Go Where the Hurdles Take You
Part III: Something of the Eternal
“…[H]e was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.”
-from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Three years passed between the initial thought that coaching could be part of my career plans and the actual beginning of my coaching career. First, in September of 1992, I enrolled at Shippensburg University in South Central Pennsylvania to earn my master’s degree in English, with a concentration in creative writing. Shippensburg was one of many “burgs” in that part of the state. Harrisburg, Gettysburg, Chambersburg, Mechanicsburg. Very rural. Not much of an economy. I remember there was a job opening at the Pizza Hut in Chambersburg once and so many people came to apply that the line went out the door.
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I didn’t like living in Shippensburg. There was one McDonald’s, one gas station, and a whole lot of old people. There were no other black people in sight except for football and basketball players. Though only a couple hours from home, it felt like a million miles away. Even though I’d grown up in a small town, this place took country to a whole other level. They held an annual corn festival. My first time driving there – to meet the directors of the Learning Center where I’d be tutoring as part of my grad assistantship – I ran into corn festival traffic.
But the school was cool, and my professors were excellent. By this point in my academic life, I was very engaged and very purposeful. I had become a voracious reader, and I wasn’t just reading for pleasure. I was reading to learn how to write more efficiently, more effectively, how to tell a story in such a way that it moved people. I was picking up on authors’ techniques the same way I used to pick up on hurdlers’ techniques. Now, unlike ever before in my life, I was surrounded by peers who shared my enthusiasm for the written word, who had their own writing aspirations. I was beginning to believe that maybe I could be as a writer what I could never be as a hurdler – talented enough to make a name for myself.
In my classes, I was writing papers on a wide variety of topics, but I remember one particular class where I had the opportunity to pursue topics that appealed to me personally. My professor, Dr. Taggart, allowed his students space to explore their own interests, as long as our essays showed a suitable level of intellectual thought and scholarship. I wrote papers on jazz musicians Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane. I had grown up hearing such music in the living room, since my dad was a huge jazz fan who grew up in Philadelphia going to clubs and listening to jazz every day in the 1950s. So, now in my mid-20’s, I felt eager to get to know that world better, if, for no other reason, so that I could get to know my dad better.
Dr. Taggart was a published poet in addition to being a great professor. He helped me to appreciate the importance of specific word choice. Class discussions were a challenge. He didn’t let us just sit there and listen. We had to interact with him and with each other. And we couldn’t settle for stock answers. We had to think, and we had to articulate our thoughts. And we always had to be ready. He might discuss a topic for ten minutes and then turn to you and ask, “What do you think?” And if you weren’t paying attention, if you had let your mind wander, you looked like a fool. In his classes I became an independent thinker, a true student. Instead of taking notes, I listened. Instead of trying to figure out the right answers, I was shaping my own views and expressing them. Though he possessed a wealth of knowledge that we couldn’t even begin to match, he always spoke to us as if we were his intellectual equals. Lack of confidence in one’s own voice, in one’s own interpretations, was not accepted. You had to speak. And you had to know what you were talking about.
With such stimulation in my academic life, I didn’t have time or mental space to keep up with the hurdles. And since I was no longer a competitive athlete, what would be the point?
During those two years at Shippensburg I didn’t even follow track. I had, for all intents and purposes, moved on. Besides working in the tutoring center, I also worked in the Mac writing lab, helping students with their essays and troubleshooting printer problems. (Most of the time, it just needed more paper). So between those two jobs and attending classes and keeping up with the reading assignments and gathering research for all the essays I had to write, I had no time to even entertain thoughts about track.
