• 1:25:07
  I'll coach myself, you know, Did you ever have that example?
• 1:25:11
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we recruiting wise, we
• 1:25:13
  would get, you know, kids who are just interested in Sienna.
• 1:25:16
  It's a good school, it's in a good area, you know, serves the
• 1:25:19
  region. And they would reach out and
• 1:25:21
  just say, Hey, this is what I do and I'm interested.
• 1:25:24
  So we would always sort of have that conversation.
• 1:25:25
  Hey, this is our focus. Seems like you're outside of our
• 1:25:28
  focus, you know, but best of luck.
• 1:25:31
  And then, yeah, we would get kids on campus that go, Hey, I
• 1:25:34
  pole vaulted or you know, hey, I I'm a sprinter and and most of
• 1:25:39
  the time we'd say, Hey, this is what we do, you know, appreciate
• 1:25:42
  your interest, but very, very rarely were they good enough
• 1:25:47
  kids to impact on our level. So it was an easier conversation
• 1:25:52
  to just say, hey, like, you know, if you're a 53 second guys
• 1:25:56
  400 runner, it we could add you to the roster, but like, you're
• 1:26:01
  not going to get to any meats because, you know, we're going
• 1:26:04
  to bring our best kids and you're not one of our best kids
• 1:26:07
  in any event. And that's it in that sense.
• 1:26:09
  So, but every once in a while I remember we had a pole vaulter
• 1:26:12
  that reached out that was really good.
• 1:26:14
  And the Mac isn't a big pole vault conference, so he could
• 1:26:18
  have scored. We didn't have mats, we didn't
• 1:26:19
  have a runway, we didn't even have a portable box.
• 1:26:22
  And he's like, I'll bring, I've got poles.
• 1:26:24
  And it was just like, that's time from those are the things I
• 1:26:29
  need to do. And you know, the whole point
• 1:26:31
  was to drive enrollment and this kids already here.
• 1:26:34
  So if we're talking about expanding our roster to help Dr.
• 1:26:38
  enrollment to the school, this this extra kid doesn't do that
• 1:26:41
  part and they don't serve our our core philosophy.
• 1:26:44
  But we would yeah, we would have kids that would definitely Hey,
• 1:26:47
  I'll do it myself. Or, you know, don't you don't
• 1:26:48
  have to coach me. I just need to get to the meats.
• 1:26:50
  And you know, you're like, that's not quite what Division
• 1:26:52
  One track and field is. So it.
• 1:26:55
  It makes me think that you became someone's chip on their
• 1:26:58
  shoulder. Like, you know what, Sienna,
• 1:27:00
  Coach Kenworthy, they wouldn't even let me.
• 1:27:02
  I don't. They don't need to buy me
• 1:27:03
  anything. I'll just show up and I'll train
• 1:27:05
  myself. Just get me to the meat.
• 1:27:06
  And it's like now they're like, I'm going to show him.
• 1:27:09
  Yeah. Hopefully.
• 1:27:10
  Hopefully. What's that saying?
• 1:27:12
  Live long enough to be the the villain in someone else's story.
• 1:27:18
  Yeah, it's like you live long enough, you're going to be the
• 1:27:21
  bad guy in someone's story. So that's just funny.
• 1:27:24
  A guy who, you know, it's not like you're picking other pole
• 1:27:26
  vaulters or sprinters. It's like, no, no boss, we, we
• 1:27:29
  don't do any of that. It's just not who we are.
• 1:27:31
  And they're going to be like, yeah, that's just funny.
• 1:27:34
  I love that that 53 second guy, you could have been like, yeah,
• 1:27:36
  you could certainly. Come on.
• 1:27:37
  Do you like the 800? Because that's where we yeah,
• 1:27:39
  there's the bottom right there, buddy.
• 1:27:41
  And at 53, you know, maybe you got something there.
• 1:27:43
  I don't know. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:27:45
  Well, talk to us about Brown because you know, Sienna being
• 1:27:49
  the majority of your coaching experience and I'm sure you know
• 1:27:53
  a lot of Northeast schools. So this may be a stereotype, but
• 1:27:55
  it's a +1. Sienna is probably a very highly
• 1:27:58
  selective, very hard to get into academic school.
• 1:28:00
  Well, now we're talking about the Ivy League, where I know
• 1:28:03
  you're highly selective, hard to get into high academics, things
• 1:28:06
  like that. It always felt like the Ivy
• 1:28:08
  League is this, it's this very unique set of schools that it's
• 1:28:14
  really amazing. When you go look at the
• 1:28:16
  conference meeting of the hubs, it's like, good God, look at
• 1:28:18
  these, these are all future CE OS and doctors and lawyer
• 1:28:21
  whatever. And they fast.
• 1:28:23
  You know, it's really amazing to me.
• 1:28:26
  How was your, I'm going to call it your immersion into Ivy
• 1:28:29
  Leagues. There's there's different
• 1:28:30
  recruiting, there's different rules.
• 1:28:32
  You know, there is no red shirting, right?
• 1:28:34
  There's no grad students. I don't, I don't think.
• 1:28:38
  Do do you take transfers? I can't remember that or not.
• 1:28:42
  We'll take, we'll take it's different school to school, but
• 1:28:44
  we'll Brown will take a transfer through 1/3 semester transfer.
• 1:28:48
  OK, so there's some limitations on trans like the transfer
• 1:28:51
  portal's probably not a big deal for you in regards to like
• 1:28:54
  you're not checking it everyday and things like that.
• 1:28:56
  So how was this learning the Ivy League and and what's unique to
• 1:29:00
  Brown in the Ivy League as well? Yeah, I, I, I had no idea, to be
• 1:29:07
  honest. But, you know, we're surrounded
• 1:29:09
  in upstate New York. I was surrounded by Ivy's.
• 1:29:11
  And we knew that, you know, they didn't offer scholarships and
• 1:29:14
  they offered supported admissions slots and, and we
• 1:29:18
  knew that they had some limitations on, you know, they
• 1:29:21
  didn't have flexibility on admissions.
• 1:29:23
  They didn't have timelines that we had and, you know, yadda,
• 1:29:26
  yadda, yadda. But I didn't know the nuances.
