Justin Wickard

I left D1 coaching to be home with my son.

Fifteen years on college tracks — Texas Tech, UNC-Chapel Hill, TCU, Louisiana Tech, the Air Force Academy. Five programs as a sprints and hurdles coach. In 2020 I stepped away to be present for my family.

What I saw next changed how I thought about coaching.

Almost every D1 freshman I had recruited and worked with was missing the basics. Not the advanced stuff — the basics. Coordination. Balance. Body awareness. Half couldn't skip properly. Galloping was a mess. Motor skills you'd expect a 10-year-old to have, missing in 18-year-olds on athletic scholarships.

The first full year of college was almost always spent cleaning that up before any real performance work could happen. Two years of remediation for things that should have been coached at 12.

So I built Tier1Athlete to coach those years instead — ages 12 to 18, in Frisco, Texas. Speed, hurdles, motor skill development. The same process I ran at the D1 level, applied at the age where it installs the foundation instead of trying to retrofit one.

My job isn't to squeeze every drop of performance out of your kid in high school.

It's to build a foundation strong enough that their college coach has real material to work with — and an athlete with growth left to give. The trainers who burn kids out at 16 to chase short-term PRs are leaving nothing in the tank for the years that actually matter. That's not coaching. That's extraction.

Small groups. Direct coaching. The work D1 coaches wish their freshmen had already done — done the right way.