Even in my last year as an undergrad, I had already stopped following track as a fan. It already had seemed to become irrelevant. In the summer of 1991, Colin Jackson of Great Britain set a new world in the high hurdles and I don’t even remember hearing about it. In the summer of 1992 Mark McKoy of Canada won the Olympic gold medal in the 110 hurdles and I didn’t even know who he was. In that same Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain, Kevin Young of the US demolished Edwin Moses’ world record in the 400 hurdles and became the first man to break the 47 second barrier in that event. It was the greatest 400 hurdle race of all time, and I didn’t even watch. Meanwhile, Jack Pierce and Tony Dees took up the mantle of top American 110 hurdlers, replacing two-time Olympic champion Roger Kingdom and three-time world champion Greg Foster in that role, and I didn’t even know who these cats were. I had lost touch with track, with the hurdles. I had lost interest.
Ironically, Shippensburg had a beautiful red, eight-lane, rubberized track. It would’ve been a great place for me to train on my own, if the spirit moved me. The high school state championships were held there every year, and the Shippensburg team itself was very strong – one of the best Division II programs in the country. But I never ran out there, or had any desire to. I never attended one of the team’s practices, not even just to observe. My exercise consisted of playing pick-up basketball on occasion and going on road runs of 4-5 miles with one of my writing-nerd friends.
I had thought about helping out with coaching, to the point where, during my first year there, I actually contacted one of the coaches to inquire. He told me to come by his office and chat, but I never followed through, mainly because they had hurdlers faster than me. One of their hurdlers had blasted me in a preliminary round at the conference meet the previous year. And at that time I assumed it wasn’t feasible to coach someone I couldn’t beat in a race. The very idea intimidated me. What could I teach him?
***
When I graduated from Shippensburg in May of 1994 with an M.A. in English, I still hadn’t pinned down a job. I had been thinking of going on for a Ph.D., but my disillusionment with intellectualism soured me from that idea. At my core, I was a creative person, an artist, not an intellectual. As much as I loved Dr. Taggart, I grew tired of intellectualism. Ultimately, it seemed rather soul-less. Very stimulating to the mind, but not personally fulfilling. Many of my professors worshipped writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, all of whom, to one degree or another, seemed to go out of their way to be overtly obscure.
Another thing I didn’t like about literary criticism (lit crit, as it was called) was that it de-emphasized the actual text. Regardless of which book we were assigned to read, it made more sense to read books and articles about the book than to read the book itself because, in lit crit, you spend all your time responding to the responses of other critics than you do responding to the content of the actual novel. It’s sort of an intellectual boxing match, in which each respondent is trying to show how the views of the previous respondent are flawed. I found myself realizing that this type of interplay had nothing to do with why I liked to read, with why I decided to become an English major.
When I sought advice from Dr. Taggart about my future, he suggested that I look into teaching at a private school. With a master’s in English, as opposed to Education, I could teach at a private school without certification. Plus, I had attended a private high school myself, so I was familiar with that world. So I applied to a placement service in Princeton, NJ, and the placement service helped me to find many potential schools. Two expressed interest in offering me a position – Ravenscroft School in Raleigh, NC, and Severn School in Severna Park, MD. But on graduation day, I had yet to hear anything definitive from either of them.
Later that same week, both of them let me know the job was mine if I wanted it. Weighing my options, both schools appealed to me. My interview at both places had gone well, both schools were located on beautiful, sprawling campuses. Severn had the advantage that it was only a 90-minute drive from my home in Pennsylvania, while Ravenscroft was a good seven-hour drive. On the other hand, the Ravenscroft position was an upper school position, whereas the Severn position was in their middle school. And I really couldn’t see myself dealing with a bunch of smart-ass twelve-year-olds.
Another advantage of Ravenscroft was that they had a track team. Knowing how private schools like for their teachers to help out in extra-curricular activities, the only thing I could see myself doing was coaching track.
Severn had no track team. They were a big lacrosse school. The athletic director at Severn didn’t prove to be very open-minded when I proposed the idea of starting up a track program. “Well,” he said, “the only problem is, that would take away athletes from lacrosse.”
