Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #215: Sean McCafferty-Christian Brothers Academy (NJ)

Transcript

#215: Sean McCafferty-Christian Brothers Academy (NJ) · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

• 0:10
  Track and field coach, the ones that point
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  people most every season. He's the voice of reason.
• 0:27
  Speaking, the growth gotta prep for you carry the load.
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  Talk to the stove. For those of us, stay on the go
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  pop, the handle, staying in the zone.
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  What you packing for the role is more than one way to go taking
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  those tests. And you told it ain't practice
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  it before it became clear. You can't happen to you.
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  Listen with both ears, can't Mentor, without a mentor, kids
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  of experience, you can reinvent those kids.
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  Every plans got to stand and deliver in the price sacrifice,
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  can you give up Hugh its choice and to fight not to win or lose?
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  It's not a boy, but if I see, y'all can make more movies, not
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  about how to All about why you don't know what you're you know
• 1:02
  who you are inside. Six, many ways to die.
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  She's not absorb. Your faults Finish Line.
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  The work ain't done. So we learn from the experts to.
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  Y'all got to put in the legwork Gil athletic shoes Network.
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  It's all about Connections put together for the profession to
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  every track coach could be blessed.
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  Hey, welcome back to the Gila FedEx track and field
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  connections podcast. I'm so humbled to be your host.
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  Mike getting him business development manager here at the
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  great Gill Athletics. And today we're going to go,
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  we're gonna go east coast to really one of my my favorite
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  recruiting States. Not my favorite steak because
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  it's cold. So I'm not a keen there, but
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  we're gonna go to New Jersey and I'm sure we're going to talk
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  about recruiting and athletes and just everything that has
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  fun. No left turns.
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  There's a lot going on here so let's get into it.
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  Help me welcome head cross country, coach Assistant
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  distance code for track and field for Christian Brothers
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  Academy, help me, welcome the wise, the wonderful mr.
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  Sean McCafferty Sean, how are you sir?
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  I'm great. Thanks for having me on it.
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  Is it, by the way? It's a lovely day in New Jersey,
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  my wife and I were just riding our bikes around the beach, and
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  it was about 70 degrees, beautiful things.
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  So, it's not cold today. Now, when he said the beach is
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  that mean, that's the Jersey Shore.
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  Yes. Yes.
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  You did a little gym and little champion, and a little All
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  right. All right.
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  So I've never seen the show. I used to lifeguard about a mile
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  north of where they used to hang out.
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  Yeah, my wife and I held off on watching it for a long time and
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  then we started watching it became like our guilty pleasure
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  television show. It was just so funny though that
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  these guys and gals, yes, the hijinks literally that they got
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  into. So yeah, there was a couple of
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  years where, no matter where I went people would ask me, like,
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  oh, Where are you know, where do you live it like oh New Jersey,
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  all by the shore and like how we see a great we saw the TV show,
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  that's what you want your whole state to be known for that show,
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  right? Yes, exactly.
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  The other day we were walking around.
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  I think Costco. And in there.
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  No, no, a store called Ali's. Do you have all these?
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  We do not know. Oh, I don't know that.
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  Where they're at this. We've just got one here and
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  we're in Champaign, Illinois. Where the University of Illinois
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  is that, and it's kind of like a A catch-all discount store so
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  you have no idea what they're going to have in there but
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  they'll have a lot of it and it'll be really cheap and it's
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  awesome. It's kind of like a to me.
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  It's kind of like a swap meet Goodwill.
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  Right. Love.
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  You know, you don't know what you're going to get, but it's
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  going to be cool and they have a huge book section, some wife and
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  I were looking around in the book section there and we came
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  across this cookbook and I covered up the name cuz I
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  instantly recognized who this person was, it's I cover the
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  name is like you recognize this and she's like now who you know
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  what celebrity chef is that? That and it was, I can't
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  remember his name, but it was one of the Jersey Shore guys
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  know. That's like, who times are low
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  when they're just slapping your name book?
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  Yeah, for her. Like and cheese and cheese
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  steaks. Yeah, that's yeah.
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  There you go. It's on the most important
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  question we can ask you, is, why does New Jersey not allow?
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  Left-handed turns, what is, what is going on?
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  My mom loves it because she hates making left-handed turns.
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  So, yeah, I don't know. We also have crazy circles where
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  like, there's no turns technically I don't know, it
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  really makes driving sometimes very difficult depending on
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  where you're going. But yeah, I have no idea.
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  I've been like that since before I was born.
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  So, yeah, first time I went there, you know, there's the old
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  days where I have MapQuest printed out.
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  So I was looking at her roots and stuff and I hit the left
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  turn signal, I guess I didn't realize it was a cop behind me,
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  so he kind of he looked me up to kind of like, you know, you
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  can't do that and I think I didn't saw the sign of no left
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  turn. I was like, what in the world?
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  I was just kind of, so discombobulated, what is going
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  on around here and interestingly enough, if I remember correctly,
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  Jersey, one of the two states that all I'm calling full
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  service, gas stations. Mean you can't pump your own
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  gas. No, you're not allowed to.
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  I think we're the only now. I believe Oregon was the other
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  one just in Oregon. No.
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  I was just an organ. It they pumped my gas so I
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  think. Well.
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  Okay. So yeah.
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  We're the two states than yeah. Yeah yep.
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  Yeah. And I don't think it's ever
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  Engine, not. Not anytime soon, people loving
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  and our gas is not expensive either.
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  So that's what you'd expect. Exactly, right.
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  I remember the first time I popped into New Jersey and I
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  went into, you know, getting gas from a rental car or whatever.
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  And I popped out and just started, like, I just started
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  pumping it and the guy comes over as like, you couldn't wait
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  for us. And I was like, here's what I
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  thought, I thought I had pulled into what probably was the very
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  last full service gas station in this country.
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  I thought, like, oh, I didn't realize that and he educated was
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  like, no. Man, we do this around to.
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  Yeah, what's funny is if you do pull up to a gas, it's like I
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  ride a motorcycle and they refuse to pump your gas because
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  I guess it's harder. I don't know.
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  And a tanks are very small so It's Tricky.
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  Or if you go up with a boat they kind of don't pump it for you.
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  Yeah, it's it's weird. Yeah.
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  But technically supposed to all the time, right?
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  Yeah. There's the the jurors if you
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  know, that's a good girl. Well, the Sean lets, you know,
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  I'll take you off the representation of all New Jersey
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  and lets you know, kind of maybe narrow down and focus on you
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  here. John love to learn more about
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  your journey in this great profession, this great sport of
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  track and field. I always like to start off the
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  questioning with, you know, for coaching assuming that you were
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  an athlete somewhere, it had to turn for you.
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  We don't normally kind of just grow up knowing that coaches, a
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  professional kind of just think it's just What other people do
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  but somewhere coaching had to be maybe something that instead of
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  was done to you, you know, hey go run this goal.
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  If that somewhere maybe had to flip and be like, wait a minute,
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  maybe I could actually be a coach.
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  We're just coaching begin for. You probably when I was born.
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  Oh yes, thank you. Yes.
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  My dad was a coach in New Jersey for a very long time and so I
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  grew up around that I from as long as I can remember, I wanted
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  to be a math teacher. And track coach cross-country
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  coach in a high school. So I grew up doing that.
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  I had the lucky opportunity. My father became an
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  administrator my freshman year of high school and eventually so
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  he couldn't coach anymore and then when he retired he started
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  coaching again with some of his one of his college roommates and
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  one of his other close friends. And I got to coach against him a
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  couple times, which is pretty cool.
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  Yeah, because I was just starting and he was kind of
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  towards the end there but yes, I always wanted to be a coach and
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  a math teacher. I'm not a math teacher.
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  I'm a Latin teacher so that didn't work out but you know
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  yeah. So I remember when I was five or
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  six years old I got to Iran with my dad.
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  A lot, just he would run every day and I'd go run, half mile
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  with him, whatever it was. I played soccer basketball
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  baseball, but I always had in the back of my mind that I
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  wanted to run. I got the middle school and I
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  ran really fast and I left the other sports behind and that was
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  kind of it. So good, Dad coach, you all the
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  way through. He didn't coach me at all.
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  Okay wondering, okay, he wanted to kind of take a step back.
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  He advised me, you know, there were times when we had tough
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  talks about things but for the most part he did not coach me.
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  He kind of Let me figure things out and, you know, times where
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  he would give me workouts and such if my high school coach was
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  not involved, but for the most part, it was, it was me and
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  whoever my coach was at the time.
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  So, yeah. It's always wonder, you know,
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  son of a coach, you hear about this, like, in the football and
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  basketball world, and maybe we only hear about it on the times
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  that it works out. But you hear that, you know,
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  that son or daughter goes on to be a great basketball player or
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  great football or, you know, typically a quarterback is what
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  I was here. On the football side like
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  coach's son quarterback. I mean, it's just automatic.
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  I've never heard of the coach's son who becomes the offensive
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  lineman. I don't ever hear that story
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  but, um, but I'm curious as you were going and you said you were
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  playing some different sports. There was there as dad was also
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  coaching track, and he might have coached some other sports
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  as well. Was there?
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  Always that? I of like, yeah.
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  But my dad is the running coach. So, that's kind of what I need
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  to be going to. Yeah, so even further back than
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  this, my Was the 1921 state champion in the six hundred yard
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  dash in Massachusetts? And then in 1965, I want to say
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  my dad was the 600 yard Champion.
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  Massachusetts, my grandfather went to Notre Dame to run.
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  He did not finish at Notre Dame. He something happened where he
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  was released from the school, but he said it involved a horse
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  in the dorm or something, but we never got the real story.
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  What about that around Thanksgiving, right?
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  No, no, but Knute Rockne was his track coach back in the day.
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  Oh wow. So because back then that, you
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  know, he coached football and it was 1921 like, yes, it was
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  before he was Knute, Rockne basically and then so anyway,
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  and my Dad ran at Quincy High, just outside of Boston, I
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  believe my grandfather was Boston English.
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  I think he ran for my dad ended up going to Also render jumbo
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  Elliott won several Penn relays titles there in distance medley
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  and I think 4 by 8 and then he started coaching shortly after
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  that. So yeah, it's in my blood.
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  It's interesting. I can kind of picture you
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  growing up like hearing these stories.
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  No, no, no, no grandpa sits down with a grandson, just tells them
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  their history, but through certain things a story would
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  come as like well, you know, I actually won the State title,
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  the 600 and that story comes out to your kind of I'll always be
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  here in these stories. You kind of had two choices
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  there. You could have been, like, okay,
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  well I'm gonna Forge my own path.
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  I'm going to become the greatest lacrosse player than I don't
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  want anything to do with running or okay.
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  This is, you know, obviously there's some genetics and family
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  history and you kind of went that world.
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  Yeah, I was always, I was always very fast like when I played
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  Little League I I was lead off, I would bunt almost every time I
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  got up because I could outrun every ball and I You know,
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  fourth inning, when they put the bench kids in.
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  I would go to center field so I could cover for them because I
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  was just so fast. You know, Middle School, I ran
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  for 4207, and and 55. So I was, this is in the 90s
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  when that was still kind of fast food kids.
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  But yeah. So, I always kind of knew that.
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  That's what I wanted to do every.
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  Once while I'd run a road race, and when I was little, I didn't
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  never really trained until I got to high school, but yeah.
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  So, You said dad didn't coach in high school though.
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  No. So what was that like though?
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  Because you know, it's obviously there's a coach over seeing you
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  but you know dad still be right there in your bed that sounded
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  like he. At least had some kind of lure
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  of like, oh man, they I mean Dad ran into Villanova right?
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  So I mean right there, he's got some cash a not only Villanova
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  its own but during that era holy cow, pretty amazing.
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  Yeah, I'm still working on trying to beat some of the the
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  records that he coached when he was at st.
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  So touching and later break ice. But that's another, another
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  angle. Yeah, I think so I had several
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  coaches in high school. I did go to see ba for a year
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  and a half, so I did have Tom, he for a little bit.
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  I was just traveling an hour to get there, just became too much
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  and I think my dad kind of wanted that type of situation
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  where he could literally drop me off and somebody would really
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  care for me. But then I went up going to
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  Central Regional, my cross-country coach was a great
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  guy. He did a lot.
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  He coached me in the spring as well.
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  He kind of he was hands off but caring.
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  So we did a lot of we had a huge state park next to us.
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  So called Double Trouble State Park and he would say, good girl
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  run. Yo, yeah, go run for an hour,
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  half the team would go play football in the woods and I
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  would run for an hour and run, you know, ten miles or whatever
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  it was. And that's kind of what my high
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  school was like, in a way winter was wasn't as the we didn't have
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  the arm. We didn't have ocean breeze, so
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  the winter season was quite a bit different than it is now.
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  So I think it served its purpose, it was a lot of
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  training, a lot of outdoor races, we'd run at Princeton for
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  our state stuff, but it was no spikes.
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  So it was a little bit tricky. Most of our races were at Red
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  Bank, Regional High School. It was a 11 lap to the mile
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  track. I think all-purpose room floors.
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  So Yeah, it was pretty. It was pretty wild and it was no
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  room so the infield would be packed as running around but yes
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  so high school was kind of that. It was, you know, Loki coaching
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  but I was very solid structure. I'm kind of hearing.
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  No, yeah, you said you kind of were born into thinking that I
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  want to be a coach, I want to be a math teacher.
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  So during this time with that, I'll call a Lustre, there's
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  always structure rights and very structure or loose structure.
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  There's some structure, right? I took them to the park and they
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  ran for an hour. That's a structure but as you
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  had that idea of I want to be a coach.
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  Did you? What was your mindset where you?
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  Reading books where you quiz and dad like hey, what should we be
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  doing? Were you trying and that our run
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  where you doing? You know what I'ma Do mile
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  repeats instead of just a steady state run where you anything
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  that at that point in time it's hard to ask.
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  If you're 15 16 years old, son of this but maybe you know I did
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  a lot of coaching myself when I was in high school.
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  I remember times across country was go down to the track and do
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  a workout. And I would just kind of say,
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  okay, this is what we're going to do, guys.
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  So I I kind of ran the workouts a little bit.
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  I think my cross-country coach had an idea that my dad was
• 15:53
  feeding me things in a way he really wasn't until I was right.
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  Wasn't? I mean he would if I asked him
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  questions, he would, he would help me out and he would tell me
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  what to do and what not? But yeah, for the most part I
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  was on my own a lot and you know so yeah what as you were doing
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  that you know that's a that's very much in that.
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  Has the leadership, a captain type, a type of role especially
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  if there's again that loose structure coming from the the
• 16:25
  coaching side. But I was going to ask that
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  question to coach thought, maybe your dad was giving, you
• 16:32
  workouts doesn't sound like that.
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  But we're you having conversations with your dad
• 16:36
  about what might this look like on a Sprint day or the, you
• 16:41
  know, or was like good like we had to be getting your coaching
• 16:44
  education somewhere. You're not just making up mile
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  repeats and quarter you know had to be getting that from
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  somewhere. You definitely he was he was a
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  big part of that but it was again he tried to kind of let me
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  Forge my own path. I think that was a deliberate
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  Thing by him and yeah I'd ask him like Hey I'm doing this.
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  What do you think? I also Spoke to other people
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  along the way like, you know, Mike mulqueen you know, him from
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  Rutgers heat, my dad coached him in high school and my parents
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  were, I think are his daughters godparents.
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  So he was always around. He was very careful once I
• 17:27
  started to get older and better at running, but he was always
• 17:31
  around if I ever had questions and things like that.
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  So there was a lot, you know, we were attract family and it was a
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  constant conversation. And my mom had to make rules at
• 17:42
  the dinner table. You know what?
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  We're not talking about track tonight.
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  Yeah, I meant to ask because I don't hear mom is was mama.
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  The Villanova track runner as well or she was not heard
• 17:51
  something here that's like yeah we're not going to talk track
• 17:53
  tonight. Yeah, the so my mom very
• 17:56
  supportive of all of us, I have a brother.
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  He wasn't really a runner but he has had incredible success in
• 18:04
  life and his career, my dad and everything.
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  In my mom has been in the rock for us, you know, throughout the
• 18:09
  years. And she became an official.
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  I don't if you know Ed scullion. Yes.
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  So yeah, so my dad during the years when he wasn't coaching
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  worked with Ed scullion in the timing system and my mom did as
• 18:23
  well. So they would travel to the Big
• 18:25
  East me, you know, the ACC me and everything.
• 18:28
  So it's a track family 101. Oh yeah, big time yeah.
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  Okay. So where does a high schooler?
• 18:37
  Who wants to be a math teacher and a coach weird.
• 18:40
  One, go to college for this. So, yeah, my parents pushed me
• 18:45
  to, you know, try and get the best education I possibly could,
• 18:48
  you know, I was looking around the Northeast Mid-Atlantic area.
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  So I ended up I got accepted to Princeton and I ran for Mike,
• 18:55
  Brady, and Fred Samara there so, yeah, unfortunately my health
• 19:00
  just never really worked out, and I wasn't able to run much at
• 19:04
  all, so that kind of stinks. But I was the guy that was at
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  practice most days, helping time, you know how Typing it
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  meets and everything. So I really kind of back into
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  the coaching from there. So yeah, well, I think that says
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  a lot right there because, you know, with health and injuries
• 19:20
  and things like that for our passion, you know, running track
• 19:22
  is a passion easily could have said, you know what, this board.
