A blog update: IHSA changes video review guidelines for sectional cross country finish line

The IHSA will require a video review of the finish for regional and sectional meets, as well as at the state meet, starting next year.

A small change in emphasis and language regarding video review of finishers at regional and sectional cross country meets was apparently already there in the 2012 rules interpretation presentation on the Illinois High School Association schools and officials web site, which was made available on December 13.

That presentation identifies a change in language from the National Federation of High Schools rule book clarifying  the use of “electronic transponders” in producing the results for cross country races.  The new language allows for the use of so-called bib chips, as well as mandating that if shoe chips are used, they must be used on both feet.  But after presenting those changes, the rules presentation then explains that Illinois has an entirely different rule.  Illinois continues to use the torso, not feet, even with chips on both feet, when determining the finish place.  Therefore, it will rely, instead, on a video review of the cross country finish to determine finish places:  “In Illinois, throughout the state series, meet management is required to provide some form of video review at the finish line.  In regional and sectional meets, the video is used to determine the order of close finishes.  When it becomes necessary to use the video to determine the order of close finishes, the torso will be used to determine final places, even when computerized chips are used.  At the state final, computer chips are used as a timing device and the video review is used as the primary scoring tool.”

But on Saturday, January 14, first in conversation with one of the state’s top track and cross country officials and meet manager of the state track meet John Polka, and then reiterated in an officials meeting by state officials coordinator and rules interpreter Geza Ehrentreu and IHSA assistant executive director Ron McGraw, I learned that in the future the IHSA would require a video review of the finish at regional and sectional cross country meets, just as it does at the state meet.  The change to require a video review at regional and sectional meets comes after significant problems arose at three sectional meets in the fall 2011 involving finish lines that used computer chips to record the finishes of the runners.

I wrote a long blog post about those problems in November, focusing particularly on the 2011 Niles West sectional meet.  That post compared the language used in the cross country terms and conditions booklet about the use of video at the regional and sectional meets, on the one hand, and at the state meet, on the other.  In the 2011 terms and condition, it states that at the regional and sectional meets, “Video review is not to be used as a primary method of determining the outcome of the race at the regional and sectional level of competition.”  At the state final, however, “Video review will be used to assist in scoring the meet.” 

As it was explained by Polka, McGraw and Ehrentreu, the new guidelines, which will presumably result in changes to that language in the terms and conditions, will essentially make the video review the definitive scoring tool for the regional, sectional, and final meets.

Polka and Ehrentreu discussed their experiences with the video review at the state meet, and Ehrentreu has further experience at NCAA championship meets, as well.  At the state meet, a review of every single finisher in one state championship race takes between 15 and 20 minutes.  While the emphasis is on reviewing the close finishes, which could be identified by looking at the chip timing results, Ehrentreu recommends a full review of the video for all finishers, even at the regional and sectional levels.

At the officials’ meeting, there was discussion about smaller details.  The meet referee at these meets should be involved in the placement of the video recording device and the instruction of the camera operators.  The new language will apparently not mandate the number of cameras, but two cameras, McGraw seemed to agree, would be best.  One camera could focus on capturing the bib numbers of finishers, but a second camera could look directly across or down the finish line to capture the finish of the runners’ torsos.  Ehrentreu seemed to feel that even one camera, placed appropriately, might be able to perform both tasks adequately.

The importance of the video review connected to another ongoing discussion.  In the state series, runners are told to wear their numbers very high on their chests to help with the video review, obscuring the names which identify their teams.  Spectators and even coaches have complained that they can’t identify runners and their teams.   Teams might consider redesigning their championship uniforms, it was suggested, to allow for identification below the numbers.  A good view of the numbers is essential for the now all-important video review.

The discussion at the meeting noted that in addition to helping sort out close finishes, the mandated video review would solve the problem of phantom runners who cross the finish line but whose chips malfunction or somehow do not record a finish.

It also covers other kinds of chip problems that might arise.  After I posted my blog on the events at Niles West, Jon Gordon, coach at Northside College Prep, sent me a link to a remarkable story from the Florida 2A girls state cross country meet.  When girls on the New Heritage High School team mixed up their chips and created a problem with the chip-timed results, they were disqualified and their finishes erased from the team scoring results.  As a result, they were not awarded the second place medals that they had earned on the cross country course.  The happy ending was that the team that got the medals, perennial state power Bolles High School, subsequently presented them to the disqualified team in their own impromptu and emotional ceremony.

