I recently ran into one of my former athletes, Mara White, as she is now an assistant track coach for Dublin Scioto.  Mara is a former Ohio High school First Team All-State and Division 1 collegiate track and field athlete.

I asked her if she wouldn’t mind writing something about her athletic career for my blog because it is always good to get an athlete’s perspective when you can.  She agreed and this post is what she brought to me.  I gave her no prompts this is what she came back with.  

This post is so good (and long), that I’m going to divide it into three parts.  So today and the following two Monday’s will be Mara’s account of her athletic career and how that has impacted her being a coach.  This is a GREAT READ!!

To preface, my name is Mara White, I was an athlete at the Fitness Planning Consultants Inc. from about the age of 12, all through my high school career, and into my time as a D1 collegiate track and field athlete.  During the years I was trained by Adam and his team I won the OCC capital division 1600m run all four years, was first team All-State 4 or 5 times, broke several school records, but ended my career burned out, injured and with goals left that I should have achieved but couldn’t.

Before I sort of unexpectedly stumbled upon my distance running potential in the fall of my freshman year of high school, I had a pretty serious love for the game of basketball.  My desire to become a stronger and faster shooting guard is what originally led me to Fitness Planning Consultants as a middle school athlete.

At this point I had split my efforts between both basketball and distance running.  But much to everyone’s surprise in my first year of high school cross-country I won an individual district championship and qualified for the state championships.  To put it all in perspective though, as a 14-year-old high school freshman I weighed a whopping 70lbs and didn’t even crack 5 foot yet.

Mara white standing on podium.

Because of my size the logical thing to do was to give up the basketball dream and focus my efforts on distance running.  Which is exactly what I did, and I proceeded to take up indoor track in lieu of school basketball and outdoor track replaced AAU ball in the spring.  

In hindsight regardless of my basketball potential (or seemingly lack thereof) it was a bad, bad idea.  There’s a mounting pressure on young athletes to pick a sport and devote the whole year to only that sport.  Whether it’s baseball, soccer, football, etc.

Sometimes young athletes are guilted in to specializing by a coach.  Sometimes the potentiality of a college scholarship in one sport is enough to make them give up another.  Everyone wants to win all year long and it seems a necessity to devote all your time to one sport just to keep up.

By the time kids reach 14 the reality that they’re competing for their futures, and not just that weekend’s win, is quite real.  For many reasons kids don’t get to just play sports anymore, in the most honest sense of the word play.

Now in my first year as a retired collegiate track/cross-country athlete I have found myself on the other side of it all.  I am the current girl’s distance track coach at Dublin Scioto High School and I’m using my learned experiences as an athlete to make sure the same mistakes aren’t made with my girls.

In the next few paragraphs I’m going to lay out an argument for why we absolutely have to stop specializing our kids at 13, 14, 15 and even 16 years old for the sake of wins, scholarships, the team, whatever justification some coach is giving you, if we truly want our most talented high school athletes to reach their full potential.

Stay tuned for part 2 next week.

This is a guest post by Mara White, distance track coach at Dublin Scioto High School.

Photo courtesy of Steven Pisano on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenpisano/