Negotiating With Neanderthals

How do you negotiate with a football coach who sees the kids on his football team as HIS ATHLETES, like he owns them. How do you negotiate with someone who doesn’t respect you? Let’s talk about a situation that happens way too often in high schools across America. 

YOUR FOOTBALL COACH IS A HOARDER

Your football coach has a high-pressure job. He’s the most important coach in the school. Hell, he might be the most important man in town.

Your football coach doesn’t trust track.

Your football coach worships the grind. The weight room is his church. His daily objective is the pursuit of mass. 

Your football coach never ran track, never won a race. He was, himself, a grinder as an athlete. Your football coach found joy in the weight room. Maybe he couldn’t beat the fast guys in a race. but he could kick their ass if he ever caught them. 

HE’S NOT THE ONLY PROBLEM

You are a distance guy. Lean, disciplined, smart, and thoughtful. You read books and watch documentaries. You’ve never played football. 

You are the head track coach. 

Recently you’ve heard about this SPEED IS THE PRIORITY approach to sprints and jumps. When you hear things like “DO LESS, ACHIEVE MORE”, it makes sense. You’ve read the book, Essentialism. You understand that today should never ruin tomorrow and that grinding interferes with speed and power gains. You’re excited about building a sprint culture around RECORD, RANK, AND PUBLISH. You have drank the proverbial Kool Aid of FEED THE CATS. 

But the head football coach still thinks you are a geek. 

“IT IS THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST TO MAKE THE REVOLUTION IRRESISTIBLE”

Tom Novak sent me the above quote coming from Toni Cade Bambara, an author & civil rights activist.

The Bambara quote reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

FEED THE CATS is a NEW MODEL that attracts talent to your program. Done right, by a charismatic and energetic coach, THE REVOLUTION BECOMES IRRESISTIBLE and THE OLD MODEL BECOMES OBSOLETE.. 

Don’t just bitch about the football coach. It’s not his fault that most track programs suck. Make your program attractive. Make your program irresistible to athletes. 

FEED THE CATS = NFL COMBINE TRAINING

You must show athletes in your school that you train speed and power. Replace running with sprinting. Always train speed when fresh, not tired. Repeat this often, “TIRED IS THE ENEMY, NOT THE GOAL”.

Everything we do in sprint training should improve 40 yard dash times. When I started feeding the cats in 1999, I told people that we were no longer a program focused on the 400. FTC puts the focus on the 40. Pure speed. (By the way, we are still good at the 400).

The *DO LESS, ACHIEVE MORE* approach allows athletes to leave practice with gas left in their tank. We may rightfully preach, “ONE SPORT AT A TIME”, but parents don’t listen. Parents don’t seek our advice. Dads choose to be their kid’s agent, not their father. “We can’t change things by fighting the existing reality, instead we must build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” 

The fact is, today’s kids are often doing more than one sport at a time, but we still need those kids on our track team (and those kids still need track). If we can offer a speed and power program better than kids can find anywhere else, they will join our track team. If they are playing some basketball, lacrosse, hockey, or 7on7 on their own time, that’s not ideal, but eventually we will win them over. If you don’t attract football players to your program, you will end up with a track team of distance runners and nerds. 

FTC is the BEST program for training football players in the off-season (and in-season). The revolution is irresistible. 

DATA AS PROOF

Feed the Cats is a data-driven system of training speed. I often say, “If you are not spiked-up, timing, recording, ranking, and publishing, you are not sprinting.” Data shows you where you’ve been and where you’re going. It also shows the football coach that the sprint coach is just as important as his weight room guy.

Numbers will impress the football coach because it makes you look smart. Neanderthals respect intelligence. Throw in some graphs and he might start saying hi to you in the hallway. He might ask you to keep stats for him on Friday nights (say yes!). 

