ESPX - Fall Sports Podcast - Cross Country
ESP Media Podcasts
ESPX - Fall Sports Podcast - Cross Country
Welcome into the St. Xavier Falls Sports Podcast. Today we're focusing on cross-country. Joining me is ESPX Broadcaster and St. Xavier Student Jack Muthin and the head coach of the cross-country team, Andy Wheatmarshin. Coach, first and foremost, the most recent invitation that you guys ran in was the Mason Invitational, but didn't have your main runners in that one. But it's a good experience for some guys a little bit further down, I guess, on the depth chart, if you will. Oh, yeah, definitely. A lot of the upper-level JV guys that we have had the opportunity to run in a fantastic meet. Lots of great competition from around the city, our region, other states as well. I know Trinity from Kentucky came on up and they have a very good team this year. Anytime that you run against Mason, you're running against the best. So those guys had a really competitive meet that they ran in and quite frankly did it quite well. So I was pretty pleased with what we had. You got a couple of wins under your belt. You won the Buckeye Running Sunset Invite back on August 23rd and then won the Hot Summer Bash at Hillier-Davidson High School. You had a couple of great individual performances. Alex Bruns won the Sunset Invite, finished second in the Hot Summer Bash. You had what the five of the top 17 finishers were your guys in the Hot Summer Bash. Five of the top 14 finishers were in the Sunset Invite top finishers. You've got a bunch of guys getting a very low numbers when it comes to points, for sure. Yeah, the first two meets have been really encouraging from what I've seen from the guys just how they're kind of going out and taking care of business and running well. We knew coming into the year that we had a pretty senior-dominated team and those guys have shown a certain amount of maturity in preparation for the season. For meets, for practice, it's been just really fun to watch so far, but we also know that all those meet to run in August. We really want to make sure that we're running well at the end of October and in November as well, but it's a nice stepping stone as we enter into this next phase of the season. How do you ramp up for that? Because obviously competitors you want to win, but there's also a ramp up process along with it too, right? Yeah. I love coaching cross-country because it's what I'm kind of liking it to a science experiment. You know, we are constantly experimenting with guys and training styles not just during a season, but really throughout their four years that they're with us. We tweak things during cross-country season. I coach track and field as well. We do it during the winter and during the spring. But yeah, it's all about making sure that we have our best guys available to us in their peak performance that first weekend in November. So anything that we can do, whether it's, you know, resting for a week and just training on through or, you know, making sure that we're putting guys in situations where they're going to be challenged throughout the year individually and as a team as well. So yeah, like a science experiment, it's always kind of constantly tweaking making sure that we're at our best at the end of the year. Are you guys a pack style or do you just let your guys go and kind of try to set their own pace? How do you manipulate, I guess, meat to meat or does it change from meat to meat? Yeah, I wish we were a pack style if everybody could go with Alex. So we'd be pretty prepared here. That's a good point. But I think, again, that's one of the interesting aspects of the sport is that while it's a team sport, you're working with individuals and each individual has his own style of running and what he feels comfortable doing during a race. So what I like to do is just try to know that individual is best as I can throughout the year. And again, we'll experiment with things. Are you a guy that wants to go out fast? Well, then we're going to try that at a race and see how we fare. Are you a guy that likes to start out maybe a little bit more conservatively and then just know that throughout the race, you're going to have to be picking people off all over the place. I do think it's kind of encouraging when you're out there when you have teammates around you. It does make it feel a little bit more like practice. You're comfortable with those guys. Certainly, there's strength and numbers and you can just kind of keep clipping people off. But again, it's all about trying to recognize that individual's racing style, what he feels comfortable with and what he's going to excel at at the end of the year. We bring in ESPS ESPS broadcaster, St. David, student Jack, do you think you have a couple of questions for Coach Wheatmarsh? Yeah, Coach. So obviously, this Saturday, it's our home invitational, Sanix Invitational. I was just wondering, does anything different go into the pregame or like the mindset of the runners and the coaches with this one being kind of having to defend our turf? Yeah, definitely. You want to perform well anytime that you're hosting. I mean, I think first and foremost, we want to make sure that all the teams that are coming, all the fans that are coming have a great experience. I mean, it's a way to show off our campus, especially with the junior high kids. You know, it's a way to introduce them to Sanix if they haven't been here before. So I think primarily