Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #337: Kyle Jones-Lithia Springs (GA) High School | Building Culture Through Simplicity and Grace

Transcript

#337: Kyle Jones-Lithia Springs (GA) High School | Building Culture Through Simplicity and Grace · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

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  You're listening to the Gil Athletics Connections podcast
• 0:05
  with host Mike Cunningham. Track and field world juvenile
• 0:12
  tuned in to a humble servant, Mike Cunningham for another
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  extraordinary message for Gil Athletics Connections.
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  We're back here on the Gil FedEx Connections podcast.
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  And as you can hear if you're a regular listener, my voice is
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  still trashed. It's a little bit better.
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  My throat is a little bit better.
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  So it won't hurt so much this time.
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  But I do have that. I don't know, I want to say that
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  deep, sexy voice, but I'm not sure it's it's one of those or
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  not the other. But we're going to have a great
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  time here on the Gil Connections podcast, uplifting an honor and
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  coaches from around the country. And we're going to go, we're
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  going to go more towards my home area.
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  We're going to go to the Southeast.
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  My neighbors, I grew up in Alabama.
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  We're going to go to my neighbors over here in Georgia.
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  Help me welcome from Lithia Springs High School in the
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  beautiful state of Georgia, the wise, the wonderful Mr. Kyle
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  Jones. Kyle, how are you, Sir?
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  Man, I am excellent, fabulous, blessed and always man.
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  How are you, Sir? Well, you know, if you're
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  watching on YouTube, I'm sipping my tea, so I'm trying to get
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  better here. I don't know what in the world
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  wrecked me over this past week. I think it actually was
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  allergies that turned into like some kind of sickness.
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  But I went to the to the doctor. Do you, are you a big, I'm not a
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  big going to the doctor, No hospital.
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  Yeah, same, same. I don't know if it's a guy thing
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  or what, but I just, I'd rather not.
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  But I finally went Friday night. I'm just feeling horrific after
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  work on Friday and I go and when I've gone to the past, they've
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  given me a thing called AZ Pack. I don't know if you ever heard
• 1:34
  of that. I don't know what that really
• 1:35
  is, but it's always helped. So I go there, do the song and
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  dance, you know, the check my temperature and all that stuff
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  and expecting, you know, get AZ pack and go home.
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  I'll feel better by the time, you know, I wake up on Saturday
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  for college football. I guess whatever they thought I
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  have or had or didn't have no Z pack.
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  They she basically told me to go home and suck it up that that's
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  I'm not kidding. She's like, take some cough
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  medicine, take some Tylenol and I was like, man, I can't break
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  my nose. I it was terrible and I
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  literally got the, you know, my wife basically just, you know,
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  suck it up. Buttercup is what I got that
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  that was my prescription. You know, I, I think that's
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  it's, I had that a couple of weeks ago, ironically, the exact
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  same symptoms and, and my wife was she had it as well.
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  And we and we had this, you know, prolific cough that would
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  not go away. And we were like, what is this?
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  It wasn't really. It didn't.
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  I didn't feel sick, but I felt like not great.
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  Right, right. And we, we ended up doing some
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  spoonfuls of organic honey and a few tea, you know, tea baths on
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  the throat and but we're fine. Yeah, I took something called DM
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  or something like that, like, yeah, what was it called?
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  I've never heard of it before. It's kind of a it looked like a
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  cough medicine type, but it was more thicker.
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  So I did that, finished that out today and a couple of Mucinex,
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  which didn't help it on my, my, my nose, especially my left
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  side. I mean, literally just blocked
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  up, like could not breathe. I mean, just that was the worst
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  part. It's finally starting to open up
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  a little bit. And then the throat hurt real
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  bad. Anyway, this is not a medical
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  podcast. It's like, thank goodness, by
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  the way, that it's not. We're here to learn more about
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  you, my friend. I'm really excited about this.
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  You know, we meet people in different ways in society,
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  right? And especially in our sport and
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  our profession. We may meet through track
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  clinics. We may meet through track needs,
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  we made me through doing business, etcetera, things like
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  that. But one of the ways I truly love
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  meeting people because I love accentuating the positive part
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  of it is through social media. And my friend here, Kyle Jones
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  and I have been, I don't know how I meant to look to see how
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  long we've been connected on Twitter, but he is one of those
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  guys. If you know me on Twitter, you
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  know my style on Twitter, he he might, he might beat me.
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  Actually, he is one of the more funny, positive, prolific
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  tweeters out there. And that just, you know, if you
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  know me well enough that that's attractive to me.
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  I like people who do positive things in this world.
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  So before we even get started in your story, man, I just want to
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  know, like, is that an intention for you?
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  Like do you think about social media of like, oh, I'm going to
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  go put positive into this world? Or is this just like a organic,
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  like I just pick up my phone and just do things, Mike, It's just
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  who I am. No, I don't intentionally do
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  anything on social media, which is weird, right?
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  My wife says you're so connected to people and I'm just like, I'm
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  just being me. And so typically whatever comes
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  up comes out. I do try to filter it as as with
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  with the negativity and I, I do believe in, in spreading some
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  form of positivity. There's enough trash out there.
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  I have my days right where I'm like, I can't believe that,
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  especially when it comes to the New York Giants.
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  Jeez, they, they drive me crazy, right?
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  And then just with sports in general, but for the most part,
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  I'm just out there to have a good time.
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  And we, you know, I, I look at it like this, that the more
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  positivity you could put out there.
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  Maybe it's a smile on somebody's face, maybe to help him get
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  through that day. Just never know what somebody's
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  going through. And I live my life like that.
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  It's not just a, a tweet or I'm not just on IG, not just on
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  Facebook, you know, trying to make people laugh.
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  I'm I'm, I'm literally more than likely if I pull something and
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  it's funny to other people, I'm already laughing at it myself.
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  So one of those weird people that makes that make you, I make
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  myself crack up and I'm like, oh, I got to share this.
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  This has got to be funny to somebody else, right?
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  I don't know, I, I, I bless that because, you know, I, I
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  understand. So I'm, I would say I'm an
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  advocate of social media and that's because, you know,
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  throughout history, everything new has always been the devil,
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  that it's going to ruin society. It's what they said about radio
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  when it first came out. It's what they said about cars,
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  by the way, when it first came out, TV's, obviously the
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  Internet, obviously social media, all that was going to
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  ruin society, young kids, etcetera, etcetera.
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  And certainly all of those things have been used in bad
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  ways in some form or fashion, although a lot of those things
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  have been used in good ways. And that's what I like to focus
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  on with social media. It's like, certainly there are
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  bad actors on social media and you can say more on Twitter than
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  any other. I don't know if that's
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  necessarily true. It has its issues, but but to
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  me, it's always, you know, we were touching on this a little
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  bit before we hit the record button today is the only way in
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  my opinion, to get rid of dark is to be light.
