Chris Legters

Happy Birthday Mel Blount🤠 This is what 78 looks like. As a birthday tradition #47 brings in every birthday with a monster 5am workout! “This is how legends are made.” #HappyBirthday #MelBlount

It’s hard to overstate how impressive this is. 3:29.85. Wire-to-wire. No pacer. 19 years old. What a sensational run by Cam Myers to win the Australian 1500m title.

This rings true to something that I’ve been thinking about the past couple days. I currently have a great group of freshman girl distant runners and while they were good during the fall, they are really looking good now in the spring. And I bet they’ll be even better next fall. The point is that all of the flowers are in all of the seeds that you plant today.

The hardest part of coaching has nothing to do with X’s and O’s. Here are 5 hard truths that come with the job… 🧵👇

Applied to coaches... 6 Rules for Sports Coaches. 1. It’s their journey, not your résumé Don’t coach for your record. Coach for their growth. 2. Hard moments are where growth happens. Don’t remove them. Guide them. 3. Own the locker room tone What you say, and how you say it, sticks longer than you think. 4. Model what you expect Effort. Energy. Attitude. They will mirror you. 5. Celebrate the team over the individual Culture wins when “we” matters more than “me.” 6. Make it about more than the scoreboard Years from now, they won’t remember the score. They’ll remember how you made them feel. Be the coach they remember for the right reasons.

If you’ve never cried after giving everything you had to something that mattered, you’ve probably never given everything you had to something that mattered. The UCONN women’s basketball team was undefeated, 38-0 for the season. But with a little over a minute left in their final four matchup against South Carolina, Kayleigh Heckel went up for a lay-up to cut the score to 9 and keep alive a tiny bit of hope. She missed. The camera zooms in on Heckel as she drops her head and tears began to flow. It was a harsh moment of realizing that the dream was over. In 2024, Keisei Tominaga was captured crying on the sidelines with a minute left when his Nebraska team lost to Texas A&M in the tournament. Back in 2006, Adam Morrison had a similar reaction with a few seconds left, after Gonzaga had blown a 17 point lead in the sweet sixteen. Will all due respect to Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, there is crying in sport. A lot of it. And contrary to some of the talk on social media, it’s the opposite of weakness. It’s a clear signal of a genuine competitor. We cry because we care. Tears are proof of our investment. Psychologist Ad Vingerhoets at Tilburg University has spend decades studying crying. He found that humans are the only species that cries emotionally. And the primary reason we do it is it acts s a kind of communicative device. Tears signal to others that something matters deeply to us and we need support. It’s as if the tears are saying, “this thing matters to me more than I can say.” As a coach, I’ve seen the toughest of competitors, athletes who are among the best in the country or even the world, break down from time to time. It’s one of the beautiful things about sport. For many reasons, it’s one of the few areas where we let the guard down, show what we really feel, and express genuine emotion. Sometimes, that means tears of joy, other times a crushing bitter disappointment that we can’t quite process. This is especially true for men, who often try to be stoic, thanks to a combination of culture and biology. Yet, in the days before memes Morrison might as well have become one, as he “got murdered for it” and was “kind of shocked by how much negative feedback” he received. Heckel’s been met with a mixture of support and the sadly expected condemnation. Those people are clueless. From the sidelines, it may look like a weakness because you’ve never been in those moments. You’ve never given your all to something, risked greatness, and saw that dream get ripped away. When you step into the arena, you put it all on the line. And in sport, music, and performance arts, one of the few places that are the last bastions of reality. You can’t fake it, it’s all there to see, and there’s a clearly defined success or failure. You have to care deeply to even be in that spot in the first place. No one made it anywhere close to fulfilling their potential, let alone the pinnacle of their endeavor by not caring. That kind of nonchalance is reserved for the sideline. It’s the cool kid in high school who tries to convince others not trying is the cool thing to do. All so they can protect their ego and say, “I would have gotten an A, made the team, won the tournament, if I had tried…” Caring is cool. It’s also the only way you see how good you can be. Our brain has a kind of internal safety mechanism that prevents us from ever truly pushing to our limit. And for good reason. If a marathoner really ran out of glycogen or let their core body temperature keep rising, then serious illness or death awaits. Instead, we run a kind of inner calculation that says: is the juice worth the squeeze? Caring deeply is what allows us to push just a bit harder. It tells that safety mechanism, “Ya, we’re in a lot of discomfort right now, but this means a lot, so give us a little bit longer of a leash.” So if I ever saw someone crying after a tough race, I knew that was an athlete I wanted on my team. It meant they cared. It meant the moment meant so much to them, that they could no longer put on a face, or hold things back. It meant more to them than they could verbally communicate. We need more people with passion, who are willing to risk it all, to be have the emotions of the moment overwhelm them. It’s only by stepping into the arena and taking that risk that we find out how good we can be, and more importantly, who we are. The potential for tears is the price of admission. Morrison got murdered for crying in 2006. Tominaga said it should be celebrated in 2024. He was right. -Steve

Resist the urge to use April workouts to verify fitness. Just keep building.

@FaithRemich Brilliant!

Honored to have been a part of the 29th Annual AK Valley Cager Classic. It was great getting to play with former AAU teammates and so many other talented players!

Going to neglect my family for a couple of nights.

I’m a high school teacher. We have policies. Late work gets points deducted. Turn it in on time or take the hit. That’s how students learn responsibility. Senior year. Final paper worth thirty percent of the grade. Due Friday. Monday came. Still no paper from this one kid. Smart kid. Never missed assignments before. Called him to my desk after class. “Where’s your paper?” He looked down. “I don’t have it” Waited. He didn’t elaborate. “You know this tanks your grade right? Might not graduate” He nodded. Still wouldn’t look at me. “Do you not care?” His voice cracked. “My dad died Thursday night. Heart attack. Paper was done. On my laptop. But I’ve been at the hospital. At the funeral home. I forgot. I just forgot.” My chest tightened. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?” “Because it sounds like an excuse. Everyone has excuses.” He finally looked up. Eyes red. “Just fail me. I deserve it.” Closed my gradebook. “Email me the paper tonight. Full credit. And take this week off. Come back when you’re ready.” He shook his head. “The policy—” “I’m the teacher. I make exceptions when life happens. Your dad died. That’s not an excuse. That’s a tragedy. Go home.” He graduated. Top ten percent. Spoke at graduation. Mentioned a teacher who showed him that rules and compassion can coexist. I was in the audience. Crying. Sometimes grace matters more than policy. —Mr. Hayes, English teacher

Assistant coaches are the unsung heroes. They develop players, build team culture, make tactical calls, and do the behind-the-scenes work that keeps everything running. Teams don’t succeed without them. 👏

@FaithRemich Go for it!

@FaithRemich Have you ever done this?

Criticism is sticky. When we get criticized, we often can't let it go. How to give better feedback 1. Turn down the alarm 2. Stop Feedback sandwiches 3. There’s a sensitive window. 4. Our expectations impact our interpretation. thegrowtheq.com/what-makes-cri…

100% true. Kids need honesty. Kids need truth tellers. Kids need standard bearers. Kids need transformational coaches. And yes… sometimes that comes with intensity. And that’s ok.

Humans spent centuries writing books, essays, articles, and research papers. Then we used all that human writing to train AI systems to write like humans. Then we built another AI system to inspect the writing and say, “This looks AI suspiciously.” So now we have one machine trained on humans to sound human, and another machine trained on humans to figure out whether the first machine sounds a little too human. And after all that, a stressed human still has to make the final call.