When I had interviewed at Ravenscroft, the athletic director introduced me to the track coach, who introduced me to the track team and offered to let me coach the hurdlers for practice that day. I did so, and enjoyed it immensely. By this time, three years after my days at Cheyney, I had forgotten about that bus ride, when the idea of coaching had first entered my mind. Now, my primary objective was to find a suitable teaching position. But the afternoon that I spent coaching the Ravenscroft hurdlers was so much fun that it made me realize that yeah, I really do want to coach. The kids eagerly followed my lead, and I could see them improving right before my eyes. I was now directly applying so much of what I had learned, observed, picked up on, and experimented with over the years.
I was barking instructions like I’d been coaching all my life. “Lead with the knee!” “Make sure you lean from your waist, don’t just hunch your shoulders.” “You’re a sprinter between the hurdles, don’t forget to sprint.” If there was a concept they couldn’t understand, I would demonstrate it to them myself, basking in the glow of their admiration of my hurdling form. I knew then that coaching mattered to me just as much as teaching. I could see, even then, that coaching and teaching were one and the same. Coaching was teaching on the track; teaching was coaching in the classroom. I wanted to do both.
But the fact that Severn was so much closer to home made the decision very difficult. Being 90 minutes away would mean I could visit my family any time I wanted. Being seven hours away would mean visiting on holidays and maybe during summer vacation. Maybe I could deal with teaching middle school kids if it meant living closer to home. And who’s to say that after a year or two I couldn’t find a position in the upper school?
I didn’t know what to do. There was no “right” decision. Both situations had their positives. Both had their negatives. So one night, about a week after receiving my master’s degree, I meditated on it. Ravenscroft wanted to know, yes or no, by the next day. I closed the door to my room, put on some Coltrane, asked my soul for guidance, and sat quietly.
About ten minutes later, in the midst of a “My Favorite Things” soprano sax solo, I heard a voice from somewhere deep inside of me. A soft voice. A whisper:
Go where the hurdles take you.
I felt the same calm, the same inner peace that I had felt three years earlier, when I heard that same voice suggest, Maybe you could coach.
My decision had been made for me. I would accept the Ravenscroft position. The hurdles were taking me there.
***
While I didn’t have an abundance of talent to work with, the good thing about coaching at a private school with such high academic standards was that I faced no immediate pressures to succeed. I could learn on the go, and our head coach, Cherie Fowler, was a very pleasant person to work with.
The funny thing was, I had no idea what I was doing. Especially when it came to coaching girls. I didn’t know anything about the women’s hurdle races. I assumed that when it came to the 100m hurdles you either three-stepped or you weren’t ready to run the race. Ain’t no four-steppin’. So I had a couple girls who weren’t fast enough to three-step, but I kept having them do different drills and workouts designed to develop their speed and technique so that they could take three steps between the hurdles. When they still couldn’t three-step, I grew frustrated with them. Not until a new girl who was 5-2 and naturally ambidextrous came along in my second year did I have my first four-stepper. Then I started implementing drills and workouts to teach the other girls to lead with either leg, and all of them picked it up very quickly. And two of the three of them eventually got to a point where they could three-step most of the race, as the transition from four to three proved to be quite manageable without needing to be forced.
Even with coaching males, I only had my own hurdling past as a frame of reference. When dealing with technical issues that had never been a problem for me in my own hurdling past, I didn’t know what to do. I’d always had a problem with drifting to the lead leg side of the lane, so when I had a kid who drifted to the trail leg side, I just stood there baffled. Eventually, through experimentation, we were able to figure it out together and straighten it out.
But what I also found was that when coming up with a solution to a technical problem for one hurdler, the same solution didn’t necessarily work for another hurdler with the same problem. When it came to troubleshooting hurdlers’ issues, there was no textbook, no manual that could be relied upon to provide consistent answers. I had to coach each individual athlete, not the group. I had to come up with creative ways to find enough time and lane space to provide each athlete with the attention he or she needed.
