Through the track hurdles, into the screen

iPhone in one hand and Amazon microphone in the other, Coach Jasher Foster presses play as he films a potential video for his platform @hurdlelabhq by the field. On select days, students might encounter when a camera man is over to help record.

For the past three years, Foster has been the hurdles coach at Walnut, guiding sprinters through different drills and helping them improve for meets. Last July, he started posting more on his Instagram account, where he breaks down technique, shares tutorials and tricks and posts educational videos to whoever stumbles across his feed. 

“The purpose was to create content for people who can learn from the videos. It’s not pure entertainment. I also like to play educational stuff so people can get something out of it,” Foster said. “Not every student likes to be critiqued on social media, so if I posted [the video] and go, they did this wrong and they need to fix this, they won’t like that. I normally leave those in the vault, and we’ll just talk about those at practice. The ones on social media are just for social media if [the] student [featured] won’t mind me critiquing them.”

The hardest part of his social media journey were not trolls or algorithms, but instead, an internal conflict. @hurdlelabhq had been activated in 2023 but Foster only started to become more active last summer. His hesitance to take the chance and create content had forced him into inaction in posting on his account. Once he overcame the reluctance, he started to be more active, numbers slowly climbing to nearly 200 posts, a few thousand followers and shoutouts from hurdle accounts and coaches he’d admired before in his comment sections. 

“In his videos, he comments on techniques, so while we’re running, we’re learning from it too. He also posts videos of himself showing us [what to do], so it’s like a lot of tutorials for us at home. He’s really slowing it down and has videos of what not to do too, so that’s always really helpful,” senior Katherine Bien said. 

“Ever since I started with him last year, I’ve made a whole lot of improvement. I started off running 16 [seconds] (in the 110 hurdles), and I ended up running 14.6 [seconds]. That’s a big improvement, and I couldn’t have done it without him,” senior Brenden Neeley said. “After my practice, I can watch [his videos] and see where I messed up and what I can fix. He’s the best coach I’ve had in my life. Whenever I text him asking questions about what I can work on, he tells me, and he always has the best interest for me in his mind.”

In the past, Foster was a track runner himself, surrounded by high-level coaches and professional sprinters. It was one of his mentors who kept nudging him toward content creation, not because he loved social media himself, but because he saw the power of turning knowledge into something shareable— which social media provided a platform for.