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  So like, it kills me. It pains me when I see someone
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  say, hey, that, you know, I'm leaving Twitter, whether they're
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  going to go somewhere else or not, but they're leaving Twitter
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  and they're a positive person. It's like, oh man, you just you
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  just allow the darkness to win more like we need you like like
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  Carl Lewis very love his stuff. And he got fed up with Twitter
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  and said, I'm just going to stay on Instagram.
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  And I was like, oh, Carl, but we need you like we need, we need
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  positive role models and people have positive minds on this
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  site. And yes, I know you get beat
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  down, especially a guy of such a high profile as him, you get
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  beat up constantly, but I guarantee he's getting beat up
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  on IG too. It's just sadly people think the
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  anonymity of social media and the Internet is what saves them.
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  And it's like man, you know someones watching you.
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  Even if you think you're anonymous, someone knows what
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  you're doing and that's that's not a good thing.
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  So I love you, being you and keeping that positivity and
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  staying true to yourself on that, man, that's that to me is
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  a big deal. Oh yeah, absolutely.
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  And I'll tell this Carl, hope he jump back on.
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  But I'll tell you, if you learn how to use that block button and
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  that mute button, man, it just saves your life.
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  You know, OK, I'm glad you said that.
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  On one hand, I immediately wanted to say agree 100% and I
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  certainly have blocked my fair share of some accounts out
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  there. But however, I don't want to be
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  an echo chamber either, right? Like I, you know, even in just
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  our vertical of track and field, there's certainly people that
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  I'm like, oh man, you just, I don't want to see your stuff
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  anymore. But then I'm also like, oh, you
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  know, I also want to see what both people are thinking.
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  You know, not that I agree, not that I would amplify it, but
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  like, man, I, I also kind of want to know who not to pay
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  attention to in real life. Like, oh, if I ever run into
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  that person, I've seen what they tweeted.
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  I don't need to necessarily be hanging out with them.
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  So I don't know, it's a tough world.
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  I think, you know, protecting your network both on social
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  media and in real life, I think is extremely important.
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  And that's what I love about this podcast is I get to
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  surround myself, my network with with great people like you, man.
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  And so I'm excited to learn your journey and to share your
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  journey with our listener. So let's hop right into it, man.
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  Let's get in our Wayback Machine here.
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  You know, Kyle, assuming you are an athlete, track had to start
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  for you somewhere. Now that's a big assumption.
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  We know we've had plenty of great coaches on here who are
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  not athletes. But ultimately, tell us, where
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  does track and field the sport? Where does track and field start
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  for you? So track started in two places
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  for me. I know this sounds weird.
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  So there's like a, there's a stutter step and then there was
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  an actual beginning and the stutter step.
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  I started in 4th grade, believe it or not.
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  And I'm at this school in, in Philadelphia where at my
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  hometown, right? And we were in gym class.
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  And do you remember the the they used to make you to jump over
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  the bars back in the day? Like this one single bar to see
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  who could jump the highest. Yes, yes, yeah, I never made it
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  over, but yes. Yeah, I was.
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  I was quite the opposite. I actually jumped the highest
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  out of everybody at the school and I'm in 4th grade and they
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  only let 5th graders compete in track and field.
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  And so my mom's like, she comes up to the school and she's like,
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  you're going to let my kid on the team.
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  He beat everybody at the school. He's the best jumper here.
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  Oh dude. And so she advocates for me and
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  I get out there to the track and I'm not jumping yet.
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  They're like, hey, you got to run.
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  I'm like what's what's running? Yeah, wait, I just jump, right?
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  Just. Jump right and and these girls
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  are beating me around the track and I said like this.
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  And so my mom got mad because she was like, she did all this
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  advocate. I was gonna say she fought for
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  you. Right, right, right.
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  And I just was like, Nah, I don't want to do this.
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  So Fast forward, we we move over to Jersey.
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  This is how I became a Giants fan.
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  But yeah, I was going to ask about that actually.
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  Yeah, OK. Yeah, people go, how are you in
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  Philadelphia hometown? And then, yeah, I grew up in
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  half my life in Jersey, so I spent time there.
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  But so I end up in in this place, this little small town
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  called Pennsauken. It's in between Cherry Hill and
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  Camden. That's where people like, I
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  don't know where that is, right. So people know Cherry Hill and
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  Camden. And I'm in there in middle
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  school and my gym teacher in 8th grade, he used to make us run a
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  lap every day before gym. This is when kids played
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  outside, right? And me and one of my closest
• 10:27
  friends, we would race every day just trying to get around.
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  And I could never beat him. He was always fast at that time.
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  That's another story, by the way.
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  That's going to be a fun story later on if we can get to that.
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  And so my gym teacher, Mr. Collins, he goes, hey, you've
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  got a nice stride. I think you should run track.
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  I said thank you, Mr. Collins. Question.
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  What's a stride? I don't know what he's talking
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  about. Hey, that's a great example,
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  though. Sometimes we say things to kids
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  and we know it because we just live in.
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  We think they know it and they have no idea what we're talking
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  about. That's so funny.
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  That's awesome. What's a stride?
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  Right. He's like, yeah, you got a gauge
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  shot. I'm like, huh, what's a stride?
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  And so he said you should come out for track.
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  Said OK, what's track? I'm still clueless at this
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  point, Right? I knew it.
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  Yeah, I was like, so you didn't from back and forth grade didn't
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  like start loving track or, you know, paying attention to try
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  you just like oh, that was 1 blip and.
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  I I didn't really understand what it fully was.
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  You know, I, I just did not pay attention to it like that.
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  And so we get out there and he, I try out for the track team and
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  I make it. And that year I went undefeated
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  into 100 meter dash. We won the four by one.
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  I won the high jump and I won the long jump.
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  Dude. And so I was like, this is kind
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  of fun. I'm kind of good at it and
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  enjoyed it so much so that when, you know, we went into high
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  school, I just stuck with it. And it, I, I fell in love with
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  the sport that year because I was running with my best
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  friends. We were having the time of our
• 12:01
  lives and, you know, it just, it just became a joy for me to want
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  to get better and better. And it really wasn't about the
• 12:08
  wins. It was just about being out
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  there with my closest friends and we just had a ball.
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  Any other sports during high school?
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  During high school, yeah. So I I tried two years of
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  football. I was terrible, by the way.
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  Yeah. And the only reason I even tried
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  football is because the football coach saw me practicing for
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  track and field during the summer.
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  He's like, hey, you're pretty fast.
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  You come out now, Miranda, that was a pretty good coverage
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  corner. I couldn't catch worth the darn.
