Continuing with the interview series, this interview comes from a coach from California who has had his share of success. Coach Joel Bernard of Hughson High School gives us some insight into what he has done in the past couple decades.
Coach Bernard's team from Hughson High School
Chaz Caiado: Coach Bernard, can you give us a short biography of you and
your team profile including any honors won either team or individual?
Joel Bernard: I hold BA in P.E. and a M.S. in Exercise Physiology. I was hired at Hughson High in 1998 to teach
special education. Our school used to host a
country program for Severely Emotionally Disturbed students. Someone told me I’d be good at that, so I
applied. During the interview I found
out that the track coach at HHS had just retired, so I told the panel I’d love
to coach the track team and since the football team was coming off a state
championship, I said I could coach football as well. My first year at HHS I was very lucky to be
able to coach Alexandra Guerrero. She had previously run times of 5:19 for
1600m and 11:26 for 3200m as an 10th grader. Since we did not have a cross country program
at HHS when I arrived, she was running with a rival school (Riverbank High,
which would later produce German Fernandez).
As a junior she won a section title while training with our rival, then
went on to finish, I believe 19th in the state Division 4 race. My first chance to coach her was in the
spring of 1999. She was in good shape
coming into the season, running 11:00.74 at a very early season all comers
meet. My goal was pretty much not to screw her up. She ended up that year running 10:40 for
3200m to take 6th at the track state meet, a few weeks after that,
we went to Denton, Texas for the USATF junior meet, where she placed 5th
in the 3k. The following year, she
dropped her time to 10:30, placing 2nd at the Golden West Invite
(back before NBN and NON, GWI was THE post season meet). Back then that time was good enough for #8 in
the United States. We went back to
Denton in 2000, where she placed 3rd in the 5k, beating that year’s
Footlocker champ, Victoria Chang of Hawaii.
The other really notable girl that I’ve had run for me is Becky
Hobby. She posted PRs 2:18, 5:01, and
11:05 on the track. During the cross
country season of 2009, Becky ran 18:25 at the Woodward Park course to place 5th
in the Division 4 race.
Team wise, we’ve had a lot more success with the boys than with the girls,
but individual wise, our top dogs have been girls. It wasn’t until this year that we had a boy
win an individual section championship in cross. Our boys have never been outside of the top 3
at our league meet except for the first year we had a team. We finished 4th that year. The boys have never been outside of the top 8
at the section meet sine the second year I coached the team. We’ve qualified for state 4 times as a team
with the boys, placing 10th in 2003.
My current top boy, Zach Morrett has been a really interesting kid to coach. One of my other athletes recruited him during
freshman roundup in 2010. He was the
last kid I would have picked out of a lineup as a star runner, but he found his
niche in cross and has been on an uninterrupted upward trajectory for the past
4 years. Winning the D4 section meet in
cross was a really nice feather in his cap.
He was hoping for a top 10 finish at state, but his legs were just not
very peppy there and he finished 15th with a time of 16:14. The aim for track this year is to go sub 9:20
for 3200. Zach is naturally geared for
the longer distances. His 1600 PR is
only 4:38, but he’s run a 9:37 for 3200m.
He will likely run the 10k in college.
Our track teams have had quite a bit of success lately. Our boys have won the last 3 league titles
and our girls have won 2 of the last 3.
Our girls also won a divisional section title in 2011
(note: California schools compete
in divisions for cross country, our division for cross country is loosely
defined as having schools sized from 501 students to 1250 students) In track, there are no divisions for the
state meet, but there are divisions up until the week after league meets, where
we have team section championships.
Simply qualifying for state is extremely difficult. To get to state, our kids have to first
qualify out of our league meet by placing top 3. The next week, they have to qualify
individually out of one of the 3 divisional meets, for us that means placing in
the top 5. The following week, they run
at the Sac Joaquin Section Masters Meet against the top runners from all the
other divisions in our section, and have to finish in the top 3 to advance to
state. The SJS, last time I checked, has
198 high schools. )
CC: Your school is of small to moderate size but you are piecing
together a good program with some solid front runners. What challenges to
you face with your team and what measures do you take to overcome them?
