Hey Matt,
Congratulations again on your big weekend. I hope you're enjoying it and not worrying too much about school/xc.
The Glows/Grows thing is a "Wes thing" that I didn't embrace at first but I like it and am trying to use it in my classroom more. I threw in some pictures of the boys I found on milesplit to illustrate a couple of things.
Glows:
1. All teams: Doing warmups, cooldowns, and stretching with little to no prompting. Awesome self-discipline here.
2. Girls' race: keeping it together when things don't go as expected. The finishing order was a little scrambled and the start was rough, but the girls pushed all the way through and had good finishing times after a hard week of training and racing.
3. Boys' race: preparing before the race and letting off excess energy at the starting line.
2. Girls' race: keeping it together when things don't go as expected. The finishing order was a little scrambled and the start was rough, but the girls pushed all the way through and had good finishing times after a hard week of training and racing.
3. Boys' race: preparing before the race and letting off excess energy at the starting line.
I'm not sure what's going on here. It looks a little like Tyler is about to punch someone, but as I got to the start after the girls' race, the boys were in the middle of a runout doing this. They all had strong races and are continuing to grow. Also they nabbed starting lane #6, as opposed to the girls' #21.
4. Justin Garagnani: from taking care of cards while I was running around to continuing to cut time off of his own 5K while working to bring younger runners along on JV. This kid is a huge asset to our team.
5. Everybody's parents are awesome.
Everyone has a lot to look forward to and a lot to be proud of and thankful for.
Grows:
1. Girls getting to the start early when there are no assigned lanes: the girls had to start at the bottom of the sloped start line and Sierra did not have a number on her hand at the start. I got her number from my phone and borrowed a sharpie from another coach, but it was a very close call.
2. Eyes up. It was sunny and the kids were suffering a lot, so they had even more of a tendency to get caught looking at the ground. Jarrett and Tyler look different than many of our kids do and that is one thing they both do really well.
Thanks for your continued leadership and for giving me the opportunity to learn from you and work with such a great group of kids. Yesterday was exhausting. You do so much on race day!
Thanks,
Charlie