Episode 3-The times they are a changin

This is a podcast episode about coaching, specifically about the experiences and challenges faced by the host, Coach Rick. He explains that he started the podcast to provide guidance and support for new and aspiring coaches. In this particular episode, Coach Rick talks about his efforts to change the image and mindset of the South Lake Tahoe Steppers, a team he coached. He discusses changing the team name, improving the uniforms, and seeking help from a distance runner friend to improve the girls' running abilities. He also mentions the advantages of training in South Lake Tahoe, such as the altitude and various running courses available. Coach Rick emphasizes the importance of changing the team's reputation and earning respect from their competitors. He shares an anecdote about a rival runner who respected him as a competitor. The episode also briefly mentions the team's experiences competing in various locations and a memorable trip to Santa Cruz. Hey, welcome back coaches, new coaches, old coaches, or anyone thinking about becoming a coach. You've turned in to Gotcha Coach, a podcast about coaching, done by a coach, for coaches. Thanks for checking us out. I'm your host, Coach Rick, and this is episode three. But before we get into this week's episode, I want to clear up some questions that have come up from my first two episodes. First and foremost, I'm not doing this for the fame and fortune. In fact, I don't really care if I ever see any money from advertisers at all. I'm doing this because I feel that it's important and it's needed for anyone thinking about being a youth coach or someone who is new and looking for direction. When I got into coaching, I didn't do it for the money, and I'm not doing this for the money as well. When I first started, there wasn't the internet, YouTube, blogs, or podcasts where people can go now to get help. I was going solely on what I had learned in college classes and from the experiences that I had from my own training, which meant that most of the time I was either lost or learning as I went. This podcast series is intended to give insight, discuss where I developed my coaching philosophies, how I changed those philosophies, some of the pitfalls experienced, as well as the successes, so that anyone can feel just a little bit more comfortable as they begin going down the road of coaching. So now, on to episode three, The Times They Are a-Changing. That was a song that was written by Bob Dylan in 1963, and I'm not going to go into the philosophical discussion as to what the meaning is, but I set out to change the image of the South Lake Tahoe Steppers. First thing I did was drop the lake from the team name. The high school was referred to as South Tahoe High. The middle school was South Tahoe Middle School. So why have the word lake as part of the name? Besides, as I said earlier, I had painted our name on my van, and really, I didn't have room for lake. Next was changing the competitive mindset of the girls on the team. I had received my AA degree in psychology, so I was aware of how the mind could be manipulated in a positive way to achieve positive results. I wanted to start by changing the team uniform, which looked like it was made in the 60s. I knew that a group that looked good would naturally feel better about themselves and strive to perform better, but we were lacking the financial means to upgrade the uniforms. I mean, our uniforms were so much worse than the other teams in Northern California, and it bothered me that I had to come up with a secondary plan. Trying to figure out how to coach these girls in running distances was completely foreign to me. Like I said, there was no internet, no YouTube, no DVDs to watch or refer to, so I solicited help from the best distance runner that I knew, my best friend from high school and college, Bob Smith. Bob was an outstanding mile and two-mile guy, and was voted team MVP during our senior year in high school. P.S. I was voted team captain. Bob and I went on to DeAnza Junior College in Cupertino, California, and had a wonderful two-year career there in both cross-country and track. As I said in my last episode, Bob would convince me that I needed to, quote-unquote, work on my stamina in the off-season, and would drag me along on those crazy three-, four-, and five-mile runs. He used to drive me crazy because he was extremely comfortable on those runs and would talk my ear off while I was huffing and puffing while struggling just to keep up. But I was somewhat thankful for the training that he gave me when track season came around, and our coach wanted us to run repeat 400-meter runs and do 20 of them. Now that was for the distance guys, but the sprinters had to run every other one, so that was 10 400. That was more than I'd ever run in a single workout in my entire life. I was very happy to have had some distance work that allowed me to complete my workout, even though I did lose my guts at the end. Bob was an extremely valuable member of our team. We referred to him as our distant, long-distance coach. You see, Bob lived in San Jose, about four hours away from where we practiced. I valued the input from Bob as to how to organize distance practices, and I adapted those