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  And then they tried to play me a running back, and I couldn't
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  remember any of the plays. So I was not very good at it.
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  So. And I did two years ago.
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  Yeah, yeah. I did a year cross country,
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  which I absolutely, you know, it was no, no way.
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  I was going to say wait a minute for a guy who in 4th grade was
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  like what is this running stuff and now cross country?
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  You could not have enjoyed that. No, I did not, and it was
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  horrible. We had some, we had a pretty
• 13:00
  good, pretty good couple of runners on our team.
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  But my closest friend, he was like a 17 minute cross country
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  guy. Yeah, pretty decent, right?
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  And we had this girl and she was like a 17 or 18 minute girl.
• 13:13
  Wow. Yeah, remember her name was
• 13:14
  Veronica, but she went flying past me one time.
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  They ran like a Coed race. I was like, Oh my goodness, this
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  girl was flying. It's.
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  Like it's not. For me.
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  So talk to me about high school track and field.
• 13:28
  Do you fall in love with it? Now you say it's interesting.
• 13:31
  I want to unpack this a little bit.
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  You said it wasn't about the one you were winning a lot.
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  And we tend to know that, you know, winning is fun, right?
• 13:37
  And and being shown like you have value.
• 13:39
  I remember I tell the story every once in a while back in it
• 13:42
  was probably episode, I don't know, 5080, maybe 100.
• 13:45
  Somewhere around there. We had the great triple jump
• 13:49
  king Willie Banks on the podcast and you know, Willie amazing,
• 13:54
  great storyteller, first of all, but you know, tells his story of
• 13:57
  when he was young. I want to say middle school.
• 13:59
  I'm probably butchering here a little bit.
• 14:00
  Go go back and listen to the episode with Willie Banks.
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  It's amazing. But he talks about he got like
• 14:06
  8th place or something. He did not win in the triple
• 14:08
  jump, but he got 8th place like in his first competition and
• 14:11
  they gave him a ribbon. It actually kind of made me
• 14:13
  rethink the whole, you know, everybody gets a trophy kind of
• 14:17
  thought philosophy. He gets a ribbon and he goes
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  Mike, he goes. That was the first time like
• 14:22
  someone told me like I was good at something, like I could be
• 14:24
  good at it. I got a ribbon for 8th place and
• 14:28
  that it really kind of was a big blast off for him to go become
• 14:32
  the world record holder and gold medalist and you know, all these
• 14:34
  other things and it really like it.
• 14:36
  It was with the real or lesson, I think of the story was like,
• 14:40
  oh, young people sometimes they're we're always crapping on
• 14:43
  them a lot of times as adults, by the way, And here is some
• 14:45
  time where, you know, you go out and win or you know, are told,
• 14:49
  Hey, good job. Like you're our best 100m guy
• 14:52
  and there's a like some self esteem as a you went to high
• 14:55
  school. High school's tough for boys and
• 14:57
  girls, man. Here's something that the you're
• 15:00
  being told you're good at. So, but you said it was more
• 15:03
  about like, oh, I liked improving.
• 15:04
  Like I love going from 12 seconds to 11 1/2 and 11 and 1/2
• 15:07
  to 11/1, etcetera. Kind of like that.
• 15:09
  Tell me more about like, where did that mindset come from then?
• 15:13
  You know, I don't know where developed from, I just know that
• 15:17
  when I was younger I just always wanted to be better.
• 15:20
  You know, I grew up in a really tough neighborhood and called, I
• 15:24
  don't know if you ever heard of Fairmount Fairmont Park.
• 15:27
  It's in Philadelphia. It's right near the zoo.
• 15:29
  And so the area, I hate to say it like this, but it's that that
• 15:33
  that park is known as, I'll call it like this 187 park.
• 15:36
  You kind of. Fill in the OK.
• 15:38
  Very dangerous part of town. And so we were always striving
• 15:41
  for more. And in my mind, I just always
• 15:46
  had this growth mindset. I just wanted to get better.
• 15:49
  It didn't matter what was needed to be done.
• 15:51
  I just wanted to do it. And when I'm engaged with
• 15:54
  something, I can be like a pit bull, right?
• 15:56
  If I'm, if I've got a latch on, I'll, I'll just latch on to
• 15:59
  whatever it is in front of me And I'll just go and go and go
• 16:02
  and go and work to improve. And I just knew.
• 16:05
  And I'll tell you that's, this is a fun story too.
• 16:09
  Again, my closest friend, the one that we used to raise every
• 16:11
  gym class, he ran track too. And so I'm winning in the 100
• 16:16
  and the long jump and the high jump and all, you know, the 4 by
• 16:18
  1. And so I asked the coach to put
• 16:20
  me in the 400. Like, who does that, right?
• 16:23
  What short sprinter says put me in the 400 because I wanted to
• 16:26
  try something new to try to push myself because I was already
• 16:29
  winning in a lot of stuff. And I was like, I want to try
• 16:31
  something different, something I've never done before.
• 16:33
  And my best friend, he's my one of my closest friend, one of my
• 16:36
  best friends. And he goes, we run, we end up
• 16:39
  in the same heat together. And at the time, I didn't know
• 16:42
  what the heat was, by the way, but I didn't know how to run it.
• 16:48
  And then I'm winning for about 200 meters, as expected.
• 16:52
  And then we get to the last 100 meters and he goes blowing by
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  me. And I'm like, wait, what just
• 17:00
  happened? And so he kind of, this is
• 17:03
  weird. He kind of walks across the
• 17:05
  finish sign and kind of sags his pants and looks at me like,
• 17:07
  yeah, this is my. Team as we are here, yeah.
• 17:10
  I said OK, and that began the battle, right?
• 17:14
  And so every year we would try to kick each other's butt
• 17:17
  through high school and see who would end up at the end of the
• 17:20
  year with the fastest time in our, you know, our crossover
• 17:24
  race. Because I ran the one and two,
• 17:25
  he ran the four and 8. And so we would go, oh, he ran
• 17:28
  the 8 and a mile. We wouldn't meet in the 400 and
• 17:30
  go, all right, let's go, buddy. Let's see who has the fastest
• 17:33
  time. I do like Speaking of your your
• 17:36
  friend there, you know, you mentioned you guys raced every
• 17:38
  day and you're like, I didn't beat him.
• 17:39
  He was better than me, but you didn't quit.
• 17:41
  You didn't because you weren't winning and say, you know what,
• 17:43
  why don't change the race or something.
• 17:45
  You're like, all right, I'm going to keep trying.
• 17:46
  I'm getting better every time. But that's so you did kind of
• 17:48
  exhibit that a little bit from a younger age of like, all right,
• 17:51
  it's not necessarily about winning.