Because Illinois gives the video review primary importance in the determining of the finish result, overriding the chips, the Florida situation cannot happen in Illinois.

After the officials meeting at Oak Park, I introduced myself to Ron McGraw and spoke briefly.  It is not my habit yet, which I suppose it should be, to identify myself as a blogger and alert people that we are talking on the record, so to speak.  I had emailed McGraw in November with a long list of questions about the events at the Niles West sectional, running through the issues that I later wrote about in the blog.  I also sent a second follow up email asking simpler and more direct questions.  I did not get a response to either email.  In subsequent emails and conversations with John Polka, I was told that I would not get a response because the IHSA simply stands behind the decisions made by its experienced officials at the Niles West meet.

On November 29, 2011, the IHSA advisory board for cross country held a meeting in which the problems at the chip-timed sectionals were apparently discussed, but there was not much comment about it in the published minutes after the meeting:  “The committee reviewed the recommended procedures for evaluating the finish of state series events (special emphasis on sectional meets). IHSA Officials will be reminded that the final evaluation of all races is their responsibility. A camera at the finish line will continue to be mandatory. The Meet Referee has the option to use the images captured on the video to determine the order of finish as they deem necessary. The video is to be viewed only by the meet officials and meet management. Results are not to be posted by meet management until the meet referee has made them official by placing his/her signature on the written copy and giving permission to post.”

I had sent my blog post to Gordon, who is a member of the advisory committee, and to Polka, who participated in the meeting, as well.  But it was not clear to me after reading these minutes whether IHSA officials had fully understood the seriousness of the problems as I had tried to explain them.

Polka reiterated the basic position that the IHSA stood behind its officials when we talked for a long time in December at the seasonal Illinois Track and Cross Country Coaches Association gathering of coaches held at Angelo’s restaurant in Elmhurst.  It strikes me again that I did not make it clear to Polka at that time that we were talking on the record, and to be fair I will consider his comments as off the record.  But I pushed pretty hard with my basic argument that there is a serious problem with the open chip-timed finish lines which do not have a finish chute that puts runners in order when they finish.  Even if an IHSA official made a call on the order in which runners had finished using their torsos, I insisted, with the open finish line there was no way to record that finish without a finish chute.   The chips record the finishes of the feet, not the torsos; no one makes a record of the torso calls, and how could an official remember them?  Require a chute, I had insisted, or get rid of the torso finish and turn the finish over to the chip timers officially.

Mandating the video review, which seems to be a change from the position announced in the advisory committee minutes, essentially addresses that problem with the open finish line with a simpler solution.  The video tape will record the torso finishes of the runners, and the review of that tape will establish a definitive order of finish for all the runners in the race.

Whether my conversation with Polka or my blog or my emails had any impact on the new IHSA decision probably doesn’t matter to anyone but me.  I did not ask McGraw directly when I had my chance to do so whether my emails or my blog post had been helpful in any way.  What I should be happy about, finally, is that I was part of a larger process which produced a change that should help with the situations that came up in the sectionals last fall.  As a coach and as an official, I am much more confident about getting correct results at the high stakes sectional meets in the future by using the video review.

The coaches’ clinic that kicks off the track season

Yesterday was the Illinois Track and Cross County Coaches Association annual clinic on the second Saturday of the year at Oak Park and River Forest High School.  As long as I have been coaching high school track, going back to 1998, I think, I have been attending this clinic.

It really kind of marks the beginning of the track season, for me and for many other coaches.  Some years we have a week break before the season actually begins, a date mandated by the Illinois High School Association, the third Monday of January.  That third Monday is the federal Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and we usually have school off.  So we always hold our first practice on the Tuesday following the King holiday.

This year I attended a clinic for track and field officials, conducted at the same site and date, instead of attending any of the coaches sessions.  As an IHSA official, I am required to attend one of these education sessions every three years to be in good standing.  Often I attend some of these sessions, and some coaching sessions, but I discovered last year that part-time attendance every year at the officials’ sessions does not get me credit for my required attendance every three years.  So this year I was a full-time official at the clinic.

