Today we chat with Bella Vista HS (SJS) coach Brett Sargent. In three years, Brett has turned Bella Vista from an average cross country program with 16 athletes to a team that now has both boys and girls qualified for this year's California State meet in Division II. His boys' team is currently ranked 10th Brett did not grow up running but instead delved in other sports so it's interesting to hear how he has evolved into a distance running coach.
1)
What sports did you participate in during your youth? Highlights?I
played football, basketball, and baseball through my youth years. The highlights include two trips to the
National tournament in basketball with a third place finish the summer before
my senior year. I played on a team with
the Mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson.
I also left my alma mater, Del Campo, being the third leading scorer in
the history of the school in basketball.
Needless to say, with the invention of the three point line I am no
longer number three… haha.
2) Who were your high school coaches and tell us a little about their
impact on you?
My
varsity basketball coach was also my Precalculus teacher my junior year and he
had a great influence on me. He was so
inspiring that I became a basketball coach and a math teacher, following in his
footsteps. My high school baseball coach
also had a great impact on me because he taught me the value of hard work and
that it would eventually pay off.
3) From your own experiences as an athlete, what do you feel you learned
then that help you as a coach today?I
learned that hard work and perseverance are the most important traits to
success. A little talent never hurt
either.. haha. I learned how to be a
leader by playing sports as a youngster.
There is no better way to learn how to lead than to play sports and be a
captain of a team. It taught me how to
get along with people and how to motivate people, which are key components to
being a good coach. From my days of
training in triathlon I learned that it is better to be 10% undertrained than
1% overtrained… that sometimes merely getting to the line for a race is better
than being injured and missing the race altogether. That was a hard lesson for me to learn... I
am a bit of a type A personality and I tended to overtrain. In coaching I tend to error on the cautious
side so that my runners will be lifelong runners and not just good high school
runners who burn out after they graduate.
4) What led you into teaching and coaching? What do you teach and
what sports have you coached?My
experiences in high school and college athletics led me into coaching. I started coaching my second year in college.
I coached high school basketball at the JV level at my alma mater, Del Campo. Over
the next five years I coached JV basketball, freshmen baseball, and Varsity
girls and boys volleyball. I eventually
moved to the community college level where I coached a men’s volleyball team at
American River College that finished third in the state in my second year at
the school. I “retired” from coaching
when my son was born in order to spend more time with my family. When my son turned six he started racing
triathlon and it was time to come out of “retirement” and coach again. Along with my close friend, Jack Powless, we
started the first kid’s triathlon team here in the Sacramento area. I have taught math for 22 years and have been
a math teacher at BV for 18 of those years.
I am also the co-department chair of the math department at BV. I am a math teacher first and a coach second…
most of the time…
5)
How did you get involved with the Bella Vista HS XC and track programs?When my
son entered BV as a freshman (2009) he was forced to make a decision between
running and playing soccer, and he chose to run. At that point I felt like I needed to get
involved in the program here at BV and try to make it the most positive
experience that I could for the runners in the program. There were 12 boys and 4 girls on the team
when I first got involved with the program, and my goal was to build as big and
as competitive of a program as I could.
We now have 35 boys and 20 girls on the team and we are hoping to grow
even more next year.
6)
From when you started coaching to now, who would you include on your list of
mentors?In my
30’s I started racing triathlon and was fortunate enough to meet some great
people who are experts in training. As I
mentioned before I spent a lot of time with Jack Powless who has competed in
fifteen or so Ironman triathlons. I also
had the privilege of training and racing with TBF (Total Body Fitness) owned by
Mark Shaw and Bill Driskill. I learned a
great deal about training and racing as well as cross training from these gurus
of the multi-sport world. When I got the
job at BV I was able to wrangle Harold Kuphaldt into helping me with the
program. He was a great runner here at
BV and at the University of Oregon. His
enthusiasm and positive energy helped me create a fun team atmosphere to build
the program. Two years ago I was lucky
enough to begin working with a new girls coach, Melanie Cleland. She came on board, and after a bit of an
adjustment period we have been able to work really well together. Melanie is a very accomplished runner in her
own right and is a master at writing training programs. She works really well with both the boys and
girls and has been an invaluable resource for me. I give her tons of credit for our success
this year!