• 19:26
  I'm trying to put everything into this board it and given me
• 19:28
  anything back. I'll go be a teacher, but I'm
• 19:31
  done with this. But instead you double down in
• 19:33
  like, okay, I'll be there when you need me to do Fred.
• 19:36
  Give me the time. I'll time you need to write down
• 19:39
  the result. All right.
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  Right? If you kind of delve into that
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  side, I did I did. And again more dealing with Mike
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  Brady who is, you know, obviously he passed on a few
• 19:50
  years ago but he was one of my heroes Through The Years.
• 19:55
  Just stay. Every time, I had issues, he
• 19:59
  would just say this will pass. He was always there for me,
• 20:02
  really important person in my life through those, you know,
• 20:06
  those four years of Princeton. So I learned a lot from him.
• 20:10
  And and how to deal with people. So, so I know Fred Samara fairly
• 20:15
  well, my former boss now. Retired and him were decathletes
• 20:20
  together, so that the hairy mayor and the Jenner, oh, group,
• 20:24
  you know, I came here, it was generous dog, or Fred Samara is
• 20:28
  dog, was famous to be in the training group.
• 20:31
  Yeah. What there's some dog in that
• 20:32
  group said, Sara tells a great story about it but I don't know
• 20:36
  Mike, Brady very well and obviously he had a big impact on
• 20:40
  your life. It's more about Coach Braden,
• 20:42
  it's a Mike. Brady was he was a decathlete
• 20:45
  back in the day. These are everybody was okay.
• 20:49
  Yeah. And he ended up going.
• 20:51
  I think he was coaching at rider for a very long time.
• 20:54
  Not a very long time for you know, five or ten years and he
• 20:58
  he took over Princeton in the late 80s.
• 21:01
  Early 90s, I want to say and he coached there until until Steve
• 21:06
  Dolan took over. And I think his wife was a A
• 21:10
  high-level executive in Waterford Crystal and she got a
• 21:14
  job in Western Massachusetts and he's like, all right, I'm done
• 21:17
  coaching, you know, and that was that was kind of it.
• 21:19
  But yeah he was he kind of brought Princeton back on the
• 21:25
  map in terms of distance running because they lost it mid 80s.
• 21:28
  They were very good and there was a you know, 5 or 10-year
• 21:30
  period where they kind of fell off the Earth in a way and then
• 21:35
  you know that when I was there that are very very good and
• 21:37
  since then have been very good, of course, yeah.
• 21:40
  So what was it about him and his style that I mean your face kind
• 21:44
  of like if you're watching this on YouTube you probably noticed
• 21:47
  it you know your face Shawn like it softened up.
• 21:50
  When you mentioned Mike He he really cared about his kids at
• 21:58
  athletes, as people, you know, I had a lot going on.
• 22:04
  I like, I came in, I had a hip bone issue, pubic bone issue.
• 22:09
  So that was one issue and then I ended up having a heart problem
• 22:12
  that I had to get fixed. And I remember I had a Sunday
• 22:15
  practice I had I showed up and I just got out of a car, you know?
• 22:20
  Because my parents dropped me off and Because I was going to
• 22:24
  Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick.
• 22:28
  And so the day before I had been there to get evaluated and
• 22:31
  everything and I told him what was going on and he just kind of
• 22:34
  put his arm. He said, don't worry, this will
• 22:35
  pass. And yeah, it was, it was a tough
• 22:40
  time for me, physically, but it was nice knowing that he was
• 22:43
  always there and he always accepted me and he did a lot of
• 22:48
  that for the guys, on the team. I remember a guy named Adam
• 22:50
  stool fault who owns running Now, I'm not sure where I
• 22:53
  haven't spoken to in years, but he came in from Minnesota and
• 22:58
  had had a really bad injury coming in and like, Brady never
• 23:02
  gave up on him. And by his senior year I think
• 23:06
  he finished top three in the ivy league in cross-country.
• 23:09
  Tony borracho was a New Jersey state champion from Kearney.
• 23:13
  The, the soccer capital of the u.s. but he, he was injured for
• 23:19
  three years and then his senior year, he coach Brady.
• 23:22
  Never gave up on him and his senior year, he won the IV's.
• 23:25
  He was I think second in the icy for 80s.
• 23:28
  When that was the the combo of the Mid-Atlantic and New England
• 23:32
  region. So, yeah.
• 23:33
  He, he just never gave up on us and I think that was an
• 23:36
  important thing, especially in a place like Princeton where
• 23:39
  there's kids there that are there there for school that
• 23:44
  that's number one. And, you know, Yeah, Runnings
• 23:48
  important but it's a lot of the kids.
• 23:50
  That's not the order it goes, you know.
• 23:53
  So yeah, that's what I was going to ask you.
• 23:56
  You know, I went to the Harvard of the South Troy University,
• 23:59
  but that's not the same academically.
• 24:01
  I don't think as a Princeton as your, you know, dealing with
• 24:05
  again. You know, I can sense the
• 24:07
  emotions of, you know, not being able to fulfill a running career
• 24:11
  that you would want, doesn't mean you thought I could make
• 24:13
  the Olympics. But like, man, I think I can
• 24:14
  contribute to the Princeton team and that's obviously not.
• 24:18
  Working out with the heart and things like that but at the same
• 24:20
  time year at Princeton so not only do you have that going on
• 24:24
  but you know academics and the Society of Princeton are also
• 24:28
  great stressors especially 18 to 22 year old young people.
• 24:34
  How were you was academics going?
• 24:36
  Okay. At that point though still or
• 24:39
  how just how are you managing this?
• 24:41
  Yeah it was hard. School was very, very hard
• 24:45
  there. I tell you.
• 24:46
  One thing that saved me. Sometimes we we had exams after
• 24:48
  Christmas for the first semester so you were able to go home and
• 24:52
  you had three or four weeks to study and write papers that, you
• 24:57
  know, final paper. So that helped a lot.
• 25:00
  But yeah, it was challenging and it was challenging for 90% of
• 25:04
  the people there. And you know, the reason people
• 25:06
  that were the smartest people in the world But for them their
• 25:10
  standard was so high that They too had, you know, like we're
• 25:14
  just working their butts off. So it was tough and I took some
• 25:19
  classes that were, you know, I went from beat trying to be a
• 25:22
  math major, I left that in the first week I was there and then
• 25:26
  I was like, okay I'll be a history major and I had a
• 25:29
  professor named Anthony Grafton Who convinced me to SLI Classics
• 25:34
  and I said well why? And he said, well if you major
• 25:37
  in history, you have to learn the language.
• 25:39
  A time period that you want to study and he said, you want to
• 25:42
  do Roman history, have to learn Latin or Greek.
• 25:44
  I got a great and he said the classics Department, only has
• 25:48
  eight people in it and there's 25 professors.
• 25:51
  So, you know, like, when I wrote my thesis, I had three advisors.
• 25:54
  Yeah, it was a, it was pretty cool.
• 25:57
  But, you know, having that guidance kind of really help me
• 26:03
  out. But yeah, there were midterms in
• 26:05
  the fall were Ivy, ivy league, championships was you.
• 26:09
  Really the Friday of midterms. So you'd have class all week,
• 26:13
  midterms all week and then the ivy league championship.
• 26:16
  It was, it was brutal. It was a very, very brutal for.
• 26:20
  I never got to race that unfortunately but for the guys
• 26:22
  were racing and it was tough. So yeah, I remember, you know,
• 26:25
  just talking about the ivy league and you mentioned like,
• 26:29
  you know, some of the smartest guys in the world and they're
• 26:31
  still use the word struggling, but they're really having to
• 26:34
  work hard at. It's not like they just come in
• 26:36
  and just Breeze through though, you can probably imagine some
• 26:39
  class. You had that didn't like how
• 26:41
  lucky is that guy? Yea, but I remember there was a
• 26:44
  study done about that about like it was focused on the ivy
• 26:49
  League's, no one specific School.
• 26:50
  In the ivy League's was just the the ivy league in general.
• 26:53
  And it was talking about, you get the, you know, the number
• 26:55
  one kid from every school, let's say, you know, generalizing
• 26:58
  here. And when you do that, that means
• 27:00
  that all these kids together. Like well, that means the kids,
• 27:04
  you know, 99% of the kids that were number one are no longer
• 27:06
  number one and they have to deal with what is number two.
• 27:09
  Look like Like, and what does number 60 look like a number
• 27:11
  one? And some of them mentally just
• 27:14
  can't handle that. They've and it wasn't born of
• 27:18
  like like a Like I think it should be easy because it's
• 27:23
  always been easy. It's just been like, oh, I've
• 27:25
  always been applauded and lauded for being the number one, kid
• 27:28
  and 8th, grade and 11th grade, and Senior year.
• 27:31
  And now, while I'm 20th, I'm not getting those actually you know,
• 27:35
  the other 19 are getting more accolades and hard to put
• 27:38
  yourself back and say oh well you know, 20th is at Princeton
• 27:41
  is really stinking good. Like your van, I wasn't 20th.
• 27:47
  Yeah, I can assure you that I don't know how many students
• 27:51
  there But I would have been the 20,000 so any is perfect.
• 27:55
  Perfect perfect. Right, so you studied Classics.
• 27:58
  That's interesting. Offbeat our CFO J Norton.
• 28:05
  You know what? School?
• 28:05
  He went to, he's from Oregon originally, but he is also a
• 28:08
  Classics undergrad. And I remember thinking that was
• 28:11
  so odd because you had go in his office and he's our CFO and I'd
• 28:15
  see the the diploma and I'm like the classics like, what are you
• 28:20
  doing as a CFO? No man in like it he went on to
• 28:23
  get an MBA in finance and all that's yeah that's how I went
• 28:25
  down that path. But what so tell us there's a
• 28:29
  lot of different Majors out there.
• 28:30
  What does a Classics major obviously you study Latin
• 28:33
  because you should teach like I assume you learned Latin or you
• 28:37
  know cuz yeah. What is a classic major do you
• 28:41
  read? Like The Iliad all the time or
• 28:44
  what? So in college I mean you're
• 28:47
  studying Latin and Greek so I learned to read Greek and Latin.
• 28:51
  And yeah, and you study the authors of the time period And
• 28:57
  there's different angles, you can take some people take it in
• 28:59
  a religious way to study, the ancient religions, some people
• 29:04
  take it in a historical way. As I did philosophy is another
• 29:07
  angle people take. So really, it's a very broad
• 29:11
  subject but the key is you have to learn Latin and or Greek to
• 29:16
  be able to do it. I mean, if you want to go beyond
• 29:18
  the college level, you have to learn both of them.
• 29:21
  So yeah, did you learn both are I did just Latin and Greek.
• 29:28
  I probably couldn't read Greek right now.
• 29:30
  It's been a long time but yeah it helps you because they're the
• 29:34
  structure is very similar. So yeah.
• 29:38
  So you studied Latin, you know and you teach it so you know it
• 29:41
  really well. Do you know what?
• 29:43
  Le taenia? I might be pronouncing that
• 29:44
  incorrectly liit. A ni a say that again l80 I
• 29:51
  pronounce Latina liit, a n IA. So it's supposed to me, what?
• 29:58
  We looked it up, was, it's a list of prayers until litany?
• 30:01
  Yeah, yes, yeah. Okay, all right, all right,
• 30:04
  we're on the same path. Okay.
• 30:05
  Okay, that's really weird of like the we named our company.
• 30:09
  No no no no, no, you're right our owner of Gil purchased
• 30:13
  another company called porter athletic which does basketball
• 30:16
  and volleyball. And so when those two companies,
• 30:20
  you know, came together when we purchase Porter we had to have a
• 30:22
  colored an umbrella name, you know, we're Just Gil.
• 30:25
  Athletics were, you know, we're on a collection of other brand
• 30:29
  names. And so he named the company
• 30:32
  Latonia Sports Group. As he has always had in his
• 30:36
  office, it's kind of quite famous.
• 30:38
  If you're here long enough and you kind of get to know him in
• 30:41
  his office, he has no whiteboard and he has a list of prayers
• 30:44
  for, you know, he's really famous for its quite amazing.
• 30:48
  It happened to the very first day that I've worked at Gill and
• 30:52
  now on my almost 17th year, it still happens every Single day,
• 30:56
  he goes around and speaks to every employee in the company
• 31:00
  and so he knows everybody from the first day.
• 31:02
  Well Burger to the 17th year sales guy to the gosh are the
• 31:07
  CFO. I mentioned has been here, I
• 31:08
  think maybe close to 25 years now and he stops in house, you
• 31:12
  know, how are you doing? How's your family?
• 31:14
  And so through that as you gain trust, when you first get here,
• 31:18
  you'll typically say oh you know my we were visiting, my mom,
• 31:21
  she's not doing real well, you know she's you know, whatever
• 31:25
  you Yeah. And he puts it on his white
• 31:26
  board, you know, Mike's mom. Yeah.
• 31:29
  And so he's always had this list of prayers and so when it came
• 31:32
  time to name the company, you know, the umbrella companies,
• 31:35
  like, what am I going to name this after?
• 31:37
  And it was just kind of like, you know, that's, that's who we
• 31:39
  are. And that's who I am and Sola
• 31:41
  tinea SpongeBob. Yeah, that is the only thing I
• 31:45
  know about lat. Done.
• 31:50
  That's awesome. I think I know, but it's
• 31:56
  probably wrong, so I'm not even gonna say it, okay?
• 31:59
  Shawn you graduate from Princeton, you graduated from
• 32:03
  Princeton with a Classics major and, you know, Latin and Greece.
• 32:10
  And you say, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go coach track and field.
• 32:15
  What was your first? Well, I went to grade, I went to
• 32:19
  grad school for a year. You did, what's a Rucker's to
• 32:23
  get a teaching? Thing.
• 32:26
  Okay, I've got your certificate type.
• 32:28
  Yeah, but I ended up leaving before I finish.
• 32:30
  I just did a year of school. I didn't.
• 32:32
  They had a, they were supposed to have a master's in teaching
• 32:35
  Latin program and they really didn't, even though they had it
• 32:38
  on paper. So after a year, I ended up
• 32:41
  moving on to teaching, I started a prep school for just a year
• 32:46
  and then I moved on to the public schools in New Jersey.
• 32:50
  So did you when you were at that riggers for that year did?
• 32:55
  To help out with the team did. Yeah.
• 32:57
  Okay, so I had eligibility. So I ran in the fall and then
• 33:02
  getting ended up getting injured again but I did help quite a bit
• 33:06
  while I was there because again you know, Michael Queen was such
• 33:10
  a good family friend. So yeah, yeah.
• 33:15
  And during that during your undergrad at Princeton and
• 33:19
  you're helping out and then this year at Rutgers, was there more,
• 33:24
  that's the word I want. To use here.
• 33:28
  I must say solidification but I'm not sure that's the right
• 33:30
  word of like, oh yeah, this is I mean, I know I want to run.
• 33:34
  You try it again injury again but it's like okay, you know
• 33:36
  what I really maybe my real calling, maybe someones trying
• 33:39
  to tell me I need to be coaching here.
• 33:42
  Yeah, it's funny at the time. I wanted to be a college coach.
• 33:46
  I think a lot of college athletes have that dream, you
• 33:50
  know, especially Runners. But I think the the concept of
• 33:57
  helping Kids grow and become better men or women.
• 34:01
  I coach an all-boys school so I often leave out the other
• 34:05
  gender. But I think to me, that was
• 34:08
  something that I am good at and I enjoy doing.
• 34:11
  I also love Latin and I love teaching it.
• 34:13
  So but yeah, you know going to Rutgers helping out it meets
• 34:17
  helping friends and things like that.
• 34:18
  Train has always been something I've loved doing and, you know,
• 34:23
  all that time. Yeah, did help me figure that
• 34:25
  out. So yeah, you know we've had 200
• 34:28
  plus episodes here. Sean and no one has ever said
• 34:31
  and I love that. It's never been spoken on the
• 34:36
  show. It's a beautiful language.
• 34:41
  Everybody should learn it. You know, I said I'd be done
• 34:45
  with Latin but there's like a lot of jokes but also a lot of
• 34:47
  curiosity from me as well because isn't it, what they call
• 34:50
  a dead language? Like no one speaks anymore,
• 34:52
  right? Yes it is dead but we Yes, we
• 34:58
  do. What does learning Latin help us
• 35:01
  besides going on to become a Latin teacher.
• 35:04
  So, great question. And I see I don't see my job and
• 35:09
  I never have seen my job as teaching a skill.
• 35:15
  I think. And honestly, I think that
• 35:19
  education has lost its way quite a bit over the years because we
• 35:23
  are too concerned with coaching teaching kids how to Do
• 35:28
  something instead of teaching people how to be studious, how
• 35:32
  to be good people, how to take care of yourself.
• 35:36
  And those are things that that I always was very that, goes back
• 35:42
  to Mike, Brady, you know, that that whole listen, you're here
• 35:45
  Princeton. Yeah, you're learning.
• 35:46
  But you're trying to become the best version of yourself?
• 35:50
  And how are you going to help Society in the future?
