I'm Patrick Wales-Dinan, and people ask me a lot what shaped my coaching style. Not a training method, not some favorite workout I swear by. Honestly, it's mentorship. Every program I've been part of, whether I was a young coach still figuring things out or a senior staff member running a distance group, came down to the relationship between coach and athlete. That's stuck with me at every single stop.

Where It Started

I graduated from Bates College with an economics degree, then took my first head coaching job at Traip Academy in Kittery, Maine. I was young for the role and probably learned as much from that first group of runners as they learned from me. High school coaching teaches you patience fast, whether you're ready for it or not. You are not just building fitness. You are helping teenagers figure out who they want to become, on the course and off it.

That first job taught me something I still lean on. Good mentorship starts with listening. The instructing part comes second.

Carrying It Through Williams, Duke, and Long Beach State

Once I moved to the college level, first as an assistant coach at Williams College and later at Duke University, the core idea stayed the same but I had to grow the approach. College athletes are juggling academics, independence & pressure in ways high schoolers just are not yet. Mentoring at that level meant helping runners set their own standards instead of me just handing mine down.

My stretch as the cross country and distance coach at Long Beach State drove that home even more. Every program has its own culture and part of mentoring well is understanding what a team actually needs before you go trying to change anything. I've found athletes respond best when they feel understood first, challenged second.

Harvard and What It Taught Me About Building Teams

Coaching at Harvard changed how I think about mentorship at scale. When you have got a large roster of driven, high achieving student athletes, you cannot mentor everyone the same way, it just does not work. Some runners want direct feedback. Others need room to work through a rough patch on their own terms. Learning to read that difference, and still stay consistent, made me a better coach overall. Watching that group put together a breakthrough season confirmed something I already believed anyway: teams that trust their coaches and each other will beat teams that just have more raw talent.

Bringing It Home to Monte Vista and Bay Area Track Club

As head coach at Monte Vista High School nowadays, and also through my work with Bay Area Track Club, I try to give back the kind of mentorship that shaped my own path. High school athletes just need right guidance and it can shape a lot more than their running career. It can shape how they handle pressure, how they set goals and how they treat teammates, years down the line.

A few things I try to keep in mind with pretty much every athlete I work with:

• Show up the same way every day. Good season, bad season, does not matter.

• Listen before jumping in with advice, even when the answer seems obvious to me.

• Set standards around effort and character, not just finish times.

• Notice progress that does not always show up on a stopwatch.

• Stay available outside of practice, since that is usually where the real conversations happen.

Final Thoughts

Looking back on almost two decades of this, from Traip Academy to Williams and Duke, out to Long Beach State, then Harvard, and now Monte Vista, mentorship is the one thread that holds everything together. Programs change. Rosters turn over every few years, sometimes faster than you would like. Titles and job descriptions change too. But the responsibility to guide young athletes well does not, and honestly, that is the part of this job I care about most. Every runner I've coached has taught me something, and I try to carry a piece of that forward with the next group. That is really what mentorship is: passing it on.