Coach Ryan J. Banta Psy.M.

1️⃣ Team Title 3️⃣ State Records 1️⃣1️⃣ Top 5 State Team Finishes 1️⃣5️⃣ Conference Team Titles 2️⃣0️⃣ District Team Plaques 2️⃣4️⃣ Individual State Champions 2️⃣4️⃣ Individual State Runners-Up 1️⃣9️⃣6️⃣ All State Medalists @PCHXC_TF @parkwayathletes @pchcolts

@pntrack @coachklee That rule really needs to be changed for a lot of reasons.

@coachklee Illinois order of events. Final two races.

I hesitate to share this but maybe it needs to be shared. When coaches fail kids, someone should speak up. Twice in the past two weeks, 4 girls, all freshmen & sophomores, made nearly a 3- hour round trip to train with me in the parking lot of Dryden Elementary, across from my house. The girls run at a small school. They are talented. Their MPHs (Dashr Silver): 18.9, 18.7, 18.6, and 17.9. Their verticals (OVR): 25, 24, 22, 19. Solid athletes! After the first session, parents said the workout was the first positive experience of the season. The girls wanted to do it again. Problem #1: track practice should not be consistently miserable. 🥴 The girls told me that their meet warmup was to run two laps as a team. I showed them how sprinters warm up. When they asked their coach if they could try a new warmup, the coach made them run a mile. 🥴 They think their best chance to qualify for state is the 4x1. (Remember, they are all underclassmen.) I had them practice handoffs. They had been taught some crazy things: 1) Run in middle of lane (no inside-outside lane ownership) 🥴 2) Baton stayed in right hand (no R-L-R-L). 🥴 3) One “go mark” at only “5 short steps” (measured to be 12’) 🥴 4) They had never been videoed doing an exchange 🥴 I taught them how to do it right, hoping their coach wouldn’t find out and punish them with a two mile run. Our go mark was 16’ with a bang step (first step down at mark). I videoed every exchange. I maintained their upsweep technique. They looked GREAT. ⚡️ The girls were free to train yesterday because they didn’t have practice on the Monday of Sectional… because the boys team had a meet. 🥴 For Sectional tomorrow, I wish they weren’t all required to do 4 events. Wish they could concentrate on 4x1 and 4x4 (they have a chance in both). One girl is entered in 4x1, 4x2, 300h, and 4x4. Never have I entered a boy in those 4 events, let alone at a Sectional. Another has to run 200 and 4x4 back-to-back. 🥴 It’s sometimes hard to support the work of other coaches. Kids get one chance to do high school sports.

@JoeAratari Play multiple sports. Don't just sink a bunch of money into a club

Girls. Training. And ACL Tears. Girls don't need a 3 day ACL program or a 5 minute ACL Warm up. Girls don't need a 6-8 wk bootcamp. It is not a one off thing you do in a 3 day clinic or a 10 minute warm up. It's not a bootcamp right before the season just to not continue with training while in-season. Girls need sound, progressive and comprehensive S&C 2-3x wk for at least 40 wks during the year during their off and in-season competition periods. Quad Strength. Glute strength. Landing mechanics. Deceleration. Pivoting/Twisting. Taking contact. Conditioning. Agility. Isometrics. Power work. Etc.. Cannot be neglected for weeks or MONTHS on end. It is total negligence to go months without a weight room session or even a break in a kids schedule to make time for training. It's a year round plan of attack to do the best we can to mitigate risk. Girls sports and those involved need to do better and what is in our power/control.

Rising track star Gout Gout is drawing comparisons to Usain Bolt, the Jamaican eight-time gold medallist, considered the sport’s greatest-ever. Bolt recently said of Gout, “He looks like young me.” cbsn.ws/4u5t5Mp

Exciting news! @pchcolts @PCHXC_TF squad varisty & jv has won our conference championship team title! Extending our streak @parkwayathletes district record to 11 straight starting in 2015!! Proud of our athletes, coaches, & program! Lots of PRs individual champs! @ParkwaySchools

Ryan's unconventional path from politics to coaching & how early success & failure shaped his evolution. He reflects on moving from ego-driven outcomes to athlete-centered development, emphasizing joy, community, & long-term retention. @JustFlySports youtu.be/yXnbTF3YYfM?si…

Cant wait to listen! Had a lovely conversation with him on my Podcast a few years back Episode 30 Companions of the Compendium: Dr. Kelly Starrett The Ready State by Companions of the Compendium share.google/ZlJfxMRKvXIE4i…

Another big day for the @PCHXC_TF @pchcolts winning again this season! Amazing performances all round! @parkwayathletes @ParkwaySchools #staystrong #gocolts.