• 1:29:30
  You know, we lose some kids every once in a while doing Ivy
• 1:29:32
  League school and it was always just like, yeah, like why
• 1:29:36
  wouldn't you want to go to Columbia or why wouldn't you
• 1:29:39
  want to go to Cornell? If you're, you know, like that
• 1:29:42
  makes sense to me. Good luck.
• 1:29:43
  See you around. But I didn't know the detail.
• 1:29:47
  I didn't know the the depth of the rules that the league had
• 1:29:50
  specifically. And I didn't quite know the the
• 1:29:54
  rigor that the recruiting process had and the vetting and,
• 1:30:00
  and the pre read process and just how involved it is.
• 1:30:03
  And I guess, like, how committed you have to be to being at an
• 1:30:07
  Ivy League community to take those extra steps.
• 1:30:11
  And we run into that often, you know, in the recruiting trail,
• 1:30:14
  as we say, like, you're good enough, You're a good enough
• 1:30:17
  athlete, you're good enough academic profile, you're good
• 1:30:21
  enough kid, you fit into our program, you could be here.
• 1:30:24
  You could, you know, your life could change with an Ivy League
• 1:30:27
  degree. And they don't see the work they
• 1:30:32
  have to put in to get through the recruiting side.
• 1:30:34
  And it it that never becomes an option.
• 1:30:39
  We fight to get. There are kids that like, it's
• 1:30:41
  very clear that the Ivy League is a goal that these types of
• 1:30:43
  schools, the Nescax or, you know, some of the NYU's or EU
• 1:30:47
  Chicagos and those, you know, the Pomona's like that's the
• 1:30:50
  world they want to be in academically and they want to be
• 1:30:52
  great runners. So then luckily all of these
• 1:30:54
  schools are fantastic programs and that's the bubble that
• 1:30:58
  they've built. And then, but there's a lot of
• 1:31:00
  kids that we say like, you know, this, this could work for you.
• 1:31:03
  And then they see that that public school or that Power 4
• 1:31:07
  Power 5 school, just they can get them in and they can get
• 1:31:10
  them a scholarship. And it was black and white.
• 1:31:12
  It was easy and, and that seemed simple.
• 1:31:14
  And there are some really great schools academically for, you
• 1:31:18
  know, in that world too. So it's not like they're giving
• 1:31:20
  up an education, but that's a big part of I didn't quite
• 1:31:24
  understand. What's different from if I'm
• 1:31:28
  going to I applied to college out of high school, What was
• 1:31:31
  different from my process because I did not apply to the
• 1:31:33
  Ivy League, by the way, what was different between that process
• 1:31:36
  and applying to a Brown? What what it sounds like there's
• 1:31:38
  extra, I hate to always say hoops that jump through, but
• 1:31:41
  seems like there's extra requirements.
• 1:31:42
  What? What are those kinds of things?
• 1:31:44
  I think that the earliest thing is just we, we have like a July
• 1:31:49
  1st hard deadline for pre reads at with admissions.
• 1:31:54
  And so we can't we we can't move before that July of year before
• 1:31:59
  your senior year. So we can recruit and we get
• 1:32:02
  like, you know, I've got lists coming together and we're
• 1:32:04
  talking with, but we really don't have certainty that an
• 1:32:08
  athlete is is a viable candidate in in our school until after we
• 1:32:13
  submit a pre read for them in July.
• 1:32:15
  Explain explain pre read is that I thought for for a second
• 1:32:19
  you're talking about like essays, but no now I'm starting
• 1:32:21
  to get like maybe pre read of like their transcripts.
• 1:32:24
  Yeah, OK, so they had. They got to get through their
• 1:32:27
  third year of high school before the school will even say I can't
• 1:32:29
  even assess if they might fit Brown's requirements until after
• 1:32:34
  their junior year. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:32:35
  So and we, we obviously like, we, we grow, we have an eye
• 1:32:39
  towards what we're looking for academically.
• 1:32:40
  So we see it coming, but there's always that really great athlete
• 1:32:43
  that's going to be borderline that you're going to work really
• 1:32:46
  hard to get them to be a viable candidate.
• 1:32:50
  And you could talk to a kid for nine months and they could be in
• 1:32:52
  love with Brown and we get the pre read back and admission just
• 1:32:56
  says there's not enough here. And now in the pre read goal is
• 1:33:00
  to be eligible for support. So like if you don't get a good
• 1:33:03
  pre read and they they stop at dead in the water, then you
• 1:33:06
  can't come back in the fall and say we're going to support this
• 1:33:09
  application. Can you help us get it through?
• 1:33:11
  Like that's that's that doesn't happen.
• 1:33:14
  So we really need to get the green light from emissions in
• 1:33:16
  the summer for the crop we want. So you get a group of juniors
• 1:33:22
  that you might want to recruit and they have to go through the
• 1:33:24
  process of pre read. Is pre read a black or white
• 1:33:27
  like yes or no or is it a graded scale?
• 1:33:31
  Yeah, nothing, unfortunately in the admissions world, in the Ivy
• 1:33:34
  League, is a yes or no until the admissions decision.
• 1:33:37
  Actually, OK, do they can kid in their end of their first
• 1:33:44
  semester of senior year go through pre read like or is it
• 1:33:47
  like, oh, you screwed up, you didn't come back, Come to us in
• 1:33:49
  June and July. OK, OK, so it's not like you
• 1:33:51
  have to do that. It's just a it can't start until
• 1:33:54
  that July 1 going into senior year.
• 1:33:56
  OK, OK, OK. Yeah.
• 1:33:57
  And and the I would say one of the things is the pre read
• 1:34:00
  process is pretty rigorous. It's not just like toss us a
• 1:34:04
  couple quick documents and we'll get this done.
• 1:34:06
  It's, you know, it probably takes the kid a couple hours to
• 1:34:10
  prepare everything. It's not just like, it's not
• 1:34:12
  like just transcripts. No, it's a pretty thorough
• 1:34:15
  process because they basically they eventually when we do offer
• 1:34:18
  support and then they're in the process for like a likely
• 1:34:21
  letter, which is kind of like our version of a of the NLI, but
• 1:34:24
  it's not, it's, it's not as cut and dry.
• 1:34:28
  They're comparing the application to the pre read,
• 1:34:31
  right. So the pre read is really
• 1:34:32
  thorough. It's it's a it's a full
• 1:34:33
  foundation of this student that they then are confident enough
• 1:34:39
  to say, continue moving forward with this person or, you know,
• 1:34:44
  be careful, proceed with caution or hey, this is this already
• 1:34:47
  looks like there's too much that we can't change.
