The Greatest Sport Ever · 20 May 2017
I only competed in the sport for one season (if you can call what I did more than thirty years ago competing) and have only coached it since 2010, but I must say that Track and Field is the greatest sport ever.
(Of course, I am biased. Track and Field (T&F) is the sport I am currently coaching. But there is more to my claim than just my own bias.)
If you think about it, T&F must be the ultimate athletic competition. After all, it is known as Athletics in the rest of the world. That must count for something. All the different athletic events – running, jumping, throwing – are pure athletics. Things that other athletes do as part of their sports, T&F athletes do as their sport.
But that is not why I contend that T&F is the greatest sport ever.
I contend that T&F or Athletics is the greatest sport ever purely from the coaching perspective. Where else but in T&F do you have coaches from competing teams give each other tips on what their athletes can do better? Even during competition! Where else can you get a five or ten minute clinic from another coach that has the potential to increase your athlete’s performance so that he or she might even beat the other coach’s athletes? Where else can you have another coach volunteer to come and give a two-hour clinic to your athletes to learn something at which he is an expert? Or where else can you tell your own athletes during a competition to listen to whatever another coach tells them because you need to go coach a different event? Only in Track and Field. Only in the greatest sport ever.
I have been the recipient of all those scenarios I just mentioned. I have had coaches tell me something that my athletes can do better during a competition. I have had short clinics with other coaches. I have had a coach come to our stadium to give my athletes a clinic on javelin technique. And I have told many athletes to listen to that same javelin coach when I have had to go coach another event.
Now, I must say that I was way out of my element when I first started coaching T&F. I had little knowledge of the events I coach so I went to clinics to learn. Those clinics where coaches can come together to learn from each other have been important, but those impromptu sessions at meets have been even more valuable to me. For learning teaching and coaching techniques, and for building relationships. And those relationships I have developed with other coaches amazes me each time I see them. They were all there to help me out in the beginning and they are still there to help me out now.
Relationships between athletes and great competition and skill development and all kinds of other factors are reasons why Athletics is the greatest sport, but those claims are best left to the experts. All I know is that T&F coaches want the best for all the athletes involved, not just their own. And that, in and of itself, is enough to support the claim that Track and Field (also known as Athletics) is the greatest sport ever.
© 2017 Michael T. Miyoshi
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