Mount Greylock Students Coach 'Little Kids Track' Program
The workshops are run by high school student-athletes.
But there is feeding involved.
"Julie feeds them. Eight times a month, she feeds 50 people," Gill said.
Julie is Julie Gill, the coach's wife. "They" are the dozens of Mount Greylock student-athletes who commit to coaching the next generation of runners, jumpers and throwers two nights per week each May.
"They go to school all day, then go to track practice, they come to our house to eat, and then they're out here until 8:30, and then they go home and do homework," Brian Gill said. "It's amazing. I don't know how we got so lucky.
"These kids are excited about doing it."
Mounties senior Cameron Castonguay has been doing it for four years, and he said the program — called "LKT" for "Little Kids Track" by the Mount Greylock team — is not work.
"It's really fun watching a lot of these kids grow," Castonguay said while on a break from raking the long jump pit on Williams College's Lee Track. "Over the years, mostly I've done long jump [at the clinics]. I've done other things, too, but mostly I've been here.
"Every year, they come back, and they always remember something. And there's always an improvement, whether it's just because they're getting older or because we've helped them some way. It's always awesome to see them grow."
LKT was founded by Coty Pinkney, who passed the baton along to Kris Kirby who, about six years ago, turned it over to the Gills.
"When we inherited the program, they had parents doing it," Julie Gill said. "We thought it would be a great opportunity for community service for the Mount Greylock students. A lot of these seniors have been doing it for six years.
"The high school kids love the little kids. You'll see them usually when they're bringing their group from station to station giving the kids piggy-back rides."
Sure enough, there were plenty of examples of Mount Greylock students getting extra workouts by providing transportation to their younger counterparts as they moved from event to event.
Over the course of the evening, more than 100 youngsters circulate through track and field events — with age appropriate equipment. The Mount Greylock students keep things organized, provide advice, occasionally run next to the youngsters on the track and keep records of times and marks.
"The very first time we meet each spring, we talk to our kids about how to coach, about giving the kids constructive criticism," Brian Gill said. "Kids' times and distances are recorded, and they're encouraged to keep them and see how they improve from year to year."
And year after year the same high school students return to participate in a program which, Gill notes, helps create family atmosphere in the Mount Greylock program and remind its students that sports are about more than just winning meets and medals.
The Mounties also get a little taste of what it's like on the other side of the coach's whistle.
"I think far down the road, once I've gotten settled in, I'd consider coaching because I've always loved trying to teach someone something new," said Castonguay, who is attending Northeastern in the fall. "It's really cool to try to talk someone through something — even my own teammates, when I try to help them learn something I just learned."
It's also cool to help pass along a love of track and field to an eager crop of learners.
"I think a lot of these kids, even if they don't do track later on, they're going to be better athletes because of it," Castonguay said.
"These kids are always excited. They never sit down and say, ‘I don't want to do anything.' They're always down to do something more. If they just ran 800 meters, they're ready to go another 400.
"That kind of liveliness and wanting to learn something new is always fun to see."
Tags: track & field, youth sports,
