#34: Gill1918 presents Jeff Ondo "How to Coach HJ at Meets"

Jeff presents another podcast that goes over how to coach high jump at meets. Covers things like how to warm up properly, pick starting heights, create and use effective cues, handle athletes in running events while jumping, and keeping track of misses.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the Gill 1918 Project, a podcast series by
coaches, for coaches powered by Gill Athletics.
Think of this as the Ted Talks of track and field coaching.
Short, insightful, and packed with valuable strategies to help
you grow as a coach. We'll bring in the once a year
track clinic straight to your ears daily.
Interested in creating your own episode?
Everyone's welcome to participate.

(00:21):
Check out the show notes below For more information.
Now let's get into today's topic.
Hi everyone, my name's Jeff Ondo.
I'm the head boys track coach atMidview High School.
I'm also the owner of 0 Gravity Performance, which is my private
coaching business where we specialize in the jumping and
sprinting events. Before I get started with my

(00:43):
topic for the day, I want to give a big thanks to Mike and
the team at Gill Athletics for giving coaches like myself a
platform to share ideas and helpgrow the sport.
What I'm going to go over today is how to effectively coach the
high jump at a meet, go over things like how to warm up
properly, what heights you should be starting at depending

(01:05):
on your athletes, what you should be giving your athletes
as far as coaching advice in themeet and not over coaching them,
and some other things that I think will help you be a better
coach. The first thing we'll start with
is the warm up, which is an areaI see a lot of people mess up by

(01:25):
doing way, way, way too much. So the warm up itself is I break
it down into two sections. So you have your dynamics, which
could be any dynamic movements you do if you like to jog before
Sprint, drill, stuff like that to get your body primed.
But where the mistakes mostly happen is when the athletes

(01:46):
actually spiked up. So once you get spikes on, you
need to do 2 approaches with no bar bungee, and then one to two
jumps with a bar bungee at an appropriate height.
And that's it. There's no prizes for winning
warmups. You're not going to reinvent the
wheel with your jump right before in the meat starts.

(02:08):
You just need to get some approaches that feel good.
One to two jumps at an appropriate height.
Don't be afraid to move the bar or bungee around in warmups.
You're allowed to do that if youhave a talented athlete.
They don't need to be jumping over a starting height bungee
that's probably sagging another 2 to 4 inches anyway.

(02:29):
It's just a waste of jumps. Good solid approaches, one to
two jumps and then that's it. We don't need to do anything
else. As far as the warm up goose,
when you do your approaches without the bar or bungee, you
should always pop onto the mat. If you're able to stop your
momentum and not pop onto the mat, then you're not getting a

(02:50):
true idea of what your approach is actually like.
So your athletes should always pop onto the mat, ideally aiming
towards their takeoff angle point, which should be somewhere
between the back and front corner of the mat.
But you don't want to do your approaches and then just have
your athletes stop and just be guessing.
Always pop up onto the mat. The next part of the pre

(03:12):
competition process is getting the correct starting height for
your athletes. This is another area where I
think people make a lot of mistakes.
You don't need to come in at opening height if you can jump a
foot higher than it. You don't need to come in and
scissor heights for no reason. No one who actually knows high
jump is impressed by your scissoring of low heights that

(03:34):
don't matter. What you want to do is pick a
bar that is about 3 heights below your goal for that day.
So if your goal is to jump 5/8 that day, then we probably want
to come in around 5-2. If our goal is to jump 6 foot,
then maybe we come in around 5658 somewhere in there.

(03:57):
But you don't need to waste jumps at the lower bars.
All you're doing is killing yourlegs and taking away jumps that
you could have later when you'reactually going for PRS.
This is something that as a coach you have to enforce with
your athletes because sometimes they'll be scared that they
don't want to come in at a higher bar.
They're afraid that they're going to know height, but 99% of

(04:20):
the time they're not going to know height because they're
coming in at a height that they would have cleared easily
anyway. They just need to get over the
mental barrier of starting at a higher height and then they'll
be even happier when they get tothose PR bars and they actually
have more legs left and can get higher and better attempts.
Before we move on from pre competition and warming up once

(04:42):
the competition begins you need to have a plan for your athletes
to stay warm. Sometimes high jump can take a
long time, especially if it's during running events and you
have people checking out. You could have a 2 1/2 hour high
jump competition, so you need tohave, whether it's some Sprint
drills, some short sprints, somecurved runs, whatever it is, you

(05:06):
want to have something for your athletes to do when it's about
to be their turn to jump again, to get their bodies ready to go.
Moving on to actually giving coaching advice during high
jump. When we're at the meet, we don't
want to over coach. We want to give advice on things
that maybe we've been working on.
Any approach issues like if they're a little too far away,

(05:29):
if they're a little too close, we make minor adjustments like
that. But as far as technical coaching
goes, you want to do a lot of that in practice and then you
want to create cues in practice that you can simply say it meets
and your athletes know what thatmeans.
So some examples for that. If you have an athlete who

(05:49):
struggles and they get really shallow in their approach and
they don't have a good angle andthey travel along the bar, I
like say something like try to get to the back corner or just
get to the back corner. And then when we're in a meet
and that issue is arising, I just go, hey, not a bad jump.
Let's just make sure we get to the back corner.