JB: As I mentioned before, when I got to HHS, we didn’t have a cross country
team and didn’t have any distance runners to speak of (except for Alex
Guerrero). As a matter of fact, that
first track season, Alex was our only runner to break 5 in the 1600. Toward the end of my first year at HHS, I
went to the AD and asked if I could start a Cross Country team. His only stipulation for saying yes, is that
I wouldn’t try to recruit kids away from football.
The first year with cross was really challenging. I had Alex, who was one of the better runners
in California and I had 2 boys that had run track for me as freshmen. The rest of our team was made up of, to put
it politely, fringe kids who thought that cross country would be cool because
it was the un-football. That was a group
that I could not really trust. Quite a
few times, I would tell them to go off for a warm up, then catch them sneaking
off into an orchard to sit around. My
two sophomore boys that had run track for me the previous year ran pretty well. Nic Dodd placed 17th at our
section meet that year.
The following year, only 3 of the fringers came back (2 boys and one
girl). I put special emphasis on getting
over to our junior high feeder and making presentations for the PE
classes. The following year, I had a
pretty good freshman class come in. The
top boy out of that class was Ernesto Madrigal (now FATHER Madrigal). Ernesto, Nic and the 3rd
dependable boy, Gabe Pitman, made up the nucleus of our team for the next 3
years.
The hardest thing to do at Hughson was to build a culture. I feel like, after 15 years, I might finally
have a handle on the thing, but it can evaporate quickly. After our section title in 2003, we graduated
all but 2 of our boys. One of those was
kind of a flaky kid and the other had to stop running after suffering a
spontaneous collapsed lung. Without any
senior leadership, the team culture that I thought I had developed went out the
window. It took a good 5 years to
finally get the team back to the right mindset.
I learned the hard way that once, as a coach, you let the wrong type of
attitude linger on the team, it is really difficult to root out.
What really allowed our team to turn the corner about 4 years ago is when
we stopped talking about trying to win.
I made the focus for each kid to simply be the best runner he or she
could possibly be. I made sure to start
praising the little things that kids were doing right rather than simply
praising good results or fast times.
I’ve been trying to emphasize that success in distance running is
dependent on hard work and dedication. Once I started praising effort and
stopped praising the talented slackers for being fast, the team attitude came
around pretty quickly.
CC: Can you describe your teams training for cross country and
track and how your training differs, if there is any different?
JB: There isn’t a whole lot of difference for us between the two seasons. During track, we will pay more attention to
running at various race paces, but for our mile/2mile kids, the general
framework is the same.
CC: How do you train your female athletes different than your
male athletes?
JB: My training groups are broken down based on 2 categories: 1. Previous
training volume and 2. training pace. For cross, our top 2 training groups run
about the same volume, but the second group runs a little bit slower. Usually, my top girls will be in this second
group. Only Becky and Alex have ever trained
in the top training group. I have 4
groups all together usually. Groups 3
and 4 are pretty evenly balanced between boys and girls.
I am beginning to re-think this strategy a bit. For our top girls, the way I group the kids
seems to work pretty well. The downside
is that it is very hard for the girls to develop as a cohesive unit. I will probably try to have my varsity girls’
team train all together next fall.
For Track, the training groups are based on event first, then experience,
then racing speed. Boys and girls train
together in these groups as well.
CC: Distance running is an intense mental sport. How do
you help your athletes prepare for training and racing from the psychological
side?
JB: Every kid is different. This year,
I think my biggest mistake with Zach was to try to build him up mentally. He already puts a lot of pressure on
himself. Leading up to state, I told him
a number of times that I thought he could get into the top 5. I think that ended up being too much for
him. He had run 16:02 on the state
course in early October, but despite being in much better shape 7 weeks later,
he ran 12 seconds slower. So, with
runners like Zach, the attitude has to be, “hey, let’s just get in the best
shape possible, then line up and let it rip”.
Other kids maybe don’t have the same internal motivation or confidence
and they need more of the building up. I
think that in general, my kids are pretty driven, so the best thing I can do
for them is to keep workouts and meets light and fun.