• 1:34:50
  This is a no. So it's more than transcripts,
• 1:34:52
  it's extracurricular activities. Yeah, we write a, you know, we
• 1:34:57
  write a personal statement. We, we, you know, the kid has an
• 1:35:01
  opportunity to submit a lot of things, but it's the basis of it
• 1:35:04
  is your grades, your test scores, a lot of, you know, your
• 1:35:07
  full personal profile. But then we're, we're basically
• 1:35:11
  saying like this is the person that we know, you know, this is
• 1:35:13
  what the, how they can contribute.
• 1:35:15
  This is the, you know, this is the, the person we've gotten to
• 1:35:19
  know over the recruiting process.
• 1:35:20
  And This is why we think we want to continue moving forward with
• 1:35:23
  them. And this is the first big
• 1:35:26
  hurdle. So what I think I heard you say
• 1:35:29
  is we've got kids that we kind of initially look at and like,
• 1:35:32
  man, they'd be able to get in. They'd contribute to our team.
• 1:35:35
  And they're like, I don't want to submit this cuz it's not just
• 1:35:39
  transcript. You're saying this is, you said
• 1:35:40
  it takes hours potentially for a kid to do.
• 1:35:42
  And they're like, you know what, bro, I can just fill out this
• 1:35:44
  application to XYZ university. I ain't got to do all this other
• 1:35:47
  stuff. And I'm, I'm in, yeah.
• 1:35:50
  Yeah, that's, that's the first, that's definitely the start.
• 1:35:52
  Yeah. And the the thing I would say
• 1:35:53
  that happens more often is if kids are excited about the
• 1:35:56
  league, then they'll do that. But then when the uncertainty
• 1:36:01
  comes back of like, hey, we need you to change your senior
• 1:36:03
  schedule or we need you to retest, or we need you to like
• 1:36:07
  these are the edits that admissions will be looking for
• 1:36:09
  to get you moving down to be a really great candidate.
• 1:36:14
  Then like those are the things that the kids are like, well,
• 1:36:17
  this other school's not making me retest or this other school's
• 1:36:19
  fine with my schedule or this other school gave me a black and
• 1:36:22
  white answer right away. Like they said you're going to
• 1:36:25
  get in right away and you don't know if I'm going to get in.
• 1:36:28
  They said I'm going to get a full scholarship right away and
• 1:36:30
  you want me to fill out a full financial aid profile to give
• 1:36:33
  it, you know, get your financial aid to get like, it just becomes
• 1:36:36
  a lot on the family and a lot on a student.
• 1:36:39
  So, and I'm hearing the way I'm, I'm interpreting you not only
• 1:36:44
  it's one thing, most of us are probably looking at two things.
• 1:36:49
  One is, you know, they're they're athletic prowess and
• 1:36:52
  obviously you're looking at that and then they're academic, like
• 1:36:55
  can they get into my school? That's a pretty, you know, those
• 1:36:57
  are pretty two thing. And then, you know, I've
• 1:36:59
  discussed before how much I really think coaches are looking
• 1:37:02
  at personality and social media, you know, things like that,
• 1:37:05
  because I've yet to see, I've yet to see, I'll use a distance
• 1:37:09
  example here. I've yet to see a four flat high
• 1:37:11
  schooler that had a bad attitude not get a scholarship to a
• 1:37:16
  school. I haven't seen it yet, not yet,
• 1:37:18
  not yet. All the all these, you know,
• 1:37:20
  it's usually football and basketball where they'll say I
• 1:37:23
  stopped recruiting a kid because I saw a tweet.
• 1:37:25
  And I'm like, I don't think you were really recruiting them to
• 1:37:27
  begin with. To be real honest with you.
• 1:37:29
  It's never the big boys anyway. So so you're looking at those
• 1:37:34
  things, but but I'm hearing that you you get another layer of
• 1:37:37
  like, oh, I have to recruit kids that want to come to the Ivy
• 1:37:40
  League. And that's one thing I thought I
• 1:37:44
  mean that that shrinks us down. I'm also kind of kind of hearing
• 1:37:48
  you like it has to be a kid that wants to come to Brown.
• 1:37:52
  Yeah. Yeah, wow.
• 1:37:55
  I think like the thing that people make the biggest mistake
• 1:37:58
  from the outside. I think the kids that are
• 1:38:00
  looking at our schools often understand this.
• 1:38:02
  A lot of them, the families don't.
• 1:38:04
  And we we talk about it quickly in the recruiting process.
• 1:38:07
  But the Ivy League is a league of schools, but it it's not a
• 1:38:11
  universal brand of communities. Like the difference between
• 1:38:16
  Brown and Columbia or Princeton and Harvard is as big of a
• 1:38:21
  difference as any other schools that you can think of.
• 1:38:25
  There is a tie here that they're extremely academically
• 1:38:28
  selective. They're they are really well
• 1:38:30
  known. They're top schools in the
• 1:38:31
  world. But like IOA, I, I have a filter
• 1:38:35
  in our recruiting process where my radar will go off sometimes
• 1:38:40
  for a kid that is motivated to end up in the league, but looks
• 1:38:44
  like they're motivated more by the status of the opportunity
• 1:38:48
  than the specifics of the school.
• 1:38:51
  And, and that triggers a lot of alarms for me is that is this
• 1:38:54
  kid just looking for the school and the brand that comes with
• 1:38:59
  the idea of being here more so than they fell in love with
• 1:39:04
  Brown and Brown is like Brown, I can speak to is an extremely
• 1:39:08
  unique place. Like they do things differently
• 1:39:11
  academically. They have, you know, they have a
• 1:39:13
  relationship with Rhode Island School of design that's unique.
• 1:39:15
  They have an open curriculum that for community Providence as
• 1:39:19
  a city is a very unique place. And the culture and community on
• 1:39:24
  campus is very unique. And it's not it's it's not
• 1:39:28
  unique that no one else could ever imagine doing something
• 1:39:31
  like Brown. But it's not Harvard's culture.
• 1:39:34
  It's not, you know, Columbia or Cornell's culture.