• 35:53
  And I'm an academic I you know, obviously I took high level
• 35:57
  class. High school and things like
• 35:58
  that, but it was more to me than that.
• 36:02
  It was always. How am I helping the world?
• 36:07
  You know? And like listen, I'm not a
• 36:08
  president, I'm never going to be, I'm never going to be at
• 36:10
  that level, but I can help my small little part of the world.
• 36:14
  And hopefully every year I graduate, you know, 5 10, 15
• 36:17
  kids in my track team and you know, 5 10, 15 Latin students
• 36:23
  that are great people that are going to benefit society and are
• 36:27
  going to Help Society, grow, and become better to me.
• 36:31
  That's the most important thing I do.
• 36:34
  And again, it doesn't matter what you teach, you could teach
• 36:39
  how to clean carpets, if you're showing kids, how to be studious
• 36:44
  and how to know how to do your that thing perfectly.
• 36:47
  Well, that's great. My wife is a stem teacher, she
• 36:50
  teaches technology, education in a middle school.
• 36:53
  So, you know, we often argue about this exact Can she agrees
• 36:58
  with me? Of course, on terms of what
• 37:00
  we're supposed to be teaching. But, you know, I think things
• 37:03
  like Latin things. Like English are getting thrown
• 37:06
  to the side even Spanish and you know, other languages are
• 37:09
  getting thrown to the side. A lot, not necessarily on paper,
• 37:14
  but I think a lot of students, a lot of parents like well it
• 37:16
  doesn't matter. And in the end, these everything
• 37:19
  matters to you. And, you know, we teach theology
• 37:22
  at CBA of course. And, you know, I think a lot of
• 37:26
  those kids get a big Benefit from, but I think a lot of them
• 37:29
  are like it's theology class, whatever but you can learn just
• 37:32
  as much from that even as a non-religious person.
• 37:37
  Again you're learning how to read, how to interpret, how to
• 37:41
  better present arguments. And that's where Latin comes in.
• 37:44
  Its it's like math problems with words.
• 37:47
  It's reading the Best Literature that's ever been written.
• 37:51
  My AP class advanced placement. We read The Aeneid.
• 37:54
  We were Julius Caesar as well, which I'd rather throw in the
• 37:56
  garbage. But You know, reading Virgil's
• 38:00
  Aeneid to that to the kids in light and it's just it's
• 38:02
  unbelievable and it's it's awesome to me to be able to
• 38:06
  present that to them and talk about Augustus and how this poem
• 38:10
  relates to him is pretty cool. So I think we would agree with
• 38:15
  each other a lot on education you know especially I certainly
• 38:19
  didn't think about education much as I was going through it
• 38:21
  you know as a 13 14 year old kid and maybe even certainly not
• 38:25
  through college but now having to of My own.
• 38:28
  So having a seventh grader going into seventh grade and going
• 38:30
  into fourth grade and socially where you know I'll call it
• 38:34
  technology is today in 2023 like I'm not a big fan of the
• 38:37
  memorization of Education because I'm like well you know
• 38:41
  that's what we have Google for and definitely that's what we
• 38:43
  now will have ai for, you know with GP teas and things like
• 38:47
  that. But I think the you didn't say
• 38:51
  this but and maybe maybe you don't go this way but we'll talk
• 38:55
  about here. How to learn.
• 38:58
  The cow to be curious that, that to me, is where he talked about
• 39:01
  Latin and The Iliad things like that, like, oh like, yeah, I'd
• 39:04
  be curious of like, how they wrote Things, why they wrote
• 39:07
  them that way, how it's different, than what we write
• 39:09
  today, and things like that. And why they wrote it this way?
• 39:11
  Because they didn't have computers and whatnot.
• 39:14
  Like, being curious to me, is one of the biggest super powers
• 39:18
  out there and so, that's I think that's why I don't like the some
• 39:22
  of the rote memorization that we do.
• 39:24
  And it patient is like, well, that's just, there's no
• 39:25
  curiosity there. Just shut up and Earn this
• 39:28
  order. Learn this these formulas or
• 39:30
  what not. And I'm like, man, if you could
• 39:32
  just be curious and and that means that, you know, somebody's
• 39:36
  not going to be curious about math, but they're going to be
• 39:38
  real curious about English and language arts, and someone's
• 39:41
  like, no like that, they're going to love site.
• 39:43
  You know, talk about your wife, being a stem teachers going to
• 39:44
  love going to physics. And why do volcanoes work?
• 39:48
  And that person becomes the greatest volcano person in the
• 39:50
  world. You know, that that's where, you
• 39:52
  know I just I just look at some of the things that like I don't
• 39:56
  get caught up in grades four. Kid, like they come home and
• 39:58
  they're like, oh I only got a B in my hand.
• 40:00
  You try real hard like yeah. Alright, cool.
• 40:03
  I mean what I mean you're not going to Princeton like Shawn
• 40:07
  kids so they never no, you never never know.
• 40:11
  It's true. What's funny is?
• 40:12
  I had a student years ago. I taught them in seventh and
• 40:15
  eighth grade. I believe I think that was it.
• 40:17
  I taught middle school for a while and they became a
• 40:21
  geologist because we studied Vesuvius and Pompeii and the
• 40:25
  love, the idea of volcanoes and Rock.
• 40:27
  Acts and things like that. So I'm kind of curious about
• 40:30
  something at least. Exactly.
• 40:32
  And that's a great point. You don't know where the
• 40:35
  curiosity is going to come from? It's exactly right.
• 40:38
  They may be a math class and hate math but like man, but I
• 40:41
  really do like my teacher. So maybe I should go in to
• 40:43
  teach, you know, and going to teach something else, but you
• 40:46
  never know where Kira. That's why I like the buffet
• 40:49
  analogy especially when kids are young and even it's my own
• 40:52
  analogy. You don't worry.
• 40:53
  Don't you're wrecking your brain.
• 40:54
  Like oh we're not study. Got no, no, this is my
• 40:56
  Cunningham original here. And even when kids get out of
• 40:59
  high school and in college before College of sampling, a
• 41:03
  lot of things. Like, you know, you got a buffet
• 41:05
  like I have a piece of pizza, plus a stake, plus a twice,
• 41:08
  baked potato, or whatever, right?
• 41:11
  Try it. All try lots of little different
• 41:13
  than tried a bunch of classes and see what really sticks for
• 41:17
  you. We just had a recent interview
• 41:19
  camera which one it was here and we were talking about like isn't
• 41:22
  it kind of ridiculous we make 18 year olds pick their major.
• 41:25
  We say hey you're 18 years old, your Still, you were just a
• 41:28
  senior, the year before, by the way, but pick a major.
• 41:31
  That's going to be your career for the rest of your life.
• 41:34
  Like that, to me is just so again, especially now that I
• 41:37
  have a call on a middle schooler, it's like that
• 41:39
  terrifies. Me like that.
• 41:40
  Kids going to pick with me what to do.
• 41:42
  I certainly am not doing what I thought, right?
• 41:44
  18 years old. I mean we have schools in our
• 41:47
  County and in our state here, in New Jersey and New Jersey is one
• 41:50
  of the best school systems in the country.
• 41:53
  We have schools where kids are picking to be engineers at 14.
• 41:58
  You know, and like and biologists, doctors, and it's it
• 42:01
  is very young, very young and that's for somebody some people,
• 42:06
  for sure. It is her some.
• 42:08
  I'm not saying that even a majority, for some just like,
• 42:10
  there is for some, some people should probably just be playing
• 42:13
  basketball or just running track at age. 14, not the majority.
• 42:17
  I think the majority of should also play both Sports and try
• 42:20
  something else but certainly there's some that yeah, you
• 42:23
  know, they were, you know, we're all put on another Cunningham
• 42:27
  Theory. Here for your shot, you know,
• 42:28
  the Troy grad, educating the Princeton grad here, this is
• 42:32
  great. I never thought I would be able
• 42:34
  to do this that if you know I lost my train of thought because
• 42:39
  I was bragging about school and the Princeton guy, what are we
• 42:45
  talking about? We're talking about and I really
• 42:46
  had a good thought here to Shawn.
• 42:47
  This is a good one to the both of you on your series.
• 42:50
  It was a good theory. The buffet theory is really good
• 42:52
  like that. Yeah.
• 42:54
  It was really good, right? Yeah.
• 42:55
  It's probably not original. I probably From someone my mind,
• 43:00
  blank, I'm 40. He's all right years old, it
• 43:03
  happens more and more frequently, but let's keep going
• 43:05
  with yours story here, Sean. So you go to Rutgers to go, you
• 43:09
  can now you want to go into teaching.
• 43:10
  So you have to do, right? Thought was a teaching,
• 43:13
  certificate course not. But that lead to are actually
• 43:18
  going into teaching after. Yeah, absolutely, yes, yes.
• 43:22
  So I taught it at a place called The Hun School for a year Point
• 43:25
  Pleasant Boro for a year. And then Then I moved to Holmdel
• 43:29
  high school and home to high school is it's where New Jersey
• 43:34
  has their state cross country Championship.
• 43:36
  Adam heard a very calm down. Yeah, it's where bell Labs was
• 43:41
  they invented the computer? There is so when I started there
• 43:46
  there was a lot of Lucent Technologies had taken over Bell
• 43:50
  labs. And so there was a lot of very
• 43:52
  very intelligent families. Their Engineers, some of
• 43:57
  Teachers that were working, there were retired, you know,
• 44:01
  phds from this place is so it was a very, very cool place to
• 44:06
  work at. So some of the kids I've taught
• 44:08
  over the years have been brilliant and it was awesome but
• 44:12
  about two years ago and I coach there for very long time.
• 44:16
  So eight or nine years ago, I guess when Chris Bennett.
• 44:19
  I don't know if you know Chris Bennett.
• 44:21
  He's an ikigai. Now he's like their Global
• 44:24
  something coach. Yes, yes, Exactly.
• 44:28
  Yes. When he he was the assistant
• 44:30
  behind Tom Heath for a little bit.
• 44:33
  When he moved on, I took over as the assistant I still was
• 44:37
  teaching at Holmdel and then after a year and a half time, he
• 44:41
  stepped down and retired. And so I took over his role as
• 44:45
  the head coach. And two years ago I started
• 44:48
  teaching at CBA as well. I really like cba's idea of what
• 44:55
  education is and it's kind of what we just talked about. about
• 44:57
  is, you know, creating good, young men, not necessarily
• 45:02
  concerned with You know, preparing kids perfectly for a
• 45:07
  job, it's more about, hey, how are you going to help Society
• 45:10
  moving forward? How you going to do that?
• 45:12
  And I really dig that. So yeah.
• 45:16
  And so leading up to see ba, you read a couple different spots
• 45:20
  along the way. You were coaching along the way
• 45:23
  as well. How did you continue to develop
• 45:26
  yourself as a coach as what's interesting to me, we recently
• 45:31
  had a high school coach, who doesn't teach at the high school
• 45:34
  and I Talk about and actually, when I coached high school.
• 45:37
  So I coach data similar risks. Cool to see VA De La Salle High
• 45:42
  School, you've heard of D LaSalle's.
• 45:44
  Schools, may be kind of like Christian Brothers and there's a
• 45:46
  lot of cba's all around. We are Christian Brothers, De
• 45:49
  Lasalle so. Oh, okay.
• 45:51
  I thought, you know what? Because I thought there's some
• 45:52
  kind of Christian Brothers connection.
• 45:54
  Yeah, I worked at D LaSalle and Chicago.
• 45:57
  Right? Absolutely.
• 45:59
  And so, but I didn't teach them. Yeah, it was, you know, as a
• 46:01
  young College, Dropout actually and there, I thought there were
• 46:04
  some benefits and Disadvantages to not being a teacher there but
• 46:08
  I thought there'd be more advantages to being a teacher
• 46:11
  there because you get to interact you know during
• 46:13
  planning period during Latin or something.
• 46:15
  That's right. Yeah.
• 46:16
  How did you have your developing yourself as a coach at this time
• 46:20
  and a teacher? How was that going for you?
• 46:24
  That's how it's always tough. You know, especially when, you
• 46:29
  know, I had years where very few of the kids in my classes were
• 46:32
  on my team but it, but it was a challenge.
• 46:35
  Challenge as early on when you're coaching and teaching and
• 46:39
  trying to balance that time. But again, if you look at it as
• 46:44
  hey, I started eight in the morning.
• 46:47
  I'm trying to teach children how to be better people and I'm
• 46:51
  finishing at 5:30 at night and that's what I do, you know, and
• 46:56
  so I look at every moment, I don't care how fast my kids run.
• 47:00
  Never do. I mean, I do not gonna lie but
• 47:05
  that's not my main concern. My main concern is that, you
• 47:09
  know, Nick Sullivan, who's just graduated for us, Lucas Ward.
• 47:12
  Just graduated that they go to college, and they're prepared to
• 47:15
  learn and they're prepared to be good people.
• 47:17
  And Prepared to be a good roommate and be a good family
• 47:20
  man and things like that. So if you look at your day in
• 47:24
  that way, it really changes and kind of flips on its head how
• 47:28
  you do things. And I felt like when I was
• 47:31
  coaching at CBA but not teaching their I didn't have that mindset
• 47:36
  as well as I could. And when I was at Holmdel
• 47:39
  coaching and teaching their I did in the past two years, have
• 47:43
  really kind of opened that door to me because now I'm teaching
• 47:46
  there And coaching there. So I really have that advantage
• 47:50
  and the ability to be that, you know, kid in my home room sits
• 47:54
  in the Alex Camp. I see him at the end of the day
• 47:57
  for track practice and it's awesome to be able to start my
• 48:00
  day and say, hey, how you doing Everett Kaylee's, that one of my
• 48:03
  shop worker? I don't coach him, but one of
• 48:04
  the shop owners in the team and I see him every morning like,
• 48:07
  hey, what are you doing today? How was it throws yesterday?
• 48:09
  Things like that and I enjoy being able to do that in the
• 48:11
  school. And you know creating that
• 48:14
  rapport with the kids is really important.
• 48:16
  So Yeah, I think many many more advantages.
• 48:20
  Oh yeah even over like you know, if you're faced with two choices
• 48:27
  A and B and one is a pretty good track coach, but it also a
• 48:31
  teacher versus someone who's a great track coach but doesn't
• 48:34
  teach at the school. I'm not, I'm not sure option.
• 48:39
  B's the right one? Especially as you're talking
• 48:42
  about, you made a great point there of.
• 48:44
  And, you know, I talk a little bit about it before in the
• 48:46
  pre-interview Hero 99.9%, these kids are not going pro.
• 48:51
  I don't know, I mean, the percentage of kids that go from
• 48:53
  high school to college for to run track is also very slim.
• 48:57
  I can't memorize all the actual stats somewhere but it was it
• 49:00
  was very slim, which actually caught me a little off guard
• 49:03
  because, you know, in high school boys and girls
• 49:06
  participation together, track and field is the highest
• 49:08
  participated sport. Well, in college, when you have
• 49:11
  the college minute college women, track and field together,
• 49:13
  it's also the most part it. So I kind of I mean, it's It's
• 49:17
  still a math game but I still thought there'd be a higher
• 49:19
  percentage of high schoolers that one of the college.
• 49:21
  It's not so very few of your kids are actually going to go
• 49:25
  onto any kind of Next Level to run but certainly at a school
• 49:28
  like CBA and certainly for a teacher like you, you want the
• 49:32
  vast majority of them to go on to college so to be able to see
• 49:37
  them in homeroom and do that check in you talk about that
• 49:40
  rapport with them. I think that's more important
• 49:42
  than Shawn being a much, much better distance coach you know
• 49:46
  that Doesn't teach at the soda 100% at the high school level,
• 49:52
  you know, I spoke with a bowl of Boulder Running clinics in
• 49:55
  January, and one of the first things I said is science does
• 49:59
  not matter as much as you think it does.
• 50:02
  It doesn't high school kids are constantly getting better,
• 50:06
  they're constantly adapting to the training because most of the
• 50:09
  kids I get freshman year, have run, either nothing or have run
• 50:15
  in the middle school program. That was Terrible.
• 50:17
  I have a couple exceptions here and there but so everything I'm
• 50:21
  giving them is adapting their bodies and making them better.
• 50:25
  So as long as you don't overdo it, they're going to improve to
• 50:28
  Annex certain extent. And then once they get to Junior
• 50:30
  Senior Year, you have to start throwing a little more in there.
• 50:33
  But you know that adaptation it's more.
• 50:37
  So what they believe in you and what they believe in themselves
• 50:41
  and their teammates that's significantly more important to
• 50:46
  any workout. You do you do you look at Timo
• 50:50
  monster doubted? American Fork, High School.
• 50:54
  He has had countless amazing athletes, and they do one work
• 50:59
  out every Monday. They run, you know, I don't even
• 51:01
  know what it is. They call it the, the grinder,
• 51:04
  they run up. This crazy Mountain up to 87,
• 51:06
  thousand feet, or something like that.
