Why the 19-flat Hurdlers Matter
“Everybody has to matter, or else nobody matters.” –Jim Gordon from the TV show Gotham
The above quote is one of my favorites. I don’t get hooked on television shows very often, but Gotham has really grabbed me. As I’ve been working in Davidson, NC while still living three hours away outside of Raleigh, NC since the last week of January, I’ve been renting a room with a guy who lives close to the school where I teach. He got me hooked on Gotham. Over spring break in mid-March I got caught up on all the back episodes.
The show provides the back story of the Batman saga, featuring a young Bruce Wayne and policeman Jim Gordon at the beginning of his crime-fighting career. Gordon is really the main character of the show. In the episode in which he said the above quote, he was making the point that if someone is going around the town killing people, we can’t get upset only when “important” people die, but when anyone dies. If the police takes crime seriously only when crimes are being committed against people of wealth and status, then the average Joes and Janes on the street will quickly realize that their lives are not valued; as a result, they will lose faith in the system and start taking matters into their own hands.
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So of course, my hurdling-centered mind instantly connected this statement to the hurdles. When it comes to coaching, the kids running in the 19’s have to matter as much as the kids running in the 14’s. Assuming the kids running in the 19’s are putting in the same work, they should not be ignored because they’re not as talented.
Back in the days when I was coaching national champions Johnny Dutch, Wayne Davis II and Booker Nunley, there were plenty of other hurdlers on that club team that no one’s ever heard of who played a huge role in the overall success of the group. There was James Robinson, who went on to run four years for North Carolina State University. There was Harold Sims, who went on to run for four years for Campbell University (also in North Carolina). And my favorite athlete from that era was David Coe, who never grew taller than 6-7, but still managed to run in the mid-15’s in the 110’s. David went on to play running back for Hampden-Sydney University in Virginia, where applied many of the lessons he learned in his hurdling days.
People have asked me why I haven’t tried to move up in the coaching ranks, why I haven’t sought a position at a college or university. The reasons are multiple. The main one is that working as an English teacher has always been my full-time employment. I was an English major in college and grad school, so I don’t have the educational background that makes for a higher level coach. I have no educational background in physiology, anatomy, nutrition, strength training, sports medicine, etc. All I know in those areas is what I’ve picked up over the years from others I’ve surrounded myself with.
People often associate me with the well-known athletes I’ve coached, such as the ones I mentioned above, as well as the University of Kentucky’s Kendra Harrison, but what people don’t know is that I spent the first 19 years of my professional life coaching at a private school with a relatively small enrollment and not a surplus of talented athletes. On the girls’ side, many of the most talented athletes played soccer in the spring; on the boys’ side, we lost many potential track stars to lacrosse and baseball. Toward the end of my time there, girls lacrosse became a varsity sport, which more dilution of the talent pool. In 19 years at that school, I never had a girl win the state championship in the 300 hurdles. While I did have my fair share of sub-14 110/100m hurdlers in club track, the school records for the school team were 14.40 for both girls and boys. Most years I didn’t have anyone breaking 15.
Most of those kids on the school team generally didn’t run track year round. But in some cases, they didn’t have the talent to run that fast. And that’s something that is often underestimated, or at least not seriously enough considered – you can only go as far as your talent can take you, no matter how hard you work. One of the most enjoyable coaching experiences I’ve ever had was when I coached a kid named David Jones, who graduated in 2004. David started hurdling as a small, skinny middle schooler who looked like he’d be a better fit for cross country. But he stuck with the hurdles and progressed from running 20-point in his first meet as a ninth grader to running sub-16 by the time he graduated. DJ, as we called him, had a great attitude, a great work ethic, a passion for the hurdles, and he got the most out of the talent he had.
And to me, that’s what it’s really all about – not having a lot of talent, but getting the most out of the talent that you have. And that’s why coaching the less talented athletes can be extremely rewarding – the ones who put in the work despite the fact that they have no reasonable chance to be a conference champion, much less a state or national champion.