• 1:39:37
  It's they are different schools and they appeal to different
• 1:39:39
  people. They're geographically
• 1:39:41
  different. They have different focuses
• 1:39:42
  academically and styles. And so we really are looking for
• 1:39:47
  people that like those things speak to just as much.
• 1:39:49
  Like the one of the programs that we crossover with the most
• 1:39:54
  is Amherst College. And it's because Amherst and
• 1:39:57
  Brown are culturally very similar.
• 1:39:59
  It's there's some art aspects to our community.
• 1:40:01
  There's, you know, there's a common academic approach and,
• 1:40:07
  you know, and it's nice to hear a kid who says, like, I'm also
• 1:40:10
  looking at Amherst because it's like, oh, you, you're looking
• 1:40:12
  for a thing. Not a name and we could be the
• 1:40:16
  thing that makes sense, but you're not you're not putting
• 1:40:21
  the cart before the horse here. You're you're actually looking
• 1:40:23
  for a day-to-day experience. And you know, maybe we have to
• 1:40:26
  work with them on do they want to run Division One, you know,
• 1:40:29
  or do you want Division Three or whatever that may be?
• 1:40:32
  But like, they understand what Brown is as a daily life
• 1:40:35
  experience, not just as like the thing that they see online.
• 1:40:40
  It makes so much more sense when I see a, a, a news thing about a
• 1:40:44
  kid who gets accepted to every Ivy League school.
• 1:40:46
  I've always looked at those and been like, well, of course, you
• 1:40:50
  know, it's awesome. Like obviously they're smart
• 1:40:51
  enough to get into an Ivy League, but I was always like,
• 1:40:53
  Oh, well, if you get admitted to 1 Ivy League, you can get
• 1:40:56
  admitted to all of like literally I was just like, I
• 1:40:58
  mean, you can, you know, you're so smart.
• 1:40:59
  Whatever, whatever Brown saw into you, Princeton, Harvard,
• 1:41:03
  Columbia, they're all going to see it too.
• 1:41:05
  Now. It's like, Oh no, these are,
• 1:41:06
  what was there 88 teams? These are different process like
• 1:41:13
  yeah. Like you can, it's very
• 1:41:15
  different. Easily get accepted to one and
• 1:41:17
  not get accepted to the other is what I'm hearing.
• 1:41:18
  Absolutely. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:41:19
  And that's amazing. Yeah.
• 1:41:21
  And I think that's something we don't really get a lot of
• 1:41:23
  exposure to admissions directly because it's they do try to keep
• 1:41:27
  them pretty away from any influence.
• 1:41:31
  But that's I think that's something that the generally
• 1:41:33
  admissions makes very clear at Brown is that like, man, I think
• 1:41:36
  at any school like this is they're looking for something.
• 1:41:38
  They're not looking for the best there.
• 1:41:40
  There are kids every year that have perfect Gpas and perfect
• 1:41:43
  test scores that don't get in. They're looking for something
• 1:41:45
  they're looking for. How are you going to contribute
• 1:41:47
  to this community once you get here?
• 1:41:50
  Like you're all smart. I tell our recruits all the
• 1:41:53
  time, like graduating from Brown isn't the accomplishment.
• 1:41:57
  Like you work really hard and you graduate, but like every kid
• 1:42:01
  that comes to Brown is smart enough to graduate from Brown.
• 1:42:04
  That's like the of course you're, you're you, you've done
• 1:42:07
  so much work for yourself through high school.
• 1:42:09
  Like you've set yourself up to have the opportunity to come
• 1:42:11
  here. That's that's the accomplishment
• 1:42:13
  is, you know, laying down the groundwork, giving your plate
• 1:42:17
  yourself to a place where this is this opportunity is here.
• 1:42:19
  Executing the opportunity is important, but Brown wants you
• 1:42:23
  to come here for four years and contribute to the community.
• 1:42:26
  Like the graduating part is great.
• 1:42:28
  They want you to contribute to the community when you leave as
• 1:42:30
  well. But like, there's so much more
• 1:42:32
  that can happen in in a community, in our community when
• 1:42:35
  everyone's contributing to it along the way as opposed to just
• 1:42:38
  like bringing in the kids with the best SAT scores and letting
• 1:42:40
  them sit in the library together, you know?
• 1:42:43
  So I think that's like probably at the heart of a lot of the a
• 1:42:46
  lot of schools period. But a lot of schools that are
• 1:42:49
  really academically selective, I think they're the admissions is
• 1:42:52
  looking for a way for that person to come to campus and
• 1:42:55
  contribute, not just for a way for them to get good grades and
• 1:42:58
  leave. So how do you appreciate that
• 1:42:59
  That's that blue? I learned something.
• 1:43:01
  I know I literally was like, oh, Harvard gets an application and
• 1:43:06
  all that application says already been accepted to Brown.
• 1:43:07
  They're like, all right, they're in, you know, Brown likes them,
• 1:43:10
  we like them. We're Ivy League.
• 1:43:11
  So I did think that the Ivy League was this one like 08.
• 1:43:14
  All eight schools are the same and knowing there's differences,
• 1:43:17
  obviously, but like, oh, but academically, if you're good
• 1:43:21
  enough for one, you get that. That's intro.
• 1:43:22
  I really learned that. So I'm curious then how
• 1:43:26
  specifically with distance, because you know, Ivy League's
• 1:43:28
  great for distance and if a kid is is interested in Brown and
• 1:43:33
  they're eligible, meaning academically centered towards
• 1:43:37
  that way, you know, they got a lot of choices out there.
• 1:43:42
  You know, the other, you know, there's always that joke of the
• 1:43:44
  Harvard of the South, Harvard of California, those kind of
• 1:43:47
  things. But you know, the Ivy League of
• 1:43:48
  you know, Duke high academics, right Northwestern Stanford,
• 1:43:56
  gosh, in the D3 world, and I think of MIT's and think of mud
• 1:44:01
  scripts. There's AI mean there's some
• 1:44:03
  super high academic and I know someone's yelling at me right
• 1:44:06
  now going what about my school? I, I know I hear school too.
• 1:44:10
  There's some super high academic schools that those kids would
• 1:44:14
  also have choices. So there's only so many kids
• 1:44:17
  that run now, let's call it 800 meters and up.
• 1:44:20
  There's only so many kids that run 800 meters and up Now
• 1:44:24
  there's only so many juniors and seniors.
• 1:44:25
  Let's say those are your recruited aspects.
