Early on in my Track Coaching career, you can probably assume looking through my social media profiles that I was a throwing coach. Well, in my fourth year of coaching track, I was thrown into coaching sprints and relays. Which I thought would be a great experience because growing up I always wanted to be the "fast" kid on the team, and maybe even self-proclaimed myself as the "Pound for Pound Fastest Athlete in the State of Montana in 2009". Don't fact-check that claim! Without a ton of experience coaching sprinting though, I started off training my athletes "the old fashion way".
Most practices during the season were a grind! I would put them through workouts that I remembered watching sprint athletes do when I was in high school track, and I would yell things at them like, "Push Past the Pain" and "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". Even though I never knew how those sprinting workouts felt because I was always throwing the shot put and eating candy bars at track practice in high school. Then after a few seasons of this strategy, I was sitting there wondering why we didn't have a lot of sprinting kids come out for our track team. At the time, I used the excuse that all the kids were weak and soft and didn't want to work hard, not thinking at all that the way I was training my athletes was the problem. Then in the winter of 2022, it was announced that High School Baseball in Montana was going to start in the spring of 2023, and I knew that if I wanted the best athletes in our school to pick Track over Baseball I was going to have to find a new way to coach track!
A quick dive into researching new ways to coach sprinting in track & field led me to one man, Tony Holler, and his Feed the Cats program. I loved everything about his program and methods but was too nervous that spring to implement it into my Track Team because of the fear of the judgment I would get for trying something new. So for the next year, I took a deep dive into Tony's Feed the Cats Program and learned as much as I could on training sprinters in track. Then in the spring of 2023, my track team was a full Feed the Cats track team. It was easily the best year of coaching track I have been a part of. Our athletes loved the new way of training we were doing, we had minimal injuries in that season, and our boy's 4x4 Relay finished Top 10 at the state track meet. Which is a team that was never in the Top 20 in previous years. With Tony's Record, Rank, and Publish method, I created the page, "Big Cat Coaching" (Which would later change to Big Cat Training) to record our progress and to share Tony's methods throughout the state of Montana.
That track season was bittersweet for me because even though I was excited that Big Cat Coaching was doing so well. I knew that I was moving on from that school and probably wasn't going to have the opportunity to be a sprint coach in Track at the new school I was moving to. So my next challenge was to find a way to keep the Big Cat Coaching movement going!