• 17:52
  I'd like to win. Everybody likes to win, but I'm
• 17:55
  going to continue to get to get better.
• 17:57
  Yeah, You know it was. I love competition and that's
• 18:01
  the draw for me. That's the love, like the whole
• 18:05
  trophies and all this stuff. I don't care about it.
• 18:07
  I don't. I really enjoy the journey.
• 18:09
  Like I fell in love when people say fall in love with the
• 18:11
  process. I literally am in love with this
• 18:15
  process of figuring out how to be the best you can be in track
• 18:19
  and field, which is, you know, how I live my life but also how
• 18:22
  I coach and stuff. We'll get into that.
• 18:24
  But then also, you know, I've got to mess with him a little
• 18:27
  bit here. It took me 3 years to really
• 18:31
  finally beat him in a head to head race.
• 18:33
  Yeah, right. And that was that was
• 18:38
  invigorating, like, you know, but that that first started when
• 18:43
  we we had to race off for a four by four spot.
• 18:48
  And so I had never beaten him before in an open race.
• 18:52
  It was junior year and I'm like, this is it like I want this
• 18:55
  spot. And so I beat him and took it.
• 18:57
  And then we ended up winning the state championship in a four by
• 19:00
  four. I never looked back after that.
• 19:03
  He hasn't beat me since. I love it, I love it.
• 19:07
  What was, you know, for a guy who likes the process and I and
• 19:10
  I love that that's, you know, something that we strive for our
• 19:12
  athletes all the time, right? Like don't worry about the
• 19:14
  results necessarily. Fall in love with the process
• 19:16
  and the results will come. What kind of relationship did
• 19:19
  you have with with high school coach?
• 19:21
  Oh, man, listen, and I'm going to try not to get teary eyed
• 19:25
  here because let me tell you, I coach the way I do because of my
• 19:29
  high school coach. My high school, one of my high
• 19:33
  school coaches was Albert Esalfi.
• 19:36
  He's now the Sprint coach at Rutgers University.
• 19:38
  Oh. Nice, Albert.
• 19:41
  Coach Al, let me be respectful here.
• 19:43
  Coach Al was like a father for me.
• 19:48
  I don't know that I would have graduated high school if it had
• 19:51
  not been for him. Oh, wow.
• 19:53
  I definitely don't think I would have ever attended college if it
• 19:56
  had not been for him. He he took time.
• 19:59
  He was patient. He was fair, but he was he was
• 20:05
  straight up no chaser right in a in a way that I could receive
• 20:10
  it. And he ultimately helped me to
• 20:13
  believe in my capabilities and I just wanted to be around him
• 20:20
  with and track and field as much as I could because, you know, it
• 20:24
  was what manhood was for me. And so they coach Al, you know,
• 20:29
  came, everything just changed. You know, I love the sport
• 20:34
  always, you know, love the sport since middle school.
• 20:37
  But when he came, I really fell in love with the sport, like
• 20:41
  deeply. It was just he was such an
• 20:44
  exponential figure in my life. Like he magnified track and
• 20:50
  field for me, but also what it meant to be present and what it
• 20:55
  meant to be a support system for other people.
• 20:58
  When you say he came into your life, did he come in sometime in
• 21:01
  high school or right off the bat?
• 21:02
  And his freshman? No, he came in my sophomore
• 21:06
  year. OK, so you had a year high
• 21:08
  school track and and and all no shade to the coach before that.
• 21:12
  But then coach Al comes in and I mean, I, I, I, I love just
• 21:16
  listening to you explain that almost like like clouds parted
• 21:20
  and you saw like, oh, when you said this is what manhood looks
• 21:23
  like. Like that to me is a very deep
• 21:26
  and important statement. Yeah, and it was for me growing
• 21:31
  up, it was very difficult because my dad was in the Navy.
• 21:33
  He was always gone. And so I really didn't see very
• 21:36
  much. I really didn't know very much.
• 21:38
  And it was it got tough to understand what a man should be,
• 21:42
  you know, because I spent and I, you know, God bless my family.
• 21:45
  I love we, we have a lot of women in our family, but it was
• 21:48
  very difficult to figure out what manhood was.
• 21:51
  And so him showing up in in the sophomore year, it was it was
• 21:55
  great. Now, here's the here's the
• 21:56
  kicker. I was I was actually ineligible
• 21:59
  my sophomore year for spring track because I dropped the
• 22:03
  class and went to study hall. I didn't know that I didn't have
• 22:06
  enough credits. Nobody told me that hey, if you
• 22:07
  drop this, you're going to be in trouble.
• 22:09
  All the other grades are fine, but because I didn't have enough
• 22:11
  classes, I wasn't able to run. And we actually won the
• 22:15
  conference championship that year.
• 22:16
  But what I did was, and we beat some really great teams to win
• 22:21
  that conference championship like Camden High and Woodrow
• 22:23
  Wilson. They were all ranked in the
• 22:25
  country at that time. I mean, his kids are running
• 22:27
  like 3-15 in the 4x4. Like these guys are rolling,
• 22:30
  right? Scott McRae and all the Albert
• 22:33
  Dukirk, all these great guys, great athletes from New Jersey,
• 22:36
  right? And so I was an eligible.
• 22:39
  But what what I did was I said, coach, I'm not, I'm not
• 22:42
  disappearing. I'm going to practice and I'm
• 22:45
  going to be the team manager. Wow.
• 22:49
  So I stayed out there and I made sure we had water every day.
• 22:51
  I made sure our athletes, you know, we were, they were
• 22:54
  stretched. And you were really good as a
• 22:56
  freshman. Yeah, I was.
• 22:58
  I was on the varsity team as a freshman.
• 23:00
  So, I mean, that strikes me, you know, I'm just a little bit of
• 23:03
  stereotyping of, you know, young people here a little bit.
• 23:06
  But you know, here's a kid who, you know, varsity is a freshman.
• 23:09
  Like things are going well for you sophomore year because of
• 23:13
  this weird technicality. You're not on the team.
• 23:15
  You could have like no one would have judged you if you just
• 23:17
  said, you know, I'll see you guys next year or hey, I'm a
• 23:20
  practice with you, but I'm not going to be able to do the meet
• 23:23
  to actually like humble yourself and be the team manager.
• 23:26
  I mean that that that seems a little opposite of what we think
• 23:30
  about with young people. Here is a 15 ish year old kid
• 23:33
  that you would say, Hey, I'm going to help out.
• 23:36
  I'm still part of the team. I just can't.
• 23:37
  I can't race on the weekends, right?
• 23:40
  And that's all it was for me. It's it's being around getting
• 23:42
  coach. I was there.