But after the clinic, they give us lunch.  There I found my assistant track coaches, along with our Ignatius girls head coach Erin Luby, and we gathered to eat together.  It was really our first coaches meeting.  Stephen Bugarin, my assistant in cross country for the last four years, will join me for his fifth year as a track coach, working with our distance runners.  Ike Ofor, an Ignatius graduate from 2009 and currently a student studying exercise physiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will be the first former athlete that I coached to help with our team.  Ofor was a state qualifying triple jumper four years while at on my team and a near miss for winning a medal at the State Track Meet in 2009, where he finished tenth.  Ofor will work with our sprinters and jumpers.  Finally, Patrick Boyle, who helped out a little bit with our team last spring because his two sons are team members, will help us out again as a pole vault coach.

There is a program at the lunch, with awards given out first, and then an Illinois Track and Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame induction ceremony.  My coaches and I were able to sneak in some bits of planning and other conversation—like what sessions they had attended—between the formal bits of the program.

As people finished their meal and as the program continued, the high school lunch room emptied out slowly.  Lunch began at 1:15, and by 2:30 most of the audience seemed to be other Hall of Fame members or people attached to the new inductees.  I know that I have never previously waited through the entire event.

Dick Beebe, right, accepts the 1999-2000 Outstanding High School Physics Teacher Award for Illinois

But this time I did, and I was really glad that I did so.  It struck me as a particularly august group of Hall of Fame inductees this year.  For the first time, perhaps, I also felt a closer attachment to one of the inductees—Dick Beebe, who had been the head coach of the Fenwick boys team when I first began coaching at Saint Ignatius.  He had been a serious Chicago Catholic League rival for several years when I began, but he had been a friendly rival who had welcomed me into the league coaching ranks with collegiality and advice when I asked questions as a new coach to the league.  Beebe had been a long-time coach at Homewood Flossmoor High School, twenty-seven years, before moving to Fenwick, where he coached for a few more.  Like the other inductees yesterday, he had coached twenty-something State Track medalists, twenty-five, his case, with three state champions in the jumps and hurdles.  Quite significantly, in 1999 he was also selected as the Illinois High School Physics Teacher of the Year.

Beebe was composed and straightforward in his five minutes of acceptance remarks.  He thanked his family, who were in attendance, especially his wife.  His son, Nathan, as it happened, has followed him as the track coach at Homewood Flossmoor.   He had special thanks to offer to two of his assistant coaches at Homewood Flossmoor, whose names I did not catch but who were also in attendance.  They had coached together for twenty-seven years, he said, and like all good friends they could complete each others’ sentences while they were together.  He acknowledged two of his assistants at Fenwick, John Polka and David Rill, along with his athletic directors at Homewood Flossmoor and Fenwick.  He also gave a thank you, the biggest thank you, he said, to the athletes he had coached.  His speech was by the book—like everything he did as a coach, it seems to me.

Coach Mike Brazier of Proviso West High School

Of the other six inductees on Saturday, I would say that five were in much less control of their emotions.  At least three of them seemed to cry at one point in their thank yous.  It was clearly a special recognition for all of them and a special day.  Their thank you speeches gave a little insight into their coaching styles, perhaps.  Some were emotional and disjointed, with a funny story or two that seemed to have occurred to them on the spur of the moment.  One of these coaches, Mike Brazier, who has been a coach at Proviso West High School for twenty-five years, promised to keep his speech short, and he even started a stop watch.  He didn’t, and no one really minded.   Brazier is perhaps an example of the kind of coach that we would all consider as “characters.”  I do not know him, but with a pony-tail, and an earring, I think, he is a coach that I can remember seeing at track meets going back almost twenty years.  Other speeches were more straightforward and organized—like Beebe’s.  As I suggested, these are perhaps the by-the-book coaches, getting things done the way they are supposed to be done.

One thing was clear, listening to these coaches.  There are probably many different ways to get the job done.  It makes me think about what kind of coach I am, and how I could be better.

Those are just the right thoughts as we begin the five-month marathon track season that will end Memorial Day weekend.

A late post: Running in the snow

When I put my 5-year-old daughter, Maisie, to sleep at 8:00 tonight, I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until midnight.  I missed my posting deadline for today.  I broke my streak.  Big deal, I know.