suggestions accordingly to our talent pool and the age of the athlete. Living in South Lake Tahoe, we had a built-in advantage of training for distance, altitude. If you remember from the previous episode, our little city in the Sierras was the USA men's training site for the 1968 Olympic Games, and many distance runners from around the world continued to come to the South Shore to train, even after the Olympics were completed. In addition to miles and miles of flat, even surfaces to train on, we had hills. We had an extremely nice cross-country course at the high school called the One-Seven that the high school cross-country team trained on. That was, by its name, 1.7 miles in distance. It was a rolling course that was designed for speed, and we had a flat course at the middle school that encompassed a forested area just off campus that the middle school used during their PE classes. We also had a 3.2-mile run that was pretty much a rolling but mostly flat course that went from the middle school up the Pioneer Trail, and we had an extremely useful course located just off Pioneer Trail and Black Bart Avenue that was very hilly and had a course that our girls could be challenged. Using this particular course was how we earned the nickname of the South Tahoe Billy Goats because we dominated any hilly cross-country course that we competed at. Our reputation as an easy mark had begun to change. So you're probably wondering why I was so intent on changing our terrible reputation. As I alluded in a previous episode, I actually heard an opposing athlete state when they lined up at the starting line, well, at least South Tahoe is here. I know I'll beat someone. This reminded me of the situation during track season of my senior year in high school. We were running against a rival league school that had a very well-known runner in our league and beyond in the 440-yard run. He was stepping down to the 100-yard dash with his meet. Note that I'm still dealing with yards and not meters. When we lined up at the starting line to begin our practice starts, he stood up and said, which one of you is Rick Brown? Knowing who he was, I extremely freaked out. I came up on my starting blocks and in my best post-puberty voice said, I am. Why? He replied, and this will stay with me forever, quote, I just wanted to know who I had to beat, unquote. You see, your past reputations are what influences other people's thoughts about you. And this guy knew that I was a competitive threat to him at this distance. I had his respect. This was what I wanted our competition to think about the steppers. This was how I approached all of my coaching experiences throughout the years. I trained all of my teams, whether it was cross-country, track and field, basketball, soccer, or baseball, to strive for respect from our competition. You'll understand how this works in these sports as we progress through the series. The South Tahoe Steppers girls cross-country and track teams traveled all over northern and sometimes southern California for the majority of our competitions. This is not to say that we never had home meets, but that'll come later. Cross-country meets were held at Browns Ravine, at Folsom Lake, Gibson Ranch in Sacramento where a 1964 Olympic gold medalist, Billy Mills, presented the awards, something the girls really enjoyed. A meet on the beach in Santa Cruz, California, a state meet in San Diego hosted by the Wilt Chamberlain of NBA Hall of Fame notoriety, who wasn't quite, who was quite the track and field athlete in high school and at the University of Kansas. There were just a few, these were just a few of the experiences that our team of girls from the mountains had. One of those experiences was a meet held at the main beach in Santa Cruz, California. As a Bay Area kid, the beach and boardwalk at Santa Cruz was a place that I had gone to quite often, but these girls were in for a special surprise. We met in the parking lot at Raley's and Kmart at the Y in Tahoe, as we always did, and assigned the girls to the vehicles that would transport them to the beach campsite that we had reserved. Now realize this, we would be leaving at 5.30 p.m. in October and driving four plus hours to arrive at the campsite in the dark with 20 plus girls having to set up tents, yeah, well, you get the picture. The next day we arrived at the meet and the eyes on the girls were as big as silver dollars. Is that the ocean? None of the girls had ever seen, let alone been to the Pacific Ocean, and it was difficult to keep them focused on why we were there. But there was also the obvious lure of the boardwalk with all the rides and games and the fact that the host team gave every competitor wristbands that allowed them to ride every ride for free after the meet was over. Nobody really cared about how the team did. We were running in sand, not hills, and not the kind of sand that we had on our beaches in Tahoe. Oh, we tried doing some of the training before this trip, but I knew that the sand was different, so we didn't worry too much about how we performed. The main purpose and obvious upside of this trip was for the girls to have fun and experience something that few Tahoe kids had gotten to experience, the Pacific Ocean. But after dipping their feet in the ocean