• 23:43
  I wanted to be with him and and I wanted to be with my teammates
• 23:47
  because I absolutely love my team.
• 23:49
  You know, they were great. And it just it just was like,
• 23:52
  all right, well, you know, this is an obstacle.
• 23:55
  That doesn't mean I can't practice to get better because I
• 23:58
  could run, you know, I couldn't run with the team, but I could
• 24:00
  get the workout and I would just work out and I would practice on
• 24:03
  my own sometimes. And I just I was like, all
• 24:07
  right, well, I'm going to be the best person I can be for this
• 24:09
  team here. And I had one teammate who was a
• 24:12
  football player at the time. And he goes, man, why are you
• 24:15
  here? He knows why do you why do you
• 24:18
  keep showing up to come here? And I said, dude, because I love
• 24:20
  it. I love this.
• 24:22
  And he just was like, I get it. And so that's, that's what I
• 24:27
  did. And I showed up and made sure my
• 24:31
  teammates are taken care of as best as I could as I could.
• 24:33
  I. Love that double click into
• 24:36
  coach out here a little bit. You know, I know you know, you
• 24:39
  spent three years with them and obviously a huge impact on your
• 24:43
  life and what you know what I mentioned about being a
• 24:46
  teenager, you know, being a kid is hard is exactly what you
• 24:48
  talked about with your dad being gone, being in the Navy and
• 24:50
  stuff. I mean that's going through
• 24:52
  life. I mean we're we're you know, I'm
• 24:54
  almost 50 years old. It's hard being a 16 year old in
• 24:57
  life where you just don't know anything and you don't know
• 24:59
  nothing. You know, it's it's tough.
• 25:00
  So, so obviously having a positive role model like Coach
• 25:05
  Al, like what a blessing that he came in in your life at that
• 25:07
  time. Can you think of a story like
• 25:10
  when you think of Coach Al there, there's usually like one
• 25:13
  incident story that automatically pops up, whether
• 25:16
  it's, you know, when he gave me a finger wagon or when he, you
• 25:18
  know, put my his arm around me. Can he?
• 25:21
  You know, I just want to kind of really paint this full picture
• 25:23
  of this influence of Coach Al on you.
• 25:26
  Oh man, that's so hard. Yeah, you had like 10 stories
• 25:30
  pop up. Yeah, You know, I, I remember
• 25:35
  this particular moment and I, I probably never, he might not
• 25:39
  even remember what's happening. We were in the indoor track
• 25:42
  meet. And you ever have one of those
• 25:44
  Murphy Law days in athletics? But.
• 25:46
  Everything. Everything, I mean, and we were,
• 25:50
  we were a good, a pretty competitive team and for
• 25:55
  whatever reason from the first race when we ran a shuttle
• 25:58
  hurdle relay, I was on that too. The best event in the world, by
• 26:01
  the way. Man, people just don't know.
• 26:03
  Who? It's my favorite in the whole
• 26:05
  world. Love it.
• 26:05
  I love that event. So we were running in our, in
• 26:08
  our, one of my other buddies, he he fell over the hurdle and of
• 26:11
  course we we lost the race obviously.
• 26:13
  And then it just went downhill from there.
• 26:16
  So we get to the end and we're getting ready to run the four by
• 26:18
  four. And I mean, from batons dropping
• 26:21
  to people getting disqualified to people falling, I mean, it
• 26:24
  was just a barrage of horrible, horrible performance.
• 26:28
  I guess you could call it right or just mishaps.
• 26:30
  I can say Coach Al pulls me to the side.
• 26:34
  And let me throw a caveat in there as well.
• 26:38
  We didn't have our whole 4x4. One person had who was on it
• 26:41
  typically ran for events. So he one of my other class
• 26:45
  friends, he could not run on the relay, which would have
• 26:48
  guaranteed us, you know, the victory.
• 26:50
  So we had to put a freshman on the team and the coach out,
• 26:54
  pulls me to the side. He says, hey, listen, in so many
• 26:59
  words you have to show them what leadership is all about and just
• 27:07
  be the example right here. All I'm asking you for is your
• 27:10
  best win, lose or draw. Just get out there and give me
• 27:15
  everything you got. Again, let me get teary out here
• 27:20
  and I just remember standing up to the side because I was
• 27:22
  stretching while this is going on and I just remember saying I
• 27:27
  got you coach, I got you and we were the freshman.
• 27:33
  Put the freshman on 3rd and I got the baton and we were 40
• 27:38
  meters behind first place. Now mind you this is indoor, so
• 27:43
  it's 2 laps. Right, right, right, right.
• 27:44
  Yeah. And so I just looked at him as
• 27:47
  the kids come in and I'm just like, dude, come on, I don't
• 27:50
  care. Just just get me the baton, see
• 27:52
  the other kid take off. And he's half a lap on you.
• 27:56
  And so I see Coach Al out of the corner of my eye and he's just
• 28:00
  shaking his head, doing like, like, you know what I told you,
• 28:04
  just give it to me. Short end of the stick.
• 28:08
  Short story is, you know, ended up catching the kid.
• 28:11
  Wow. Yeah, from 40 meters away.
• 28:13
  And I'm telling you, I I don't know how to this day I caught
• 28:17
  that kid because he wasn't a slow kid.
• 28:20
  And I just remember as soon as I crossed the finish line, Coach I
• 28:23
  was right there to embrace me. And it wasn't the win.
• 28:29
  It was that he knew that I just gave everything I could to try
• 28:32
  to get us in that position to be on a great note.
• 28:35
  And I just grabbed Coach and I just.
• 28:39
  And that, that's that stuck out to me for so long and I can
• 28:43
  remember the race like it was yesterday, but I remember more
• 28:47
  seeing him at the finish start going.
• 28:50
  You know, there's many superpowers, but one of the
• 28:54
  overarching superpowers of a track coaches, they see
• 28:57
  something in other people before they see in themselves.
• 29:00
  And I could just see when people tell stories like that, I can't
• 29:04
  help myself, but I play like a movie in my head.
• 29:07
  So I see you as a as a young kid stretching and coach coming over
• 29:10
  to you and talking to you. And I see him at the when you're
• 29:14
  waiting for the baton and you look over and catch eyes.
• 29:17
  I see him. You know, there's that confident
• 29:19
  like, all right, I told you know nothing else to say, nothing
• 29:21
  else really yell. I either going to listen to me
• 29:24
  or not. Now it's up to you to do it.
• 29:26
  And then you go out and do that. I just love that, you know,
• 29:29
  belief in you and and knowing what you needed was probably
• 29:34
  different than what someone else in the team needed.
• 29:36
  Someone else maybe needed the raw, raw speech.
• 29:38
  Someone else needed the kicky in the butt speech.