number one, that's what you want to do is make sure that everybody has a great experience, provide a great atmosphere for racing. You know, I think that the guys are keyed up a little bit this week, just because it is our home course and guys want to do well in front of their friends and in front of their family, their fellow students. So yeah, there's always a little extra emphasis this week, and also just, you know, throughout the week, I feel like I'm a bad coach throughout the week, because I'm concerned about, you know, putting on a meet where, you know, I should be concerned about the guys, but that's where I really want to, you know, extend a whole bunch of gratitude to the assistant coaches that are on the team this year, just fantastic coaches, and they, you know, pick up the slack during that week, definitely. Also coach, just another thing. I mean, cross-country is one of those sports that has a really long season. Guys can be running up to 50 miles per week, every, almost every week for the next few months. So I guess my question is, how do you and the other captains, other seniors on the team, keep guys disciplined and make sure that they're ready to give it their all each and every run that they have? Yeah, no, it's difficult. It's a pretty taxing season, and a lot of the kind of extrinsic rewards that athletes have, you know, competing in front of, you know, thousands of people, you know, when you're in a cross-country race, you might see your coach for 15 seconds. You might see your folks for 10 seconds, you know, as you're running throughout the race. So just trying to keep guys engaged throughout the season is a little bit difficult. But that's where I really give a lot of credit to the seniors and the guys that have been with us for a year or two on the team. They do a great job of recognizing that there's a pattern to the season. There's going to be a pattern where we need to rest and recover. There needs to be a pattern of when we're going to be, you know, working really, really hard. So again, there's an ebb and flow to it. Right now, I think it's kind of a little bit of the dog days of the season. The newness of it is born off. School certainly is starting to get cranked up. You know, I understand that, you know, the runners, they're studying six or seven different disciplines. And then some of them have jobs or other extracurriculars. You got family stuff, you got friend stuff. So it's all a balancing act. But I think the more experienced guys do a wonderful job of communicating that to our younger runners. And hopefully they learn that and, you know, sophomore year, junior year, senior year, they're able to communicate that to the younger ones too. I always, whenever I do one of these, I print out a roster just in case the name comes up or I want to eat it. I think the I think the printer's still running with your roster. You got a lot of kids involved in the program. How do you keep them? You just mentioned again, how do you keep so many of those kids engaged? Because it is a it's a lengthy roster, man. Yeah, now we're at 130 guys right now, which is the most that I've ever coached. And you know, it is my heart goes in my throat sometimes and we send them out North Bend Road. And it's like a parade that, you know, we're stopping traffic and stuff like that. But again, I got to give all the credit to my assistant coaches. You know, there's guys like Mike Daring and Doug Pels when Dave Eby that have been around the program for a while, they coached me a while I was here. They do a fantastic job. We have guys that I coached that have come back a guy like Michael Hall, one of the best runners in St. David history. He joined the crew this year. It's awesome to have him. Alex Hale, a faculty member here, devotes his time to it. Dan Munzer and Mike Haskins work primarily with our novice runners. They do excellent work. I mean, they're working with the guys that, you know, they were probably walking at the beginning of the summer and they've coached them up that, you know, five or six miles, seven miles out of time. That's not anything for them anymore. So to keep the guys engaged, you know, just having a coach that they can always go to and that's how we try to structure our training groups is that each coach is going to have about 15, 20 guys. They get that personal relationship with that coach and, you know, just making sure that we give him as much personal attention as we possibly can. I think that's the key to keeping all 130 guys engaged. Coach, we talked about trying to ramp up for the postseason. That's a while from now, not till October 12th, GCL championships and then district regional state followed that. Of the courses that you will run in the postseason from Christchurch to Voice of America to Troy High School to Fortress Obits, how do they differ and do you ever try to look ahead and go, okay, I know what this course is like. Let me see if I can get something similar in the regular season or most of the most of the imitations you go to kind of laid out because those are the best ones to go to. Yeah, I think when we schedule, it's not necessarily trying to match it up to a particular course, but it's competition. You're going to be facing the best of the best at the state meet and I think the more that you can expose yourself to that as a coach and as a runner, the better you're going to be. So when we schedule, are we going to find the appropriate amounts of