 Hello, my name is Parker Wydenode, and I'm the guest host of Community Matters. For this episode, we're going to be talking about the benefits of being an athletic coach. So my guest here today is Coach Rick Hendricks of Mid-Pacific Institute, Track and Field and Cross Country. Thanks for being here. Good afternoon. Glad to be here. Thanks. So you've done, like, a lot of running in your time. So what is the best parts of being a coach at Mid-Pacific? Oh, I believe it's just being with the kids and watching them progress from the beginning of the season to the end of the season. It doesn't matter the ability of the athlete, it's just seeing the progression of making sure they do better from the beginning of the season to the end of the season. There's always going to be good athletes, but the majority of the athletes are average, so it's just good to see the progression and see them improve throughout the season. What qualities, so you mentioned, like, seeing everybody progress. What qualities do Mid-Pacific and other coaches look for in an upcoming coach? Basically it's just the attitude and the dedication that the athlete puts into it. As a coach, we can only tell the athlete what type of workout to do, but it's up to the athlete themselves to do the workout and put in the effort of it. So it's basically just showing them the way and then having the athlete do it. Yeah. So back when you were running, Cross Country and Track, I believe, I was just interested, did you draw any inspiration from your coach? Basically it was a lot of, I grew up in a real small town, so a town of 10,000. So it was basically, I played all sports and in high school, actually I started running when I was in intermediate school in seventh grade and it was just more of a social aspect back then and then as I progressed older, I got more interested in the competitive part of it. But actually in high school I didn't really run Cross Country. I played football in the fall and then basketball in the winter and then I ran Track and Field in the spring and throughout the summer, being a small town, I'd play golf and I'd play tennis and I'd play baseball but it was just the little things that my coaches told me to do and to strive to be better. So I couldn't help but notice that you played, I heard that you played basketball and tennis. So how did that running become your main sport? Just something that when I was in high school I was good at so I stuck with it but when I was a freshman, actually when I was a sophomore I played all three sports. I played football, basketball and Track and then when I became a junior I felt like I wasn't the athlete I should have been for running Track so I kind of dropped basketball in the winter. I played football and then I started competing for Track in the winter so there were some races that I'd go to indoors and I'd run indoor Track in the winter to get ready for the spring sports and that was Track. So just out of curiosity, when you were running Track what events did you do? I ran in intermediate school, back then it was yards, it wasn't meters back when I was running so it was yards so when I was in intermediate school it was a 600, the furthest we could run when we were in intermediate school, they didn't have longer races and then when I got into high school I ran the 880 which is equivalent to an 800 meter run round and then I ran the 400, I ran the 4x440 yard relay in high school. That's neat so we actually have some pictures of that and maybe you could elaborate on it. So what races is this? This is one of the races we hosted Invitational and this is, I believe when I was a junior and this was one of my better races and if you notice it's a Cinder Track. We barely ran on any type of hard surfaces and we had to wear really long cleats back then and running shoes back there in a really crude compared to what they are now but this was one of my better races I believe I ran around two minutes in this race for the 880 and it's pretty, I like this picture because it's like all the timers are really concentrating on getting my time and the boy holding the tape is really concentrating on holding it to watch me finish but that's a picture that I really like. That's awesome. It's crazy because how you came from going from there and now seeing how Track has evolved and how the shoes, so what are your thoughts on that? The technology is so much different now but back then it was basically just go out and run. I mean the coach would give me a workout and I'd do it but now there's so much more technology involved in doing the individual sports and it's a lot more technical now than it was back when I was running in high school. Do you think that the technology helped or hurt the sport of running? It definitely helped it but I mean back then I was running two minute half miles and under two minutes and right now there's athletes in Hawaii that are running basically that amount so it really hasn't changed that much as far as times but the athletes are so much more in tune to lifting weights to get stronger in their upper body. Back then it was mainly just working on running but now technology is building up your whole body to make you be stronger. So if there's any athletes watching over here and they're wondering how do you come up with the workouts, how do you make them? It's usually a hard, easy, hard, easy type workout. Mondays could be really hard and then you want to rest the body the next day so you might do a real easy workout or even like a cross training and then hit a Wednesday and do a harder workout and then just tax the body and then Thursday easy workout maybe cross training maybe have the athlete do a bicycle workout or even do weights on Thursday and then back to Friday do a hard workout and then easy on Saturday and then do a really long easy run on Sunday. It's just a matter of you got to rest your body you've got to do a hard workout but you have to rest your body. Is that some of the mistakes that sometimes you find even in pro coaching? Oh yeah definitely I mean there's athletes that try and push themselves too hard and it's just a matter of getting injured just pushing too hard. You just got to listen to your body and if it's saying you know I'm just tired today there's no reason just to back off and take it easy that day. Yeah and many people kind of get confused of that being like according to like laziness and all that but sometimes like and I found this out kind of the hard way because now like Coach John and you are trying to like make me have less smiles that I'm putting in a week so I've been trying my best to do that like I didn't run yesterday but yeah I noticed a major like like I noticed like performance wise that I was getting better in like time trials and stuff so yeah I think that I really benefit from like resting and stuff. Especially just before races if you take like