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Today's practice was all about preparation for tomorrow's home meet (that I hope happens).
I started the practice by working on the pit area while the athletes worked with the sprint coaches. I weeded and leveled the pit, I blew the water out of our board boxes, I brushed off the runway, and I removed any unneeded materials like rocks and trash. I am a BIG believer in being overly prepared for home meets. There is nothing that angers me more than going to another track and finding that they are improperly staffed and/or prepared for our arrival. I will NEVER allow us to be seen in a poor light in that manner!
After I was done working on the pit/runways I worked with the kids on the routines a jumper on my team needs to be accustomed to. We started with a discussion on bringing the appropriate clothing. I told my athletes to bring more clothes than they knew what to do with, and to be overly prepared for cold/poor weather. I suggested a minimum of 3 layers to ensure each athlete can stay warm on our breezy/cold track.
When done discussing clothing we moved on to the warm up routine (which can be found on the website). I had them go through the routine and discussed how to properly time the warm up and cool down to prepare for events the correct way. As well, I discussed how to stay loose/warm after properly warming up and had them practice this to make sure they understood the expectations. I've told athletes they need to keep a small sweat at ALL times before competing, and got them to that point to show them what it felt like.
Once done with the warm up routine I answered questions about order of events, the jump boards, etc. to make sure the athletes were comfortable with competing tomorrow.
There were a few athletes that still didn't have marks today so I spent the last 15 minutes finalizing approach numbers with them.
TOMORROW
Our first outdoor meet of the season (hopefully). If for some reason that meet gets cancelled I'm hoping to replicate a meet by having each athlete do full approaches/jumps. If unable to do that, I'm hoping we can use the pool tomorrow and go through an intense plyometric program.