Probably, in my early years as a coach, I was more valuable as a training partner, as an example, than as a coach in the traditional sense. My popularity, my credibility, came from the fact that I did the workouts myself, right along with my athletes, often right beside them. I had boundless energy. When I had all the sprinters and hurdlers doing 10×200 in the beginning of the outdoor season, I’d be doing them with them. I’d time my group then turn around and time the groups behind me. I made sure everyone kept moving after finishing a rep. No sitting down. If you’re supposed to be jogging your recovery, jog. No walking unless I say you can walk. And because I was doing the workouts, I could always easily gauge when I was pushing them too hard, when I should back off. And when it came to hurdling, if I wanted them to lean more deeply, I would demonstrate how to do it. My hurdlers learned that doing was a form of teaching, so they would not only watch me, but also each other. They learned to develop an eye for what looked right and what looked wrong. And because I kept verbal instructions to a minimum, they learned to develop a muscle sense for what felt right and what felt wrong. In hurdle workouts, I’d wait until we were between sets to give full evaluations of how the previous set went and what to focus on for the next set.
I loved track practice. It was my favorite part of the day. I couldn’t imagine how maddeningly mundane my life would’ve been had I not accepted a position at a school where I could coach.
***
Not until 2000 – my sixth year – did I coach an athlete who could compete on a national level. Before then, the thought had never entered my mind. In the girls’ race, I didn’t even know what good times were. My girls ran in the 16-18 second range. My fastest guys ran in the 15.2-15.5 range. In 1999, my kid won the NC independent school state meet in 15.6. Things have gotten a lot more competitive since then – in private school land and in the country at large. There are so many more meets now, and so much more awareness of what other athletes are doing everywhere. There was no Milesplit back then. I was oblivious to national rankings, or even the idea of it.
In 1998 a sophomore girl named Summer Knowles decided she wanted to try the hurdles. As a freshman the previous year she had done outstandingly well in the sprints, so she wanted to take on a new challenge. She trained all during the off-season. Oftentimes it was just me and her on the track, since we didn’t have an indoor team. We’d be out there till it was too dark to see, working on technique, relying on lights from cars in the parking lot to get us through the end of the workout.
Summer was not a natural by any means, but she was determined. She fell often, but she always got back up. There were plenty of moments when I thought to myself, This isn’t gonna work. But if she was willing to push through, so was I.
Eventually things started to click. By February – just before the start of the outdoor season – the speed I had always seen in the sprints was starting to show up in the hurdles. She was getting the rhythm down, and her body was learning to react to the presence of the hurdles.
On a cold, windy day in early March, Summer ran her first race over a full flight of ten barriers. She zigzagged all over the lane, clang-clanged a few hurdles, but still managed to finish first because of her speed. When I looked down at my stopwatch and saw “14.9,” I thought I must’ve made a mistake. No way she ran that fast looking so sloppy. But our distance coach, who was in charge of the finish line, also timed her in 14.9. Well damn.
We continued to smooth things out, and by the state meet she ran 14.40 FAT, winning easily. Back then, I didn’t do any private coaching nor any youth club coaching, so Summer joined a club in nearby Durham and dropped her time down to 14.32. She told me her time ranked her something like 40th in the nation, and that marked the first moment I even considered where a hurdler of mine was ranked nationally. She and I agreed that if she continued to work hard and progress over the next two years, she could be one of the very best in the country by the time she graduated.
Unfortunately, she tore her acl the following September while playing flag football with some friends. She was never the same again.
Meanwhile, on the boys’ side of things, I was in the rare position of having no hurdlers capable of competing for a state title heading into the 2000 outdoor season. My state champion from the previous year had graduated, and my best guy coming back ran like a 17.0. So when spring practice started up, I was on the hunt for a new hurdler to carry on the tradition.
That’s when Cameron Akers showed up. At first I ignored him when he asked me if he could try the hurdles. At 5-10, 140 pounds, he didn’t look the part. Too skinny, borderline too short. There were a couple other new kids I had my eye on. Taller guys, with longer legs.
