By Staff
Coaching Management, 13.1, January 2005, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm1301/bbyoungathletes.htm
For some high school coaches, the first challenge of the season is finding enough athletes to fill their rosters. Harvey Blonder, Head Coach at Stoughton (Mass.) High School, a coach who often finds himself in that group, decided to try a new approach to introducing kids to track and field: Hold a fun, community-oriented track meet and invite students of all ages, teachers, and anybody else in town with an itch to run.
"This town has Little League Baseball and youth soccer, but there isn’t anything to get kids into track. So that’s what we’re really trying to do with this meet," says Blonder. "Whatever you can do to expose younger kids to track early on is worthwhile. When those kids get to high school, hopefully some of them will come out for the team."
Sixty competitors turned out for the event, which was held in late May, paying $10 each to run. Blonder says the event was as well attended as a Stoughton varsity track meet, and raised $600 that went toward the team’s end-of-the-year banquet. And more significantly, the meet introduced 20 or so elementary-age youngsters to the sport. Other participants who paid to race included high school and middle school-age kids as well as coaches, teachers, and members of the community. Looking for a little post season competition, there were even a few members of Blonder’s team who took to the track to display their skills.
Pre-race sign-ups were facilitated by team members who pitched the idea to classmates during Stoughton High’s lunch period, and those who registered early for the meet received T-shirts. Blonder advertised the event in the local newspaper and had track team members post fliers in supermarkets. Meet applications were also distributed to teachers from the middle and elementary schools, who attempted to drum up interest among their students.
Blonder says the pre-race sign-up wasn’t a huge success—something that worried his co-organizers. "Ten days before the event, one of my assistants wanted to cancel because there were so few pre-registered sign-ups," he says. "But I had run some meets in the summer and the same thing happened in the first year of those events. And with all of those meets, the event was much more popular the second year.
"So I was determined not to cancel it, even if it looked like we weren’t going to make any money," continues Blonder. "Luckily, the day of the meet was a beautiful day, so a lot of runners came and registered, and there were a lot of parents and teachers there to cheer the competitors on."
The meet consisted of 100-, 400-, and 800-meter runs, a 300-meter hurdle race, a mile run, and a series of relay races. There were four or five heats for all of the races except for the relays, the mile, and the hurdle event. Competitors in the 100-meter, 400-meter, and 800-meter runs were grouped by age, and the mile runners were split into two groups according to projected times. As a special perk during the mile race, the kids raced against the high school principal.
The 4x100-meter relay was the premier event for the high school kids and was very competitive, says Blonder. Two members of the track team were allowed to recruit two of their friends who aren’t on the team to form a relay team, which had to consist of two girls and two boys. Ribbons were awarded to the top finishers from each age group and relay event winners took home T-shirts.
Blonder estimates that a quarter of the kids from his track team competed in the meet. "For some of the kids, the event was two weeks after they’d last competed, and they ran significant personal records—sometimes by three or four seconds," says Blonder. "Their training had stopped, they’d had some rest, and there was no pressure. It was good for those kids to have a positive experience on the track."
The meet, which Blonder says ran very smoothly, featured a Stoughton assistant track coach as the starter and athletes from the team as timers. Track athletes also sold refreshments and helped with race-day registration.
"It took a lot of work—especially in the pre-registration stage. There are a lot easier ways to raise money, but in the end we made money and introduced a few people to the sport," says Blonder. "The feedback was tremendous and when we do it again next year, hopefully it will be easier to put together and even more successful. I think people will remember how much fun this year’s was and it will be easier to sell among teachers. We have a lot of support in the community, and I think they’ll come out again."