I did run—just a mile around a big city block–to keep my running streak alive.

But I ran in the snow, in the dark, at a little bit after 5:00 or so.  Chicago got a few inches this afternoon, the first snow of the year.  When I came home from work at 3:30,  my condo neighbor and I shoveled our backyard parking lot.   The snow continued into the evening, and it will have to be done again in the morning.  I guess I will set the alarm for an earlier wake up when I go to sleep, after this post.  There is a chance, even, that we will have a school snow day tomorrow.

Running in the snow and the dark, it was interesting how many people were out on the sidewalks around the University of Chicago at that time.  I can’t remember the last time I had an experience like that, dodging people on the sidewalks, in the snow.  Most of the sidewalks on my path had been cleared of snow.  When I passed the wide groups on the sidewalk, though, I had to run around them into the snow.  I ran slowly, placing my feet carefully with each step, through the thin layer of snow.

I saw another runner, running past me in the other direction across the narrow street,  and when we passed each other, we exchanged a nod of hello.

My foot hurts

I have blogged about the many times that I have started running again after not running for a while.

You would think I would remember how to do it—and what not to do.

I ran 20 miles or so the first week.  Maybe that was too much, but maybe not.

My real mistake:  I learned long ago that when I weigh too much and run, I get hurt.  In particular, I’ve had plantar fascia issues when I run too much when I weigh too much.   In the past, I have learned to lose some weight–then run.

But, I said to myself, I have relatively new orthotics—one year old.  I am not going to be running that much, just enough to keep a streak going and have fun.

I felt a pain near the heel of my foot a little bit two mornings ago when I woke up and stood on the floor—the sign people with plantar fascia issues know.  But today, after about two miles of almost four, there was a real twinge in my foot, which came and went on different steps.

I did just change shoes.  Or maybe it is the orthotics.

Experience tells me it is probably my 170+ pounds.

I will try to be smart and run just a mile for a few days and keep my streak alive.  And maybe I will have a talk with Dr. Adkins—not something I look forward to doing.

But it was fun to be running again, and I will have to do what it takes.

New Shoes

There is something about opening a package that makes you feel like a kid.

And there is something about opening a box of new running shoes that makes you feel like it is Christmas.

Even before I joined a Facebook page to make myself run every day, I ordered new running shoes online from Roadrunner Sports.   I have worn Nike shoes, for better or worse, since I was 16 years old.  The Nike East Coast shoe development team, called Blue Ribbon Sports back in the mid 1970s, actually  made my home town of Exeter, NH, their home base.  Although I was never close to the group there, I did know some of the local runners who became part of the crew there.  I did make at least one visit to the old house that I assume they rented, across the street from what I remember as an old factory where they actually made and tested shoes.  I remember them pointing to a couch in the house and telling me the names of various athletes who had spent the night sleeping there.

So Nike is, in a sense, my hometown brand.

For a time back in the early 1980s, when I used to run a lot, I was a shoe tester for Nike.  They would send me free shoes, and I would run in them, recording my mileage.  Then I would send the shoes back a month or so later.  I also remember that I was running in the Nike Tailwind in the early 1980s, an early air chamber shoe.  I have always been hard on shoes, and I literally blew out the air sole of the Tailwind.  I took it to the Nike shoe guys in Exeter and they oohhed and aahhed over it.

I have high arches, and I think I have some kind of subtle ankle motion when I run.  It causes a dynamic pronation—not a classic one—which breaks down shoes.  The new motion control shoes work much better for me than the shoes I wore in the old days.

For a long time—at least ten years–I have used the same model Nike shoes:  Structure Triax.  Now they are called Zoom Structure Triax.  The current model is Zoom Structure Triax 15, which I assume means the basic model is in its 15^th year?  It has always seemed problematic to me the way shoe companies seem to phase out one model of shoe, which requires you to find another one that you like.  So I have been lucky that this basic Structure Triax shoe has been around, presumably with some modifications, for a long time.

I figured out a few years ago that if I looked for an older model of the shoe once the newer model came out, I could often find good deals on the older model.  So I bought my model 14s for $60, when the model 15 shoe sells for more than $100.  It was such a good deal that I bought two pair.