• 51:08
  And I talked to him about it and he's like, yeah, scientifically,
• 51:12
  I don't know if it really works but these kids it makes them
• 51:15
  Believers in our system in our program and it toughens them to
• 51:19
  each other and I think that is so much more important and you
• 51:23
  know, being able to be in the school and hook into them
• 51:27
  constantly, we do a morning, run the kids have breakfast
• 51:29
  together. You know, they have bagels and
• 51:31
  stuff after and like seeing them in the morning and then seeing
• 51:34
  that the end of the day, like you spend more time with them
• 51:36
  than their parents do. So whether they run a Ten mile
• 51:40
  long run, 11 mile long run, does not matter but you want them
• 51:46
  saying, hey I just ran that time my run and I'm freaking ready to
• 51:49
  run through walls for that because I did that that's all
• 51:53
  that matters to a large extent. With that said you do have to
• 51:59
  have some science backing to it and you have to kind of know
• 52:01
  what the workouts mean and what they do, you know.
• 52:04
  But you think I think this is fascinating and it's I used To
• 52:09
  say something that would in. The distance coaches would get
• 52:14
  upset with me when I used to teach level 14 usatf taught
• 52:19
  30-something schools, always did the Sprints and hurdles and
• 52:22
  power that, you know, I'm not a distance guy by which the
• 52:24
  imagination, but I'd always end up saying something like I can
• 52:28
  in high school. I think I could make anybody
• 52:31
  you, you can actually, you know, what you're actually here and on
• 52:33
  record. So you can push back and tell me
• 52:35
  how dumb the statement is. But I used to say, I pretty much
• 52:39
  think that I could make any high schooler 10-minute too.
• 52:42
  Tyler, like I just think I can now now Lucy.
• 52:45
  Yeah, that's what I thought. Now I was thinking of it on the
• 52:48
  science side of like oh I'll just make them run 50, 60, 70,
• 52:52
  80 miles a week. I'll just get them aerobic
• 52:54
  monsters and they'll run ten minutes out.
• 52:57
  I couldn't make them 915 s and 855 like there's a whole
• 53:00
  different ball game but now I wonder but now I wonder with
• 53:03
  what you just said because what you said as you were saying it
• 53:06
  Sean that made so much like I'm like, oh yeah like I started
• 53:10
  thinking about other you mentioned American Fork.
• 53:11
  I started thinking about Joe Newton and work high school and
• 53:14
  what he did and I was like, oh, I may be the real statement is.
• 53:19
  I bet I could make almost every boy attend minute to Miler
• 53:23
  because I love on them and make this culture.
• 53:26
  So big, it's probably a real combination of the two.
• 53:29
  I get it but it is I love what you said there though because I
• 53:32
  think that is there's a lot of weight to that of what you said.
• 53:37
  It's so tell me how is that experience?
• 53:39
  Played out for you then if you're if you're speaking at the
• 53:41
  Boulder Creek, which one of Top ones.
• 53:43
  Is that the one does Jay Johnson has a job.
• 53:45
  That doesn't love Jackie. We coach from the same
• 53:48
  conference in Juco way. Back in the day, he was like
• 53:51
  this guy's he was the coolest person the world because he was
• 53:53
  in that book. I'm not even distance guy and I
• 53:55
  read that, you know, running with the Buffaloes.
• 53:57
  Absolutely. And I was like, oh my God, that
• 53:59
  guy, he's in my conference. Again, I thought I was like a
• 54:01
  movie star. Honestly, I'll write about Nana
• 54:04
  then. I got to know him like, oh,
• 54:04
  you're just Jane. Oh, that's good.
• 54:06
  I love you guys. I know you're listening right
• 54:07
  now. I know you love it.
• 54:10
  So how was that played out for you then?
• 54:16
  I mean my predecessor at CBA Tom Heath was not a science guy at
• 54:22
  all, I think coach Bennett same and you know before you know I
• 54:29
  took over from a guy named Allah Coronet at home to high school
• 54:33
  he as well it was more about building camaraderie building a
• 54:37
  team, my dad same type of thing. I mean he ran for Jumbo Elliot,
• 54:42
  I don't think jumbo Elliott knew anything about science.
• 54:45
  But he could freaking put together a team, you know?
• 54:48
  And so, I think that I've kind of been raised around that idea
• 54:54
  of yes, workouts matter how much mileage you do matters.
• 55:00
  But if the kids don't believe in what you're doing, you could
• 55:02
  have the most talented kids. The most you know, the kids can
• 55:05
  work really hard but if they step on a starting line and they
• 55:08
  don't believe in what they just did, it just doesn't work and
• 55:12
  I've had kids over the years, that that don't trust me that
• 55:14
  Don't trust our system and they don't run as well as they
• 55:18
  possibly can. And they question it and, you
• 55:21
  know, you can tell right away when that's going to happen and
• 55:24
  it's you try to stop it and sometimes you can sometimes you
• 55:27
  can't. And you know this past couple
• 55:30
  years we were on a run right now at CBA.
• 55:32
  We we lost in 2021 in the fall. We lost two union Catholic and
• 55:38
  cross-country, you know, home of Sydney McLaughlin, thank God she
• 55:44
  didn't run cross. Country because she probably
• 55:46
  would have beaten us as good as you would have.
• 55:48
  He was amazing. Yeah, crazy.
• 55:49
  Yeah, funny story, sidebar indoors her senior year, we have
• 55:55
  a state relay championship and it's all the non-public large
• 55:59
  schools and we beat union Catholic by a little bit.
• 56:04
  It was close, she was so good. If she was on the boys team,
• 56:08
  they would have beaten us because she would have helped
• 56:11
  them. They needed one more person to
• 56:13
  be able to run relays and stuff. If that's how good she was.
• 56:16
  Yes so and we were very good, they're very clean.
• 56:19
  Remind me of Union. Catholics coach's name Mike
• 56:22
  McCabe. Thank you.
• 56:23
  Mike McCabe is a gill podcast alarm.
• 56:26
  I've had Mike on the podcast. Okay there you go that's why I
• 56:29
  said. Embarrassing is like I should
• 56:30
  know in Mike, Mike was grabbing, you know, Mike obviously great
• 56:36
  guy, I mean he was fantastic to have on the podcast as well.
• 56:39
  And we tried not talking about Sidney that much because I
• 56:41
  didn't want that to be the horse.
• 56:43
  No, but of course, We talked about Sydney, can't we talk
• 56:47
  about union Catholic without them, but anyway, so we lost to
• 56:51
  them across country that year, and I just got outcoached, you
• 56:55
  know, him and his assistant did a great job.
• 56:58
  They were very good. They finished.
• 57:01
  Fourth in the running Lane eat. We, you know, we were good to
• 57:05
  we, you know, we just, they just beat us.
• 57:08
  I changed everything after that, and I, it was a tough year for
• 57:12
  me. My wife will tell tell you that
• 57:14
  I didn't sleep a lot, I was stressed a lot, but we started
• 57:18
  to turn things around in the spring.
• 57:19
  And by last fall we were rolled on again.
• 57:22
  And so we're on, we're on a bit of a run right now and it's a
• 57:26
  lot of just the kids not even believing in me.
• 57:29
  It's believing in each other. I think that is they are the
• 57:32
  best friends, they care about each other.
• 57:35
  They drive all over Monmouth and Ocean County picking each other
• 57:38
  up to run. It's a moment in CBA where it's
• 57:42
  just a good group of guys, moving in the right direction.
• 57:45
  Erection. And, you know, I have an
• 57:47
  assistant coach who is Works in our Athletics office.
• 57:51
  Our athletic director is an alumnus of the cross-country
• 57:55
  team, he coached with me for a few years.
• 57:58
  So we have a lot of very, very good things going and it's more
• 58:03
  so belief than anything else. So okay I love that and I
• 58:07
  believe and I believe in that I'm with you I'm with you 100%
• 58:10
  Sean. So go back.
• 58:12
  You said something interesting and it's a topic we've kind of
• 58:14
  been Been talking about here in the last few weeks on the
• 58:17
  podcast, you said my paraphrase here, you know, things weren't
• 58:22
  going real. Well, you weren't, you know, you
• 58:24
  could feel it. I could tell I could feel it on
• 58:26
  your soul. You weren't sleeping, things
• 58:29
  like that, and you made the statement.
• 58:30
  So we changed everything. And now we're on a good roll and
• 58:34
  I love to explore that because we, we've been talking about
• 58:37
  this, a little Snippets with past guests here about, you
• 58:41
  know, continually learning, right?
• 58:43
  Always be an open, but And how do you actually do that?
• 58:46
  And what I mean by that is, you know, you could have a very good
• 58:50
  program, go to a clinic, or a coaches school and find out,
• 58:54
  like, oh my gosh, I'm not doing any of these things, and then
• 58:57
  it's like, well, how do you implement, do you implement
• 59:00
  little things at a time? Do you wholesale change?
• 59:02
  I don't ever know that wholesale change in is necessarily the
• 59:04
  right thing. But you literally said we
• 59:06
  changed everything might have been some hyperbole.
• 59:09
  I would tell me it was like to explore that so because they
• 59:12
  think there's people that are, you know, I'm a big Huge
• 59:15
  believer. Huge proponent in coaching
• 59:16
  education, right there has to be some education of the education.
• 59:22
  Meaning don't just throw out everything that you'd
• 59:24
  something's work. Something is working for you, or
• 59:27
  you, or you wouldn't even be at the coaches school or the
• 59:29
  clinic. There's something has to be
• 59:31
  working for you. So, how do we make changes with
• 59:33
  the best practices? What did you mean when you said
• 59:36
  we changed everything? I think we I changed my Approach
• 59:43
  into into coaching and I was very hard on myself, still am
• 59:50
  but in a different way now. So I think that I attacked
• 59:54
  coaching in a different way and I think I gave kids a lot more,
• 1:00:00
  easy days. I think that was a big thing
• 1:00:04
  that I started to change that after 2019 2020.
• 1:00:09
  I started to give more easy days and it really started to kind of
• 1:00:13
  and also for us the pandemic. We do a lot of group running and
• 1:00:20
  intervals together as most teams do but we move kids around a lot
• 1:00:26
  and we didn't really have the ability to do that because we
• 1:00:29
  were supposed to keep them grouped for two weeks and so
• 1:00:33
  that hurt our camaraderie a lot that hurt our ability to build
• 1:00:38
  build a program. And I think last kind of winter,
• 1:00:42
  I kind of looked at that and said we need to get back to this
• 1:00:45
  and we need to really dive in and start to build that more and
• 1:00:50
  we had a couple kids. We and kid named John holla back
• 1:00:53
  he was and I feel okay saying is he was so bad as a freshman and
• 1:01:00
  sophomore we could barely run a mile and a half.
• 1:01:06
  But, every time we had a try out for the team, he'd somehow
• 1:01:09
  muscle it up and make the team. And I mean, he ran by himself
• 1:01:13
  all the time because he was so slow.
• 1:01:15
  I almost feel bad for him. Pandemic happens.
• 1:01:18
  And he came back from the pandemic and was like a totally
• 1:01:22
  different person. And last year at the state meet,
• 1:01:26
  he anchored our 4x8 ran to Flat, you know?
• 1:01:30
  Yeah. Like he came such a long way and
• 1:01:32
  like, the effect that that had on the guys, on the team and me,
• 1:01:37
  What was so profound, you know, just watching him and prove and
• 1:01:44
  watching him and it was it was him buying into what we were
• 1:01:46
  doing, more so than the work he was putting in.
• 1:01:49
  It was like, wow, like and you could see it happening and the
• 1:01:52
  kids on the team could see it growing, and I think he gave a
• 1:01:56
  speech last year. We do a handshake line at the
• 1:01:59
  end of the year, where the seniors Shake, all hands, and he
• 1:02:02
  gave a little speech. And like, there wasn't a dry eye
• 1:02:04
  in the house, like it was just and just because he cared so
• 1:02:07
  much about them. And I think they started to see
• 1:02:09
  like, oh, if I do that, if I care about these guys, more than
• 1:02:13
  I care about myself, it's going to help me and them.
• 1:02:17
  And I think that's, I started to see that.
• 1:02:19
  And it kind of reinvigorated me to get back to that.
• 1:02:23
  So, one of my mentors was longtime assistant coach, and
• 1:02:27
  head coach at Indiana University Marshal Goss.
• 1:02:31
  And when he was first, teaching me, when I first got into
• 1:02:33
  college coaching, he really? I mean, literally, Like open the
• 1:02:37
  books or tree and showed me everything.
• 1:02:38
  And you know talked of course about recruiting and coaching
• 1:02:41
  and he said, you know, there's some some programs out there
• 1:02:44
  that are recruiting machines. They're going to go and get the
• 1:02:46
  best kids every year. But they can't coach and they're
• 1:02:48
  still going to be pretty good. You know, they got the best kids
• 1:02:50
  out of high school and there's other programs out there that
• 1:02:53
  can coach their tail off. Not great recruiters, they're
• 1:02:57
  going to, they're going to be pretty good teams.
• 1:02:58
  They're going to improve their kids that they do get and I
• 1:03:01
  still had Marshall looked and he goes and he was looking right at
• 1:03:04
  me because I'm going to be you Mike because Cuz I'm a good
• 1:03:06
  coach and a good recruiter and it really imparted on the of
• 1:03:09
  like, oh no one is more important than the other.
• 1:03:12
  You got to, you got to be. You ain't got to be great at
• 1:03:14
  both much, will you better be good at both and it makes me
• 1:03:17
  think what you're describing here.
• 1:03:18
  Sean of the, I'ma Call It, The Passion of the team, the culture
• 1:03:22
  of the team and the science part of it.
• 1:03:25
  How have you, you certainly seem to have the culture down?
• 1:03:30
  And I know you would say no, I'm still working on.
• 1:03:31
  I know that I get that but you seem to like that's a very
• 1:03:34
  important part to you, that story.
• 1:03:36
  Of that kid, I'm that speech. He gave probably one somebody
• 1:03:41
  else on your team, a future State title.
• 1:03:43
  Like, they'll remember, it was like, when I was a sophomore.
• 1:03:46
  Oh my God, that guy. Like I was like, I was kind of
• 1:03:48
  half in after that. Okay, my last two years I was
• 1:03:51
  fully in and that kid wins a State title or helps a relay
• 1:03:54
  team to a State title. How are you on the science part?
• 1:03:57
  What I mean? When I say how are you, how are
• 1:03:59
  you continually improving their? We don't talk X's and O's.
• 1:04:02
  I don't want to hear about your quarter repeats in mile repeats
• 1:04:04
  or whatever else you're doing. But like what are you doing?
• 1:04:07
  Coaching education wise and I was demon in formal and informal
• 1:04:12
  so formal being like coaching school, so usatf u.s. tfcc a
• 1:04:17
  Altis things like that and an informal which is just as
• 1:04:21
  valuable your Pearson, you know, you're calling Coach McQueen at
• 1:04:27
  Rutger, you know. Yeah.
• 1:04:29
  What do you do? How do you keep up with that
• 1:04:31
  side for yourself? So I read a lot of articles.
• 1:04:36
  Lee looking academic articles also, non-academic type things.
• 1:04:40
  I've listened to your podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts.
• 1:04:43
  Will I drive around or mow the lawn things like that?
• 1:04:46
  I talked to my father almost every single day about drag.
• 1:04:49
  I forgot about that resource. It's always good, always good.
• 1:04:54
  And I started this winter. A coach's social that I have
• 1:05:02
  once a week with some coaches from the Mid-Atlantic and
• 1:05:05
  Northeast I stole that. Not gonna lie.
• 1:05:07
  Stole it from Dave, Frank and the Portland coaches.
• 1:05:12
  They were talking about doing it in at Boulder and I was kind of
• 1:05:17
  like why don't we do that with zoom and Google meat and things
• 1:05:21
  like that? It's very easy to do now is what
• 1:05:24
  has this idea that maybe we'll start this?
• 1:05:27
  Tell us more about that. What does that entail?
• 1:05:29
  So we it's like 10 to 15 coaches.
• 1:05:33
  I've invited I add to it as we go.
• 1:05:36
  And if people you know, whatever and we have a topic sometimes,
• 1:05:41
  sometimes we don't I try to not make it so we just complain
• 1:05:45
  about things all the time. Well, the NJCAA constantly.
• 1:05:49
  Yeah, because it's difficult for us so, but we try not to do
• 1:05:53
  that, sometimes I'm like, all right, let's 10 minutes.
• 1:05:56
  Let's get it off our chests and then but, you know, we'll talk
• 1:05:59
  about workouts at the end of Seasons, or what are we doing
• 1:06:04
  for summer training? Things like that.
• 1:06:06
  And it's been really, really good conversations.
• 1:06:09
  And we have coaches that are really good at middle distance,
• 1:06:12
  and coaches that are really good across country and Pennsylvania,
• 1:06:18
  coaches Connecticut. Coaches jumped on it every once
• 1:06:21
  in awhile, but mostly New Jersey and it's been a lot of fun, and
• 1:06:25
  I've gotten a lot out of those conversations and I'm looking to
• 1:06:31
  expand them in the coming in the coming year.
• 1:06:34
  So, are you doing the? These resume or Google hangout
• 1:06:37
  or whatever, I don't know. Google Hangout even exist
• 1:06:39
  anymore, local meat, it's gonna be okay, the old I am, I've
• 1:06:43
  never used it so yeah, you're doing these weekly bi-weekly
• 1:06:48
  usually weekly. Yeah, in the summer, we're
• 1:06:51
  cooling it down a little bit. Take a little break, but that's
• 1:06:54
  good. And your you kind of created
• 1:06:58
  this, or are you kind of the leader?