7) What do you feel are your strengths as a coach?I
believe my strengths as a cross country coach are my organization and willingness
to learn at all times. I pride myself on
having our program run as smoothly as possible.
I send out many (too many some of our parents would say) emails with
information on all things cross country.
We have a great team camp in the summer that I am in charge of, and our
annual trip to Southern California also falls on my shoulders to organize. My second strength as a coach is that I am
always looking for a better way to do things to make my program a better place
for the runners. I recently spent an
hour or so talking with the Woodcreek coach (Terri) about how they have built
such a strong team, and came away with some great ideas about some changes I
can make in my own program to encourage success in my runners. Whether it be teaching math or coaching cross
country, I am always looking for a better way to make my runners/students more
successful.
8) Your boys won the Division II Stanford race while your girls finished
in 2nd place in their race. What do you feel have been the keys to
getting your teams to compete at this high level?We are
lucky here at BV to have a great situation where we have 8 varsity runners who
all have similar ability at the top level of our team. These kids have been training together for
three years now, and run every day together as a unit. It’s much easier to push yourself if you have
people around you that you have to keep up with. The girls team has a similar situation with 5
of the varsity girls running together for the past three years. We train the boys and girls teams together to
utilize the number of runners we have been able to bring onto the team. That, paired with the great workouts that
Coach Cleland devises has helped make us a much better team in the last two
years.
9) What are your summer expectations for your runners? We
expect our runners to run on their own in June.
When we start in July we expect everyone to make practices and run with
the team. We are very conservative with
our mileage because we are still building the program. If you look at our top seven runners they
average about 125 pounds (soaking wet) so we are more concerned about injury
than we might be if our runners were 150-160 pound kids. We averaged about 50
miles a week in our larger volume weeks this summer. We also try to get as many of the kids to go
to camp as possible. Team camp is a
blast and allows the coaches to bond with the kids and the kids to bond with
each other. The camp has grown “exponentially”
over the past three years. We had 23
runners the first year I took over the camp, 33 the next, and 44 runners last
summer.
10) What does a typical week look like for your team (with a mid-week
league race)? (with a Saturday Invitational)?
We
usually have two hard workouts during the week with a Saturday race. Usually Monday is a strength workout
involving hills and/or longer intervals.
The second hard workout is a shorter, faster interval workout to build
speed. These workouts vary depending on
the time in the season but follow this pattern later in the year. We also try to get in a long run sometime
during the week. If we have a mid-week
race we count that as our strength workout and have only one interval workout
that week. Pretty conservative by most
coaches standards, but it has seemed to work for us. We are hoping our kids will peak in college
and not be “tapped out” by the end of their high school career.
11) Tell us a little about your experiences racing triathlon as well as your
son's experience in the sport. As I
said before, I started racing triathlon in my early 30’s. I wasn’t coaching but still had the desire to
compete. I swam competitively as a kid,
and was riding my bike a lot so triathlon seemed the most natural choice for
competition. I completed many triathlons
with my longest being a Half Ironman.
After following me around and watching me race my son thought he would
like to try one. At the age of six Brynn
raced his first triathlon. It was
hysterical to watch him swim one length of a pool, ride one mile, and run
around the track one time for the total length of a triathlon! At age seven, Brynn won the Ironkids National
Championship and we realized that he might be pretty good at this. We spent six more years traveling around the
country watching him race triathlon. It
was a great time… and we were able to see the country!
12) Anything else you would like to add.Thanks
so much for allowing me this opportunity to introduce everyone to our
program. We are proud of what we have
built here at BV. A special thanks to
the awesome parents that have supported our program and allow the coaches to
work with their kids. We have a great group
of parents here at BV!
Thank you very much for your time Brett! AJC