• 29:41
  You needed the hey, this is what leadership looks like.
• 29:45
  Go go showcase, go do it. Go be a leader out there.
• 29:48
  That's what you needed in that time.
• 29:50
  And he knew that that was a that was a superpower of Coach Al, as
• 29:53
  I can tell right there alone. He knew what each of his kids
• 29:57
  athletes needed at that moment. I love that.
• 30:00
  That's so cool. As you're getting a little bit
• 30:02
  older, as you're getting to, you know, junior and senior year, we
• 30:06
  start thinking about colleges and what we're going to be when
• 30:08
  we grow up and all those kind of things.
• 30:10
  Was as you're looking, you know, in your senior year, is coaching
• 30:15
  at all in your mindset as an 18 year old eventually, spoiler
• 30:18
  alert, you become one. But are you thinking at all at
• 30:20
  that point of of becoming a coach or, or what are you
• 30:22
  thinking at that point? No, as all high school athletes,
• 30:26
  you're thinking you're going to go pro.
• 30:29
  Yeah, I'm, I'm watching like the 96 Olympics at one point.
• 30:32
  That's my sophomore year. And I'm like, Oh my God.
• 30:34
  You know, you get to see Michael Johnson and all his glory, which
• 30:38
  was really cool. And then, of course, you know
• 30:40
  what? Here's some fun stuff, man.
• 30:42
  I, I, you know, 18 years old and I, I think I you on Twitter
• 30:48
  about this when you posted that picture of John Drummond being
• 30:50
  on the field. Oh, that's.
• 30:52
  Right, yeah, between 1819 years old and seeing seeing John
• 30:55
  Drummond out there and Inger Miller and Marion Jones at the
• 31:00
  time was there and I was like, man, just being on the fields
• 31:02
  like a ha man, I feel like I could do this.
• 31:04
  But I'm going to tell you what Coach Al did for me is over the
• 31:08
  summer, I started running summer track with him, you know,
• 31:11
  sophomore year. And he it essentially made me
• 31:16
  coach the, the five year olds. So I would practice and then I
• 31:20
  would work with the five and six year olds that I teach the
• 31:23
  little kids what I've taught you.
• 31:25
  And I don't know if he don't remember this and that.
• 31:27
  And that's that's how I started. I was, I was teaching little
• 31:30
  kids how to run and I did that every summer, you know, for a
• 31:34
  little bit of time. And then it just became
• 31:36
  exponential once I got from from college and stuff.
• 31:41
  You know what a genius coach Al is here because, you know, it's
• 31:45
  we, we don't really think about this until we get older, but you
• 31:47
  know, teaching something actually makes us better at it.
• 31:50
  Like when we have to. My wife is a long term
• 31:53
  substitute teacher. She does a lot of math here
• 31:55
  lately, last couple years and like she knows the math more
• 31:59
  because she gets up in front of the class and actually teaches
• 32:01
  it from when she was a student back in the day.
• 32:03
  And I think I, I think that was a little bit of evil genius from
• 32:06
  coach Al. Like, all right, I'm teaching
• 32:07
  you. That's cool.
• 32:08
  You're picking it up one way, the way I'm giving it to you
• 32:10
  now. I'll go teach it to others.
• 32:12
  And I he, I know he just knew this where I was like, oh, you
• 32:15
  picked it up like, oh, that's why coach Al told me to do that.
• 32:17
  OK, little 5 year old, go try the, you know, like you learned
• 32:20
  it better at a young age as a sophomore than if you were just
• 32:24
  listening to him and, and doing what he said.
• 32:26
  That that's a, that that's just the craft of coaching there,
• 32:30
  buddy. That's so smart and I love that.
• 32:31
  I love that. Essentially it's the mentor
• 32:33
  mentee relationship. I'm learning, but I'm also
• 32:36
  sharing and SO. That's right.
• 32:38
  The the my name Kyle it, it actually is Gaelic.
• 32:43
  And it, it means straight Strait.
• 32:47
  OK, yeah, straight. It's like a channel, right,
• 32:49
  right. That things flow through.
• 32:51
  Yeah. And so essentially he walked me
• 32:54
  into history of my name is be a be a source that you know when
• 33:00
  you receive, let it flow through you to the next generation or
• 33:03
  other people. Wow, that's cool.
• 33:07
  I love that. So as you're looking into going
• 33:10
  to colleges and you talk to a coach, Al being a big influence
• 33:12
  on you on that as well, what were you thinking about going
• 33:16
  into become to study and talk us through that process of
• 33:19
  colleges? I had no idea what I wanted to
• 33:22
  study. I'll be honest dude, I really
• 33:26
  did not like school. I would do the work, but I so I
• 33:30
  have I'm overcoming and I still work to overcome some of this.
• 33:34
  I don't know if you ever heard of auditory processing disorder.
• 33:39
  It's some some of the hearing or something.
• 33:41
  I'm here auditory. It's, it's essentially hearing
• 33:44
  dyslexia, right? Most people haven't heard of it.
• 33:48
  I had never heard of it until I got to college and I realized
• 33:50
  that I was struggling with some things.
• 33:52
  I don't. It's essentially it's hard to
• 33:54
  understand complex instructions, right?
• 33:57
  Or and sometimes it's just basic instructions when it just like
• 34:00
  it goes in one and out the other.
• 34:01
  Just have to hear it repeatedly. It basically gets jumbled up in
• 34:04
  your head when somebody's trying to explain things to you.
• 34:06
  OK, which is why I'm such a OJT like on a job training, right?
• 34:11
  I flourish in project based. Right, like actually hands on
• 34:16
  and yeah. Not flowing that, but if you
• 34:18
  just if that's an auditory lecture, I just don't get it.
• 34:21
  It's just really hard for me to catch on.
• 34:24
  And so, you know, when I when I went in, I was like, I don't
• 34:27
  really know what I want to do, But I had a buddy of mine, he
• 34:29
  was like, yeah, you might want to go into psychology.
• 34:32
  I was like, I don't know what that is, but I can look into it.
• 34:34
  And it turns out again, I was, I was, I did not pay attention
• 34:37
  when I was younger, not very observant, right.
• 34:41
  And so I go, all right, well, what's psychology?
• 34:42
  And I found out it's the study of the mind.
• 34:46
  And I know one thing, ironically, I don't really pay
• 34:50
  attention to all the noise, but I do pay attention to people.
• 34:53
  And so I I flourish in the study of human behavior itself.
• 35:02
  And so it became a passion almost like track and field.
• 35:04
  Like at this point in my life now over decades, I can read
• 35:07
  people like a book, like you didn't even have to say
• 35:10
  anything. I can pretty much kind of paint
• 35:12
  this picture of who you may be, right, just by your body
• 35:16
  language, you know, for example. And so that's how I guess I was
• 35:20
  like, OK, well, I wanted to go into maybe psychology.