But Cam was persistent. In previous articles I’ve written in detail about his meteoric rise that year and the special coach/athlete bond that we formed, so I’ll only touch on it here. Long story short, in three months he went from never having hurdled before to winning the state championship in both hurdle events, winning the 110’s in a new meet record of 14.40.
That summer, I joined the Junior Striders Track Club in Raleigh as one of the hurdle coaches. After missing out on coaching Summer Knowles the previous year, I wanted to make sure I stayed with Cameron through the summer months. A good friend of mine named Aaron McDougal, who shared my love of hurdles, was coaching with the Striders, so he asked if I would join him.
By the end of the summer, Cameron dropped his personal best all the way down to 14.23, winning the Junior Olympic Region III championship over Dexter Faulk, who would later go on to have a stellar professional career. Throughout all of June and July, Cameron and I were basically inseparable. I picked up him for practice, we drove together to the track, I coached him, then I dropped him off back home. For out-of-town meets, we traveled together and stayed in the same hotel room.
Cameron’s success gave me credibility, and started me wondering how good of a coach I was, and how good of a coach I could be. He was the first hurdler I’d ever coached who could absolutely blast me in a race. In practice, I never did work out with Cam. He was too good, and I wasn’t about to embarrass myself. His success got me to thinking that I must be a good coach. Nobody goes from being brand new to being one of the best in the country in a matter of months without good coaching. Coach McDougal, who had an extensive background in the martial arts, sometimes referred to me playfully as “sensei.” At the state meet, a coach from another school asked me after the 110 final if I had been a hurdler myself. When I answered yes he said, “Yeah I could tell. No way that kid runs like that unless he knows what he’s doing.”
I was beginning to realize that being a great athlete wasn’t a prerequisite for being a credible coach. To put it simply, Cameron’s success – and his absolute certainty that he couldn’t have done it without me – gave me confidence in myself.
After he graduated, the school team had an influx of new male hurdlers – none as good as Cameron, but all very good. We finished 1-2-3 in both hurdle events at the state meet in 2003 and 2004. During those two years I didn’t come to the Junior Strider practices as often in the summers because the school seasons had been so fulfilling and so exhausting that I needed a break. Plus none of the guys on my school team ran summer track.
But by 2005 all the talent on the school team was gone and I found myself seeking new challenges. If I was to continue to grow as a coach, I needed hurdlers. I remember going to Coach Curtis Frye’s clinic in South Carolina in November of 2004, learning a whole bunch of new stuff, then coming back home with nobody to use it on.
In September of 2004 I started up the hurdlesfirst.com website. I looked it at as a way to combine my love for writing with my love for the hurdles. The internet had a dearth of information about hurdles, and though I didn’t consider myself an expert, I felt that my something would be an improvement upon the nothing that was out there. A few months later Coach McDougal and I started up our own youth club – the Hurdles First Track Club. (That’s why the name of the site and the name of the team are the same, even though I no longer coach with the team).
Thus began the glory years, when I had the opportunity to coach some enormously talented hurdlers.
***
While I had been focusing on Cameron and the other hurdlers on my school team, Coach McDougal had been developing a group of young kids who were tearing up the track. By the time we formed our own club, he had coached three kids who had already been national age-group champions – Johnny Dutch, Keare Smith, and Wayne Davis II. Dutch had also set a new 110 freshman record with a 14.16. As a freshman, he had already surpassed what Cameron had done as a junior. Keare, arguably the most talented of the group, was also the laziest. And Wayne was a little dynamo who wanted to beat everybody, and he wanted to beat them now, regardless of how young he was or how small he was.
Shortly after we formed the club, Booker Nunley and his younger brother Malcolm joined us. I also grabbed David Coe – younger brother of Joe and Nic Coe, both of whom had run for me at Ravenscroft. A couple other guys who proved to be strong athletes and who went on to compete at the collegiate level were Harold Sims and James Robinson. All in all we had about 20 athletes, male and female, and all but a few were hurdlers.