and running away from the waves, it was the boardwalk that was the biggest hit. So we assigned groups of girls with the adult chaperones and we all went about experiencing all that the boardwalk had to offer. The group that I found, or had, found a basketball shooting game that they challenged me to do. Now I was somewhat of a rec league stud in Tahoe, and as such, I took on the challenge. Well I conquered the challenge and had my choice of prizes. Out of all the choices, there was only one that stood out to me, and to my surprise, all of the girls in my group said, get that one, coach. It was a wooden replica of a hand with the middle finger extended. Get the picture? So I chose that one, and when we got home, I promptly mounted it on the dashboard of my van. Yeah, you gotta love the 70s. Not one parent voiced an objection to the finger. As I stated earlier, our meets took us all over the state of California, and sometimes we had to be flexible with our travel agenda and where we stayed. Motel rooms, even in the 70s, were expensive, especially for a team that had limited funds. I was a big believer in getting the team down to the location of the meet the night before so they weren't cooped up in the vehicles for two to four hours and then being expected to get out and perform well. So that meant driving back to Tahoe after the meet was over, and many of those trips were done in snowstorms. Sometimes those snowstorms were so severe that snow chains were needed on my van. This meant getting out on the main road, putting on the chains, with the girls inside laughing at me, getting soaked, and then driving 25 miles an hour over the Highway 50 summit. These storms were so strong that the snow was blowing sideways, and it resembled the hyperspace scenes from Star Wars, which hadn't even come out yet. So I had nothing to compare it to back then. All I knew was that it was scary, and I often wondered, why in the world do I do this? During our trip to Southern California for the AAU state meet hosted by Wilt Chamberlain, whose team was called Wilt's Wonder Women, we encountered some very heavy fog on our return trip, so heavy that I was having a very difficult time seeing anything in front of me. It was not safe to continue, so we stopped and found a payphone. A what? A payphone? Yeah, those were, there were no cell phones per se in those days. So I called our long-distance distance coach, Bob, who you heard about earlier, and asked if we could crash at his apartment in San Jose for the night. I knew it was inconvenient, but he graciously allowed us to use his floor, and then he cooked the girls breakfast in the morning. Knowing how I set out to change the way that our team was viewed, well, I was somewhat successful in doing so during the 1975 cross-country season. Our 10- and 11-year-old group was very, very good, and had won several of the NorCal meets that we had run in, and we had two very promising and talented underrunners as well. The Northern California AAU championship meet was being conducted at the Crystal Springs cross-country course, a very well-known course off of the 280 freeway between San Jose and San Francisco. Our chief rival was the Orinda team, a very nice group of girls with a head coach that I got along with very nicely, but this was for all the marbles, so niceness and getting along went out the window. The race was close from start to finish, very, very close. Remember, in cross-country competition, your top five runners make up your final score, with each runner getting the points that correspond with their finishing position. As example, first place gets one point, second place two points, etc., and the lowest point total is the winner. This means that every position is important and can mean the difference between a win or a loss. Well, as the race progressed, I was still young enough at that time to move from one section of the course to another to get an idea of how we were doing and to root on the girls. As each girl crossed the finish line, I was busily adding up the points and figured out it was going to come down to our fifth girl versus theirs. After the dust had cleared, Orinda beat us by two points. This was the closest that I had or would have ever come to a championship for the next 44 years. I was devastated, but never let the girls know how much. Lesson to learn here, coaches, gracefully accept the loss, acknowledge to your team how close the race was, but never, ever lay the blame on the fifth runner. And don't dwell on the disappointment. Explain to the team, if applicable, that if every runner could have beaten one girl for Orinda, the championship would be ours. And then ask them if, one, they ran their best race, and two, if not, could they have run better? Make it a learning moment and use it for any and all future moments in their lives. Well, next time we meet, we'll talk a little bit about how we handled running a track and field program that started in January and ran until May, and doing so with a track that was covered in snow for the first three months of the season. Until then, take care, be safe, laugh a lot, and tell someone you love them. Remember, you can send me your questions, feedback, or comments to coachrickb53 at gmail.com. I'll talk to you soon.