Young Athletes League

The young athletes were out at the Scottish Young Athletes League match at Wishaw on Sunday and the team spirit was remarkable and there were several very good performances with victories on track and in the field events. Detailed results will be posted when we have them but there was no shortage of officials on the day either. Phil is doing a good job of organising the teams - that's three teams he is managing for the club right now - the Senior Men, the Central and South of Scotland League and the SYAL.

Phil will be getting some help on the coaching front soon from Donna Campbell for track and field, and Peter Halpin for track. Coaching young athletes is a difficult job - even schools are sometimes a bit confused at what they want! For instance it is usually easy to get results in the short term by simply drilling the children rather than coaching them. A local PE teacher who was heavily into athletics and a Grade Four coach used to get great results with his Under 12 teams in the Scottish Schools Cross Country championships but if you look at the programme even today his teams won less as they went up the age groups. A different local teacher in the 1980's said two things - he wanted the children to have a healthy lifestyle, enjoy athletics and keep it as a lifetime sport but he also said he wanted results NOW.

An American College coach went to ludicrous lengths to get victories for the College. He got a big squad together and then had them lap the track at 85 seconds a lap (their racing speed). When they were more than ten metres off the back of the pack, they came off the track until the next lap when they jumped back in. It was drilling in the race pace on five days out of seven. And his teams won lots of team prizes but none of the athletes had an individual career worth talking about. And of course there were injuries ................ overuse injuries ........lots of them!

But I'm away from the meeting on Sunday. It was good to see the boys and girls getting on so well together: when Andrew was hurtling towards the finish battling for first place, there were lots of team mates out shouting him on; when Roisin ran so well in the 1500 metres, it was great to see (and hear!) the support. And so it went on all afternoon.
Roll on Dumfries!!!