• 35:22
  And so the hard part is this, and this is coach gave me a
• 35:28
  waggy finger on this one. I didn't do what I needed to do
• 35:31
  as much as I should have in high school to get my grades where I
• 35:34
  needed them to be because all I wanted to do was sports, sports,
• 35:36
  sports. Lesson learned and lost the
• 35:39
  scholarship to West Virginia University.
• 35:43
  Yeah, I was supposed to go to WD.
• 35:44
  I was supposed to go and and and go to West Virginia with my best
• 35:47
  friend and couldn't get into the school.
• 35:51
  They had a few scholarship offers and they all got turned
• 35:54
  down so they all got snatched away.
• 35:56
  Something up at junior college running in New Jersey where?
• 36:01
  Where'd you go? Did you go to Essex County?
• 36:03
  No. So I went to Mercer County
• 36:05
  Community College and that was in Trenton, NJ.
• 36:09
  I started there and then my dad said I can't afford to keep you
• 36:12
  up here, so you have to come back home and ended up going to
• 36:15
  Gloucester County College. The hard part is, and there's
• 36:20
  two different dynamics here at Mercer.
• 36:22
  The the Sprint crew up there, we would have probably ran 39 or 38
• 36:28
  seconds. That's how we had a team.
• 36:31
  So I got pulled out of that end up at Gloucester.
• 36:34
  So Mercer is I'm a tech man. That was an experience because
• 36:38
  that was the first time I endured real racism in Trenton,
• 36:43
  NJ. Well, it's in Chambersburg.
• 36:45
  We stayed in Chambersburg and then we had such a very hard
• 36:50
  experience there. So I think that I got pulled out
• 36:54
  of that atmosphere divinely because it was such a a terrible
• 36:59
  experience or an opportunity for very volatile and toxic place.
• 37:04
  Centered around. Not that it matters not that
• 37:06
  there's no excusing what, by the way, I'm asking this question
• 37:10
  around track or around the area or Yeah, OK, OK.
• 37:15
  All right. So not like not necessarily on
• 37:17
  track, like teammates or coaches, the the area that you
• 37:21
  were in there. OK.
• 37:22
  All right. Yeah, the team was I'm.
• 37:23
  Sorry about that. Yeah.
• 37:24
  Yeah, you know what it it was. I'm not sorry about it.
• 37:27
  And I'm going to tell you why it it opened my eyes to how things
• 37:31
  can be. And I could have let it paint my
• 37:35
  worldly picture for me or give me another tool.
• 37:39
  A tool to repaint what I see and use that to my advantage.
• 37:44
  Now I can express and I can help people through an experience
• 37:49
  because I've been through it right?
• 37:51
  And sometimes, sometimes the the trauma turns into a testimony
• 37:55
  for other. People.
• 37:56
  Yeah, I appreciate that. And obviously, you know,
• 37:58
  something very personal that affected you and and has
• 38:01
  affected the rest of your your life.
• 38:04
  I say I'm sorry because I know you.
• 38:07
  I love how you expressed it and I can appreciate that.
• 38:09
  I wish you wouldn't have had to have gone through that to be
• 38:12
  able to still have that same sentiment.
• 38:14
  You know what I'm saying? Like, like I work hard.
• 38:16
  Some I say sometimes like I, I don't.
• 38:19
  I'm trying to figure out how to say this here, Kyle.
• 38:22
  I don't think that I have to me white male here, have to
• 38:27
  experience something for me to have empathy for it.
• 38:30
  Like, you hear that a lot of times where someone goes, oh,
• 38:33
  that's what it feels like to for sexism because they see
• 38:37
  something happen to their wife or spouse or whatever, right?
• 38:39
  And it's like now I'm on the bandwagon of no sexism.
• 38:43
  It's like, I don't, I'm glad you turned the leaf there, buddy.
• 38:48
  But you shouldn't have to have had it happen to you personally
• 38:51
  to have empathy. So I've never had racism delved
• 38:54
  at me, but I still have very much empathy towards people who
• 38:58
  are downgraded just because of the skin of their color.
• 39:01
  I don't need it to happen to me. So I tried.
• 39:04
  So that's where I'm like, man, I wish that would have happened to
• 39:06
  you. And yet still you have the
• 39:08
  empathy for the rest of your life to other people.
• 39:10
  You know, I'm saying I just we we can't let we can't let things
• 39:13
  that aren't we aren't personally affected by like just be out of
• 39:16
  our purview. Like we just don't get to like
• 39:18
  think about them to go. It doesn't happen to me.
• 39:20
  Like, well, that's not that's not human.
• 39:22
  That's not human to human here, buddy.
• 39:23
  I just don't like that aspect. So I appreciate it.
• 39:26
  I appreciate. It like this there.
• 39:28
  There is. So people say, well, you don't
• 39:31
  know what it's like and you never experienced this.
• 39:33
  Yeah, but the other side of the fence is that, you know, you
• 39:37
  know what an an emotion is, right?
• 39:39
  And you know what it feels like to be neglected, for example,
• 39:43
  right? Or know what it feels like to
• 39:45
  not fit in or not, not people not want you around, right?
• 39:50
  You may know what that feels like.
• 39:52
  You may know what what it, what it feels like to be looked at as
• 39:58
  different or not be included, right.
• 40:00
  And so those emotions are, we connect us as human beings.
• 40:04
  Maybe our experiences are different and our lenses are
• 40:07
  different. Our traumas are different, but
• 40:09
  the emotions that help us understand another in in some
• 40:14
  way are what really connect us. And so it doesn't matter.
• 40:18
  Well, I can say it doesn't matter.
• 40:20
  I don't think it's as important to experience it collectively.
• 40:23
  Like, I don't think everybody needs to go through that, but we
• 40:25
  do understand, hey, here are the emotions that could come with
• 40:29
  that and I can relate to those things.
• 40:31
  Yeah, I don't have to walk in your shoes to have understanding
• 40:35
  and empathy and love for you in that situation.
• 40:38
  Yeah, that's exactly right. You.
• 40:39
  Have to choose. You have to choose.
• 40:41
  That's right, that's right, it is a choice.
• 40:42
  That's exactly right. That is a choice.
• 40:44
  Okay, so Mercer, things don't work out well, but you're in an
• 40:47
  environment of track of like, holy crap, we could do something
• 40:49
  special here. We could run really fast, but
• 40:51
  ultimately, you know, cost are cost and so hey, we got to come
• 40:55
  back home. So you go back down home to is
• 40:57
  it Gloucester? Is that how you pronounce it?
• 40:59
  Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester.
