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Scott Simmons and Will Freeman have published Take the Lead: A Revolutionary Approach to Coaching Cross Country. The book critically examines concepts like peaking and base building and provides insights into developing a championship team, and having it perform its best at the championship race.
Both coaches speak from a rich history of championship success with Simmons, now at Virginia Intermont College, winning the last four NAIA national crowns and with Freeman’s Grinnell squads winning 19 of the past 20 Midwest Conference titles.
The book has received acclaim from around the world. Joseph Chesire, coach of five-time World Cross Country champion Paul Tergat, says, "This is a book young coaches cannot afford to put aside." USA Track & Field president Bill Roe observes that the book "presents a cohesive whole with much for any coach to read with enthusiasm." Legendary high school coach Joe Newton remarks, "I recommend this book as required reading by all coaches… it moved me deeply."
The book contains a forward by chasingtradition.com’s Matt Taylor as well as a prelude by Joe Newton. It can purchased online at www.mountainhighrunning.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
SCOTT SIMMONS is a five-time NAIA National Coach of the Year and was selected twice as a U.S. national team coach. Simmons-coached teams have won four-straight NAIA national titles. He recently coached Fernando Cabada to break Ed Eyestone’s US 25k record.
WILL FREEMAN has been called a "Teacher of Coaches." A former chair of the coaching education program with USATF, he coaches at Grinnell College where his cross country teams have won 19 of the past 20 Midwest Conference titles.
[Press release submitted by outside source. EliteRunning.com is not responsible for the content.]
Posted by Alison Wade at 12:11 p.m. | Tags: Press Releases, Book Reviews | Comments (5)
Seen from the world of today's track and field, Bill Bowerman appears larger than life. As a coach at the University of Oregon, he is associated with names like Henry Marsh, Mac Wilkins, Steve Prefontaine, Harry Jerome, Bill Dellinger, and Otis Davis. He was the head track coach of the U.S. Olympic team in 1972, holding the team together through the hostage crisis there. He played a role in shaking the sport of track and field loose from the AAU and their perpetual power struggles with the NCAA. By carefully studying advances made by colleagues around the world, like his longtime friend Arthur Lydiard, he popularized many of the advances made in the science of training for his sport. He is credited, due to his massively popular book Jogging, with bringing the popular running boom to the United States. And his experiments in better footwear for his athletes, combined with the entreprenurial spirit of one of those athletes, led to the creation of Nike, Inc.
The common thread running through all these stories is the athletes, who he named in his traditional fall season-opening speech as "Men of Oregon." Author Kenny Moore was one of these athletes, a national champion at several distances and a two-time Olympic marathoner who finished fourth in the 1972 Munich Games. Moore tells Bowerman's story from inside and out, working from the extensive primary materials collected by Bowerman's wife, Barbara, as well as his own interviews with dozens of the Men of Oregon. Bowerman's story is theirs, and in Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, Moore gives Davis, Jerome, Dyrol Burleson, and Jim Grelle, among others, their due.
As such, the book spans a wider chunk of history than most track books. Bowerman's stories overlap those told in books by (or about) Peter Snell, George Young, Prefontaine, and Bob Schul, but told from this different perspective, new details are revealed and depth added to the characters.
Moore clearly holds respect passing into adulation for his former coach, but he is not afraid to show the jams Bowerman's strong personality led him into. For example, Moore tells of the split between Bowerman and his protege and Oregon successor, Bill Dellinger, which began immediately after Prefontaine's death and lasted nearly a decade. He details the story of Jere Van Dyk, a talented miler who never really connected with Bowerman despite years of effort. He also shows Bowerman's less-well-known triumphs, particularly his role in the 1968 Olympic team's discussions about civil rights and a potential boycott of African-American athletes, a movement which eventually involved Tommie Smith and John Carlos' protest on the Mexico City medal stand.
Moore's perspective as an insider is sometimes comic, as when he tells regularly of the people (including himself) who declined Bowerman's offers to invest in Blue Ribbon Sports, the new company launched by former miler Phil "Buck" Knight. When the company went public as Nike, Moore writes:
[Bowerman] appeared at my front door with a briefcase and a printout showing that $1,000 invested back in 1966, when I had had my chance, would be worth $750,000 now. This rendered me speechless.
"But," he said, "you must always know that as long as I'm with the company, there will be these for you." He whipped out a box of Cortezes.
The Cortez was based on training shoes Bowerman had designed to allow Moore to train without stress fractures, and the author found Bowerman's gesture quite revealing: "We'd made our choices and we'd lived with them happily, but wasn't it a kick to tease the other about what might have been?"
Perhaps, late in the book, there is too much of what might have been about Bowerman's life—the lost potential of Prefontaine, the rift with Dellinger, and Bowerman's ongoing frustration with the massive marketing machine Nike had become. But in the end, it's clear that Bowerman's life was unquestionably a story, and Moore the one to tell it.
Moore, Kenny. Bowerman and the Men of Oregon. Rodale, Inc. 2006.
Posted by Parker Morse at 2:21 p.m. | Tags: Book Reviews | Comments (1)