Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Sam Roberts on Winning

In the first installment of this podcast I talk with old friend Sam Roberts, longtime Knoxville-area track and cross country coach who is now sprint coach at Tennessee Wesleyan. As he discusses, beginning in 1988 at Knox West he always sought out winning--at every level he coached. During that time it was in the TSSAA A-AA division, where he won state cross country titles, and later it was in AAA, where he won state track team titles. He coached more than 40 individual champions and a Footlocker Nationals finalist at West, and then he brought that winning temperament to Oak Ridge in 2007, where he helped coach an NXN team and four state champion cross country teams before coaching several sprint greats at Oak Ridge. This past year at TWC he had the indoor national titlist at 60 meters.

We sat down to discuss how he became associated with all this winning. What does the average coach do in order to promote a competitive but healthy atmosphere at the high school level? How does a hard-working coach also become a winning coach? What kinds of things make a "program?" If I'm an ambitious new coach, what can I do to create a winning program?

What did I learn? If you want to win--long-term--this has to be your thing. Not golf, not your own training. This has to be your thing. And you have to set clear expectations for yourself and for the athletes and families of athletes that you coach. Oh--and keep learning. Your stuff may have worked twenty-five years ago, but if you haven't learned and changed your practice during those twenty-five years, you haven't gotten any better.

If you like this podcast or have comments, please do leave them below. Thanks for listening.

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