• 1:06:59
  Like are you like, hey this week, we're going to talk about
• 1:07:02
  into season workouts or hey. Next week, we're going to talk
• 1:07:04
  about culture. If we're going to about how to
• 1:07:07
  get your kids recruit, I don't know.
• 1:07:08
  You know? Yeah, yes.
• 1:07:10
  I I'm I'm the leader. I started it.
• 1:07:12
  I guess I'm the one who creates the link that everybody goes to,
• 1:07:15
  but everybody comes up with ideas and I'll get, you know,
• 1:07:20
  somebody attacks me during the week.
• 1:07:21
  Hey, we should try to talk about this or like, what?
• 1:07:23
  After Penn relays. I think we just talked about
• 1:07:25
  Penn relays. Such a cool but New Jersey did
• 1:07:30
  so well in some of the events, so, it's pretty cool, but yeah,
• 1:07:34
  you know, it's kind of A fin-tastic idea, you know, back
• 1:07:41
  in my days on. So I had tried tried.
• 1:07:45
  I failed, we didn't get this actually going but I had kind of
• 1:07:48
  done this similar thing but in person like I think the value of
• 1:07:52
  level 1 and level 2 of like, oh you get all these coaches
• 1:07:54
  together and certainly we have classes.
• 1:07:56
  But man, that the talks after classes is the real Notions of
• 1:08:00
  the real value, because the coaches education was great and
• 1:08:03
  it was real awesome to me. And so I try to do You like
• 1:08:06
  these Huddle's. I remember, in fact, you know
• 1:08:09
  what, am I really good friends? Now Ray, Ray, Ray Williams,
• 1:08:13
  who's coached at Ole. Miss Grand Valley is now at
• 1:08:15
  washu done in St. Louis just won a national title
• 1:08:18
  National program of the year. They're amazing down there he
• 1:08:21
  and I met because I don't even know how I invited him.
• 1:08:24
  But he was one of the guys I think someone else probably like
• 1:08:26
  hey I know a guy named Ray Williams, he's a North Central
• 1:08:28
  grad where Williams should be in this as well and so I invited
• 1:08:31
  him. We never could make the extra
• 1:08:32
  weekend so we never actually met but I became really good
• 1:08:35
  friends. With Ray Williams and was able
• 1:08:37
  to bounce off coaching ideas from your career because of him.
• 1:08:40
  Now, with technology, not only technology like with zoom
• 1:08:44
  obviously here. But now with the acceptance of
• 1:08:47
  it as well, you know, covid. There are some positives that
• 1:08:50
  there's a lot of negatives over covid.
• 1:08:51
  Some positives on how do we, you know, we have some more
• 1:08:55
  acceptance of some of these Technologies.
• 1:08:56
  I think like I think this is an amazing idea.
• 1:08:59
  Like if people are listening and you know, that if they're
• 1:09:03
  thinking about like man, you're right when I go to Texas track
• 1:09:05
  coaches. Show.
• 1:09:07
  And we certainly have our speakers and they're amazing,
• 1:09:08
  but man, that hallway talk like that was really awesome.
• 1:09:11
  Well, this is a way to like recreate that hallway talk every
• 1:09:15
  week, or even by week, every month.
• 1:09:17
  Even it, you know what to do this weekly.
• 1:09:19
  I think this is phenomenal. And I think, I think there's
• 1:09:22
  people listening right now that are leaders and comfortable
• 1:09:27
  enough to the technology. And by the way, if you're not
• 1:09:29
  comfortable with the technology, it'll take two minutes.
• 1:09:32
  It's super simple. This guy does it every week
• 1:09:35
  right here. Trust me, you can do it through
• 1:09:38
  Zulan. The thing is, most high school
• 1:09:40
  teachers should be used to it because we did it for a year.
• 1:09:45
  I'm like why? Oh, yes.
• 1:09:46
  So it should be, you know, I could see college coaches, not
• 1:09:49
  really ever dealing with it. But for high school kids, High
• 1:09:52
  School teachers, it's we lived on.
• 1:09:55
  This is the bulk of your group, purely high school or do you
• 1:10:00
  have any college, coaches, its all high school.
• 1:10:03
  I was worried about inviting College.
• 1:10:06
  Coaches because there might be rules against it to.
• 1:10:11
  I got that's kind of I didn't want to put them in a bad place.
• 1:10:14
  And I also didn't want to have them feel like they had to put
• 1:10:18
  up a, you know, because there's a college coach recruiting you
• 1:10:21
  at, you know, I want it to be very loose and you're able to be
• 1:10:25
  more vulnerable around your own years.
• 1:10:28
  So, yeah, I know, I like that, I would encourage you to Sean and
• 1:10:32
  in, in this me, the beauty of it may be that it's not what I'm
• 1:10:35
  about. Out to encourage you to do
• 1:10:37
  honestly because there's no recording of this.
• 1:10:39
  I assume meaning we can just speak.
• 1:10:42
  And you know what? If I say something stupid, it's
• 1:10:44
  okay only these 11 people or whoever but I'm just imagining
• 1:10:49
  this this circle and there's some there's got to be some
• 1:10:51
  amazing nuggets that come out. Yes.
• 1:10:55
  Yeah, I would encourage you to record them and either put them
• 1:10:59
  as a podcast or you just put them up on YouTube that may ruin
• 1:11:02
  the magic. That's why I say this might not
• 1:11:03
  be a great you know saying but but what I do know is that there
• 1:11:08
  absolutely is nuggets that are coming out of there that other
• 1:11:10
  people can learn from. What's funny is I took the usatf
• 1:11:15
  level 1 class during the pandemic.
• 1:11:18
  I was kind of when I get when I don't have things to do, I get
• 1:11:21
  very depressed. So my wife was like go do
• 1:11:24
  something. So I took that class and what's
• 1:11:27
  interesting is a the a woman that coaches acts Ridge High
• 1:11:32
  School, I had a really, really good team last year.
• 1:11:35
  She was also in the class. I didn't know where the time the
• 1:11:38
  cold goalie and we, I took this class and I hated it.
• 1:11:43
  It was on Zoom. I just no, no, no, but it was a
• 1:11:50
  lot of stuff I Learned was kind of, like I remember at one
• 1:11:52
  point, I maybe I shouldn't throw Pui.
• 1:11:55
  I won't mention names or anything names.
• 1:11:56
  Yeah, don't say names. No, no, I don't even remember
• 1:11:58
  their names, but they're talking about like relays like the
• 1:12:02
  distance medley in the guy's coat teaching didn't know what
• 1:12:05
  the distance medley was. And I was like Somewhere right
• 1:12:10
  now. Someone's going.
• 1:12:11
  Yeah, I took this little one and then his Sprint, dude, got up
• 1:12:14
  there was like I can make anybody a 10 minute 10, miler,
• 1:12:16
  you know? So yeah, forgive us.
• 1:12:18
  All right, we all say our dumb things.
• 1:12:20
  And here's the, here's the thing.
• 1:12:21
  I honestly think, when you said that 10 minute thing, I think
• 1:12:25
  this year, my slowest, freshman ran 1016, and I had.
• 1:12:34
  Wow. And I only had four guys.
• 1:12:37
  Rise above 10 minutes. I think that are returning so we
• 1:12:41
  might be able to pull it off. Sophomores on up this year's.
• 1:12:44
  Yeah, that's okay. But that it was 100%.
• 1:12:47
  I'm just saying the bulk of kids I can make them 10-minute kids
• 1:12:51
  but we're going to run the crap out.
• 1:12:52
  Some of them are going to drop out of the sport for sure.
• 1:12:54
  For sure, for sure, for sure. Yeah, I'm just a little boy in
• 1:12:57
  the get anything under 10 like you got a first of all, genetics
• 1:13:00
  have to play a part in to it, of course.
• 1:13:02
  But you got a coach sub tan, like you run 950 even like,
• 1:13:05
  okay, you doing a good job. What actual the science and the
• 1:13:09
  culture culture? Part of?
• 1:13:10
  Well, I love this, I'm gonna call it a huddle kind of the FCA
• 1:13:14
  model here a little bit but I love that you started that.
• 1:13:18
  I love that you led that. I love that the people that you
• 1:13:21
  impact on that mean that, that to me is real Legacy type stuff
• 1:13:25
  Shawn, you know what you've done at Holmdel and other schools and
• 1:13:28
  what you're doing at CBA. Those are Legacy of like, oh
• 1:13:31
  this, many state titles and I'll State certificate and those are
• 1:13:34
  great. I mean, that's awesome.
• 1:13:35
  I love it for the kids and their friends.
• 1:13:37
  And families and things like that, but there has to be
• 1:13:40
  something extra for legacy, you know, it's like, well, what else
• 1:13:43
  did he? How did he contribute to the
• 1:13:45
  greater sport? Or, you know, my passion, the
• 1:13:48
  greater the profession of coaching track and field and
• 1:13:51
  that's what you're doing with those Huddle's.
• 1:13:53
  I mean, there are people that are, you know, I have to
• 1:13:57
  imagine, you know, having LED kind of groups like this.
• 1:14:00
  There's some people that never say a word boy.
• 1:14:03
  They're there. Every week, they're gaining,
• 1:14:05
  even though you'd never talks, you're like, I really They just
• 1:14:08
  have the mic turned off. They're not even.
• 1:14:11
  Just checking a box. A I was there.
• 1:14:12
  Now they're gaining from it man I love that you were helping.
• 1:14:17
  You said this is kind of Mid-Atlantic North these.
• 1:14:18
  You're helping all of those programs rate rise, you know,
• 1:14:22
  the time. And that's, that's a really
• 1:14:24
  amazing. I love that.
• 1:14:26
  That's that's the goal you know where we're trying to, you know,
• 1:14:30
  part of it is stem from in the local area here.
• 1:14:34
  A lot of coaches don't like CBA. At all, for various reasons.
• 1:14:41
  I mean, mainly because we're very good and have been for five
• 1:14:44
  decades, you know, and we do pull kids from their districts,
• 1:14:49
  you know, it is what it is. But I wanted to kind of expand
• 1:14:55
  my thing and, like, I need coaches that I can talk to and,
• 1:14:59
  and there are some local coaches that are, that are in the social
• 1:15:02
  that, you know, take part in it. So you've got a social?
• 1:15:07
  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:08
  The Thursday night coaches social.
• 1:15:10
  Yeah there's there's there's about I want to say there's like
• 1:15:14
  six or seven that are Deaf, and it's every week and then there's
• 1:15:19
  another five or so. And again, I want to expand it.
• 1:15:23
  I we did it. Probably From February on most
• 1:15:29
  weeks, we missed a few weeks towards the end because attract
• 1:15:32
  just gets busy, but I get it. I kind of started with people.
• 1:15:36
  I knew pretty well and going to expand it this year, too.
• 1:15:41
  You know, what's been The Sweet Spot in there is something about
• 1:15:46
  too many people. Even to few of people, is there
• 1:15:49
  a sweet spot that you've noticed at this point?
• 1:15:54
  Not really why? Because I think everybody is
• 1:15:57
  respectful of each other and it's, you know, if you're out of
• 1:16:01
  the restaurant eating pizza talking, it doesn't matter.
• 1:16:04
  It's just, you know, it's been pretty good.
• 1:16:08
  I think that 10 to 15 is a good number and you know, we'll see
• 1:16:13
  where it goes. But yeah, yeah I can see where,
• 1:16:16
  you know again having some knowledge of group dynamics, use
• 1:16:20
  the Pizza. Pizza Palace example of like you
• 1:16:24
  got 10 to 15, well there. You know, there could be side
• 1:16:26
  conversations there and that's something that's a good and bad
• 1:16:29
  thing, right? So Goods like okay, people are
• 1:16:31
  participating bad's like Hey we're all trying to listen to
• 1:16:33
  this one person. You don't get side conversations
• 1:16:35
  on Zoom or huge. Nobody here in anybody but my
• 1:16:39
  concern was getting too big would be that the introverts can
• 1:16:43
  easily hide and again they may be there may still be given
• 1:16:45
  value but boy you would like to hear from them because they have
• 1:16:48
  value to give as well. Well I just encourage you no
• 1:16:51
  Sean, that's amazing. I mean, I really really love
• 1:16:55
  this. Well some my idea steal this
• 1:16:58
  from. I love again, I believe day
• 1:17:00
  Frank. Yeah, at Central Catholic in
• 1:17:03
  Portland, I just retired. I would be stored in the west
• 1:17:06
  coasters, right? Right.
• 1:17:08
  Yeah. They started this, I think years
• 1:17:09
  ago. Yeah.
• 1:17:10
  And I think it started as a they would go somewhere and I think
• 1:17:13
  it's spun into a zoom type of thing.
• 1:17:16
  Yeah, yeah. I would, you know, it's funny a
• 1:17:20
  while back 10 years ago, I was making an observation.
• 1:17:25
  Our coaches and I was dead wrong.
• 1:17:27
  Thankfully about this, what I saw through social media and
• 1:17:31
  stuff was I saw coaches from MacArthur rival school so
• 1:17:35
  conference schools and things like that is on the college
• 1:17:37
  side. But it's like, man.
• 1:17:39
  Like they're becoming really good friends and I'm like, how
• 1:17:42
  did they recruit against each other?
• 1:17:44
  Now, I've never what and I never have been never will be if
• 1:17:48
  you've done any business with me at all.
• 1:17:50
  You know, I am the exact opposite of a negative recruiter
• 1:17:54
  - sales Personnel at this point. So I wasn't talking about that.
• 1:17:57
  I would just talk about like man, I'm talking to the same
• 1:18:00
  recruit as I'm using my buddy, Bap as an example of my buddy
• 1:18:03
  back at the other school will got all.
• 1:18:06
  I'm going to say is good things about bat like oh you're talking
• 1:18:08
  to coach papal man. That's like my bro, how's that
• 1:18:10
  his wedding? He was in, I was his best man or
• 1:18:12
  whatever you know. It's like, how do you know
• 1:18:14
  there's a Cutthroat business, how do you use?
• 1:18:17
  But luckily, I was wrong, dead wrong about that because what is
• 1:18:20
  actually happening. Exactly, as you described there
• 1:18:24
  in the Thursday night, Coaches social is because of
• 1:18:28
  communication becoming much, much easier with a cell phone in
• 1:18:31
  our hand and social media. Etc, is where communicating at a
• 1:18:35
  much, much better rate. So we're learning from each
• 1:18:39
  other. And so, therefore, our base
• 1:18:41
  knowledge of coaches on all levels, by the way, high school
• 1:18:44
  college Etc, has gone up. And I think that is why, when
• 1:18:48
  you mentioned about, you know, the times you ran your like,
• 1:18:51
  well, back in the 90s when I was pretty good.
• 1:18:52
  Crazy. It's all your fault.
• 1:18:54
  It's coach. His fault.
• 1:18:55
  You know, every time I have great, these kids are, it's like
• 1:18:57
  what? Well you decode you coach?
• 1:18:59
  No man, you do you, you don't want, make it all these crazy
• 1:19:01
  times, but I think that these things and this is what you're
• 1:19:05
  describing. There were the social that's
• 1:19:08
  still a new thing. I know it's not happening, a lot
• 1:19:10
  of places everywhere. So as that starts gaining
• 1:19:13
  popularity, I think are just base knowledge goes up and even
• 1:19:17
  more stuff happens at a higher rate in a better rate and I'm
• 1:19:21
  not talking about just the performances on the track.
• 1:19:23
  I'll talk about how we as people Work through this profession of
• 1:19:27
  coaching track and field of well yeah I think I I hate the whole
• 1:19:33
  shoes are the reason for this and Super Shoes like I think in
• 1:19:37
  the Marathon road racing those stack those statues?
• 1:19:40
  Yes absolutely this is you know Vapor Flies 100% are helping but
• 1:19:45
  I think the track spikes aren't really doing much.
• 1:19:47
  I think it's more of this type of thing where your podcast, you
• 1:19:52
  know, I also think some of the private Has, you know, I have a
• 1:19:56
  very strong opinion about that but I won't mention it, but guys
• 1:20:01
  like Tom Schwartz and the ccg guys.
• 1:20:04
  Jay Johnson a kid at some random high school that doesn't have a
• 1:20:09
  good coach, that's really motivated.
• 1:20:12
  Now can pay a couple hundred bucks a month, right?
• 1:20:15
  And be really good, right? We're at least be cared for, you
• 1:20:18
  know, and I think that's reason a lot of people's game and you
• 1:20:23
  know, it's making its making But he better, and it's challenging
• 1:20:27
  the normal High School coaches, that I shouldn't say normal.
• 1:20:31
  The traditional High School, coaches, and things are just
• 1:20:35
  improving very quickly and it's the conversations were having.
• 1:20:38
  It's the endless and anybody who is doing things the right way
• 1:20:44
  and isn't doing things that are slimy and everything.
• 1:20:46
  Like, I respect, what they do. Absolutely.
• 1:20:50
  One of my good friends, Crystal fell ski coaches at Westfield
• 1:20:53
  about 45 minutes north of where seed.
• 1:20:55
  Ba is he is doing a great job up there and it's awesome to see
• 1:20:59
  Nicole who I mentioned from Ridge High School.
