When athletes are at practice, most work hard. However, there are those athletes who show up to practice to socialize and put forth minimum effort. This does not happen in every sport or with every athlete but when it does, the rest of the team feels the affects of that lazy athlete.
The sport of cross country is unlike any sport out there. Coaches cannot watch over their athletes at all times, unless they are doing a track workout where everyone is at the same spot. Now these cross country coaches give their athletes a great deal of leeway in where they go for runs. On runs, coaches expect the athletes to actually run for the entire practice and not skip out on the workout. Granted there have been numerous times that I chose to wait around and not run until five minutes left of the practice. However, those times were limited and I always felt bad about doing it.
So what is wrong with skipping out on a few runs? In cross country, or any sport for that matter, what you put in, you get out of it. Simply meaning, if you work hard, by the end of the season you should see real improvements. The way I see it, in cross country there tends to be more athletes at practices to socialize and hang out with friends than any other sport. There is nothing wrong with that at all, on teams friendships are bound to happen, you’re a family. When it comes down to it, at practices athletes should forget about their friends on the team for the time and just work hard to better themselves. Coaches may not catch you cheating in the practices but they will find out when it comes to the races or the games.
If you’re an athlete and you are there for the social aspect of the sport keep this in mind: you are only hurting the team in the long run. Cross country is a unique sport and these athletes should not break the trust of their coaches and work hard when coaches are not looking. If you do not want to work hard, then why would you put yourself through the practices and the games/races, the sweat, blood, and tears? Do yourself a favor and quit; better yet, do the team a favor and quit. I know everyone is at different abilities but on a team the athletes should work hard to get better.
40 years ago I was on my high school cross-country team, not because I loved running, but because it was a way to avoid gym class. I certainly cut corners during practice and it showed. I train with much more discipline today and it makes me wonder what I might have done had I been dedicated back then. If you're on a team, then train to your God-given abilities or you will someday look back and say, "what if ..."
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more. I saw this when I ran for Suckville-Chili. We had a lot of lazy ass people who showed up and just socialized for practice and slacked off. This was much much more evident in track because Cross country actually required work and we had a good coach. I say that when you aren't doing a workout, socializing is great. That is where all of my good memories came from. But when it is time to get down to business, socializing and joking around only hurts you. XC/track are varsity sports not social hour. Granted there is socializing but not when it gets down to doing hard work. I wish some people took XC more seriously. I have seen so much wasted potential on my past XC teams
ReplyDeletemeh the way i see it you can't force anybody to want to do work. they have to be internally self-motovated. i matched the kind of person you're talking about almost to a T in high school, and you know what, it made me enjoy and love the sport even more even if i wasn't exactly working hard. yeah i could have been a lot better, yeah i probably could have gone to states and been recruited by somebody, but its not the goal in HS. the goal is to get kids to enjoy XC/T&F in whatever way they can. The only reason i continued running in college was because of how much fun i had at gates skipping out on runs, getting in trouble and being suspended from meets, and probably spending more time playing hackey sack and ultiate frisbee than actually running.
ReplyDeletethe point is, if someone is motovated and wants to put in the work, thats great. a coach should do their best to develop their competitive edge and work with them to achieve their goals. but if all a kid wants to do is have a good time and goof off, theres not too much a coach can do about it, regardless of how talented you are. yeah its annoying when you see people with a lot of talent waste it for other reasons, but the fact of the matter is they are not going to capatalize on that talent regardless because they don't have any reason to. maybe someday they will turn around and decide for themselves that they want to do well, but until then, no amount of convincing will be able to make them want to be serious about running.
/rant