I should have had the new shoes for January 1 when I started my new running streak.  They sat in the Fed Ex facility in LaGrange, IL, from December 27 until January 9.  I had them delivered to Saint Ignatius, and Fed Ex held onto any package going to a Chicago school until the Chicago Public Schools reopened after the Christmas holiday, assuming that all schools were locked up.  Ignatius was open for various kinds of business throughout the holiday, but I couldn’t get them to deliver the package.

They arrived yesterday, and so I wore my new shoes for the first time today.  Ten days of running, and counting, by the way–and nine days of blogging.

Looking ahead to an Olympics summer, and what happened to Universal Sports?

It must be because I joined the Flotrack Facebook site that I get Flotrack Facebook news posts on my wall.  So I am more aware than I usually am about the United States Olympics marathon trials this year, which will take place in Houston on Saturday.

At some point I should write something about Flotrack itself.  If you don’t know, it is a wonderful site that presents videos, blogs, and of course results about track and field and running generally, with an emphasis on elite running at the high school, college, and professional levels, but with some attention to not-elites, too.  Anyone can have an account with a training log, for example.  I’m not a big Flotracker, but I am slowly getting hooked.  The site takes its name from its brother founders Mark and Martin Floreani, who also happen to be Saint Ignatius alumni.

Anyway, that awareness of this weekend’s Olympics marathon trials prompted me to take a look at the Olympics calendar for the summer.

The U.S. Olympics trials for track and field will take place at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon starting on Friday, June 22 and ending on Thursday, July 2.

Track and field at the London Olympics—remember that you find it under “Athletics” on the London Olympics web site—begins on Friday, August 3.  Competition on the track itself actually ends on Saturday, August 11.  The men’s marathon is the final event of the track competition and one of the final events at the London Olympics on Sunday, August 12.

I assume that NBC sports will handle the Olympics trials as well as the Olympics themselves.  At the start of the New Year, the name of the Versus cable channel was changed to the NBC Sports channel, and this channel will presumably have a heavy Olympics schedule.

We’re not such track and field freaks that we would plan our summers around these events.  But we certainly want to be near a television when we can be.

I have noticed that the NBC-affiliated Universal Sports channel has been dropped from our Comcast cable line-up.   Universal Sports has a heavy emphasis on coverage of Olympics sports events, including  sports that I care about–triathlon, cycling, and track and field–between the Olympics, especially.  I seem to remember watching daily coverage of the trials last time around on that station?  It used to be available as a free digital television channel, 5.3 in Chicago, but apparently it is no longer be available that way, either.  That is a big loss–because it is one of those stations that I used to check every time I turned on the television.

This will require more research.  I guess I still have plenty of time to do so.

Once a Runner redux

Last August I was driving home from Michigan on a Sunday night, with my mom in the car with me, and we listened to a program on WBEZ radio.  Twice now, including a good hour or so this afternoon, I have wasted a significant chunk of time on an unsuccessful internet goose chase trying to track the program down—or to identify the author we heard reading that night.

My memory tells me that it was part of a program about the mental aspects of exercise.  I might be wrong, but I think it was the same program that did a story about kids with ADHD who have treadmills in their classroom.  When they get antsy in class, they do a little bit of exercise; then they go back to work.  There might have been a story about exercise and autism, as well.  All of these talks might have been part of an international conference on exercise and the brain?  Of course, that might have been a different Sunday night.  My searches, obviously, have been in vain.

The author in question read a story about a track race between two friends—rivals who had trained and raced together at other times.  Circumstances had separated them, but here they were, racing again.

It was clearly a story written in the shadow of John L. Parker’s Once a Runner, which I have blogged about before.  Indeed, in some remarks, perhaps in a question and answer session either before but probably after the reading, the author talked about Parker’s book.  It had been a cult classic among runners in the 1970s, he remembered.  When it went out of print, it became a treasure.  Runners who possessed a copy wrote their names in the back of the book, and then passed it on to other runners, who read it and did the same.  It was a rite of passage among runners who felt themselves part of the larger community of runners.  Presumably there was a kind of status involved, as well.  I would assume that you didn’t pass the book on to just any runner.  You would pass it on to someone who deserved it, right?