• 1:44:29
  We get even smaller. There's only so many that have
• 1:44:31
  the, the call it the PRS, if you will, that you'll even look at.
• 1:44:34
  I mean, you're, you're starting to slice down.
• 1:44:37
  Yeah. So how many kids do you bring in
• 1:44:39
  a year? That's that's what I'm really
• 1:44:40
  kind of getting at. Like how it feels like, like you
• 1:44:42
  got one good, man, you got one this year.
• 1:44:44
  Good. You get 2.
• 1:44:46
  That's a big class, you know, and I'm talking specifically on
• 1:44:48
  the distance side, obviously here.
• 1:44:50
  But how do you, I mean, this just seems impossible, bro.
• 1:44:52
  That's what I'm kind of getting at.
• 1:44:53
  It seems terrible. No way.
• 1:44:56
  Yeah. I mean, we ultimately like being
• 1:44:59
  in charge of everything from the 800 and up it, it hits a lot of
• 1:45:03
  areas, right. So we're, we're looking, you
• 1:45:05
  know, the Ivy League is very heavy in the relays in the
• 1:45:08
  middle distances. Indoors, we've got both 4 by 8
• 1:45:11
  in the DMR, we've got a 58000 in a mile, you know, so like
• 1:45:15
  there's an element there. We're like, we're always
• 1:45:16
  attentive to the middle distances because you, you have
• 1:45:19
  a lot of bodies required at the championship.
• 1:45:22
  We're also attentive to cross country.
• 1:45:23
  We see that obviously in the NCAA cross country results that,
• 1:45:27
  you know, there are great programs in our league every
• 1:45:29
  year. So I'm, I'm recruiting in
• 1:45:31
  different buckets for sure. So we, we have a little bit of
• 1:45:35
  like multiple agendas going on at the same time.
• 1:45:37
  But ultimately my goal would be to bring in, you know, 5 to 8
• 1:45:43
  women a year to fill all those needs.
• 1:45:46
  And they're not all going to be recruited.
• 1:45:48
  Some of them are going to get in on their own and we'll add them
• 1:45:51
  to the roster that, you know, more on a developmental walk on
• 1:45:54
  side. And we have a lot, but we have a
• 1:45:56
  lot of demands. I mean, they're the, the league
• 1:45:59
  is inherently, even though it operates at a pretty high level,
• 1:46:02
  it's inherently developmental because we're just not, we're
• 1:46:06
  not operating on scholarships. We're not operating on you can't
• 1:46:10
  divide up your scholarships. You can't say we're going to,
• 1:46:13
  you know, distance is going to take, you know, 5 scholarships,
• 1:46:17
  but divide them up 10 or 15 ways, You know, so we have a lot
• 1:46:21
  of really nice things that help us in the process, but there's
• 1:46:26
  also some things that the, the system is a little different and
• 1:46:28
  it makes it challenging. So it's inherently
• 1:46:31
  developmental. You're always, you can look
• 1:46:32
  through our, our league right now.
• 1:46:33
  And I think every program in the Ivy League has done a great job
• 1:46:37
  of having upperclassmen that were walk ONS that are now
• 1:46:40
  contributing. And, you know, so we always want
• 1:46:43
  to make sure that we have depth of the roster so that we can
• 1:46:46
  keep that side of, of the program and keep kids getting
• 1:46:49
  better and, and helping out, even if it's only for a year or
• 1:46:51
  two at the end of their career. But yeah, I mean, we're I think
• 1:46:56
  we're your your point earlier there.
• 1:46:59
  There's also just a lot of really great athletes that get
• 1:47:01
  the attention from really great programs that have all of this.
• 1:47:05
  Like if, if, if you're a great athlete and a great student and
• 1:47:09
  Stanford calls, like, of course, you're going to listen, like, of
• 1:47:12
  course, what a great opportunity to have everything that you
• 1:47:15
  would want. And you know, whether that's
• 1:47:17
  Stanford or it's Michigan or Northwestern or Vanderbilt or
• 1:47:20
  Duke or whatever, you know, there's so many to your point
• 1:47:24
  that the the really, really great athletes are are going to
• 1:47:27
  have more than just the Ivy League to pick from for great
• 1:47:30
  schools. And then so we're always looking
• 1:47:32
  at a mix of how, how good of an athlete can we get that really
• 1:47:35
  wants to be here with what are the developmental kids on the
• 1:47:38
  other side of the roster that we can grow and, and keep our
• 1:47:40
  program competitive that way. So, you know, my goal is to have
• 1:47:44
  25 to 35 women in my stable from 800 and up.
• 1:47:50
  And but there's no shortage of interest.
• 1:47:52
  You know we have hundreds of names on on lists so.
• 1:47:56
  No, no shortage of interest from actually qualified kids.
• 1:47:59
  Like are you getting the all right?
• 1:48:01
  I I thought I was a pretty smart kid.
• 1:48:03
  I had over a three-point O and I think my ACT was a 26.
• 1:48:07
  You know, that's pretty solid from middle of nowhere Alabama.
• 1:48:10
  But I'm I'm afraid I'm probably not an Ivy League kid.
• 1:48:13
  But do you get me? Am I?
• 1:48:15
  Do you get a lot of me's calling you up and like, hey, man, I I
• 1:48:19
  got 26. That's pretty solid.
• 1:48:21
  I ran 4, by the way, I did not run 413.
• 1:48:23
  I don't want to put that on my resume.
• 1:48:25
  I barely ran 513, you know, but I'm a solid, you know, I'm, I'm
• 1:48:30
  something to say 413 because that's, you know, that's not,
• 1:48:32
  that's not terrible. It's pretty good 420, right?
• 1:48:35
  Like you get a lot of those. And because I feel like those
• 1:48:37
  are not really their interest, but you're like, yeah, thanks,
• 1:48:41
  but no thanks. I can't.
• 1:48:42
  I can't get you into school. Yeah, the I think there's both
• 1:48:45
  sides. I think there's kids that found
• 1:48:49
  Brown athletically, they were looking on TFERS or they were
• 1:48:53
  looking at results and they saw this is a good fit athletically
• 1:48:56
  and they reached out and maybe maybe they're good enough
• 1:48:59
  academically, maybe they're not. And then that's our job as
• 1:49:01
  coaches to figure out the whole picture as quickly as we can.