(06:11):
To use another example, if you have an athlete who struggles
with turning before they go intothe bar, they like to throw
their shoulder head into the bar, which is very common.
Say something like, hey, make sure we go up first or just
simply up first, something simple like that.
So when they're doing their jumps, if they lean in on a

(06:32):
jump, you go, hey, let's make sure we go up first.
And if you need to combine two issues, say you have an athlete
who has both issues, I just said, and you want to maybe try
to give them two cues. Saying something like, hey, get
to the back corner and go up first is a lot easier than
saying, all right, you're getting too flat.
So you're traveling along the bar for a long time and then

(06:56):
you're coming down on it. But also when you take off,
you're leaning into the bar as soon as you take off.
So we need to make sure we driveup more and that's just way too
much for them to think about. Just get to the back corner and
go up first is way more effective and much less
overwhelming on your athletes. Like I said, the queue finding

(07:19):
process is something you need todo in practice by testing out a
few different queues with what you're working on.
You may have one athlete and thequeue for up first works
perfectly for them and that's great.
And then you try up first with someone else and it just doesn't
click. And then maybe you try something

(07:40):
like rise and rotate and you saythat to 1 athlete and it works
perfect and they mean the same thing, but it registers in their
brain differently and it makes the jumps actually effective.
So it's good whenever an athletehas a good jump in practice, if
they fix something we've been working on, I always like to ask

(08:02):
what were you thinking on that one?
And typically they'll tell you exactly what they were thinking.
You could just make that into a queue.
So if they said I just thought to reach my arm up as high as I
could just go, OK, that queue isgoing to be arm high.
And then that's what we're saying, it meets.
So that is a very important partof coaching.

(08:23):
It meets, but it needs to be done at practice and find
effective queues that work for each individual athlete.
A little bit more on over coaching or not over coaching.
Once you get into championship season, you're coaching as far
as technical. Coaching should be even more

(08:45):
limited at that point. You got what you got with your
jumps. I mean, you're just trying to
make it work with what you've developed up to that point
earlier in the season. Say you're at a dual meet that
might not matter too much to youor your team.
Then it's OK if you maybe you'rea little more technical in
practice. Obviously everything has nuance

(09:08):
to it. There's no black and white rules
to it. But if you're at an important
invite or a meet that matters, qualifying needs, something like
that, you don't want to overwhelm.
You want to just go in, say as little as you need to and be
encouraging to your athletes. They're probably nervous.
They got a lot of things going through their head.
Stay calm, encourage them, and just make sure they have fun.

(09:32):
That's making them smile, makingthem laugh.
Something like that goes a long way, especially in the field
events when they have to stay focused for hours on it.
Sometimes switching gears to some other things that I don't
have exactly set into categories, but I think you
should know how to handle. Is your high jumper having other
events? This is another thing that's

(09:53):
commonly mishandled, especially at invites and they're holding
bars forever. If you have an athlete and you
know their event is coming up, you should ideally get them to
jump before they go to their event.
So if you know it's coming up, go up to the official, say hey
my athlete has to run the four by one.

(10:14):
Can I put them at the top of theorder at this next height so
they can get their jumps in before they run and they don't
hold up your competition? If you preface it with we're
trying to do it so we don't holdup the competition, they're even
more likely to do it, but I've never had an official have an
issue with it anyway. Not only does it help your
athlete get their jumps in before they have to go run, it

(10:35):
also makes it so the competitiondoesn't get delayed forever.
The last thing I want to talk about is just having general
situational awareness as far as the competition goes, especially
if it's at a qualifying meet or meet that you're trying to score
as many points as you can for your team.
Anything like that. You should do your best to have

(10:56):
a good idea of what the other athletes are doing as far as
misses. You should always know how your
athlete is doing on misses. So that way when you get to
later bars and maybe it's a situation where the bar is only
going up by 1 inch and or you could, some people are passing
to two inches. You need to know if you're in a

(11:17):
spot where you're safe to pass the 2 inch because there's
enough people left that the one inch isn't going to matter.
Or is it close in the competition you're doing bad on
this is you want to try to undercut it.
It's just things you want to be keeping track of as best you
can. So those are the things I think
that if you can do as a high jump coach, you will set your

(11:38):
athletes up in the best possibleposition to have success.
Just to run through them real quickly.
Don't over warm up. Make sure you have a plan to
warm up once the meet is going with little drills or maybe it's
some light plyos, stuff like that in the meet.
Use the queues that you established in practice to

(12:00):
create easy to understand ideas for your athletes.
Make sure you know if your athletes are in other events and
plan around that accordingly. And do your best to keep track
of misses of your athletes and all the other athletes to ensure
you know what to do later in thecompetition.
Thank you all for listening. If you're looking for more high

(12:20):
jump content, I did write a 50 page e-book called the High Jump
Handbook that could be purchasedon Gum Road or you can find it
on the link in my Twitter page which is at Coach Ondo Ondo.
The Handbook is a comprehensive guide to coaching high jump
written in very simple terms so that anyone can understand

(12:43):
whether you've been coaching fora while or you've never seen the
event before. It's got deep dives into the
different phases of the event, how to coach when you're at
meets like we talked about, and a lot of other various tips and
tricks to become a good high jump coach.
It also comes with a library of drills that you get video
examples of as well. Want to give another big thanks

(13:04):
to Mike and everyone at Gill Athletics for creating this
platform for us coaches to have and share ideas and grow the
sport. I wish you all the best of luck
with the remainder of your season.
Hey gang, Mike Cunningham here. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this
episode of the Gill 1918 Projectseries.
It's really my mission, my passion to bring you massive

(13:25):
amounts of value and I hope thisone hit the mark.
The Gill 1918 Project is really dependent on you if for you to
build your own episode, to hear your voice, to have your voice
heard you have something to say and teach other coaches out
there. So please get a hold of me,
E-mail, text message, Twitter, smoke signals, get a hold of me

(13:47):
and let's help create your episode of the Guild 1918
Project. Hope you enjoy the day, they
will see you tomorrow.