Hearing that story made me kick myself a little bit that we hadn’t instituted a similar kind of tradition when, thanks to the generosity of a parent, our team was in possession of twenty or so copies.  The book was back in print, of course, which made it less of a treasure, in a certain way.  But it would have been a neat idea to start a tradition of passing the books from older to younger runners.

Perhaps it is something we could still begin.

But Once a Runner also came up recently when our English department organized a book swap among the teachers to replace the Secret Santa efforts of previous years, which didn’t get full cooperation.  This year we submitted names of books we had read recently—with the emphasis I think on recently in order to steer us clear of classics and old English teacher standards.  The books were also kind of supposed to represent us in a way, as well.  Since I had read the book last summer again, I put Once a Runner on my list—along with some other books I read last summer, Dan Savage’s The Commitment, about gay marriage, and the Len Deighton books about British spymaster Bernard Samson.

Our colleague Elizabeth Wagenschutz, who organized the swap, chose Once a Runner from my list.  Wagenschutz took it upon herself, first, to procure a list from everyone, and then, even, to purchase and wrap the books.

In our party meeting before Christmas, we passed the books out, more or less randomly.  Then one person unwrapped a book.  When someone opened the book you had supplied to the swap meet, you said a few words about it just so people might know something about it.  Then we selected the next person to unwrap.  But if you wanted one of the books someone else had already opened, you could swap your unwrapped book for that book.  In that case, the person you stole it from opened the wrapped book.  We did that until all the books were unwrapped.  Get it?

Once a Runner ended up happily in the hands of Tony Harris, our department chair—who is also a track coach for our girls team.   Harris ran track and played football at Vanderbilt.  He is a pretty serious track guy.

The first time I saw him after the break last week, he pulled me aside to tell me that he had read the book straight through—and early in the vacation.  “Could someone really run 60 times 400 like that?” he asked me.  Well, I said, I would never do it.  But then, of course, I am not someone attempting to win a medal at the Olympics.  The point of the book, it seems, is that to do so takes a commitment beyond what any of us can really imagine.  (As an aside, it is also what it takes to run a sub-four minute mile, which the people who filmed “Chasing a Dream” did not really understand.)

It is indeed a book that means so much to track people that you want to give it away.  And that ties the story up nicely, I hope.

There is still, of course, the loose end of the name of the author that we heard last August.

Falling Down: Just something to watch and think about

“Fall down seven times; get up eight.” – Japanese Proverb

I don’t have much more to say about this.

But in the 1972 Munich Olympics, before he defeated Steve Prefontaine in the 5,000 meters, Lasse Viren of Finland won the gold medal in the 10,000 meters.

He was by no means the favorite in the race.  And just about halfway into the race, he fell to the track.  Viren himself never knew or remembered how exactly he fell.

He got up and won the race in a world record time of 27:38:40.

Here’s the video:

Lasse Viren falls and then wins the gold medal in the 1972 Olympics 10,000 meters.

We all fall.  How many of us get up and try to win?

__________________________

If you want a more complete story of this race:  “Viren’s 1972 10,000-He Falls, GetsUp, Sets World Record” by Marc Bloom

The worst track movie ever

So it is late in the day–almost midnight–and I haven’t made my required post.

I have found that there is a different kind of pressure under the requirement to post every day.  My mind goes blank—almost panic mode—as I try to think about something to write.  I suppose it is partly because I don’t think I have the time to write in complete enough terms about some of the things I want to write about.

Here is a try at something incomplete and short.  But it probably doesn’t deserve much more than the incomplete attention that I can give it here:

This is the only image I could find anywhere for "Chasing a Dream"--not even a video box or poster. This guy is supposed to be a four-minute miler?

I was flipping through the movie channels, and I stumbled across a movie that I have stumbled across before, called “Chasing a Dream.”  It is a track movie.  The main character is a high school football player, with a demanding football coach father, played by Treat Williams.  I loved Treat Williams in that show in which he was a high powered New York City brain surgeon who moved to Colorado and changed his life—“Everwood.”  Anyway, the football player is such a good football player that the father is counting on him to get a football scholarship to pay for college.  Then his best friend, a runner whose goal was to break the four-minute barrier for the mile, dies tragically in an accident.  The football player feels survivor’s guilt.  So he decides to quit playing football in order to complete his best friend’s dream.