As eager as I was to get started, I was also feeling a bit overwhelmed. In previous cases, I had been the one who had developed the talent. With the Ravenscroft hurdlers, including Cameron, I was the only coach they’d ever known. Now I was being entrusted with helping established stars to improve even further. What if they stagnated? What if they regressed? Despite my success with Summer and Cameron, the self-doubt was there.
The website was helping me to grow in ways that I hadn’t thought of. I wasn’t just growing as a writer, but as a coach. Interviewing athletes and coaches for profiles gave me valuable opportunity to pick the brains of those who had competed and coached at the highest levels of the sport. In 2005 I interviewed my childhood hero Renaldo Nehemiah, and I was floating on a cloud for a good month after that. I also interviewed his high school coach, Jean Poquette, whose workouts for Nehemiah had served as the basis for my coaching ideas and methods since my college years, when I was basically coaching myself.
Along with Coach McDougal and our other coaching partner Troy Baker, I took a trip to the western part of North Carolina to meet with Poquette, pick his brain, and have him evaluate Dutch’s technique. While Poquette did find some minor things that Johnny needed to work on, he was overall very impressed with how he looked, saying he’d never seen a high school hurdler who looked so efficient over the hurdles since Renaldo. Hearing those words from someone whose opinion I treasured gave me the confidence I needed to keep pushing forward.
So what can I say about those years? The Johnny, Booker, Wayne years? It was just a magical time. Johnny finished 2007 as the number one ranked high school 110 hurdler in the nation, Booker finished 2008 ranked number one, and Wayne finished 2009 ranked number one. But the glory years were 2006-07, when all three of them were together, before Johnny graduated.
Literally, every practice, I was learning something new. Every practice was filled with the spirit of adventure and creativity that I find to be absolutely thrilling. These guys didn’t just want to get better, they just didn’t want to beat people; they wanted to learn. They wanted to master the event. None of them had any fear – of losing, of falling, of making mistakes. And competitively speaking, they were warriors.
With those guys, it wasn’t just me coming up with new ideas and sharing them with the group. They would come to me with new ideas and we’d work them out together. I can’t count how many drills Wayne created on the spot, just messing around before or after a workout. And he liked to time everything, even one-step drills, so he was always revving up the competitive atmosphere. Johnny was always experimenting with different styles, and he had this crazy ability to mimic anybody’s style.
With those guys, I learned that coaching isn’t about coaching. Meaning, it isn’t about having a plan and sticking to it. It isn’t about dictating. It isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about growing with your athletes. It’s about making adaptations to a workout during the workout. Those guys taught me more about hurdling and coaching hurdlers than any other source I can name. Because Johnny was the oldest and had the most experience, the majority of my deeper conversations were with him. But we could never have a one-on-one discussion without looking around and seeing Wayne and Booker moseying over to join in.
We were absolute hurdle nerds. All of our talks were about the hurdles. Booker would walk on the track talking about a race he’d seen on TV and how Dayron Robles’ trail leg looked and ask if he should try that. That one question would trigger a half-hour conversation on trail leg mechanics, with everybody providing input.
Though we never had any deep philosophical discussions about life, about our purpose here on this earth, etc., it felt like we had an unspoken agreement that when we were talking about hurdles, we were talking about life, we were talking about the bigger picture.
The reason I say that is because, looking back, it was around the time I was coaching those guys that I began to look upon hurdling as something that contained the seed of the eternal. In college, I had begun to understand hurdling as an art form, but now I was beginning to delve even more deeply. I was beginning to perceive that hurdling was something that had no beginning and had no end – that it went on and on, like a river.
It’s a concept that continues to take shape in my mind.
***
In Part Four of “Go Where the Hurdles Take You,” I will discuss the last five years of my coaching career, up to the present day. Part Four will appear in next month’s issue of The Hurdle Magazine.
Note: The title of Part Three – “Something of the Eternal” – is borrowed from a line in The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, edited by Mark Roskill.
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