2015 Arizona Cross Country Coaches Clinic Recap

It is two weeks before the start of the 2015 Cross Country season in Arizona and on the weekend of Friday and Saturday the 21st-22nd of August, the Arizona Cross-Country Coaches Clinic was held at Mesa Community College in the hopes getting people to engage in an open discussion about improving athletes. The main attractions to the event were two veteran Coaches Dr. Joe Vigil Ph.D., a treasure chest of stories and life lessons learned across a career of coaching Collegiate Champions and Olympians alike, and Hall of Fame Coach Dan Green who spent 33 years guiding The Woodlands High School Cross Country teams of Houston, Texas to State Championships. Dr. Jeff Messer explained, “Our objective was two-fold. First, we wanted to bring Arizona Coaches together. Second, we have to unparalleled clinicians here for an unequal learning opportunity.”

Dr. Messer kicked the event off Friday evening with a discussion of three topics: (High Intensity-Interval Training, the Long Run, and Post-Workout Macronutrient Intake) chosen by the audience, using data based literature found on each topic. With each point there was a story about a discussion or debate that expressed a seemingly insatiable curiosity for other rationales or methods. Dr. Messer’s second presentation bore all secrets to Desert Vista’s successful program, which outlined a basic week with modest volume, about 2 workouts per week and a weekly long run. Excellence in academics is a priority and so Jeff empowers his girls to make choices based on those responsibilities. He explains, “If we’re going to make a mistake, I’d rather risk undertraining than over-training.” That shows in the training program he designs for his girls as well. While mileage is progressive in nature over the course of an entire Desert Vista female student-athlete’s career it isn’t something that grows unrestricted over the course of a season and gets cut down drastically two weeks before State Championships.

Dr. Vigil gave his first presentation, about Cross-Country training, on Friday evening and having accumulated 60 years of experience in the business, Vigil had a lot to say about training athletes like Deena Kastor, Brenda Martinez, and most recently Diego Estrada, for longer distances. “If I can teach you anything, it’s that you have to get inside every person’s heart and mind.” Coach Vigil says that what motivates him is the passion he has as a mentor. Desert Vista assistant Coach and former pupil of Vigil’s at Adams State University, Bob Davis praised his former Coach’s ability to, “take dry subject with a lot of science and a lot of numbers and give it a human element. You learn the science and you’re inspired at the same time.” While Coach Vigil has had the opportunity to witness for himself many of the breakthroughs made in sport at the highest level over several decades, in his opinion, “The one element that’s still there is the trust and respect that athlete and coach have for each other.”

Saturday started and ended with Coach Green and that morning the attendees got to listen to a Coach Dan Green’s powerhouse of a sermon about how to build a successful distance program. He challenged the audience to remove the word “try” from coaching vocabulary, in order to avoid playing the victim and own the program for what it is. “We don’t want to try. We want to do!” says Green. Ultimately, while Coaches should have the ambition to win, the goal in the journey should be to teach the value of hard work, sacrifice, and commitment. To close out the presentations Coach Green lectured about year-round training for distance runners. He displayed a training spreadsheet on which he mapped out the whole year and although he calls it a blue print for success, it’s not written in stone and so it’s acceptable to improvise when necessary. His point was that kids need to see and know for a fact that their Coach cares and has a purpose set day-in and day-out.

To say the least the clinic was very well received and the most important pattern seen across all the presentations was striving for excellence with the intent to improve young people. Dr. Messer, Dr. Vigil, and Coach Green were all so fervent in sharing information with the community. “The primary theme we want people to take away from this clinic is a passion for continuous improvement as Coaches,” said Messer. The attraction to hear the words of wisdom from guys who have been there and done that is something everyone in attendance felt. Coach Chris Zent of Deer Valley High School, shared his support for the clinic because, “When you have an opportunity to hear from successful Coaches and learn from them and people who are more than happy to share all their information, you go if you want to get better. We need more of that in Arizona. The comradery that’s built between Coaches in the community to help one another and as a result help our respective kids only happens when we feel comfortable not as adversaries but as peers.”