Anyone ever heard of a high school tri club or team? Seems like a great idea since the college tri scene is growing.
I teach at a high school and (at least) three of our most outstanding female athletes (2 state swimming champs and a third-place (I think) cross country runner) are signed up for and actually training for the local sprint in mid June. One is borrowing one of my bikes and these girls are all buying biking shoes and biking and running and swimming a bit to get ready (amazing for h.s. kids IMO … to train on your own anyway, not with a team, I never could have done that at 17) … I also know of one local h.s. boy training for it, too, but he goes to another high school.
So it got me thinking. Since this tri is well-timed (2 weeks after school lets out) and there’s a ton of kids around here, it might be worthwhile starting a club next year. Maybe 10 kids would be interested, maybe zero … But if any showed up we could just get organized in March and do a little training in April and May. Make it as fun as possible: Get the kids who don’t bike used to bikes and those that are not good swimmers less intimidated of the water (it’s in a pool). Anybody ever heard of such a thing for prep athletes?
What inspired these girls to try this? All three are serious athletes and plan to compete in college but are seniors and burned out on their fortes this year. They are also inspired by friends who recently graduated and now compete in triathlons in college, so college kids, keep up the good work! -TB
There was a friend of mine who coached a cycling team at a local high school and a lot of them ended up doing triathlons. He was great with that age kids and it was pretty successful but when he left to do other things the team went kaput too. Point being I think if it’s something you’re passionate about (helping kids get into the sport) by all means go for it.
I work at a small high school, about 250 kids per grade and have talked about with the kids. There was very little interest. There have been a few kids who have done tri’s but the commitment to consistent training is what turned them off. They’re in good enough shape that they can pretty much go out and do an olympic distance without a lot of formal training so they don’t see the need to train on a regular basis for all three sports.
I’d be curious to see what kind of success you have with it. Good luck.
I started a triathlon club at my school… we all trained togeather for 2 or 3 months… however once i left it ended… I only got it going cause i convinced all my x-country buddies to join, and then i found two teachers willing to help out/who were interested in helping coach and off we went. Its definatly possible!
I suggest talking to the swimming and cross country coaches and getting them on board. Most state high school athletic associations place strict limits on out of season training and a tri club could be a great way for them to get around these rules and work with their teams in their off seasons. The rules work like this, the swim coach can not run supervised swim workouts and “coach” his/her team members out of season. But coaches are always looking or creative ways to get around this rule.
A tri club, even if coached by the swim coach and/or cross country coach probably would not run afoul of the out of season rules since it is a different sport. Get these two coaches on board and they’ll get their team members to join the club. Even if they don’t want to coach, they will offer technical advice and encourage their teams to join for the workouts alone. You’ll have 40-50 kids for a spring club season before you even start advertising and you may end up with some excellent coaching as a bonus.
That’s funny you mention that. I was just thinking yesterday that a great way to develop the tri scene in a region would be to have a high school division in local races. You could have entrants check off the high school they go to on the entry form, race with everyone else but score points according to how they rank against all the other high schoolers of the same sex in the race. One point for 15th place and 15 points for 1st and then have a series of races. I think it would be a very easy way to drum up interest in the sport at an early age. But good luck with the club. I was part of cycling club in high school and know that for clubs like that to succeed, they really have to be well organized and the members would have to know each other well. For us, we were all cyclists at different levels and no one took charge to do stuff consistently so we got together for a meeting here and there where we’d talk about making t-shirts and then just listened to gearheads talk about their components and that was about it.