So, after a year and a half away from teaching as I was rebuilding this website and dedicating time to this magazine, I’m back teaching again at another private school. During the year and a half away from teaching, I coached at Southeast Raleigh High School, where I was fortunate enough to coach another sub-14 hurdler, Jacklyn Howell. So here I am now at Davidson Day School, a very small school with about 150 kids in the entire high school. There are maybe 10 kids on the track team, girls and boys combined. There’s one hurdler – an eighth grade girl named Josie who is six feet tall and mainly identifies herself as a basketball player.
The school has only one field. The soccer teams and lacrosse teams share it. There’s no track. The track team practices at a public middle school about a 10-minute drive away. The middle school track has a super-thin layer of rubber over a slab of concrete that is very hurdler-unfriendly. When I was first hired, I asked the head coach about coaching, and he basically told me that it wouldn’t be worth my time. There were already two coaches on the payroll, and there was no way the AD could justify hiring a third with so few athletes.
But since there was one hurdler, I decided to help out on a part-time volunteer basis. That way, I could focus on making all the necessary adjustments to life as an English teacher at a new school while still staying connected to coaching.
After a couple days on that hard slab of concrete, I decided this wasn’t going to work. Also, Josie was on an AAU basketball team, so our practice time was limited before she needed to leave for basketball practice. I kind of checked out altogether for a week or two, enjoying the extra time at the end of the school day to get some grading done before heading out for a run on my own.
But a few weeks ago Josie came by my classroom after school and asked if I would work with her on the hurdles again. Sure, I said, but I ain’t goin’ to that concrete track again. Ain’t no point in training on that. Instead, I told her we could train on the small (about 30 meters in length) slice of grass right outside of the front of the school building, and we could use two training hurdles that I had stored in the trunk of my car.
So that’s what we did. The training hurdles didn’t always remain steady on the uneven grass surface. They proved easily cracked and broken. We had to tape them up. I tried carpenter’s glue that the distance coach had offered to me. It worked … until Josie hit the hurdle again. So tape it was.
Meanwhile on some days there was a group of lower schoolers being coached in golf, and we had to share the little patch of grass with them.
In spite of it all, Josie was getting better. She was learning to do her A-marches and A-skips more efficiently, staying on the balls of her feet, not letting her hips drops. She was learning to use her height and step over hurdles instead of kicking out her lead leg and sailing over the hurdles. She was getting in the habit of running with her knees up – something that had seemed so foreign and weird to her when we had first started. She was learning to be more aggressive, to focus on sprinting and not be so fixated on the hurdle.
And we were developing a bond.
The hurdles have a way of bringing people together. It always happens that way. And it’s always magical when it happens.
The conference meet took place this past week. We practiced on the grass Monday and Tuesday and she competed on Thursday. The meet was an hour away, and I rode there with the head coach and the distance coach. I guided Josie through her warm-up and I made sure she remained mentally focused and relaxed leading up to the race. I had her do a few starts over the first hurdle, the first two, the first three, with me giving her commands. I changed cadences and reminded her to be ready for whatever the starter’s style may be. She looked confident.
In the race, she finished second, three-stepping the whole way. She ran 19-flat, which was a personal best. Later that night, in the 300 hurdles, she finished second again, in something like 57. In both races there were only six girls competing.
During the 300 hurdles, I watched from the infield, near the second hurdle. I watched Josie get out very slowly, but finish very strongly, passing two or three girls on the final straight-away. When the race was over, she walked over to where our other two coaches were standing. She was smiling, and they were smiling. And her mom, sitting on the front row of the bleachers, was smiling. I can’t tell you how good it felt to know that I had played a role in putting a smile on all those faces.
Josie had set personal bests in both races. As an eighth grader just beginning to learn to put one foot in front of the other, she could have a bright future ahead of her if she chooses to stick with it. I told her as much, and she agreed. As the group of us sat in the bleachers at the end of the meet, Josie remarked to me, “Having you here really helped.”
“Of course it did,” I told her. “Everybody needs a coach.”
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