This past Tuesday, I received news that would dramatically alter the next four years of my college running career. At four o'clock, the time we always begin practice, we were called into a conference room with all of our coaches and the athletic directors. As we sat around a large table as a team, we were told that our head coach was asked to immediately resign from his position. This came as a shock to all of us. I was not too fond of him, and I knew the he was on thin ice with the administration as well. However, I thought that if they did decide to let him go it would not be until the end of the season. Suddenly, the distance runners on the team were stuck without a coach, three weeks before our conference championship meet.

Whenever you tell an outsider that your coach was fired in middle of the season, they are almost always expecting some big scandal to surface. In this case, there was no scandal. I will spare you all of the details, but our coach was simply not performing his duties. Trips to meets were unorganized, no recruiting was done, training was ineffective, and athletes were repeatedly disrespected. I agreed with the administration's decision to let him go. His resignation will be better for the team in the long run. But, in the present, the distance runners have definitely been placed in a less than ideal situation.

The role of a coach for any team is vital. Without a team, the group lacks structure. Even a subpar coach offers a sense of unity and authority to a team. When our head coach was here, we may not have agreed on everything he had us do, but at least we knew what we were to do.

As I sat down with my teammates at dinner on the evening of our coach's resignation, we discussed the challenges that lay ahead of us. The throws coach was to take over as acting head coach, and the sprinting and jumping coaches would be helping us to create our workouts. We all agreed that although we were stressed, the coaches were most definitely put in an even more taxing situation than we were. We knew that our assistant coaches were great people who genuinely cared about our success. Some of the workouts they were going to run us through were going to be quite different from what we were used to. They may have different techniques to coaching, and they may require different things from us. However, we had to respect them. This would be very important to our success as a team.

We also decided that we would have to support each other, now more than ever before. Some people were definitely going to struggle with the adjustment, as change is always difficult. The seniors on the team would have to act as role models for the younger runners, such as myself.

People were going to doubt us; especially the other teams in our conference come championships. We all agreed that this year we had something to prove. It was not the time to give up. We had to keep training hard, and keep believing that all the work we had put in over the last year was worth it.

This situation has been a bump in the road that I have had to overcome. In the end, I think it will make me a stronger person and a better teammate. It has forced me to believe in myself and my teammates. I am truly looking forward to our conference championships in two weeks. I know that every single athlete on our team will strive to do their absolute best, as we all want to show the other teams that we are great athletes, even without a head coach. I know that this conference championship will be a meet that I will never forget. Other teams may doubt us, but we are not letting that bring us down as a team. We just say, "Bring it on."