a do an easy run two days before the race and then just maybe take the day off the day before the race your body just replenishes and if you eat well and you go into the race your body's all refreshed and you run your better times when your body's refreshed. So yeah so about also eating well like for people my age that don't because we have pretty high metabolism and I still try to eat pretty well because I don't restrict calories anything how do you think nutrition wise like how we should watch our nutrition. Well basically it's it's you just got to watch what you eat as far I mean vegetables is good fruits are really good to stay away from sodas and bread and rice and just eat a lot of carbs Italian food is good I mean spaghetti carb carbohydrates is really good to hydrate but the main thing is is hydrating your body make sure that you drink a lot of water especially in Hawaii where it's really hot and you're out in the sun running at three four in the afternoon you just need to replenish your body with you know hydrate we I just constantly tell my athletes you got to hydrate you got to drink water because I've seen too many cases where kids are athletes of a run and they get dehydrated and no matter how much you tell them to drink they just for some reason skip it and it shows sometimes they just you know get dehydrated yeah and I I think it really you get like I don't know about you but like it really benefited me when I actually started writing down like workouts and nutrition wise so that way I could say oh like what am I eating and like having like for me personally like having a little bit is not that bad because if you write it down you should say okay maybe I need a little bit grams of like saturated fat and all that yeah and I think keeping a notebook is good so do you like encourage that oh yeah definitely writing down what you eat the mileage that you run every day keeping a record of of of that really helps you can just you can just see and then you can look back and see how your performances are after you you know maybe there's something you can tweak and improve on or some or you can eat something different and maybe that'll look that'll change your change your performance but keeping a record of it is definitely a big plus yeah well okay so this is um I'm like back also when you were in like in collegiate running because I know that you ran for a college right what were like the big moments in your career well right out of high school it was it was fun because I was being recruited by University of New Mexico and Texas El Paso and the local school in my town Western New Mexico and then I also was recruited by a junior college in Arizona Central Arizona and I ended up going to Central Arizona my first year and the coach was George Young who was an Olympian he ran the steeple chase in the late 60s and they ran the marathon in the late or the early 70s so he was a bit influenced my life in my early collegiate career and then I transferred to Western New Mexico which is in Silver City New Mexico so I finished my collegiate career there and it was just really really neat to do a lot of traveling to go to different places different colleges and meeting different athletes on all types of levels but I think just the travel was a lot of fun in college I really enjoyed that yeah okay so we're going to take a short break and then we'll dive more into coaching itself okay Aloha and Richard Concepcion the host of Hispanic Hawaii you can watch my 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energy man and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii Aloha and we are back with community matters I'm here with my coach coach Rick Hendricks and now we're going to be talking more about coaching itself so the first one I want to really like ask you is what are the difference between coaching cross-country and coaching track cross-country is more just running I mean cross-country you just have to go out and get the mileage in there will be days where we do some track work like 800s to work on more speed work but most the workouts are basically running mileage anywhere from two miles up to six or eight miles once the athlete can do that whereas on track it's more refined so track you have shorter distances whereas cross-country is a two to three mile race track is more specified anywhere from well you've got your sprinters and then your distance middle distance which is 800 and then your your more distance being 15 and 3000 so those are a lot shorter distances in cross-country so you do a lot more speed work for for track so that involves more of a track workout whereas cross-country doesn't so cross-country can I just go out and run on the road and just run run run a track is more specific just more speed work on the track okay so why why do you think that there isn't a 5000 meter and 10,000 meter on the track um well college has it but not in high school and I think it it's more of a development issue for high school uh athletes um I believe they just and time too it's a lot of time consuming you know people complain about running a 3000 a lot of coaches complain or the the parents complain about 3000 because it just takes so long and they can't imagine having a five or a 10,000 which would just you know really take a long time and attract me but it's a lot of it is is time also you only have a specific amount of time that you can hold the meat yeah what are your um biggest goals for this year in terms of um coaching wise again I go back to just making sure that the uh the athletes uh progress throughout the year um and do better um a lot of times a lot of the the athletes are in it for social aspects of it and then there's athletes like you who want to compete and really do good in competition so it's it's a matter of just you have to kind of just uh look at the athlete and see what their needs are and you know which ones to push harder and which ones to kind of back off on and uh you know if they're more social aspects of it you don't push them as hard but you want to the athletes that you're not know are going to compete really well you just you you just push them harder to to improve and do really well in the in their competition especially towards the end towards uh the the conference and the the states well I I really like also the um the social aspect too because I got to meet a lot of um people that actually inspired me to like do the sport more like Charlie and like Dane and Matt guys and I think that's like really cool that if it weren't for the sport I want to have known them so that's that's a pretty um big thing and I'm so happy that I got the opportunity plus you meet plus you meet a lot of the athletes from other schools and you kind of become bonding with them too because especially when you're in a 3000 it's it or or cross country all of you're just putting so much effort