I’ve been hired as a track coach for a middle school near my college, since I’m a D1 runner.
The first thing I did was essentially take stock of the kids current level of skill and discussed their motives with them— if they just do this for fun/exercise, cool, I won’t push them and will let them do them. If they want to get better, then I’ll help them. You get the idea.
From taking stock of their skill levels, all of the kids that weren’t doing as well as they wanted had one reason for it— they didn’t have the stamina and/or explosive speed. At a middle school level, higher level stuff like running technique, race strategies, and so on don’t play a big role at all, so most kids lagging behind are doing so because they aren’t at the right level of fit yet. So, of the kids who wanted to improve, I drew up two plans— one for kids who needed to boost their fitness to improve, and those who were already incredibly fit and were ready to learn more technical aspects to bring their game to the next level.
The former, I gave them drills mostly focused on building endurance and explosive speed. The latter, I wanted to work on with techniques such as stride, body positioning, more subtle details. I knew that more oversight was required to examine somebody’s stride and correct it than in telling a kid to run a mile, so I decided to split my time 65:35 more advanced kids:less advanced kids.
I explained this to the kids, they seemed willing, and over time, I’ve been seeing a lot of progress. As I predicted, drills like sprinting/HIIT/long distance running to build fundamentals took less oversight than the more subtle advanced elements to teach, so the time split worker, and both groups are advancing beyond where they were well. They’re all generally happy with how things are going.
One of the parents of the kid in the basic drills group got upset I wasn’t giving her son enough attention and claimed that it’s unfair. I asked the son directly about it, and he says he sees the logic, but she said I shouldn’t as an adult rely on what kids think is fair but listen to her, the other adult. I found this funny because I’m 19, so probably closer to her sons age than hers, but I told her that the time split I had designed was working in terms of results and the kids were happy with it, so I wouldn’t be changing it. She called me TA and left. AITA?