CC: What steps do you take to prevent injuries on your team, and
how do you deal with injuries when they arise?
JB: We do core work twice a week. We
stretch daily after practice. I keep an
arsenal of foam rollers in my store room and encourage the kids to come in
after practice and roll out anything that is sore. This makes for kind of a cross country party
in my classroom after practice. Kids
rolling around on the floor, icing, rubbing on smelly liniments…
Our school was forced cut shop classes after the 2008 economic
downturn. For our distance runners, this
has been a blessing. I’ve been able to round up a few exercise bikes, a rowing
machine, and an elliptical trainer and put them in the old wood shop. When kids start to get a little hurt, they
head over to “The Room of Shame” (their term, not mine) to spend time on the
bikes.
CC: Do you have any team building exercises that you think
foster the team atmosphere in your program?
JB: For cross, we do a camp in the Sierra’s every summer. While we are up there, we play team building
games. This season, I didn’t really do a
lot of team building stuff once the season started. The group I had was super cohesive
already. Really, the only thing we did
this year was an occasional game of Ultimate Frisbee, or Capture the Flag.
We used to have a pool on campus, but it would have needed $500,000 worth
of repairs. Before it went away, we
would do some pool workouts if the weather was too hot in August or early
September. The kids really liked that.
(You would probably scoff at our idea of heat, but it can be as hot as 105 when
we practice at the beginning of the school year.)
CC: Since the early 2000s distance running has taken off to
previously unheard of levels in the US. Do you feel the coaching side of
the sport has improved in the past decade or are better athletes joining the
sport?
JB: First of all, I would disagree with your statement that the levels of
success were unheard of in the US prior to 2000. We had some stud runners in
the 70s. Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers
in the Marathon, guys like Rudy Chapa and Eric Hulst in high school. Of the 7 high schoolers to break 30 min for
10k, only one (Mo Trafeh) has done it since the 80s. You are correct that
running has greatly improved since 2000, but I think we are back to about where
we were 30-35 years ago.
I think it has been the internet. From where I’m sitting, I don’t see
superior athletes coming in to the sport.
I see more coaches who have access to all kinds of free training info
now that maybe they would have had to go to a clinic or buy a book to get
before.
I think the biggest factor has been that coaches have re-discovered
distance training. When I first started
coaching at Westmont High, in 1991, my kids were doing 45-50 mpw and everybody
was looking at us like we were crazy. Nowadays, it seems like 45-50 is the
floor mileage for teams that are any good and that many of the better squads do
much more. Back in the Day, guys like Eric Hulst were running over 100 mpw and
Lindgren was running over 200 mpw at times.
Also, I think there has been a movement away from the “very hard” “very
easy” training modality. I used to have
my kids running workouts like 6x800 at significantly faster than 3200m goal
pace. The faster they would run, the slower they would have to go the next day. I try to avoid that pattern now. It seems like every time we slip into that
training mode, we end up racing really flat. It seems like most of the good
coaches have gone away from the very hard interval workouts in favor of more
volume, more tempo, and when they do assign intervals, there is a clear speed
limit posted.
CC: How do you evaluate talent and help place athletes in
different events?
JB: My policy for track has always been to let kids flutter around to
different events early in the season until they find one they like. The cross
county kids usually gravitate to the distance events, but last year, two of my
kids ended up going 1-2 in our league pole vault competition.
Last year, I stepped back from the head track coaching job because I
needed a break. The new coach instituted
a battery of tests: 40 yds., vertical jump, 1 minute push ups, 1 minute sit
ups, pull up max, and I think a 12 minute run for distance. I thought it was a great idea and was all for
it. It took about a week to rotate
everyone through all of the tests. After all that, I think the kids still
pretty much ended up in the events they wanted to do
CC: And lastly, what do you think is the single most important
ingredient for a team to have to be successful?
JB: Culture: You have to have the
environment where kids are all striving to be the best athletes they can
possibly be. Praise dedication to the
process and you’ll be well on your way to building a good program.
CC: Once again, thanks a lot for your time, I really appreciate
it!