The movie is terrible.  It has to be even worse for anyone who knows anything about running.  (There is already a thread on Letsrun.com about how bad it is.)  All one really needs to know in order to evaluate the movie is that the football player does complete the task, which of course at the time of the film’s release would make him only the fifth American high school runner to break four minutes for the mile (as Lukas Verzbicas fans know).  In fact, when he runs his sub-four mile, he finishes second, behind another high school runner.  This is something that has never happened ever–two high school runners under four minutes in the same race.

They do this on a cinder track in a 2009 movie.  There’s a scene where a machine is painting the lines on the cinder track as they get ready for the big race.  Where did they even find this track?  The track is apparently located right behind the high school.   There are fewer people in the stands at this meet than we have at our Ignatius home track meets.  The football player’s mother and father stand in the middle of the football field during the race, with the mother jumping up and down mechanically for four minutes clapping her hands.  They stand next to the track coach who shouts out the quarter-mile splits from the middle of the football field.  The football player pointedly runs the race in training shoes.  When the dead boy’s mother brings a pair of her son’s track spikes for the football player to use in the big race, he leaves them on a bench as if they are going to watch the race.  Maybe he just prefers running a four-minute mile in his training shoes.  As the laps go by, the film shows somebody holding up a small six inch pad of numbers that get flipped lap by lap.  It is just plain silly.

But finally, the worst thing is that the football player is played by actor Adam Lawrence (who plays a character now in “United States of Tara”).  In this movie Lawrence must be about five foot six inches tall and about 160 pounds—way too small to be a great football player, but way too big for a runner capable of running a five minute mile, much less a four-minute mile.  He looks so funny in the running scenes, in which the other athletes actually look like real runners.

Just as a comparison, Brad Pitt once starred in a track movie, “Across the tracks,” in which he plays a talented and troubled high school runner.  This is not a great movie, and I haven’t seen it for a long time.  But as I remember it, especially as track movies go, it isn’t bad.  The running scenes are at least realistic enough.  Pitt and Ricky Schroeder (from “NYPD Blue,” among other things), who plays his alter ego brother, also a runner, at least look like they are runners when they run.  I’ll write more about that movie sometime.

I suppose one could make some of the same complaints about another old track movie that I have always loved, “The Jericho Mile.”  In “The Jericho Mile,” the unlikely runner is played by Peter Strauss, who won an Emmy Award for the 1979 movie.  Strauss’s character “Rain” Murphy  has been sentenced to life in prison, where he starts to run around the prison yard.  Other prisoners make fun of him.  Long story short, he gets so good it looks like he could contend for the United States Olympic team.  But of course they won’t let him out of prison for the day to compete.  I know it sounds silly, but it is a way better movie than “Chasing a Dream.”  It is at least a guilty pleasure, and I have to admit in honesty that I even own a VHS copy, which I picked up at a going out of business sale at a video store–or maybe I bought it off Ebay, which is even more of an admission of guilty pleasures and even a recommendation.   Patrick McHugh blogged about it, too.  He also posted a Youtube link to the movie’s final scenes, set to the soundtrack of “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Anyway, I don’t know what I am complaining about in more general terms, other than this:  If people actually think that someone could quit his high school football team and then run a four-minute mile, what is the world coming to?

Edit:  Just a few minutes after I posted this, a friend on Facebook (and actually an old friend from high school) asked if there are any track movies about high school girls.   One came to mind quickly:  A young Nicole Kidman plays a talented high school runner in a 1985 Australian television movie, “Room to Move.”  Her dad wants her to be a track star, but she wants to be a dancer.  She ends up doing both–but not at the same time.  There are clips on Youtube.  I remember watching this movie with my older daughters Mairead and Hanna, neither of whom became runners or dancers.  But I bet they remember the movie.

Uniform Day

For my first six years of coaching, our bright yellow uniforms were easy to spot on the cross country course or on the track. Our boys still admire this classic look.

Some of the logistical moments of coaching are not fun.

It is a standing joke, sort of, that the worst day of the season for me is the day that we hand out uniforms to the boys.