competition, the appropriate quality of competition? And again, we're lucky that we're in a region, we're in a state, we're cross-country. It's a big-time sport, so there's always a meet that is around where you're going to face that competition that you're going to find at the district regional or at the state level. Those courses have been around for a while. The Troy course has been around forever. I ran at it back when I was in high school and each one of them's unique and each one of them's special. But yeah, just talking about it right now and already getting fired up about the postseason, but yeah, it's more the quality of competition that we see than a particular course. Yeah, last along those lines, I mean, if you're playing football, you know, the field is 100 yards long and there used to be crowns in the middle of football fields for them to drown in others, et cetera. But really, cross-country courses do differ from course to course. Does that ever change maybe your lineup at all or maybe a guy's really good on one type of course or is it just mostly, they're good in general and you're just mixing and matching those guys because they are good in general? Yeah, so I mean, your top seven guys are your top seven guys at the end of the year. We don't really swap out too much while we get to the postseason. But the one thing that I do think you got to guard yourself against and I tell the guys this all the time, you know, I really don't care what your time is in cross-country for what you just said. I mean, there are some courses that are early. There are some courses that are slow. There are some courses where they didn't cut the grass and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And I think guys gravitate a lot towards time just because it's something that you can look at and all improve, not improving, you know, and let that be the sole indicator of how you're doing during a year. But again, what I'd like to look at are all right, our first guy and our fifth guy. Those are the guys that scored. How close is that gap? Because I know our first guy is really good. So if our fifth guy can be within a reasonable amount of time of that first guy, that's when I know all right, hey, we're in business, we're working with Sylvie here. Yeah, the two means I mentioned that you won your first guy finish first, your fifth guy finish 14th and one of them, your first guy finished second, your fifth guy finished 17th and another. It's pretty good. That's a pretty good type pack right there. No, it's a good spread so far. But again, you got to keep improving. I know the teams that we're going up against, they're going to keep improving so we can't stay static during the season. And again, a lot of that falls on me and making sure that I'm giving them training plans that they can improve with. But also, I think the guys this year, they are of one mind of what the goal is and from what I've seen so far this year, they're definitely pushing towards it. Jack, you got to find a question too for Coach? Yeah, because just one final question. So obviously, it's no secret that the San Diego cross country program is one of the best in the state widely regarded. I mean, 13 straight GCL championships and a lot of district championships in the past few years. I don't have the exact enough time. I guess my question about that is, how do you make sure that the guys on the team, they see these stats, but they don't take anything for granted. They make sure that every meet is still going to be a really big challenge and they make sure they have to give it their own. Yeah, I think you took the words right out of my mouth. I mean, that's something that, you know, we start with every year is that you can't take what we've done in the past for granted. And quite frankly, you know, I think the guys that are on the team, and this is not unique to these guys, but I think it's from year to year, they want to chart their own course. And it's great that we've had success in the past, but they haven't experienced that success in that single season. So they're certainly motivated to experience that success. They hear the stories. They know that what they what we've done, but they want to feel that for themselves. So, you know, again, we've had a lot of success in the past, but, you know, again, each season, there's a new challenge that's out there. And we try to emphasize that that, you know, we haven't won really anything this year. You really haven't left your mark on this team yet, now's the time to do it. Well, coach, certainly a congratulations on the start of the season so far, still a lot ahead, including a big event for you guys this Saturday, your own invitation, where to your point, you're trying to help run it and coach. And somebody that did that as a high school golf coach for a while, you feel like you're getting directions on that day. But it is always cool, because there's always an amount of pride when you see the teams that want to come in it, want to compete in it. And when it's all said and done, putting on a great event, like I said, I know you're probably turning a bunch of different directions, but you'll wake up tired and with a smile on your face on Sunday. Exactly. Yes. There you go. All right. For Jack Moothing, ESPN's broadcaster and St. Xavier student and head coach of the cross country team, Andy Wheatmarsh and I'm Richard Skinner. You've been watching the St. Xavier full podcast cross country.