16 YEAR HISTORY OF THE @PNTRACK INVITE Plainfield North hosts a 12-team invitational Saturday, March 9th, starting at 10 a.m. We run on a 178-meter 4-lane track where the curves are nearly impossible. We seed on the fly and time races with stopwatches. We do live scoring using a Google Sheet … 2023 RESULTS Somehow we make it work. Somehow the atmosphere is thick with excitement. Somehow performances are extraordinary. I tried to explain our meet when I wrote The Gauntlet Mile for Freelap four years ago. Once on a camping trip I saw a sign “Always Leave the Campsite Better Than You Found It ..read more

I wrote this article in June of 2017 in the car on the 2,113 mile ride home from the NCAA Championships in Eugene. The article caught the interest of the legendary Michael Boyle who flew me to Boston to speak to his staff and interns. Seven years later, I’m speaking alongside Michael in a free webinar for Les Spellman and the Universal Speed Rating, USR. I thought it would be a good day to republish “Ten Sprint Facts”.  +++ TEN SPRINT FACTS I WISH EVERYONE UNDERSTOOD I consider myself a coach, a veteran of 36 years (now 43) of coaching football, basketball, and track. Stuart McMillan rec ..read more

THE TEN DON’TS OF SPEED TRAINING There is no sprint textbook. There is no absolute certainty when it comes to optimal sprint training. Like it or not, the training of a sprinter is experimental. If someone tells you they have the exact recipe, run away from them. Instead, learn to cook. Even though great coaches will admit to uncertainty, they have a reliable confidence of WHAT DOESN’T WORK. 25 years ago, I decided that the #1 way to have a dominant high school track team was to make practice the best part of a kid’s day and attract my school’s best athletes (cats) to the track team. To do th ..read more

Don Holler: The Death of a Coach It’s hard telling when the cascading medical problems began. Let’s just say that life in Don Holler’s eighties was not kind. Procedures, infections, surgeries, medications, nursing homes, hospitals, Alzheimer’s, and maybe even Parkinson’s eventually killed him. I have wondered if being in terrific physical condition heading into his eighties prolonged his agony. He died at the age of 88, same as his father.  The final time I visited Dad was December 31st, 2023. He was in a hospital bed but at home. He had required around the clock care for over a year ($5 ..read more