New track coaches race into preseason
Track has two new coaches, Sean Brosnan and Dylan McNey, have been hired and are currently preparing for the spring season with off-season practices. Coach Brosnan coaches the 800 meter and 1600 meter races, while McNey coaches the sprinters and the hurdlers.
McNey graduated from Newbury Park High School last year. He knows the competition from his experience as a CIF preliminaries participant in his junior year of high school, and recognizes that other local schools are strong competitors. “Westlake and T.O. are the best track programs in the Conejo Valley (because) they have the best team,” McNey said.
On the other hand, Brosnan is from across the country. “I grew up and went to high school in Long Island, New York. Then I went to college in Colorado, and then moved out to California after college,” Brosnan said.
Both have a history of coaching, ranging from youths to professionals. “When I was younger, from fifth grade up until my freshman year of high school, I taught water skiing and wakeboarding,” McNey said. “Then my senior year, up until this December, I was a gymnastics and parkour coach.”
McNey got the coaching job after offering his help to the coaches at last year’s season banquet. They were “open-hearted and open-minded about it,” McNey said.
Brosnan is currently a student teacher at NPHS, but has been coaching for many years. “I’ve coached some professionals; post collegiately, I coached at a Division II college in North Carolina and I also coached individually two kids in high school before this,” Brosnan said.
Both McNey and Brosnan stress the importance of the team aspect of track and field, even though a large number of events are completed individually.
“You are only as strong as your weakest link, but what a lot of people don’t understand is (that) in order to be the best school…everyone has to perform equally, because you only get to be league champs based off of everyone’s points,” McNey said. “You all work together and train together, but it’s all just like a big push because running is the most natural thing you can do.”
“I feel like track is an individual sport just as much as a team sport. Basically the hard work you put in, you see the results from,” Brosnan said.
As a hurdler and sprinter during his own track career, McNey’s goal in coaching is to reveal the lesser understood aspects of running to his students.
“With hurdles, it is more than just running and jumping, because there is form, technique, you have to get your steps down if you want a good time, you have to plan ahead of who you are racing,” he said. “With sprinting everything is based off of your first fifty meters, which a lot of people don’t understand. It’s not just going off the block and going as fast as you can, you have to be able to know how to get off the blocks the right way, how to put yourself in the first twenty meters, accelerate, and then finish strong.”
Ethan Duffy, junior, a mid to long distance runner believes the coaches are a benefit to the program. “Coach Brosnan is very positive and is very precise and accurate with knowing what times we should be hitting. Considering that Coach McNey is young, he relates well to the hurdlers and sprinters he coaches and knows a lot about proper hurdling form,” Duffy said.