• 1:21:01
  Same thing like I mean shear and I think they were in 734 last
• 1:21:05
  year for four by eight. I mean, it's just ridiculous and
• 1:21:08
  it's awesome to see because it makes makes me better as a
• 1:21:12
  coach. It makes my team better because
• 1:21:14
  it challenges me a little bit. When you can Catholic beat us,
• 1:21:17
  it challenged me and challenged our team, you know, our guys
• 1:21:21
  last year, we're calling the whole season.
• 1:21:24
  I didn't know this. Last day they were like, well,
• 1:21:26
  this is our revenge tour and I think the Revenge toilet we
• 1:21:29
  talking about, but it was kind of a fun little thing they said.
• 1:21:34
  So I think, if you look around and I bowled a running clinics
• 1:21:38
  that people were traveling there from, it was mostly from local
• 1:21:41
  states to Colorado. But there were guys from South
• 1:21:44
  Carolina there, guys from Florida and guy from New Jersey
• 1:21:47
  want to me, but that's how we're getting better, that's how we're
• 1:21:51
  improving. And, you know, 20 years ago used
• 1:21:53
  to go to the Atlantic City Clinic.
• 1:21:55
  Okay. Yeah, you know and I was young
• 1:21:59
  and when you're young you only get little bits and pieces of
• 1:22:02
  knowledge that you can use. Now, when I go to those clinics,
• 1:22:05
  it's like you get everything, because you whatever, but you
• 1:22:10
  know, claim is City Clinic, they would videotape it and then you
• 1:22:12
  have to buy the CD or the DVD. Now, Jay throws up Clips on the
• 1:22:18
  internet. You can buy the digital version
• 1:22:20
  of it like in seconds and it's it's just something that has
• 1:22:24
  changed. So All much over the recent
• 1:22:27
  years, especially since the pandemic is that we were forced
• 1:22:30
  to do this and coaches when they're bored, get depressed.
• 1:22:33
  So, we have to do things, you know, like we're tracking cross
• 1:22:36
  country coaches. We are 365 days a year, you
• 1:22:38
  know, football coach at home, to high school asked me one time.
• 1:22:41
  He's like, what are you gonna do in the offseason?
• 1:22:44
  What up season? I'm gonna coach.
• 1:22:48
  He's like, oh, in the spring. I'm like, no, the winter and the
• 1:22:51
  spring. So what about the summer?
• 1:22:53
  I'm like, yeah, coach then too. And he just he was like, whoa.
• 1:22:57
  He's like he just couldn't, you know, and I think that's that's
• 1:23:02
  cross country coaches. That's track coaches, that's
• 1:23:04
  what we do. Another way to add on what you
• 1:23:07
  said there about coaches. We are as long as they're not
• 1:23:09
  doing things slimy and I agree 100%.
• 1:23:11
  Take that off, that's tables. Things like long as you're not
• 1:23:14
  doing the wrong things for kid, you know, I have a lot of
• 1:23:16
  empathy for coaches at all levels.
• 1:23:19
  Not, I'm not just talking to about High School coaches here
• 1:23:22
  under what colleges well, you know, when they Don't when you
• 1:23:26
  said as long as you're doing the right things, and I think what
• 1:23:27
  you meant by, that was their training at a safe level and
• 1:23:31
  they're learning their crafts. They're getting becoming better
• 1:23:33
  Sprint, coaches, distance, coaches, etc, for the high
• 1:23:36
  school coach. I have a lot of empathy for the
• 1:23:39
  high school coach teacher. You know, they're teaching all
• 1:23:42
  day, they have families, they're great.
• 1:23:45
  And I think, you know, I wish it wasn't like this.
• 1:23:48
  But I think again since I had kids and my wife started
• 1:23:51
  long-term subbing as well so I get, you know so I get to see No
• 1:23:55
  dinner works of what a teacher actually does not just what I
• 1:23:57
  think they do. So I have a lot of empathy of
• 1:24:00
  like, man. They're busy a high school.
• 1:24:03
  Teacher is busy. Oh, now add a sport to it and
• 1:24:09
  let's not forget that they're people--.
• 1:24:10
  So they probably have a family or at least passions and
• 1:24:14
  Charities and Faith Etc to do it.
• 1:24:16
  Like, so when I see in and I'll get on to month on the, on the
• 1:24:21
  Twitter, you know, it's basically where I live when they
• 1:24:23
  start, well, you know, these coaches You know, they would
• 1:24:26
  just take time to learn their craft.
• 1:24:27
  It's like, and I honestly think, I honestly think again, table
• 1:24:31
  Stakes that they're not doing anything slimy, you know, in
• 1:24:34
  slightly meaning, you know, anything bad, and hateful and
• 1:24:36
  revengeful and Partnerships. I think they're doing the best
• 1:24:39
  they can. And I think that's all we can
• 1:24:41
  ask for, you know, honestly. Yeah, let me I love Sean here.
• 1:24:44
  And with the things that you do and I wish that for everybody
• 1:24:47
  but that's not and you know this that's not for everybody, it's
• 1:24:50
  not. No yeah no.
• 1:24:53
  It's you know I leave my House at 6:30, 6:00 in the morning, a
• 1:24:58
  couple days a week. We have morning practice at
• 1:25:01
  7:15, and then I get home at 6:00 at night, 6:30, at night.
• 1:25:05
  It's, it's a lot. And then on Saturday, I, you
• 1:25:09
  know, in the fall, I'm already, you know, we have a mutual
• 1:25:12
  calendar, my wife, and I, and I'll put the beads on and
• 1:25:14
  everything. You know, Manhattan invite, I'm
• 1:25:16
  gonna be in New York City from 5:30 in the morning till 6:00 at
• 1:25:20
  night on a Saturday, you know, it's, it's It's a lifestyle you
• 1:25:26
  have to choose. It's it's not easy.
• 1:25:29
  So yeah for sure. Absolutely.
• 1:25:31
  Earlier you mentioned that you wanted to be a college track
• 1:25:35
  coach. Does that desire still live?
• 1:25:40
  And if not why not? I really like what I do.
• 1:25:46
  I think right now, college coaches, a lot of the ones that
• 1:25:53
  my athletes are dealing with. I feel are too obsessed with
• 1:25:58
  numbers, you know, I have kids that get in contact with coaches
• 1:26:03
  and, you know, I have some extremely good athletes and they
• 1:26:07
  tell them. Oh yeah, if you run this time
• 1:26:09
  we'll recruit you. And, you know, I just, I don't
• 1:26:13
  like that. Not all the coaches are like
• 1:26:15
  that, but it seems like it's heading that way, because I
• 1:26:18
  think a lot of the coaches they deal with are the assistants.
• 1:26:22
  And the assistants are trying to climb the ladder and they're
• 1:26:25
  just like, I need numbers and I think the NCAA system is very
• 1:26:30
  sick right now and with the transfers and all this.
• 1:26:33
  And, you know, I had a kid last year, run for 21 and they're
• 1:26:37
  like, oh, if you break for 20 will recruit you and it's like
• 1:26:40
  really mad. That's like what's the
• 1:26:41
  difference there? Come on?
• 1:26:42
  Yeah. Like did you ask him when he ran
• 1:26:45
  in? Like we've had kids that were
• 1:26:49
  given spots on teams. Not Scholarships but given spots
• 1:26:53
  and they'll take it away because he's not running fast enough
• 1:26:55
  anymore. It's just I just I that's not
• 1:27:00
  what I'm into. I'm into teaching kids.
• 1:27:03
  Getting a better making sure that they're good people.
• 1:27:06
  And again not all college coaches are like that.
• 1:27:11
  Some when they're recruiting reach out to me and say, hey,
• 1:27:14
  how's this guy as a kid, how you know, what, How's he with his
• 1:27:17
  family and things? I think.
• 1:27:20
  Ironically, those are the ones that win all the time, you know?
• 1:27:25
  I remember Mike Smith at Northern Arizona, he had just
• 1:27:28
  started there but he was recruiting, Blaze Pharaoh, you
• 1:27:32
  know, he emailed me and was like, hey, what kind of kid is
• 1:27:35
  this, you know? And I appreciate that.
• 1:27:38
  I think that's I think it's no secret, that's why he's doing
• 1:27:43
  well at any, you know, I was recruited by gag Liana at
• 1:27:47
  Georgetown. And you know one of the things
• 1:27:50
  that really stuck with me I was he asked me one day.
• 1:27:54
  He said, well were you looking? And I said oh I'm looking to
• 1:27:58
  Princeton. You know that's that's what
• 1:27:59
  number one choice he said great school Mike brings a great guy
• 1:28:03
  and I appreciated that and what's funny is Mike, Brady said
• 1:28:06
  the same thing about gags so it's just That's that's where
• 1:28:14
  that's where I'm at and I'm not into the bottom line, I'm not
• 1:28:17
  into freaking out over numbers and it's and I've seen the way
• 1:28:21
  it makes my kids on my team, just obsess over numbers and
• 1:28:26
  it's part of it, smile split and athletic dotnet and that's, you
• 1:28:30
  know, making listen things but it's a lot of if you run this
• 1:28:33
  will recruit you and and I don't know, I don't like that.
• 1:28:40
  I didn't think about that impact on the high school.
• 1:28:44
  Coach, would that kid? So now does that kid.
• 1:28:48
  And again, we're talking big swaths here so not every kid and
• 1:28:51
  every situation is unique of course.
• 1:28:53
  But that kid then comes back to you and says, hey coach I've got
• 1:28:57
  to run the mile this week because I got to go for 20 or he
• 1:29:00
  won't even recruiter he or she won't even recruit me.
• 1:29:03
  And now it's like you have a we got a 4x8 setup or know that we
• 1:29:06
  got the car training, the 2-mile was for this weekend.
• 1:29:08
  I never thought about that aspect.
• 1:29:10
  Down to, okay? The day-to-day aspect of the
• 1:29:13
  high school coach after a college coach or coaches uses
• 1:29:17
  these these numbers and not to mention that, you know, my team
• 1:29:21
  that you know, this is I want to complain about something that
• 1:29:24
  maybe I shouldn't complain about.
• 1:29:25
  But you know, this year, my fourth fifth kid was, you know,
• 1:29:30
  416 417. They don't get to run in meets
• 1:29:34
  all the time because we're limited.
• 1:29:36
  So that's another aspect that those time.
• 1:29:40
  It's really affect us. But yeah, I wish it were
• 1:29:44
  different. I get it.
• 1:29:45
  But, yeah, you know, I've everything on both sides.
• 1:29:49
  I mean, again, it's funny when we do with the NCAA equipment
• 1:29:54
  sponsor, so we get to do the gifts for coaches and athletes.
• 1:29:59
  And so I get to, you know, it's actually one of the second,
• 1:30:02
  coolest job, part of my job. The first being here at the
• 1:30:04
  podcast, but I get the, you know, coach comes up and I'm
• 1:30:07
  like, man. Congratulations.
• 1:30:08
  Here are your 20 half Gifts and your five or six, whatever
• 1:30:12
  coaches. It's really kind of cool, right?
• 1:30:14
  And you know we'll have a coach like oh man, where we going to
• 1:30:16
  put all this stuff over on I'm like hey man, it's your fault.
• 1:30:19
  You want to qualify it all these kids, you know, they feel like
• 1:30:22
  when I think about what's going on on the, I can't even say the
• 1:30:26
  Collegiate. Well, I'll say the Collegiate
• 1:30:27
  level because it's also based off of the high school level
• 1:30:30
  when you look at the not just division one.
• 1:30:33
  I know that's the one that gets all the pub in the press and I
• 1:30:35
  can stop. And certainly there fast.
• 1:30:36
  No questions asked, you know, the four-minute mile is do
• 1:30:40
  something special. There's another podcast.
• 1:30:42
  It's not special anymore. That's bunk still very special
• 1:30:45
  because it's a numerical number that we put special in this
• 1:30:47
  point. Yeah.
• 1:30:49
  Just like 10 flat in the hundred is still extremely, extremely
• 1:30:51
  special, but you know, the division 2 is unbelievable
• 1:31:00
  division. 3 is unbelievable any. I mean, literally we get spoiled
• 1:31:06
  sometimes in track and field because we have so many winners
• 1:31:09
  at every meet, you know, if you're at a school board meeting
• 1:31:11
  of those, maybe a boys on a girl's champ, and then we have
• 1:31:13
  20 events. So there's a mile winner and 100
• 1:31:16
  winter, and a shop that winter. But I think that in football,
• 1:31:20
  there's only one winner like, there's not a quarterback in
• 1:31:22
  there, there's a team winner. So I think sometimes we, as
• 1:31:24
  track coaches, That winning is hard, very hard.
• 1:31:30
  Period winning is hard. So to win division, three ads,
• 1:31:35
  hard very hard, the results right.
• 1:31:38
  So when you get down to the recruiting side of it, like I
• 1:31:42
  have a lot of empathy of the coach who says oh man you know
• 1:31:45
  why 420 is my number because golly it takes for flat to make
• 1:31:51
  it to Nationals. So for 20, I think I can develop
• 1:31:54
  a for 22. A four flat through four years
• 1:31:57
  for third in and we're just somewhere there's got to be a
• 1:32:00
  divider so 41. I'm not sure I'd be that harsh
• 1:32:04
  on the guy who's running for 2011, 420 is my number, but
• 1:32:06
  whatever. So I can also understand that
• 1:32:09
  aspect of it too. But I also, you know, kind of to
• 1:32:13
  the point. What I said about my mentor
• 1:32:14
  Marshall Gotham what he said, I heard someone the other day, it
• 1:32:17
  was on Twitter, of course, and they said, and I think I believe
• 1:32:23
  the context was, I could be wrong here, they were talking to
• 1:32:25
  track. Coaches college track coaches
• 1:32:27
  and they said, you need to spend less time recruiting and more
• 1:32:31
  time, I can't hear what he said. Not not developing but I think
• 1:32:35
  it came up with the word they were used but it was like
• 1:32:37
  learning your kids like engendering.
• 1:32:39
  Trust like if you if you think the portal and transferring
• 1:32:42
  sucks because all your kids are transferring well, maybe you
• 1:32:45
  need to spend a little less time recruiting and little more time
• 1:32:47
  with the kids that are right there in front of you right now,
• 1:32:49
  my paraphrase to it. So I understand like I get that
• 1:32:53
  and I also get like, yeah, that's great.
• 1:32:54
  I love these kids there. I hear they're on my school the
• 1:32:58
  next crop has to come. I mean there's a lot of
• 1:33:01
  pressures of just the I mean we're a time-based for great
• 1:33:03
  time and distance based for tomorrow is looking at it's like
• 1:33:06
  man I need more for 20s. That's that's the bottom line.
• 1:33:10
  I will be successful if I get more for 20s and I don't have
• 1:33:13
  time for for 30s but think about this as a high school coach, if
• 1:33:17
  you send a kid off to college, if the kid does really well.
• 1:33:23
  College coaches the hero. If he does poorly, the high
• 1:33:26
  school coach did too much and burn about.
• 1:33:30
  I think you're coming at that from the angle of your a high
• 1:33:32
  school coach. It's that's that's what we get
• 1:33:35
  man. That's it.
• 1:33:36
  Unfortunately, that's the general perspective that we get,
• 1:33:40
  you know, and there's a lot of reasons why kids succeed and
• 1:33:43
  fail in college, but there are times when kids come from
• 1:33:47
  schools that have no coaching, and they go to a great school
• 1:33:51
  and they do very well. You know, there's kids that come
• 1:33:54
  from CBA that I very good coaching and they do it, like,
• 1:33:57
  can please pharaoh to mcinerney down the Georgetown.
• 1:33:59
  Those kids do very well beyond that, but a lot of it is.
• 1:34:03
  Okay. And we don't just coach.
• 1:34:09
  A runner, you know, we coach a full person, a full team and
• 1:34:13
  when kids don't get that in college and that's not
• 1:34:15
  necessarily the college thing to do, I think some do that, but
• 1:34:18
  it's not necessarily what they're supposed, you know,
• 1:34:21
  that's not their job necessarily and that's why they don't
• 1:34:23
  succeed or there was a kid on my team.
• 1:34:26
  Andy McClintock. He he was the West Virginia
• 1:34:30
  state champion in the mile. I think he ran like 413 in high
• 1:34:33
  school in 1990, you know, for when that was your top 10 in New
• 1:34:38
  Jersey. At the time, right?
• 1:34:41
  He decided, you know what, I want to be the best.
• 1:34:44
  I can be in school and I want to study and he ended up I think he
• 1:34:48
  got into UVA law school and but after he finished his thesis, he
• 1:34:53
  ran like 40 23 or something like that and it was just a matter of
• 1:34:57
  like he wanted to do school and it.
• 1:35:00
  So I think there's a lot of different reasons, but I think
• 1:35:03
  in the public perspective, I think a lot of people look at OU
• 1:35:09
  coach College, you're better at coaching kids that 100% agree
• 1:35:13
  with you that, you know, because Shawn what I'ma tell you is, I
• 1:35:16
  love you, I love you. I think what you are expressed
• 1:35:20
  in here is the exact same thing that, and I've had it where a
• 1:35:24
  college coach could set the college coaches did exactly what
• 1:35:27
  you said. If a kid comes to my program and
• 1:35:30
  improves great, I get, I get some accolades for that.