I was the freshman football coach at Plainfield North in 2013. Tyler Hoosman’s BEST 40 TIME in the summer of 2013 was 5.43, ranking him 46th on his incoming freshman team. And, Tyler was a running back. Think about that… 46th fastest guy on his freshman football team! I coached Tyler for the entire year (2013-14)… summer, fall, winter, and spring. Tyler’s 40 time ranked 120th in the school in the winter of his freshman year. Tyler was the slowest guy on the track team as a freshman, ranked 39/39, with a max speed of 17.5 mph. Then he got fast. As a sophomore, Tyler ranked #26 at Plainfield North. As a senior, Tyler Hoosman ran 23.1 mph and ranked #2 at PN. Now he plays for Northern Iowa. 

When you publish 40 times and miles per hour two or three times a week, the football coach will take notice. (MPH = 22.35 divided by 10m fly time). 

MAKE YOURSELF VALUABLE TO FOOTBALL

Improving the speed and power of football players will immediately legitimize you from the Neanderthal point of view. However, there is more. 

You must become a talent finder for football. Last year, we convinced a talented sophomore basketball player to come out for track. Carlos Conley ran 1.00 in the 10m fly (22.35 mph). Carlos is a big, strong kid that can dunk a basketball. I told Carlos multiple times that he could be a college football player, even though he had never played. 

To make a long story short, Carlos went out for football and became a terrific cornerback, possibly the best defensive player on the team. Carlos will be highly recruited as a senior.

The educational value of high school sports is not understood by too many modern parents who choose to focus on highlight tapes, social media exposure, and the nauseating recruiting process. If high school coaches don’t encourage a multi-sport, educational view of athletics, who will?

BOMBARD SOCIAL MEDIA WITH THE FACTS

College and professional football players rarely specialized in high school. The vast majority of good high school football players played multiple sports and their main secondary sport was track. 

There’s three ways to get yourself blocked from my Twitter account: trolling (trying to trigger a Twitter war), saying negative things about kids, or encouraging specialization for high school athletes. 

I have a complicated relationship with guys in the athletic training industry. I appreciate their work to improve high school athletes but I go to war with those who preach that average athletes must specialize to play at the next level. They perpetuate the scholarship myth to gullible parents and discourage educational opportunities. They often say dumb things like “no one should MAKE kids play a second sport”… never happens. They also say things about cause and correlation. Recently some meathead complained that high school coaches were telling their kids that playing multiple sports would result in becoming the next Patrick Mahomes. Once again, never happens. No one says playing multiple sports will lead to an NFL career. 

However, Patrick Mahomes really did play multiple sports. FACT. So did most great athletes. 

Coley Candaele, speaker at TFC-4, coached Michael Norman (45.19 in 400) and as the head football coach at Vista Murrieta HS (CA), had a record of 132-25. He used a blackjack analogy to teach kids to play the odds…

In blackjack, if you have 19 showing and the dealer shows a 7, the odds are in your favor and you STAND. If you say “HIT” the entire table would look at you like you just grew horns. Could you improve your hand by going against the odds? Yes, but it’s dumb and there’s an 85% chance of going bust. That’s the way Coley Candaele saw the football-track connection. If you are a good high school running back and 74% of all college running backs ran track in high school, maybe you should run track in high school.

Tracking Football is revolutionizing college recruiting. The NFL is also getting on board. College and professional teams want verifiable performance data (track data). They also want multi-sport athletes. This is FACT. Screw that cause and correlation bullshit. The best athletes choose to compete. 

BIG CATS?

Ok, maybe skill players should run track but the big guys just need to lift. Right?

Wrong. 

Big Cats, Not Hogs

The fastest offensive linemen from the NFL Combine get picked in the first round for two reasons… they have the best careers and they have the longest careers. Slow doesn’t age well. 

Pretty cool that Joe Staley (above) went to a high school that encouraged multi-sport participation. Speed allows linemen to perform at a high level. Joe Staley is still going strong at age-35.

One Big Ten S&C coach told me, “we train our skill people like sprinters and our bigs like throwers”. Hmmm… maybe high school skill people should sprint and the linemen should throw!

MAKE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

Finding common ground doesn’t happen in modern day politics. I’m Bernie or Bust. However, for the sake of football teams, and track teams, and KIDS, we must find common ground. 

Football players will lift. They will squat. They will overdo it. “NO PAIN NO GAIN” is the mission statement. It’s all counterproductive to speed training. 

But, we must make a deal with the devil. 

My first year in Franklin, TN, I lost 90% of my track team to spring football (two weeks starting in late April). I effing hated it. Eventually the head coach, Tim Johnson, liked what I was doing so much, he promised to move spring practice to March. When Tim surprised everyone by taking a new job at Giles County, he brought me down to do a speed clinic. The next Franklin coach, Craig Clayton, heard about my sprint program and moved his spring practice to March, just like Tim Johnson had promised before leaving. 

When I came to Plainfield North (2006), I left our weight training in the hands of the football coach. My only request, “Don’t crush their legs until the last day of the week.”. In other words, “Don’t mess with my speed training!”. It worked. Tim Kane and I had the best football-track coaching relationship of anyone in the country. It’s win-win to work together.

I like to think of it as win-win-win (football, track, kids). 

INFILTRATE

I spent most of my football coaching career coaching incoming freshmen. PERFECT. 

I always want my throws coach to come from the football staff. ALWAYS. 

If you don’t have those connections, start working on it. 

Edwardsville H.S. (IL), has FIVE crossover coaches including the head football coach, Matt Martin, serving as the throw’s coach and the head track coach, Chad Lakatos, serving as freshman football coach. Does this spirit of multi-sport cooperation hurt Edwardsville? In the past eight years, Edwardsville football is 67-17 (.807) while their track team won five team trophies between 2012-2017. No high school in Illinois does football-track better than Edwardsville.

I recently hired 21-year-old PN graduate Nico Capezio as my jumps coach. Nico is a terrific coach. Last week, I introduced Nico to Anthony Imberdino, Plainfield North’s new football coach. I told Coach Imberdino that Nico would be a fantastic volunteer assistant next year in football. Win-Win.

My track program has declined since I retired from freshman football. Hard to believe that no one on my 2020 track team had me for a football coach. The days of every fast freshman in the school running track may be over, but we will survive. 

A couple weeks ago, I told Coach Imberdino that even though I no longer coach football, I want to be considered an honorary member of his football staff. He smiled and said, “You got it!”. 

IF ALL ELSE FAILS, GO TO WAR

Seriously.

COACHES WHO SPEAK AGAINST EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR KIDS SHOULD NOT BE WORKING WITH KIDS. 

Case in point: 

There’s a big suburban high school in the Chicago area with winning programs and amazing facilities. The football coach discourages track. Since the football coach has won 79% of his games, he’s damn sure he’s right. (The fact that his football teams are classic underachievers in the playoffs and the coach has never won a state title makes me believe otherwise. That’s the problem with sports, many coaches have enough success to justify their process, even if their process is 100% shit.)

What’s my proof of this coach discouraging track? Could it be that his football players just boycott the sport on their own?

I have a screenshot of an actual text exchange between athlete and coach. I use it in my presentations. 

In the exchange, the athlete (only a sophomore) is asking the head football coach about going out for track, not wanting to jeopardize his status on the football team by doing so. The kid states that a coach from the football staff told him, “out of sight, out of mind”. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you. If a coach tells a kid that if he goes out for track, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”, the intent is clear… DON’T RUN TRACK. 

So, does the head coach double down? Of course. Here is a direct quote. Remember, I have the screenshot of the text. 

“I don’t subscribe to the adage that track makes you faster if that’s why you go out. It’s a totally different type of speed that’s needed in football.”

CERTIFIABLY FALSE. 100% BULLSHIT. 

“The biggest reason why juniors don’t play in our program is a lack of strength, not speed!!”

Yes, the head football coach added two exclamation points. 

This is absolute proof that a high school educator is telling “his” kids to boycott a spring sport and spend their time in the weight room instead. This means that kids at this suburban school are year-round football players. The coach is a hoarder of athletes. Any Athletic Director, Principal, or Superintendent who won’t condemn this should not be in a position of educational leadership. Even if the coach wins 79% of his games, the coach is WRONG. 

As Nassim Taleb says, “If you see fraud and don’t say fraud, you are a fraud.” Sometimes Neanderthals must be reported to the authorities.

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