Prelude

This book is an outgrowth of several years of thinking about coaching and teaching and encompasses my experiences with the sport of cross country throughout my life.  It is meant not as a definitive guide, but as a collection of stories and thoughts about what it takes to be a person of consequence in this world.  The book advances on the idea that teaching kids to be good people will lead to success both on and off the cross country course.

When Fred Miller and I started coaching together in 2001, the Palatine boys cross country program had endured a couple of tough years as a team even as it had produced several great individual runners.  When we began work together, we had only one senior returning on our team and a lack of numbers in the program.  Both of us wanted to re-establish the CC program as one of the best in the state, but how do to that was not exactly clear.  In retrospect, I think the best decision that we made was to start reinforcing the value of every athlete on the team and to coach every person that wanted to run, regardless of their talent.  By coaching “good” people, we thought that we could produce success.  We wanted to win and had big goals, but success had to come from finding the right kind of people and teaching them the values necessary to be people of consequence.

This book, then, is really a meditation on values.  The sections are organized around values that we consider to be important in developing good people.  When you develop good people, you will develop good runners.  The Palatine program started to win again when we began to focus on the self-improvement and progress of each and every athlete on the team.  This focus on self-improvement extends far beyond our practices and competitions.  How can we teach kids to have goals in their lives?  How can we show them that hard work yields results?  How can we demonstrate the value of improving oneself?  All of these questions are answered in the day to day operation of our team.  We stress honesty, strong character, hard work, responsible decision making, and the value of working together.  Since we try to keep things simple, we boil this down to three basic rules:

1.        Be here, be honest, and be on time.

2.        Respect yourself and others.

3.        Always try to get better.

There is obviously a lot more to our program than that, but I think that each one is broad enough to encompass the values we find important.  Rule number one is about being counted on and being responsible.  Rule number two is about promoting strong habits of body and mind while also recognizing the individual’s duty to others and the community.  Rule number three is that each athlete has to try to improve – whether athletically, personally, or educationally – or they are not welcome on the team.