Highlights from Ryan Banta’s Office Hours: Coaching Insight, Culture, and Performance Strategies
The latest Office Hours session with Ryan Banta was packed with incredible insights on coaching, training, and building a winning team culture. Banta, a highly accomplished coach at Parkway Central High School and author of The Sprinter’s Compendium, shared his journey into coaching, valuable lessons he’s learned, and practical tips for improving both athlete performance and team cohesion.
Here are some of the best takeaways from the session, along with some of Banta’s most memorable quotes.
Advice he would give his younger self: “You don’t know anything and you need to start researching right now…”
Reflecting on his early coaching days, Banta emphasized the importance of research, mentorship, and being open to learning.
“If I could go back, the first thing I’d tell myself is: you don’t know anything. You need to start researching right now from coaches who have had repeated success at different levels over a long period of time. You need to go out and do the research. You need to find a mentor who's been doing it for a really long time and been very successful. And you need to beg, borrow, and steal all the best ideas from a lot of these coaches. The other thing I would tell you that I would go back and tell myself is it's track and field. It's not just track. And more specifically, it's not just sprinting. And more specifically than that, it's not just short sprinting. So all I cared about was the 100 and 200 and 4x1…”
Training Without a Weight Room: “You can get a lot done outside”
For coaches who don’t have access to a full weight room, Banta offered creative solutions.
“With a few weighted vests, a couple of Olympic bars, Swiss stability balls, med balls, and a sled, you can get all sorts of specific strength training done outside. You don’t need a high-tech facility to build explosive power.”
He highlighted depth jumps, sled pulls, hip thrusts, and general strength exercises as essential for speed development, even in a minimal-equipment environment. For those who want to know more, Ryan Banta will be conducting a workshop called “Weightroom Without Walls” at the Ascent Track and Field Clinics located at Harvard University (June 28-29) and at George Mason University (July 12-13).
Building a Winning Team Culture: “Making every athlete feel like they belong”
One of the most compelling parts of Banta’s coaching philosophy is how he develops team culture.
“The sport of track and field is not one that people will inherently love unless they find connection and success.”
Some unique team-building traditions he implements:
Big sister/little sister mentoring: Every younger athlete is paired with an older athlete for support and guidance.
Theme days for competition: “We dress up for meets — twins day, international day, college day, pride in pigtails… It gives kids something fun to look forward to.”
Candy bars for PRs: “Every time an athlete gets a personal record, they get a candy bar. It teaches them to celebrate progress, not just wins.” Banta continues: “Once in a while it's okay to have something that's maybe not that good for you but tastes great. It also sends a signal to them that I’m not watching their waistline, and we tell kids all the time about how much we want to enjoy food. And a lot of the ways we celebrate is through food. And so I tell them I never care what the scale says. I care about what the stopwatch says, how confident you are… and I actually say, more importantly, ‘most of you girls will probably get heavier because you're going to get stronger.”
“The key to team culture is making every athlete feel like they belong and have something to strive for, even if they aren’t the star.”
Mental Training and Positive Psychology: “Burn your fears”
Banta, who has a master’s degree in positive psychology, stressed the importance of mental preparation. He incorporates exercises like:
Mantras & self-talk: “Athletes repeat affirmations to themselves like ‘I am strong, I am prepared, I am aggressive, let’s go.’”
Visualization scripts: “We have athletes write their ideal performance script, then record it with music to listen to before competition.”
Gratitude journals: “For 21 days, athletes write down three positive things daily to train their brains to focus on what’s going well.”
Pre-meet rituals: “We do an exercise called ‘burn your fears’ — athletes write down their fears, read them aloud, then we burn them. Then we write down what’s true about us, what makes us strong.”
His approach to race-day mindset:
“We tell our athletes: ‘Time is just an indicator. The real evaluation is how you compete against others on that day.’”
Long-Term Development: “Multi-sport athletes have an advantage”
Banta emphasized that early specialization is often detrimental, and multi-sport athletes tend to be more successful in the long run.
“The best athletes — LeBron James, Roger Federer, Max Scherzer — played multiple sports growing up. We need kids to play more. They need to sprint fast at a young age, but in different ways.”
His advice for parents and youth coaches:
Avoid year-round single-sport specialization.
Encourage movement in all planes — sports like basketball, soccer, and volleyball help develop full-body coordination.
Delay smartphones: “Once a kid gets a phone, their childhood is over.”
“Focus on the process, not just the outcome”
One of the biggest takeaways from Banta’s talk was his emphasis on effort over results.
“The only thing you can control is your effort. The joy of the sport is in the struggle, the development, and the shared sacrifice with your teammates. If you focus on that, the results will come.”
Banta’s insights offer a blueprint for coaches looking to build not just great athletes, but great teams. Want to hear more from Coach Banta? He’ll be back with Ascent Track on March 30th for a workshop, ‘Translating Elite Training: Coaching the Athlete in Front of You.” We hope to see you there!