into it and you know how much effort you put into it and they're putting as much effort into it as as you are so it's kind of like a special bond that you all have together that you're running together and putting in that time together and working it so you know how hard they're working and they know how hard you're working so it's kind of a bond bond for all of you pushing each other yeah what and I don't really notice like you get frustrated but I'm just curious because you're really good what is like the most frustrating part as a coach in terms um just seeing if an athlete um can do better and they they don't um just kind of cruising along um that that's kind of just disappointing because you want them to to put in the effort and we as coaches um you know it's it's more a level of the sport we're not in in it for the money we we're in for the basically the athletes and so we we just want to we don't want our our efforts to go waste to go to waste we want to see the kids improve so we just it it's just kind of frustrating to see sometimes somebody that's just kind of dogging it yeah that's that's the most frustrating part about it so what what are your thoughts like about like new athletes coming in and how do you think that will affect the team when I'm like in varsity and stuff or even graduated like how do you feel about like new people from other schools like coming to mid-pat well I think it'd be when I first started in mid-pacific the the program was just starting to to jail I mean we didn't have that many athletes that came out and it's it's good now that to see the numbers that we get out for cross country I believe last year we had 80 athletes uh we we go from we coach from seventh grade up to to twelfth grade so it's fun to see that the the intermediate athletes get to run with the the junior and the the varsity athletes because they can kind of kind of can look up to them and see how hard they work but um it it's always good to have numbers um because you you never know there there there'll be somebody that comes in that you weren't expecting to do really well you know you might project the year before oh yeah this athlete's going to do really good and this athlete's going to do really good but that one special person that comes in and just really shines that's a big bonus yeah um like yeah it's pretty like cool that like some other people that like like you think that they're not going to be good just because they even height wise end up being being like really good because one thing that I learned is that it doesn't matter about the height it just matters like the time and effort you put into it oh definitely no it doesn't matter what size you are when you're running you know you can be four ten and and run as good as somebody actually it might be a big benefit to be a smaller smaller person in a large one but I I know larger runners have a better stride but yet a smaller person can have the turnover with their legs and and be really good at it so there there's a lot of people going to be like watching this on youtube and I know that like most some people and I mentioned this also on my instagram which has all kinds of runners and some don't even come out for track because they're like I'm not interested but then but then they do like small road races and they end up getting like phenomenal times so what would you say to them to encourage them to come out well it's basically it's not only individual sport but it's a it's a team sport so it's good for the athletes to come out and and be involved in a team sport and be around your other fellow athletes um and you you can learn from them and then it's it's like I said it's a good social sport too not only especially like before practice you can you can have us all get together and talk around and then once you're into the workout kind of push each other and then afterwards you do your cool down and you kind of kind of that's another social aspect about it just being around your other athletes and having fun with that yeah okay so I have a quick question if we can pull the picture out okay um so I so there you are um what was it's the Maui Marathon yeah this was 1986 so um when I got out of college I I kind of quit running for a while um I was in my early 20s and I kind of concentrated on just working and then in my late 20s I got back into running and I had to kind of adjust to more longer distances um of course they didn't have really competition for the shorter distance like the the 800s so I got into running road races and then I got interested in running marathons so um I ran living in Maui I lived there for 20 years so I basically ran Maui quite a bit um and then I do Honolulu also marathon but um it was a good way to just uh I I just like competing I mean that's why I ran um I didn't do it for social I was more competitive that I I'd like to win and I like to be in the top three oh no yeah what was your um marathon PR uh my best one was I never broke three hours I was right at three hours like three hours and 16 seconds oh wow yeah but I never broke that three hour barrier oh that's crazy and that wasn't in Honolulu Honolulu well it's gonna it's kind of hard all the hills in the Honolulu marathon um so so what are your thoughts on me doing the marathon uh in between cross country and track season is that something there is no problem with it all um it's good to keep up the running um now there would be a problem if you ran a marathon during the season because it's different training is different for a marathon and as it is uh for cross country you have to put a lot more mileage in for for a marathon and your body breaks down a lot more if you're training for a marathon whereas cross country you're more specific it's a shorter distance but running a marathon between seasons there's no problem with it at all just keep up the keep up the running and actually that you keep in shape for for track yeah and you start kind of after you run the marathon you kind of start uh declining on your your mileage for for track all right so i have my final question so we already asked like what are some of the um difficulties of being like like what are the some of the things you don't really like to see but like what are some of the things that like some of the joys that come from being a coach going to the meets and watching watching all the athletes compete and doing their best that you know that's the biggest joy in just watching them improve and um seeing that big smile on their on on the athlete's face when they finish you know that you know that's one of the best things that a coach can see is just seeing the athlete do well yeah well thank you so we're going to end it here thank you so much for um coming and doing the interview with me and if you want to um watch the episode it will be up at think text youtube channel and yeah thank you for watching