• 1:35:32
  If they don't, it's my fault because there's literally a
• 1:35:36
  Twitter whole going on right now.
• 1:35:39
  Yeah, about how much it provement in college is a
• 1:35:43
  success. Is it 5% 6%?
• 1:35:46
  And one of the options is any, any Improvement?
• 1:35:48
  Is that a success and so that starts, you know, conversation
• 1:35:51
  of well, why don't kids get better, PR etcetera and college
• 1:35:56
  Etc? And the greatest answer that
• 1:35:58
  I've ever seen. And I wish I remember who said
• 1:36:01
  it because this person to meet is spot on and that they had a
• 1:36:05
  one-word response of why kids don't.
• 1:36:07
  Why doesn't every kid improving college?
• 1:36:09
  And his wrist thing? Was he his response was life?
• 1:36:14
  Yeah, they go to college. You went to college.
• 1:36:17
  Yeah, I went to college. Yeah, there's a lot of choices
• 1:36:20
  in front of me in college that I did not have in high school, was
• 1:36:24
  a lot less governorship over me, my parents and Cetera in
• 1:36:28
  college, and some of us make great choices and some of us
• 1:36:31
  make not so great choices. Some of the survive, those
• 1:36:34
  choices and others to their detriment have That some of the
• 1:36:37
  great choices are, you know what, I want to go to med school
• 1:36:41
  agreed. No, no, some of the great
• 1:36:43
  choices are or bad choices are great choices, you know, it's,
• 1:36:46
  yeah, life agree with that. Never said, I liked you.
• 1:36:49
  That's why I say Shawn. I think you're coming at that,
• 1:36:51
  from your perspective as a high-speed.
• 1:36:54
  I think it's the, I think a college coach would say, oh,
• 1:36:57
  you're the high school coach. It's always our fault only, and
• 1:37:01
  it's really in the middle. And what I mean by it, I
• 1:37:04
  honestly think Sean is doing the greatest.
• 1:37:07
  That he can do. And I think the college coaches
• 1:37:08
  doing the greatest job, you can do that kid, hid, we're talking
• 1:37:12
  about 18 year old. Absolutely 19 year old kids.
• 1:37:15
  They go and they fall in love and want to go doing
• 1:37:20
  relationship or they go to decide.
• 1:37:22
  I'm going to do the best I can in school.
• 1:37:24
  I never buckled down and high school.
• 1:37:26
  I'm actually going to try in college and they go to medical
• 1:37:28
  school, law school, Etc. That's a success.
• 1:37:31
  By the way, just because they don't PR rack because because
• 1:37:36
  it's funny that the College coach will say that the High
• 1:37:38
  School coaches always on them. Like why how come these kids
• 1:37:40
  don't PR? How come you got it for a whole
• 1:37:43
  year? I had my kid that ran for 16.
• 1:37:45
  Also played basketball. I had that ADI LaSalle in
• 1:37:47
  Chicago, by the way, we're 16 mile or nine?
• 1:37:51
  Wow. 9:39 15 to my lawyer who was a stud basketball play on?
• 1:37:55
  Ya did not go on to do anything in college.
• 1:37:58
  He went to Kentucky by the way. And I'll say this because I
• 1:38:00
  think it was not Kentucky. Don Weber was the coach at that
• 1:38:03
  point. Matt misleading who beat Oh
• 1:38:07
  gosh, not forget his name, real good kid that went to York as a
• 1:38:11
  Marius Bakken who's now? Yeah, so you would maybe no more
• 1:38:15
  is, right? He's a big clients running, the
• 1:38:17
  coach right Marius. Did his senior year at York and
• 1:38:20
  was a stud, you know, 152 half-mile or Etc?
• 1:38:22
  Mario met meseta car kid. Beat him in Cross Country.
• 1:38:25
  Now, Matt, Mystique then went on the cross to basketball.
• 1:38:28
  He was six foot four, probably convinced 300.
• 1:38:31
  I mean he looked like a power forward in basketball.
• 1:38:34
  Not a 913 I think he got everything, he was getting out
• 1:38:39
  of his body in high school right.
• 1:38:41
  There was, I don't think there was a sub 9 in that man, unless
• 1:38:44
  he decided to cut out all eating and lifting and, you know, maybe
• 1:38:47
  go to 140 and maybe I don't know.
• 1:38:49
  I don't know. I think, you know, he's an 18
• 1:38:52
  year old kid that's like, oh man, he tapped out.
• 1:38:54
  That's as far as he was ever getting and he certainly wasn't
• 1:38:56
  going to be a 10K, right? Person went, you know, weighing
• 1:38:59
  180 or whatever he did. So I think it's actually in the
• 1:39:03
  middle. It's like man you're dealing
• 1:39:04
  with first of all kids, second of all you're Dealing with a
• 1:39:08
  unrestricted life. Now in college typically where
• 1:39:12
  they have a lot more choices and again bad choices.
• 1:39:14
  Good choices. Etc.
• 1:39:16
  So I think it's more in the middle.
• 1:39:17
  I don't think you take the blame in reality shot and I got it.
• 1:39:20
  Well, it's good. You like that.
• 1:39:21
  Okay. Could do I do first and foremost
• 1:39:29
  is I think you're doing the best job that you can do what you do
• 1:39:33
  at CBA is that a thousand times different than what a American
• 1:39:37
  Fork. I think you mentioned.
• 1:39:38
  I agree. Portland, West DeSoto High
• 1:39:42
  School. It's they're all super unique
• 1:39:46
  incidences here. And what's funny is something I
• 1:39:48
  do when I send my, my kids off to college to run, I don't talk
• 1:39:53
  to them about their training. I don't talk to them about coach
• 1:39:57
  at least for like a year. I've never really told my kids
• 1:40:01
  that and some of them I don't I don't really reach out to until
• 1:40:05
  you know, just to let them get into their Coach and listen, I'm
• 1:40:08
  not your coach anymore. Yeah.
• 1:40:10
  If you need advice about school relationships or I've had kids
• 1:40:14
  approach me, say, like, hey, my coach is doing this, isn't this.
• 1:40:18
  How do I deal with that? I'll tell them.
• 1:40:19
  Hey, go talk to him, you know? And so I really try to My hands
• 1:40:23
  are clean once, you know, once they graduate, if they need help
• 1:40:27
  with anything transferring whatever.
• 1:40:29
  Yeah, of course. But that's not, you know, their
• 1:40:32
  coaches, their coach. They've chosen.
• 1:40:33
  That's cool. They liked it, there the for a
• 1:40:36
  reason and I try to stay out of it as much as I can.
• 1:40:39
  I know other coaches High School coaches that do metal and I 100%
• 1:40:44
  disagree with that. Because again, it's all about
• 1:40:47
  what the kids believe and if they believe in their coach and
• 1:40:50
  believe in their school, and their teammates, there To do
• 1:40:52
  well. And if you believe in that show
• 1:40:55
  and then you have to, you have to model that when they go
• 1:40:58
  through the program percent. Yep.
• 1:40:59
  Yep. Yep.
• 1:41:00
  Absolutely. Let's use, let's take advantage
• 1:41:03
  of this experience. You have you got you got some
• 1:41:06
  great kids there in by great meeting.
• 1:41:08
  Not necessarily all division one recruits you probably had some
• 1:41:11
  kids to D2 D3. Yeah etcetera.
• 1:41:13
  So let's keep talking about this.
• 1:41:15
  Recruiting aspect, something that you said and I'm curious to
• 1:41:19
  get more of your opinion on about coaches that All you,
• 1:41:23
  that's another big topic that gets discussed.
• 1:41:26
  And it's funny because I'm on the side when I coached College,
• 1:41:29
  I never called the high school cook.
• 1:41:31
  If I call the high school coach, it was like to get us to get the
• 1:41:33
  kids number. You know that, right?
• 1:41:35
  And I'm not saying, I'm actually kind of, I'm not sure where I am
• 1:41:39
  anymore on. What I think you seem to have a
• 1:41:41
  much more favorable like, hey, I think the coach, I don't put
• 1:41:46
  words in my mouth. Do you believe the college coach
• 1:41:48
  should always at least reach out and talk to the college?
• 1:41:52
  High School coach about the athletes of recruiting.
• 1:41:56
  I think it's very icy. I'm not a college coach.
• 1:41:59
  I never have been, so I can't really speak too much of this,
• 1:42:02
  but Contact is so easy to make now with email and things like
• 1:42:08
  that. I've only ever had one call me,
• 1:42:13
  usually I get emails. Sure.
• 1:42:16
  But email and call together there.
• 1:42:17
  Yeah. I mean there are times when I
• 1:42:21
  email coaches about kids and I never hear back which is a
• 1:42:26
  little frustrating, you know, I'm 100% with you on this one.
• 1:42:30
  What's fascinating? To me is tattoo like that.
• 1:42:32
  Hey you know, I've a sophomore who 90 for and 450 is really,
• 1:42:38
  really good. And like, I know there's some
• 1:42:41
  coaches that ignored me the past year or two about other kids
• 1:42:44
  that are going to receive how, I don't know.
• 1:42:46
  But I have a feeling but anyway, I think that reaching out to
• 1:42:50
  High School coaches and not necessarily about training.
• 1:42:53
  Some do that some will send me an e-mail like hey like do you
• 1:42:56
  have logs like what kind of things do you do?
• 1:42:59
  What has helped them which I appreciate but I don't think
• 1:43:02
  that's as important. I don't know if you listen to
• 1:43:05
  the Podcast of, with Elliot kipchoge as coach recently.
• 1:43:11
  Anyway, he took on faith Kippy aegon and he refused to look at
• 1:43:15
  any of her past training. He's like I want to learn from
• 1:43:18
  you as an athlete anyway, so that kind of would, of course,
• 1:43:23
  go go, go, go little, no, no, I'm about.
• 1:43:26
  That was a real question, not a smart.
• 1:43:28
  Aleck question is, like little different level, but I'm with
• 1:43:30
  you. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
• 1:43:32
  But I found that fascinating but is some coaches do reach out and
• 1:43:35
  say. Like hey, is there anything you
• 1:43:36
  can give to me? What helps him, whatever?
• 1:43:39
  I've heard from some coaches, a year or two in like hey, you
• 1:43:43
  know, Johnny's not running. Well what can I do?
• 1:43:48
  I appreciate those things because again they're trying to
• 1:43:51
  help the kid out. I don't think they have to but I
• 1:43:55
  think it's a good touch. I've generally heard when it's a
• 1:44:00
  really good kid you know recently this past spring Bring
• 1:44:06
  at a kid who was going to visit Villanova and I I reached our
• 1:44:11
  guests in the winter, I reached out to Marcus and I said, hey,
• 1:44:14
  Marcus. This kid is awesome, he's a
• 1:44:17
  great leader, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda and Marcus
• 1:44:21
  appreciated that. He's thank you so much, she's a
• 1:44:23
  quiet kid. I didn't really get that from
• 1:44:25
  Talking them for an hour, so he's going to film and, you
• 1:44:29
  know, it worked out for him but Yeah, I think there needs to be
• 1:44:34
  more of a relationship between the NCAA and High School
• 1:44:37
  coaches. And I understand it's hard
• 1:44:40
  because sometimes, the recruiting 50 kids hundred kids.
• 1:44:43
  Exactly. That's right.
• 1:44:45
  Yeah, that's hard. That's really, really hard but
• 1:44:48
  not with coaching their own 30 40 kids or what.
• 1:44:51
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, you know, it's funny
• 1:44:53
  when you mention that 420 421 example, and I think this is for
• 1:44:59
  all events There's some exceptions with something like a
• 1:45:05
  lot of know, I don't know, maybe there's some exceptions here,
• 1:45:08
  but I would think on the distant side, at least I would want to
• 1:45:11
  know, what is, what kind of training is this 420?
• 1:45:14
  Is it is this 420 a kid who's running basketball, you know,
• 1:45:17
  until March, and then, he's coming to me and your answer,
• 1:45:19
  maybe, maybe, maybe 421 is okay on my little 420 scale, or
• 1:45:23
  whatever. Or, you know.
• 1:45:25
  Again, just using that example, the 421 420 thing.
• 1:45:28
  You know. Hey yeah, that kid.
• 1:45:30
  He's a mileage guy. He runs a hundred.
• 1:45:32
  Miles a week, whatever. And it's like ooh I don't know
• 1:45:34
  if I'm a big Bretton Woods guy. I like mmm, well gosh what am I
• 1:45:38
  going to get you? Because when I recruited
• 1:45:40
  Runners, I like to know because I'm a very speed based, you
• 1:45:42
  know, fly 30, those kind of things.
• 1:45:44
  When a one of the first questions I would ask us
• 1:45:46
  foreigners like, hey, you know, give me what a speed day is, I
• 1:45:49
  can coach said, it's time to run fast, what's the speed day?
• 1:45:52
  And when that kid said, oh yeah, we run 10 by 200.
• 1:45:56
  I was like, okay, I like this kid.
• 1:45:58
  You'll come to me and we gonna get developed right, but if they
• 1:46:01
  started talking Yeah, we do, you know, acceleration first and we
• 1:46:04
  do fly 30s as like mmmm. Well, man, how much better?
• 1:46:08
  I mean if they're not asking the, what are you doing?
• 1:46:09
  The weight room? And it's like, no way room.
• 1:46:11
  Cool. Oh yeah, we do a lot in the
• 1:46:13
  weight room like, oh, crap, I'm not even gonna, you know, he's
• 1:46:15
  already getting stronger, like I really do here.
• 1:46:18
  So, I appreciate that. And then I've heard a lot of
• 1:46:21
  people talk about. Will you call me the high school
• 1:46:24
  coach because I can tell you the kids, a jerk or, you know, is
• 1:46:28
  laid all the time and things like that and that I don't know
• 1:46:30
  if I buy Because it's hard to tell a college coach.
• 1:46:36
  You may try to say in different ways that maybe coach don't pick
• 1:46:39
  up on. I just think that's how I'm not
• 1:46:40
  saying they're gonna lie. I just think I agree.
• 1:46:43
  There's, there's very few college coaches that I would
• 1:46:47
  reveal anything like that. To I have good relationships
• 1:46:53
  with a handful. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:46:59
  But those are the ones that I would trust my kids with more
• 1:47:01
  than Things like Steve Dolan at UPenn.
• 1:47:05
  He coached my wife at the College of New Jersey back in
• 1:47:07
  the day, you know. So but like I he's the guy I was
• 1:47:13
  with that guy. Chris been at one time Nationals
• 1:47:15
  down, North Carolina years and years ago and he sat and had
• 1:47:20
  dinner with us for two or three hours.
• 1:47:21
  And there were two other college coaches.
• 1:47:23
  When they found out, we were High School.
• 1:47:24
  Coaches were like, wow, and walked away.
• 1:47:26
  And it was like, and Chris Bennett was coaching the best
• 1:47:28
  team in the country. At that time, it was like, and
• 1:47:31
  Dolan, huh? Out with us for two hours and it
• 1:47:33
  was that's where I kind of got to know him.
• 1:47:36
  And and you know what, I've other kind of vigilante at
• 1:47:39
  Princeton and part of that is regional and you know, they're
• 1:47:42
  close to me. I lifeguarded with Bob ferrule
• 1:47:46
  over at Rucker Julie. Yes, yes.
• 1:47:50
  What a great job. Yeah, he really is a different
• 1:47:54
  team today that is five years ago.
• 1:47:56
  I told him that victims last year's like hey man people are
• 1:47:59
  noticing like the Big Ten a like oh great, whatever Rutgers
• 1:48:02
  Cares. Big Ten now is like crap.
• 1:48:04
  You know, Burgers is going to have somebody has his crew are
• 1:48:07
  doing a really good job there. Well, I went to elementary
• 1:48:12
  school with his throws coach, so we all lifeguarded together
• 1:48:16
  later as life. So that are not from the
• 1:48:19
  Northeast. Do you guys just all know each
• 1:48:21
  other? I mean that.
• 1:48:22
  Yes there but it's like top of each other.
• 1:48:27
  There's a couple States. Like you drive through Delaware
• 1:48:29
  and it's like, you know, you pay $25.
• 1:48:32
  To get through it, and it takes you, 10 minutes, you know, Rhode
• 1:48:34
  Island is very similar without the payment.
• 1:48:37
  But yeah, the Northeast is pretty close.
• 1:48:40
  It's, you know, another thing that you said that I have strong
• 1:48:45
  feelings, I guess might be the right word.
• 1:48:47
  You mentioned emailing some other email and some college
• 1:48:51
  coaches and just zero response that breaks my heart.
• 1:48:56
  Yeah, like on Twitter, you know, if you read my bio you know that
• 1:49:01
  in Read any of my tweets, you know, I'm not a coach anymore,
• 1:49:05
  and yet I get kids, at least once a week and at times, it's
• 1:49:09
  once a day. Hey coach love your school.
• 1:49:14
  Here's my stats, would love to come to school there.
• 1:49:16
  And I'm like, bro, like do one second of research, you know,
• 1:49:19
  I'm not the coach, I'm the coach Advocate but I will respond
• 1:49:23
  every time and I'll say, hey, first of all, love your hustle.