Friends who pray. I need your prayers! No one is hurt or ill. I just need some heavenly guidance on how to proceed properly. Thanks in advance.

Coach Banta "on the mic" instagram.com/reel/DXQs5NQiX… @PCHXC_TF @parkwayathletes

@4keeg_ Lets go!

Ran a 10.2 - 100m at district 🥇

An MLB player tosses a ball to a kid wearing his jersey. The kid makes the catch… then hands it to his little sister and gives her a hug. How can you not love baseball

Go Emily @parkwayathletes!!!

my life changed the moment an old mentor told me this: “stopping your worst habit would change your life way faster than starting your best habit… fix the leak before filling the bucket.”

Another One! IYKYK. Go Colts #staystrong and on to Henle Holmes-Steve Warren next wk! @PCHXC_TF @pchcolts @parkwayathletes @ParkwaySchools

No Such Thing as Middle Distance. @CoachDistance lets go!!! #SprintersCompendium

🚨BREAKING: 8 weeks of gratitude practice physically rebuilds the neural pathways between your memory and reward centers. Your brain physically rewires itself every time you feel grateful. Eight weeks of intentional gratitude practice creates measurable structural changes in the neural pathways connecting your hippocampus to your ventral tegmental area. The memory center starts talking to the reward center in a fundamentally different way. New synaptic connections form. Existing ones strengthen. The physical architecture of how you process positive experiences rebuilds itself. Most people approach gratitude like a mood they can choose to feel. A psychological vitamin they remember to take when life gets difficult. The neuroscience reveals something far more profound. Gratitude is a biological intervention that sculpts brain tissue. Researchers tracked participants practicing gratitude exercises for two months using brain scans. They watched new neural highways construct themselves in real time. The anterior cingulate cortex developed stronger connections to the medial prefrontal cortex. The brain learned to route positive emotional experiences through higher order thinking centers instead of storing them as fleeting feelings. Every positive experience you’ve ever had exists as a neural trace in your memory network. Most sit dormant, accessible only when something external triggers the specific sensory combination that originally encoded them. You smell coffee, suddenly remember a conversation from years ago. Random. Unreliable. Outside your control. Gratitude practice systematically rewires that retrieval system. After two months, participants could voluntarily access positive memories with increasing ease. Their brains had built stronger pathways between memory storage areas and emotional processing centers. They experienced deeper emotional resonance during memory retrieval. The quality of remembering itself had improved. The participants also started noticing positive details in their present environment they had previously filtered out. Their attention systems recalibrated. The same neural pathways pulling positive memories forward were scanning current experiences more thoroughly for elements worth encoding as positive memories. Their brains became biased toward collecting evidence that life contains meaningful moments. Most cognitive interventions try to change how you interpret negative experiences. Gratitude practice changes how thoroughly you notice positive ones. It teaches your visual and emotional processing systems to detect opportunities and pleasures that were always present but neurologically invisible. The timeline reveals something crucial about neural plasticity. Weeks one through three showed minimal structural changes. Participants felt slightly more positive, but brain scans looked identical to baseline. Weeks four through six showed the first measurable increases in gray matter density. Weeks seven and eight revealed entirely new neural network formation. Two months. Your nervous system can physically restructure itself with consistent practice. The method was almost embarrassingly simple. Participants wrote down three specific things they felt grateful for every evening, explaining why each mattered. No meditation apps. No guided visualizations. Just pen, paper, and the requirement to identify gratitude targets with enough detail that their brains had to actively search for positive elements. Specificity drives the neural development. General statements like “I’m grateful for my family” generate different brain activity than precise observations like “I’m grateful my daughter laughed at my terrible joke during dinner because it showed me she still finds me funny despite growing more independent.” The brain needs detailed targets to practice connecting memory specifics to emotional rewards. After eight weeks, participants developed a fundamentally different relationship with their attention and memory systems. Someone whose brain automatically scans for and emotionally amplifies aspects of experience that make existence feel worthwhile. The neural pathways remain permanent after practice ends. Gratitude carves lasting roads through consciousness.

Unfortunately there's still some really bad programming out there- @CoachMcGhghy encourages coaches throughout the state & Midwest to reach out (even if you hate Rochester) reach out to someone in the NHSSCA- it's about doing the best for student athletes channel1450.com/2026/04/02/the…