Cameron and I

by Steve McGill

Nine years ago today, my good friend and former athlete Cameron Akers took his own life at the age of 28. I want to take some time in this article to discuss where I am in regards to this tragic loss, and how our relationship continues to influence who I am and what I do in my roles as teacher and coach.

I’ve written about Cameron in previous articles for this magazine, and for this website before the magazine came into existence. His death was actually a source of inspiration for starting the magazine back in August of 2013, as I was looking for ways to honor his memory and to keep his memory alive. When I started conducting the Team Steve hurdle camps in 2017, using an image of Cameron on the camp T-shirt was a no-brainer, as doing so would serve as another way to honor him and to let current athletes know who he was. 

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Some background for those of you who aren’t familiar:

I coached Cameron in 2000-2001, his junior and senior years of high school. I was six years into my coaching career when I first started with him, and had yet to produce an athlete who could compete on a national level. Meanwhile, he had never run track before, and only came out for the team because some of his friends on the football team had encouraged him to since he was the fastest player on the team. They also let him know how “cool” I was, as many of them had had me in the classroom. So he decided to come out, and when he saw me training another athlete in the hurdles on one of the first days of practice, he asked if he could try hurdling too. I hesitated at first, because I had pegged him for a sprinter and long jumper, as he looked to be a little short at 5–10 to be a natural in the hurdles.

But I was so wrong. He ran a 15-mid in his first race over the full flight of ten, dropped under 15.0 a couple meets later, won the state championship with a 14.40, then got his personal best down to 14.23 over the summer, when he won the regional championship in the 15-16 age group at the USATF Junior Olympics. 

His senior year, I was fully expecting him to go under 14.0, but he grew bored from a lack of competition and because he had already gained plenty of scholarship offers, but he still had a very good season, and we remained close and stayed in touch after he left for college.

In his last two years of high school, we formed an inseparable bond, as I often drove him to and from practice during the summer, and we traveled together to all of the out-of-state meets. Without realizing it, I had become a father figure to him, as he was raised by his mom and didn’t know his dad. On my end, coaching Cameron enabled me to realize that I was a really good coach. Whenever he would receive praise from teammates or opponents or other teams’ coaches, he would always deflect the praise and point to me. He did it so often that I finally had to acknowledge that yeah, maybe it is me, or, at the very least, I played a significant role in his success.

Over the next ten years we saw each other infrequently but, as I said before, we still managed to stay in touch. He went to a Clemson University for college, where he ran track for two years before deciding that collegiate track wasn’t for him. He then joined the Air Force and was stationed in Japan for long chunks of time. I think it was 2009 or 2010 when he took me and my daughter to dinner as a last goodbye before heading to Afghanistan, where he would be working for a private company aiding the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

When he came back from Afghanistan in January of 2012, he contacted me via email and was talking about being “enlightened” and how he “knew the truth” — the mind of talk which I would later come to discover was symptomatic of bipolar disorder. He became infatuated with science, and physics in particular. He was saying a lot of weird things that were completely over my head. Finally, in early February, he flew from his home in San Antonio to Raleigh — where I was living at the time, and where his mom and two younger siblings also lived. 

Again, we went out to dinner and had a great time catching up. He looked happy and healthy and full of life. The next morning, he picked me up at my home and drove me to an indoor meet where two of my hurdlers would be competing. At the meet, it felt like old times as he was giving tips to random hurdlers from other teams and pointing out flaws in their technique. 

By the time he dropped me off back at my house, I felt convinced that Cameron was more than okay; he was the same Cameron I had always known, and was an older, wiser version at that. But in the next week, he was putting up weird YouTube videos explaining physics-related stuff, and he was texting me and calling me all the time with strange theories that made no sense to me. On the morning of his death, I texted him saying that I needed some space and that I’d get up with him soon. He texted me back “okay,” and the next day his mom called me with the news of his death.

For several years I regretted that last text, convinced that it had contributed to his decision to end it all. For several years I beat myself up over having either missed or ignored so many warning signs that Cameron was ill and needed help. For several years I looked upon myself as a failure when it came to being a mentor and father figure. 

The magazine and the hurdle camps helped me to keep moving forward, and to translate much of my grief into productive, creative action. As time has passed, I have learned to let go of the guilt, I’ve come to understand that there was nothing I could have done to prevent the inevitable; Cameron had made up his mind to the me his life before he’d even flown to Raleigh to visit, and the visit itself was both a final thank-you and a final goodbye. 

I miss Cameron. I miss his humor, I miss his kindness, I miss our friendship. But I no longer seek out overt ways to honor him or to make sure he won’t be forgotten. He’s a part of who I am. He’s a part of everything I do. Anyone who knows me knows him. Anybody who is influenced by me is influenced by him. That’s forever, just like the hurdles are forever. 

Cameron Akers in a photo taken toward the end of his life.

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