• 1:49:06
  And some of those kids, you know, there's always a risk
• 1:49:08
  tolerance of, you know, spectrum there where we can say like how
• 1:49:11
  far can we stretch the academic side to make this work for this
• 1:49:15
  kid? This is a great kid that fits
• 1:49:16
  our programs needs. They're great athletes.
• 1:49:19
  Can we get them through the admissions process?
• 1:49:21
  And you always are gonna push the envelope and see how that
• 1:49:24
  goes because you want the best opportunity for your program.
• 1:49:28
  Could you have gotten me into school?
• 1:49:30
  Let's say I was a 413 kid and I was a 3.6 and a 26.
• 1:49:35
  You be honest. You ain't gonna hurt my
• 1:49:36
  feelings. I imply it now.
• 1:49:38
  Probably. Not, yeah, you'd have been real
• 1:49:40
  gentle and been like, hey, man, maybe Troy University, maybe
• 1:49:43
  that's where you need to go. Yeah.
• 1:49:44
  Yeah. The the test side of it has
• 1:49:46
  become, we've become tests required now.
• 1:49:48
  So that's like a big element we brought back in after being test
• 1:49:52
  optional for a while. So yeah, yeah, right, I thought.
• 1:49:54
  We have a little less flexibility than we used to
• 1:49:56
  have, but. So you gotta be 30 + 32 plus.
• 1:50:00
  Yeah, there's no like real number, but it is because you're
• 1:50:03
  always figuring out the balance of all the aspects of it.
• 1:50:06
  But yeah, like, you know, the average, the average kid last
• 1:50:09
  year, so the average freshman at Brown for the whole school, you
• 1:50:12
  know, their average SAT was like in the mid 1500s.
• 1:50:14
  So like if you're talking about. Is it perfect 15?
• 1:50:18
  Perfect is 1600, yeah. And your average was mid 50, so
• 1:50:21
  1550. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:50:23
  So, you know, the the variance is always going to be there, but
• 1:50:27
  you know, you're always testing the waters with a kid somewhere.
• 1:50:32
  So yeah, some kids show up academic athletically, but some
• 1:50:35
  kids show up athletically too, or academically too.
• 1:50:39
  You know, they, they're the kid that knows that they, they want
• 1:50:43
  to be at a really challenging school that the Ivy League might
• 1:50:46
  make sense for them. They might be a good athlete or
• 1:50:48
  they might not. They just know this is a school
• 1:50:49
  that makes sense and they've got the grades.
• 1:50:51
  So they've got the transcripts and they got the
• 1:50:53
  extracurriculars and they're nowhere, they may be nowhere
• 1:50:56
  near the level that we're looking for.
• 1:50:59
  So you get both. You get a kid that you love
• 1:51:01
  athletically, you get a kid that you would love academically, and
• 1:51:03
  you've got to find the middle. And we certainly want to make
• 1:51:07
  sure that we entertain both ends, you know?
• 1:51:10
  I don't think it's fair to say you you try to find the middle
• 1:51:13
  because you're taking the best of both.
• 1:51:15
  You're trying to find the top. Yeah, you're talking about.
• 1:51:18
  That you got to Yeah, yeah. Let's take the middle, bro.
• 1:51:19
  You taking the top. You know, it's funny, John.
• 1:51:21
  I my my 10 years of coaching, I was a recruiter.
• 1:51:27
  That was my thing. I enjoyed it the most and I was
• 1:51:30
  successful at it. You know, I signed the
• 1:51:32
  Mississippi State was signed the indoor high school record holder
• 1:51:35
  in the 400, you know, top JUCO kid.
• 1:51:37
  You know, I was involved in all that at Troy.
• 1:51:40
  We signed some kids that we weren't supposed to that, you
• 1:51:42
  know, that the air quotes, everyone's supposed to that, you
• 1:51:44
  know, I was involved in. I'm now rethinking that because
• 1:51:48
  I think of like, you know, the schools that are always in the
• 1:51:51
  top five recruiting classes, you know, the Oregon and Florida and
• 1:51:55
  Stanford and things like that. And I always think like, Oh,
• 1:51:58
  those must be the best recruiters.
• 1:52:00
  Now they got some positives to to recruit against, right?
• 1:52:02
  It's pretty nice to recruit to Gainesville and it's pretty nice
• 1:52:05
  to recruit to to Hayward Field and things like that.
• 1:52:07
  And that that obviously helps. Now I'm starting to rethink
• 1:52:10
  that. Maybe the Ivy League coaches are
• 1:52:12
  the best recruiters out there because you got to do it'd be
• 1:52:15
  one thing if the Ivy League was like, oh, you know what you'd be
• 1:52:18
  a solid middle D3 conference like heck, man, look, because of
• 1:52:22
  your academics. Good, good on you.
• 1:52:24
  No, the Ivy League is it's unbelievable.
• 1:52:28
  Actually go to the track championships and look at it and
• 1:52:32
  they're all having to go through not only now I'm getting that
• 1:52:35
  you've given me such appreciation.
• 1:52:36
  I I would go back an hour, I would have said, oh, and they
• 1:52:40
  have to meet an academic rigor. Well, yeah, of course.
• 1:52:42
  Now I'm starting to understand, oh, it's not just an academic
• 1:52:44
  rigor, it's a application process rigor even like you've
• 1:52:48
  got, it's more than just academic.
• 1:52:50
  It's not just black and white about you got this ACT in this
• 1:52:53
  GPA and you got this PR boom, you're in like, Oh, no, no,
• 1:52:56
  there's there's a different level to that's I'm starting to
• 1:52:59
  think maybe you guys and gals are the best recruiters out
• 1:53:03
  there because, again, your pool is so small.
• 1:53:06
  You know, Florida can recruit everybody.
• 1:53:08
  They can recruit everybody. Obviously, you know,
• 1:53:09
  athletically that shores up pretty pretty pretty quickly,
• 1:53:13
  and I know they have some academic requirements,
• 1:53:15
  obviously, but it ain't it ain't the Ivy League.
• 1:53:18
  I'm going to go on yes, and that anytime that that's amazing,
• 1:53:20
  man, that's been light, enlightening to what you have to
• 1:53:24
  do there at Brown, man, that's Oh, and by the way, you start to
• 1:53:27
  coach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:53:29
  Yeah, Yeah, you still got still got to get that done.