• 1:49:26
  Like, I love that. I mean I needed to take one more
• 1:49:29
  layer of that Hustle, but I love that you're you're reaching out.
• 1:49:32
  Now go find schools. Like I'm not at a school, go
• 1:49:34
  find a school. None of them will ever go on
• 1:49:36
  answer. Like I just feel this sense of
• 1:49:38
  like responsibility and so, as a college coach, and by the way,
• 1:49:43
  vice versa, if a college coaches email and a high school coach
• 1:49:45
  and they don't respond, that's the same.
• 1:49:47
  It's like slowly, we gotta write a book each time, but respond
• 1:49:53
  respond. Even if it's like, hey coach,
• 1:49:55
  I'm sorry. I appreciate you, emailing me.
• 1:49:57
  I just don't respond to these emails.
• 1:49:59
  I use the recruiting service or I use my whatever.
• 1:50:02
  But to not respond. Oh because I know the coaches
• 1:50:06
  are so awesome people. It's like, why don't you
• 1:50:08
  respond? Yeah, yeah I don't, I don't
• 1:50:12
  know. I think maybe maybe it goes a
• 1:50:14
  junk mail. Sometimes, maybe they're just
• 1:50:16
  not good with email. Maybe their assistant takes care
• 1:50:18
  of all that stuff and we're emailing 31 per side.
• 1:50:22
  We're not going to give be nice. Any one of those is an excuse
• 1:50:25
  junk mail, you should be checking the junk mail every day
• 1:50:27
  and then emptying a real dump. You don't know email, it's 2023
• 1:50:31
  there. Means you ain't doing very good.
• 1:50:33
  There's no one. And if your assistants doing it,
• 1:50:36
  that's fine too. Because that assistant can hit
• 1:50:37
  the reply button just like anybody else, true?
• 1:50:40
  True. Yeah.
• 1:50:41
  It's always frustrating me when I emailed a coach about a kid
• 1:50:43
  that might be a walk-on. Never hear back.
• 1:50:46
  And then a year later, I hear from them about another kid and
• 1:50:48
  it's like the blueprint room. Yeah, you're important to me
• 1:50:55
  when you have a 405 but when you have a 4:30, you're not
• 1:51:00
  instantly that. That's what It's coach anybody.
• 1:51:03
  If you're not responding to emails, that is what you are
• 1:51:05
  saying without saying a single word without hitting reply.
• 1:51:08
  You were saying, you're only important to me here, if you
• 1:51:11
  have this, if you're not and guess what?
• 1:51:13
  People? Sniff that out.
• 1:51:14
  And when they do have that four or five-year no longer important
• 1:51:17
  to them, right? It comes that to help me because
• 1:51:20
  I have a feeling shot even if there's a coach that you're
• 1:51:22
  like, man, this coach is kind of whatever you might feel towards
• 1:51:26
  them. They never responded.
• 1:51:27
  But a kid says, hey, I really like that school.
• 1:51:30
  Would you make a call for me like?
• 1:51:31
  All right, yeah. Hey, oh no.
• 1:51:32
  Absolutely. And we give you 100%.
• 1:51:34
  Yeah, yeah. That's what I would do these
• 1:51:36
  college teams. They're not my teams.
• 1:51:37
  I'm not trying to tell people how to do their jobs.
• 1:51:39
  It's not my whatever. It's just that's the The View I
• 1:51:43
  have from the high school world. And listen, I'm a high school
• 1:51:47
  coach. I teach Latin, you know, I teach
• 1:51:50
  Latin and I coach on the side, you know, I'm a I'm a spend a
• 1:51:54
  lot of time coaching but I spend more time teaching.
• 1:51:56
  So that's that's my job. You know that's what I do.
• 1:52:01
  So I'm not trying to do somebody else's job and criticize
• 1:52:03
  somebody whatever. But yeah that last two topics as
• 1:52:09
  we start the rational ones ones recruiting still.
• 1:52:14
  There's been another topic on Twitter.
• 1:52:16
  That happens a lot. And that's about the high school
• 1:52:19
  coach communicating with the athlete.
• 1:52:23
  Their freshman year in college you you started touching on that
• 1:52:27
  and you know again I only come from my experiences.
• 1:52:31
  So for me I was a majority of my career was a college coach.
• 1:52:34
  I'm like, no, I don't want you to talk to that kid.
• 1:52:37
  Now I don't I don't care if you're talking just to talk but
• 1:52:38
  like right, you know, you don't have other things to do like you
• 1:52:42
  got more kids to coach, right? But then there's another there's
• 1:52:45
  a whole nother is a 180 of that were people like oh yeah you
• 1:52:48
  know the once my kid always make it I want you know they're my
• 1:52:50
  babies I've known him since they were 12 years old, I'm going to
• 1:52:53
  take care of them and you you started you kind of mentioned
• 1:52:56
  it. Like at least kind of the first
• 1:52:57
  year. Like hey, maybe that's your
• 1:53:00
  program. That's your coach.
• 1:53:02
  You believe so much that how much that athlete believes in
• 1:53:05
  the coach and the program is important.
• 1:53:06
  So it feels like you were saying, like, I need you to
• 1:53:09
  start believing and feeling into that program, you can be
• 1:53:11
  successful. 100%. I try to stay out of things.
• 1:53:16
  I try to stay away. You know what?
• 1:53:19
  Listen, when they run races well, hey, great job.
• 1:53:21
  Like, I'm a fan. That's basically what I am and a
• 1:53:26
  support person. If they reach out to me about
• 1:53:28
  things, I will not talk to them about what the coach is doing,
• 1:53:35
  you know. If there's a problem, of course
• 1:53:39
  and like right, you know something shady is going on, of
• 1:53:42
  course, that that's a whole different thing.
• 1:53:45
  But if it's normal coaching and they need some advice like, hey,
• 1:53:49
  go talk to your coach. I'm not doing it for you, I'm
• 1:53:52
  not going too bad, I'm not going to say negative or positive.
• 1:53:55
  That's just, you know, go figure it out, you know, that's that's
• 1:53:59
  part of being a college kid, it's part of doing that.
• 1:54:01
  But I strongly believe that that kids once they get to College,
• 1:54:06
  they have to be coached by their college coach.
• 1:54:10
  So yeah, I think you know, I applaud you for that shot.
• 1:54:14
  You know, the same goes on, on the college side when we
• 1:54:17
  switched jobs, he truly cared about those kids that you were
• 1:54:22
  now formally coaching, you would say, hey, this new coach, hey,
• 1:54:27
  they hire them for a reason. Like you're gonna be fine.
• 1:54:29
  Do they do things differently than I do?
• 1:54:31
  Hey, that's great. Maybe that's a better way for
• 1:54:33
  you like, you know, communicate with that person.
• 1:54:35
  I remember when I left Ball State, Go to Mississippi State
• 1:54:39
  and it's so funny because now we're very, very good friends.
• 1:54:43
  The coach at replace. Me was Brian Fetzer, who had
• 1:54:46
  Harvard and Cal and UVA and now is a amazing athletic director
• 1:54:51
  in the Cincinnati area. And I remember my high jumper,
• 1:54:54
  had a really good squad of high jumpers.
• 1:54:56
  They would call me and just, oh, coach, we're not doing this
• 1:54:59
  anymore. But, okay, the other day coach,
• 1:55:01
  Fetzer said you'd do best to forget everything coach
• 1:55:04
  Cunningham ever said, and I've /.
• 1:55:06
  I was like, hey he's probably right like I'm not coming back
• 1:55:10
  there so in the guy's pretty good.
• 1:55:12
  Like I known you know where he'd come from.
• 1:55:13
  Like he's pretty you know, it's not like the song lesson, scrub
• 1:55:15
  like this guy, fetzer's a pretty good coach, you know, listen to
• 1:55:19
  like, trust him. It may not look right today.
• 1:55:21
  It will write tomorrow and that's probably best thing I
• 1:55:24
  could ever do for those kids who I cared tremendously for if I
• 1:55:28
  would have done the opposite side.
• 1:55:30
  Yeah Fetzer he's an idiot. Yeah.
• 1:55:32
  Well he transfer get I would be doing those kids.
• 1:55:35
  Such a disservice But if you truly care about the kids, your
• 1:55:40
  attitude is more of the right attitude of like, hey man,
• 1:55:44
  you've got to believe in this coach and I can either help that
• 1:55:48
  or I can be a hindrance to that. Absolutely, yeah, well that's
• 1:55:52
  great. That's really good.
• 1:55:53
  Alright, last thing here, Sean tonight, appreciate again, so
• 1:55:56
  much tonight, I don't do on purpose, a lot of pre-research
• 1:56:02
  Pete, my curiosity cap on and just ask questions, but I have
• 1:56:06
  Been in the minutes before we hop on.
• 1:56:09
  Especially if you're on Twitter, just go on and kind of just look
• 1:56:11
  at your Twitter account and it seems like you might be a
• 1:56:15
  writer. You have kind of a thing going
• 1:56:17
  on. Kind yeah about that.
• 1:56:21
  Yeah. So I use that as kind of a
• 1:56:24
  journal and you know I've always jotted down my ideas of what I
• 1:56:29
  need to fix and I said, you know what, maybe maybe I can share
• 1:56:32
  some of these ideas and I don't know, get some Asian going about
• 1:56:38
  coaching and whatnot. That's, yeah, that's again, one
• 1:56:42
  of my goals with the coaches social.
• 1:56:43
  It's the same thing. It's, let's start conversations,
• 1:56:46
  and I send those out and I get three males from across the
• 1:56:51
  country from coaches, like, hey, what do you think about this?
• 1:56:53
  When you think about that? And that's what I'm trying to
• 1:56:56
  do, not not be the expert, but start that conversation because
• 1:57:00
  I'm not an expert at anything, you know, I'm an expert in my
• 1:57:04
  house here in Neptune, New Jersey.
• 1:57:07
  I don't know if that's true because your wife sounds pretty
• 1:57:09
  high-powered, so I'm not sure that might be true.
• 1:57:12
  Listen, I'm the expert in Toulon here and tell you.
• 1:57:17
  Yeah. But yeah, it's just the start
• 1:57:19
  those conversations and you know, I love getting a text from
• 1:57:23
  a coach like, hey, read your article really cool.
• 1:57:26
  But what do you think about this or, you know, I could disagree.
• 1:57:30
  You know, I think that's that's what's going to help make us all
• 1:57:33
  better without a doubt. So Jean, man.
• 1:57:36
  You know, as I hear your story and hear the things that you're
• 1:57:39
  proactively doing, like first of all, I'm just so proud of you
• 1:57:43
  honestly. Cuz that's what thanks my whole
• 1:57:45
  life is about. How do I lift up an honor track
• 1:57:48
  coach at them and what you're doing is a big big part of that
• 1:57:51
  you know I want to encourage you.
• 1:57:52
  I don't know that if you're doing this or not I'm a dime
• 1:57:55
  encourage you to do more, you know you're hosting these these
• 1:57:59
  socials, I love that you're doing this, you know, this
• 1:58:02
  newsletter blog, that is amazing, you know, there's a lot
• 1:58:06
  more Or in you in both aspects, both the science and the culture
• 1:58:12
  side of things. You know, you're obviously you
• 1:58:14
  know we don't talk X's and O's here but in you know, you drop
• 1:58:16
  little nuggets of like yeah, you know, my my my worst see Tara
• 1:58:21
  freshman was 1016. You obviously you know the
• 1:58:23
  science part of this pretty good too.
• 1:58:26
  I would encourage you to encourage you into two fronts
• 1:58:29
  here. One is reach out to some of
• 1:58:31
  these other amazing podcast and YouTube shows and Known as
• 1:58:37
  guests and talk about the topics that you're comfortable talking
• 1:58:40
  about, you know, the from the, on track and field podcast out
• 1:58:43
  in the west coast, they do an amazing job Athletics, LLC,
• 1:58:48
  they're a great group that talk a lot about track and they we
• 1:58:51
  could use a high school perspective and now that I think
• 1:58:54
  about it, there's some NCAA coaches.
• 1:58:56
  So maybe the camp but will but don't know what that stop you
• 1:58:58
  from asking and there's a bunch of other and I don't even know
• 1:59:01
  them because I don't listen to the X's and O's podcast but
• 1:59:03
  there's a bunch of other ones. I know that her out there I just
• 1:59:06
  You to reach out to them and say, hey, we're always looking
• 1:59:10
  for guests. Let me just give you the little
• 1:59:11
  dark secret of podcast that interview people.
• 1:59:13
  We are always looking for guests, trust me.
• 1:59:16
  I just encourage you to reach out and just be like, hey, not
• 1:59:19
  sure if I would be a good fit for you guys.
• 1:59:21
  But, you know, if you ever wanted to talk about X or Y or
• 1:59:24
  Z, I might be might be good for you because I think there's a
• 1:59:28
  lot of you're already doing it. I'm just trying to figure out
• 1:59:31
  how do we do more of it, right? How do we expand?
• 1:59:34
  We need to come out and then the other thing out in Urge you to
• 1:59:37
  do and maybe you're actually doing this the right way,
• 1:59:40
  through the newsletter blog. Maybe you're more of a writer
• 1:59:43
  than you are anything else. But I'd encourage you to start a
• 1:59:47
  podcast, man. Whether it's a YouTube video or
• 1:59:51
  an actual podcast, and whether it's an interview show or just a
• 1:59:55
  you show or it's a, you know, it could be.
• 1:59:58
  I encourage college coaches to do this for just their program
• 2:00:01
  like start a podcast, just for you.
• 2:00:03
  Just your alumni fans and recruits just a it doesn't have
• 2:00:06
  To be this big huge, you know, bunch of bunch of listeners, it
• 2:00:09
  can be very Niche to to you and your culture and your program.
• 2:00:13
  But how do you encourage you to? You got a lot of great ideas and
• 2:00:17
  a lot of thoughts. And and a lot of ways to pull
• 2:00:19
  things out of people's kind of what I sense from you.
• 2:00:21
  So I would encourage you to explore something in that Avenue
• 2:00:25
  that there could be more value. I know you don't have enough on
• 2:00:27
  your plate, so I'm just trying to help you do more stuff next
• 2:00:31
  month or two. I'm okay I got it.
• 2:00:34
  Yes. Uh Marina.
• 2:00:39
  Man. Sean, thank you so much.
• 2:00:40
  Thank you. This was amazing.
• 2:00:43
  I love your McCall. Your lineage from your
• 2:00:46
  grandfather to your day. Yeah, you know, the way that,
• 2:00:50
  you know, you could have gone a whole different angle.
• 2:00:51
  I'm so happy that you would think all you went to Egypt I'm
• 2:00:55
  glad you never gave up, you know, as I heard your story I
• 2:00:58
  was like oh man I might have given up right there oh man it
• 2:01:01
  happened again. Yeah I might have given up their
• 2:01:03
  oh man. I mean there's a lot of times
• 2:01:05
  where one of the options you had was to give up and in run and
• 2:01:12
  you never did man and I'm sure if we were to explore other
• 2:01:15
  avenues of your life I bet that's the theme of yours of
• 2:01:17
  like man this has been a hardship but you know what?
• 2:01:20
  I'm not giving up. I'm going to I'm going to double
• 2:01:22
  down here and figure this thing out and get help along the way
• 2:01:25
  as well. So I think your story is going
• 2:01:28
  to have a lot of value to those who listen to us today and I
• 2:01:31
  think you're going to you're going to get a few more emails.
• 2:01:33
  I think is what ultimately is going to come about because we
• 2:01:36
  have something and I do hope so. Thank you, awesome man.
• 2:01:40
  Sean thank you so much for being here tonight.
• 2:01:41
  It's like Appreciate, thank you for being here and listening,
• 2:01:44
  you know, this was amazing. You know, I don't have a lot in
• 2:01:47
  common with a distance coaches. Anybody who knows?
• 2:01:49
  Me, I don't like driving 2 miles.
• 2:01:52
  I certainly running two miles but it's always great to hear
• 2:01:56
  the perspective of a high school coach, High School coach that
• 2:01:58
  has very, very successful. There's more that we didn't even
• 2:02:01
  tap into in regards to the athletes.
• 2:02:03
  He's produced and his team and his staff have produced
• 2:02:06
  throughout the career. But obviously at a very high
• 2:02:08
  level, you're at some of those little nuggets of times that
• 2:02:10
  he's his kids and Reduced their. So obviously he's got a lot of
• 2:02:13
  experience there and that's where I think the value of this
• 2:02:16
  conversation, really lies in the kind of the melding of the
• 2:02:20
  college coach in high school coach together.
• 2:02:22
  I know Club coach, you're in there as well.
• 2:02:23
  There's a part of that in there as well.
• 2:02:25
  There that if you, we talk more and discuss more and have more
• 2:02:28
  open and Frank conversations, I think we all get better.
• 2:02:31
  And I hope that today's conversation, helped us all, get
• 2:02:34
  better today. So thank you for being here this
• 2:02:35
  week. Join us next week, on The Guild
• 2:02:37
  track and field connections podcast.
• 2:02:38
  And we're gonna do it all over again.
• 2:02:39
  I don't how we top this one. We will try to figure it out.
• 2:02:42
  We'll see, there's a lot of great teeth.
• 2:02:43
  Thanks, everybody have a great night.