It means so much to them, and as hard as they try, they can’t help worrying about their place in line.  For me, I worry about things like making sure we have enough larges for the large boys, and mediums for the medium boys, and smalls for the small ones.  Sometimes, when the team is big, I worry that we have enough uniforms at all.

I learned in my first year of coaching twelve-year-old girls in AYSO soccer that it doesn’t work to put kids in a line and expect them to behave well.  I really should just figure out an alternative way to distribute uniforms.

We upgraded significantly in 2009 with our new Asics uniforms, following new school guidelines which mandated a dark maroon, a Notre Dame gold, and a new athletics logo. Photo by Stpehn Bugarin.

I haven’t really enjoyed the process of purchasing uniforms, either.  It is a big expense—the biggest expense of our program.  We go through it every three years.  It requires some negotiations with our athletics director, who has to ask understandable questions about why we purchase this uniform at this price as opposed to that uniform—perhaps at a cheaper price.  Our school has some very specific guidelines in terms of the colors we are supposed to have—and the graphics that we use.  There are some IHSA uniform requirements to consider.  There is also the problem of ordering the right numbers for each particular size.  You don’t want to make a mistake because money is involved–and these are the uniforms you live with for the next three years.

And of course, most important of all, you have to worry about whether the boys will like their new uniforms.

Our 4x400 relay team won the conference championship in 2009 wearing their new Asics speed suits. Photo by Stephen Bugarin.

Three years ago we upgraded a lot by moving from a generic brand to the top of the line Asics product, their Medley style singlets and shorts.  It was a big step for us.

I worked closely with the Asics team sales representative, Dan McGinn.   Our school had just completed a graphic identity program which was quite specific in terms of color requirements—mandating dark maroon, not the more common cardinal, and what I guess one would call a Notre Dame gold, not the bright yellow gold of our previous uniforms.   The school had also developed a new athletics logo.   Working within the color constraints, I made a choice for the color combination, going with maroon and black, and we used the new logo in gold on the front and the back.

The boys liked their new uniforms, of course.  We bought speed suits for the first time, which the sprinters loved.  The distance runners–the real cross country guys–loved the short short split shorts.  The boys particularly liked something that was even my idea—putting what was at the time our new Wolfhead logo on the back of the singlet top.  Putting logos on the back was not something that many teams were doing at the time.  They loved the feel and comfort of the newer type of uniform fabric that Asics has developed.  They felt that they looked pretty good, too.

We put a logo on the back of the uniform, something not many teams were doing in 2009. Photo by Stephen Bugarin.

But over the next two years as I listened to them discuss team fashions, especially at the state track meet where that is a big discussion topic, it was clear that we had fallen a little bit short of their style standards, mainly in terms of my color choice and using the school logo.  Of course, it is also probably true that new uniforms are not new for long–and we have to wear one set of new uniforms for a few years before we get newer ones.  In other words, even new uniforms eventually become old uniforms.

Looking ahead, however, I’ve been talking to them carefully over the last year about what they would like the next round.  I have a much better idea, in principle, about what they really like.

As I did my first researches, I kept their preferences in mind.  Again, I contacted Dan McGinn, but also a few other uniform vendors.  I looked over some styles and got some prices.

And when I had narrowed down the search and had some clear choices to make, I included the boys more directly in the process.

Last week I sent out some possible styles and color combinations by email to our juniors and seniors, and got back some more specific feedback to narrow down the possibilities further.  The Asics team uniform site allowed me to make various combinations of colors and print them as PDF files, which I attached to the emails.

And today I had the fun of meeting with a good-sized group to match some pictures of singlets with some pictures of shorts and make some definitive decisions.

There was no line for the boys to wait in.  We all huddled around a bench in the school lobby with the pictures spread out before us.  The boys were gathering for their after school run, which they do on their own without any directions from me.   First there were a few out of the locker room, then a few more.  We didn’t tell the ones who came later which combination the first ones liked best.  But gradually it was clear that they had a consensus.

It was a lot of fun.

They are very excited, of course, about the season ahead—and their new uniforms.  In about two weeks, I imagine, they will begin to ask me whether the new uniforms are here yet.

I will tell them to have patience.

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Choose your favorite for the uniform top and bottom:

White with maroon panels?

Gold with maroon panels?

Gold with maroon panels?

Maroon with black panels?

Maroon with white panels?