• 1:53:31
  And you know, we talked about these other if a kids, you know,
• 1:53:34
  eligible to go to a Brown, then you know, they have other
• 1:53:36
  options like the Stanford, Thank you for saying Michigan and
• 1:53:38
  Vanderbilt. Those are two schools that I'm
• 1:53:39
  sure someone was yelling at me about.
• 1:53:42
  But don't forget, just because a kid is super, super high
• 1:53:45
  academically and super, super high athletically, those kids
• 1:53:48
  still go to Texas, Tulsa, UNLV, you know, really smart kids go
• 1:53:57
  to non traditionally. Oh God, I know someone's going
• 1:54:01
  to yell at me for this one. Non traditionally high academic
• 1:54:04
  schools, You know, so it's not just that you're not only
• 1:54:06
  competing against Stanford, Duke, etcetera, you're still
• 1:54:09
  recruiting against everybody. Everybody, yeah.
• 1:54:14
  Good luck. You sure you don't want to go
• 1:54:16
  back to Sienna? So wrap us up here, get us up to
• 1:54:22
  date. How many years have you been at
• 1:54:23
  Brown and, and how's it going, man?
• 1:54:24
  I mean, this is you. You said you, you kind of came
• 1:54:26
  into it a little bit naive and you had to learn all these
• 1:54:28
  things. So are you kind of finding your
• 1:54:29
  stride now? Where, where we at today?
• 1:54:32
  2024 at Brown with you. Yeah, so this is the this is the
• 1:54:37
  start. I guess we're a little further
• 1:54:38
  in than the start, but this is the beginning of my second year
• 1:54:41
  here. I got I, I got to Brown late
• 1:54:44
  August in 2023, So a little bit past the year.
• 1:54:48
  Second cross country season on to the second year.
• 1:54:51
  This is my first, It feels like my first full year, even though
• 1:54:54
  I did show up before classes started, just because I, I
• 1:54:56
  didn't, you know, I, I inherited a summer training program and I
• 1:55:00
  inherited a class of recruits. And so, yeah, but I mean, last
• 1:55:04
  year was fantastic. I, I learned a lot.
• 1:55:08
  I think the women in the team learned a lot.
• 1:55:11
  We had really young, successful athletes coming in.
• 1:55:16
  We had a good core group. I was really, really happy and
• 1:55:21
  blessed with seniors that immediately grabbed on to, you
• 1:55:25
  know, what we were doing. And sometimes that's not easy
• 1:55:27
  for them or not, you know, maybe that's not what they ultimately
• 1:55:31
  they want, but they jumped right in and bought in and, and they
• 1:55:36
  had some of them had really great senior years because of
• 1:55:38
  it. And, and now, you know, things
• 1:55:41
  are getting, you know, better and better by the the season.
• 1:55:44
  I think the whole point of me coming here was I felt like this
• 1:55:47
  was a program that could be developed back to being a
• 1:55:49
  national level program and having a presence in the NCAA
• 1:55:52
  scene. And, you know, the season's been
• 1:55:55
  really gone really, really well. Surprisingly.
• 1:55:58
  I, I, I'm not bashful to say that is, you know, being in the
• 1:56:02
  hunt for, you know, a pretty high finish in the Ivy League
• 1:56:05
  is, was not something that we necessarily went into the season
• 1:56:09
  thinking. The girls have run really
• 1:56:12
  incredibly. They've done the work and it's
• 1:56:15
  put them in this position. But the fun part about the
• 1:56:17
  league is, you know, right now it looks like 3rd to 8th is
• 1:56:20
  available. There's no one out back and
• 1:56:24
  there's no one, there's no one that stakes their claim for 3rd.
• 1:56:29
  You know, Harvard and Princeton women are very good right now
• 1:56:31
  and they've staked their claim for first and second, maybe not
• 1:56:34
  definitively who's going to win, but for those top 2 spots.
• 1:56:37
  So you know, so it's really exciting to be in the hunt after
• 1:56:40
  being 8th for the last few years in the cross countryside.
• 1:56:44
  And like I said, certainly not something that we've necessarily
• 1:56:48
  saw right away, but something that we were planning to build
• 1:56:50
  into. And I'm just excited to finish
• 1:56:53
  out the fall. And then we've got a really good
• 1:56:56
  returning group of of women in the track and field side too.
• 1:56:58
  So we're excited to sort of see how our group folds into to the
• 1:57:01
  Ivy League and NCAA side as we get to track.
• 1:57:05
  That's really exciting with, you know, a 3rd through 8th because
• 1:57:09
  like I said, you know, 3rd, 4th or 5th.
• 1:57:10
  Bravo, you did a great job. The kids did a good job after
• 1:57:12
  being a, you know, past couple years.
• 1:57:14
  But it's one of those things where it, it, it, it makes the,
• 1:57:17
  you know, sometimes we talk about track and cross country
• 1:57:19
  being so much about the numbers and how easy of a sport it is in
• 1:57:22
  regards to that. But here's a, here's an
• 1:57:24
  opportunity, not an opportunity. Here's a, an example that you'd
• 1:57:27
  have to look like, have to look deeper.
• 1:57:29
  So if 3rd through 8th really is kind of up for a toss, that
• 1:57:32
  means you could still get 8th by by like 7 points or 8 point, you
• 1:57:36
  know, whatever the math works out.
• 1:57:37
  And you know, if I'm just looking at results, I'm like, Oh
• 1:57:40
  yeah, look, Browns 8th again. And in reality, it's like, oh
• 1:57:43
  man, they got so much better in the way the teams were.
• 1:57:48
  You know, cross country is a great sport, a great scored
• 1:57:52
  sport. It could be just like, Oh yeah,
• 1:57:54
  you get you got 111 points and someone had 110.
• 1:57:57
  And that one point is what, you know, some of the it's just,
• 1:58:00
  it's a great example of like, hey, you got to look deeper.
• 1:58:02
  I get, I get agitated. Well, you'll appreciate this.
• 1:58:07
  I get agitated when I see on Let's Run's message board right
• 1:58:10
  there. I could have just put a period
• 1:58:11
  at the end of that sentence right there, by the way.
• 1:58:13
  But when people are, because I only look at one thread and
• 1:58:15
  that's the coaching thread to see where coaches are going when
• 1:58:17
  they get on there and they go, Oh yeah, you know, such and such
• 1:58:20
  school's been 8 for the past five years.
