You’ve paid for the camps, driven to the practices, and you’re still not sure it’s helping.

That is not an insult. Most of them are good people working long hours for almost no money, covering four events because somebody has to.

But it means the person responsible for your athlete’s approach may never have been taught how to build one. They can say "run faster." They can move the mark back a foot. What they often cannot do is look at a jump and tell you why it happened.

And here’s the part that costs you: your athlete doesn’t know that’s the problem. So when the marks stop moving, they don’t conclude "nobody has taught me the approach." They conclude "I’m not that good."

I’ve watched kids quit over that. Kids who were nowhere near their ceiling.