I am a current club-level coach for a new junior race team; this is actually our first season with the club-level team for juniors. We're looking at putting together a travel team to attend regional JN qualifiers etc to cash in on our very successful summer and fall program. Our local high school program has a very active schedule: they race 19 times between late December the end of February (does not include State meets, Eastern High School Champs, J2s, etc). This equates to over 2 races a week. Race formats vary greatly between sprints, relays, and 5Ks. My other experience with high school programs had a very limited number (6) of "league" races followed by States etc. This made it easy to get away for Sunday JNQs without getting burned out. 19 feels like a lot, particularly if I attempt to add any JNQs to the docket. What are other people seeing for their club schedules? Has it come to JNs being a private ski school only event without public school participation? That would be a shame, although the team lists from the past seasons indicate that this has come to pass.
FasterSkier Forums » Coaching
How many races are too many for Juniors?
(10 posts)-
Posted 2 years ago #
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We have had a very similar problem in the relationship between our high school team and club team in our program. Our High School coach expected us to be to involved with that program that we couldn't race our best at the Eastern Cups. Our solution has been just to ditch the high school team all together, and now this year all the competitive skiers at our club will be only racing and training with our club.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Sounds like a lot of racing to me. How many of those 19 races would be 'important' or count towards overall titles/team trophies/qualifiers/etc??? With that many races you would rarely have time to train during the winter, just race and recover from the races and go on to the next race. And adding additional club races to the mix would even make that more complicated to schedule. Too bad the High School and Club circuits don't work a little better together so they compliment each other instead of competing for many of the same skiers.
Posted 2 years ago # -
In general, high school sports, and the associated governing bodies do not play well with independent clubs, so unfortunately trying to mesh the two can be extremely difficult.
I think triguy's point about having time to train is a very good one. When I was in high school, we basically raced ourselves into shape, racing 2-3 times per week. I don't think this is generally the way to go. However, I do feel getting plenty of starts for junior skiers is important. If you want to learn to race fast, you need to race a lot. This allows you to get comfortable with not only the races, but all of the associated logistics, including travel, waxing, warm-ups, warm-downs, etc...
Athletes should become comfortable with the idea of racing.
One approach would be to plan out all the important races, and then see where there are holes. Fill those in with other events, being sure to leave some significant stretches for good training.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Dvoisin - I can state from experiences as a coach and parent of a junior racer that > 2 races a week is not a good thing. If your juniors are like the ones I know (full course load, extra-curricular clubs and an instrument as well) then that type of race schedule is unreasonable, unbalanced and wears on the racer and the family's fabric. Your story is my story...and these races never seem to be right around the corner from home. Galloway advocates one day of rest for every hard day of running; I've never seen any sort of metric like that for developing juniors. Personally, my racer breaks down and gets sick when he attempts it, and we have solved that problem by helping him pick the events that are most important to the team and to him. Hope this helps.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I found that racing 2 10-15k Eastern Cups and 1 5-7k HS race per week was not too much. I was generally able to keep my level of energy high throughout the season and keep the rest of my life together. My training volume during the year was very low, and I did little intensity other than racing. Maybe one set of short hard intervals per week in addition to racing, and most days were around just 1-1.5 hours of skiing, usually at very low intensities.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Lsiebert I think illustrates what happens when all you do is racing. The in between workouts are just recovery skis, hard to get much training in.
At the World Cup level it takes many years for most skiers to get to the point that they can race consitently fast throughout the season. Usually this has a lot to do with how much training they can handle in between races. They are racing 20-40 times a winter and with the added travel between race venues it is really hard to get in good solid training. After a number of years building up to that level many can get in the 15hrs a week of training as well as the hard races mid-week or on the weekends. For juniors that don't have that multi-year base, the racing season can end up being a de-training phase if all they do is racing. If they have that many races I would strongly suggest having some periods in the racing season of at least 2-3 weeks with no races to recover and get in some solid training without worrying about racing.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Me bad; in fact, Galloway states that is 1 day of rest or easy running for each mile raced, but triguy hints at same concept. You can't pull the trigger 3X/week for extended periods of time no matter what the sport is; and this is particularly true for young, developing bodies.
Posted 2 years ago # -
hey dvoisin and others...
my first year as a J2, i did close to 40 races, trying to balance eastern cups, high school, j2's and easterns. no one told me this was to many and it think its safe to say i'd burned out by the middle of that january... last winter i was a little smarter, but the requirements from my high school coach still imposed on my goals in eastern cups. (Dvoisin....i'm pretty sure this high school coach is the same one you're working with) long story short, over racing was a big factor in my decision to transfer to a ski school. obviously a difficult and very costly decision. i've heard 16 - 18 races a season is a good target for high school aged skiiers, obviously the high school schedule on its own doesnt stay within these limits. i hope you guys can find a balance that i never did.Posted 2 years ago # -
Bozikovina, Sorry to hear about your high school experience. I am not positive that we're talking about the same program, but I can say that they HS team that I have closest contact with is lead by a dedicated, thoughtful coach who has volunteered time over the summer to attend nearly every one of our club team practices to lend credit to our fledgling program. We'll be working together this winter picking which races to attend for the skiers, while skipping the conflicting HS meet, particularly in the inter school invitationals. We may still have skiers that get close to 25 races for the season, but hopefully, we can stay in close enough contact with the skiers to know when we need to pull them back. It will certainly be a challenging balancing act.
Posted 2 years ago #
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