• 1:58:22
  And it's like, OK, well, let's look at like, like, let's be
• 1:58:25
  fair. Let's look at the actual
• 1:58:26
  results. I'm like, Oh yeah, they got
• 1:58:27
  eight that year, but look, how much better?
• 1:58:28
  Like the kids all PR by two minutes.
• 1:58:29
  Like you going to tell me that's a failure?
• 1:58:31
  Nope, sorry, I can't help how the other teams get good too, by
• 1:58:34
  the way, But but I can affect my team and you affect your team
• 1:58:37
  good and it doesn't show up on the on the paper.
• 1:58:40
  So so it's exciting, but also like, oh, it could be
• 1:58:42
  heartbreaking because you know, you want to see a three next to
• 1:58:45
  your name, not an 8. So it could be heartbreaking at
• 1:58:47
  the same time. Hey, John, man, I can't say
• 1:58:50
  thank you enough. I love, you know, I'm such a I'm
• 1:58:53
  a lifelong learner, so I love learning and to learn.
• 1:58:57
  I've had other Ivy League schools here before and I'm
• 1:58:58
  pretty sure I went real shallow and was just like, yeah, they
• 1:59:00
  gotta have good grades and it'd be good, right?
• 1:59:02
  And just moved on. You have really opened my eyes
• 1:59:06
  about the Ivy League even more. I've always had a lot of respect
• 1:59:09
  for it. So, but to even now to know what
• 1:59:12
  the kids have to jump through, like I'm going to be even more
• 1:59:13
  impressed when someone says I got accepted into Brown or
• 1:59:16
  something like, Oh, I know what that takes.
• 1:59:18
  Now. That's that's more than just
• 1:59:19
  being a good, good student and and a good athlete.
• 1:59:22
  If that's the the case there. So really grateful for that man
• 1:59:25
  and really grateful for your time.
• 1:59:27
  You know, this has been absolutely fascinating for me
• 1:59:29
  and I'm really appreciate you sitting down with us today.
• 1:59:32
  Yeah, I I agree. Thanks, Mike.
• 1:59:33
  It's it's great to it's always great to sort of relive some of
• 1:59:36
  the the story. So I appreciate having me on.
• 1:59:40
  Yeah, and it's cool, man. You know, I know this is only
• 1:59:42
  your second full time job here in regards to being at Brown,
• 1:59:46
  but it's going to be interesting.
• 1:59:47
  I hope you're at Brown for a long time, very successfully.
• 1:59:49
  But it's going to be, I love sitting on the sideline and
• 1:59:52
  watching because you know, we're kind of putting a a time stamp
• 1:59:54
  on your journey here today, right in 2024.
• 1:59:57
  But you know, you're going to be coaching 2034 and 2044 and 2054
• 2:00:01
  and. It's going to be cool to, you
• 2:00:03
  know, in the future, come back and look and see where you were
• 2:00:06
  in 2024 and how much you continue to grow and develop as
• 2:00:09
  a coach and as a person and how much impact you continue to have
• 2:00:13
  on, on young people, hopefully specifically at, at Brown
• 2:00:16
  throughout the years, man. So it's, it's really cool to
• 2:00:18
  see. It's kind of a neat seat to to
• 2:00:20
  sit in for sure. Yeah.
• 2:00:21
  Thank you. I appreciate that.
• 2:00:22
  Absolutely, man. Well, thank you again.
• 2:00:24
  You know, most valuable thing you can give me is your time,
• 2:00:25
  brother. You're right in the middle of
• 2:00:26
  cross country season. I'm always floored when you guys
• 2:00:29
  and gals give me any of your time because I asked for a lot
• 2:00:31
  of time and we're overtime. He's Even so gracious for that.
• 2:00:35
  But I know you're in the middle of the season.
• 2:00:36
  You're in the middle of that Ivy League conference coming up here
• 2:00:38
  soon. So really grateful for your
• 2:00:40
  time. It means means the world to me.
• 2:00:42
  It's the most valuable thing you can give me to be honest with
• 2:00:43
  you. So thank you so much for being
• 2:00:45
  here, John. Yeah, you're welcome.
• 2:00:46
  Thanks, Mike. And thank you guys for being
• 2:00:48
  here and listening again, So appreciative, so grateful.
• 2:00:51
  Don't take it for granted that you're here.
• 2:00:53
  Press and play every week to learn these great stories of
• 2:00:56
  these men and women who choose to be track coaches and cross
• 2:00:58
  country coaches coaches. It's phenomenal.
• 2:01:00
  It's fantastic. It's so interesting and I'm I'm
• 2:01:04
  I'm excited to keep doing it. So as we head into season 6,
• 2:01:07
  join us next week. We'll do it all over again.
• 2:01:09
  Have some fun. Thanks guys.
• 2:01:10
  Have a good day. If it goes to appreciate the
• 2:01:15
  coach, the ones that point people most every season needs a
• 2:01:18
  voice of reason speaking the growth.
• 2:01:20
  You got to prep before you carry the load.
• 2:01:22
  Ice coffee to the soul. For those of us who stay on the
• 2:01:24
  go proper handoff to stay in the zone which you packing for the
• 2:01:28
  road. There's more than one way to go.
• 2:01:30
  Take notes that's paying your toe.
• 2:01:32
  It ain't practice if your purpose ain't Claire.
• 2:01:34
  It can't happen until you listen with both ears.
• 2:01:36
  You can't mentor without a mentor.
• 2:01:38
  Years of experience. You can reinvent those years.
• 2:01:41
  Every plan's got to stand and deliver to and the price
• 2:01:44
  sacrifice can you give up you. It's a choice and the fight not
• 2:01:47
  a win or lose. It's not a ploy boy device.
• 2:01:49
  Y'all can make more moves. It's not about how to it's all
• 2:01:52
  about why you don't know till you know who you are inside
• 2:01:56
  6,000,000 Waste of time, choose none.
• 2:01:58
  So y'all cross finish line. The work ain't done so we learn
• 2:02:01
  from the experts but y'all got to put in the leg work.
• 2:02:04
  Guil athletics use the network. It's all about connections put
• 2:02:07
  together for the profession to where every track coach could be
• 2:02:10
  blessing.