• 41:03
  So now that I I missed you Gloucester, what was that
• 41:05
  experience like? Did they have track?
• 41:08
  Yeah, they did have track. And so I'm still in Pennsauken.
• 41:10
  I'm actually staying with my mom at the time.
• 41:14
  You know, I left my my dad's place in the state with my mom.
• 41:18
  They're divorced at this time. And you know, obviously it's
• 41:20
  some trauma there, but Pennsauken is about a good 45
• 41:26
  minutes to 50 minutes away from Gloucester, Gloucester County.
• 41:30
  So I didn't have a car at the time.
• 41:32
  I'm catching three different buses just to get to school.
• 41:38
  So I'm on the bus at like 6 something in the morning just to
• 41:42
  get to class by 9:00. Right.
• 41:43
  That takes forever, yeah. Right.
• 41:45
  So I'm just, we're riding all the way across, you know, South
• 41:48
  Jersey at some point. So I'm in class, you know, the
• 41:52
  morning, probably up to about 1:00 or 2:00.
• 41:55
  I go to track practice and I'm just in there practicing as much
• 41:59
  as I could from, you know, 3 to, to, to four or five.
• 42:04
  Then because I have to pay to get there.
• 42:07
  I'm I'm a dishwasher in Morristown, NJ, and so I've got
• 42:12
  to catch several buses across town again, oh man, go to go and
• 42:18
  wash dishes, and I'm washing dishes from 6:00 to 12:00 or
• 42:22
  6:00 to 2:00 in the morning. Dude.
• 42:24
  Yeah, and I've still got homework to do.
• 42:26
  Right. Yeah.
• 42:27
  So I'm doing homework on the bus, or I'm doing homework right
• 42:30
  after I get off of work, wash this stuff up, and I'm back on
• 42:34
  the bus again the next day. And so that was my life for a
• 42:38
  year. You know, when I hear stories
• 42:41
  like that, I don't think I'm tough enough to do that.
• 42:46
  Was there ever a point of like giving up like like in this, you
• 42:51
  know, I can drop school or I can drop track or I can, I don't
• 42:54
  know if you can drop work because you got to pay for it.
• 42:56
  Was there ever a time during that?
• 42:57
  It's like, man, I just, I'm not cut out for this.
• 43:00
  Yes, and I did take a semester off because it was a lot.
• 43:05
  And yeah, I was like, you know what?
• 43:07
  I'm not going to stay here. I'm not going to be a
• 43:09
  dishwasher. I'm not.
• 43:11
  Going to be this and that. And it just made me realize
• 43:15
  that, yo, I've got to make something happen.
• 43:17
  And so here is my one of my one of my best friend's brothers.
• 43:23
  He goes, hey, man, we're going down to Grambling.
• 43:26
  You should come now. Mind you, I'm not even in
• 43:29
  school. I just hopped in the car with
• 43:32
  them and that's. Far.
• 43:34
  Yeah, it's 20 hours away from. I mean, Philly to Jersey is far,
• 43:39
  you know, relatively. It's not, obviously.
• 43:41
  But wait a minute, Jersey to Grambling?
• 43:45
  Did you even know what or who or why Grambling was?
• 43:49
  No. It was like, oh, it's a school,
• 43:51
  I guess, in Louisiana. Did you even know it was in
• 43:52
  Louisiana? I did know it was in Louisiana
• 43:55
  only because my my buddy had said or my, my friend's brother
• 44:00
  had said, yeah, we're going down to Louisiana and we're going to
• 44:02
  Grambling. I'm like, OK, I don't know where
• 44:04
  that is. So I ended up riding with them,
• 44:07
  just hopping in the car with them. 20 hour ride wasn't
• 44:11
  accepted, but Marvin it was, was my one of my closest friend's
• 44:17
  brother. He's he told the coach about me.
• 44:20
  And so I had a conversation with the legendary coach Taco
• 44:26
  Lavelle, Bertram Lavelle, who was the epitome of track and
• 44:31
  field in the swack and chip swack, of course.
• 44:34
  And so he said, yeah, we can, We can.
• 44:36
  We got some room, some scholarship money for you.
• 44:39
  And he gave me a partial scholarship to try me out, and I
• 44:44
  made the team. So that's something we ended up
• 44:47
  in Grambling. Dude, that's crazy, especially
• 44:51
  because there are so many options in the Northeast.
• 44:53
  I mean, it's one of those densely populated there for a
• 44:56
  lot of schools out of options from all ranges, D3D1 NAI,
• 45:00
  there's so many options up there and you go might as well be
• 45:04
  clear across the country. It is north to South for crying
• 45:07
  out loud. Wow, what did you?
• 45:10
  I'm always amazed because Northeast people are in Philly
• 45:13
  and Jersey and I love Jersey was one of my my like main
• 45:16
  recruiting state when I coached in college because it's an
• 45:19
  amazing state to be. You know, it's terribly cold,
• 45:23
  not terribly populated, like it's not like a New York,
• 45:26
  Florida, Texas, etcetera, but some of the best and toughest
• 45:32
  and fastest kids come out of Jersey like they're there must
• 45:36
  be like the best high school coaches in the world.
• 45:38
  The density must be really packed in Jersey because every
• 45:41
  year, not handfuls, oodles and oodles of high caliber athletes
• 45:46
  come out of Jersey. Man, it's quite amazing to me.
• 45:49
  It's unbelievable. And it's not like you have a
• 45:51
  plethora of like great facilities.
• 45:52
  You have some facilities up there, but it's not like you're
• 45:54
  overcoming the, the cold weather because like, Oh well, all the
• 45:57
  palaces of indoor are up there. It's not true.
• 46:00
  You're outdoors on the most of the time for your it's, it's
• 46:02
  amazing to me. So you have this culture where
• 46:05
  you're you're coming from and you go to Louisiana, which has
• 46:09
  its own culture. HBCU has its own.
• 46:13
  I mean, that's it. Not that they're the antithesis.
• 46:16
  They're not opposites. They're just uniquely different.
• 46:20
  What did you think coming to Louisiana?
• 46:22
  Grambling, sweet tea grits, bands?
• 46:25
  What? What did you think about that
• 46:27
  culture? Dude, it was a culture shock.
• 46:29
  Yeah. Oh my goodness.
• 46:31
  So, you know, obviously being in the Jersey Philly area, you
• 46:35
  could just take a bus and you're, you got all the stuff
• 46:37
  that you can, you know, you can imagine not.
• 46:39
  Louisiana, Buddy. Oh my gosh, when I got to
• 46:41
  Gremlin, I'm like, OK, so where is everything?
• 46:43
  They were like this is it? That's great.
• 46:46
  Where is everything? Yep.
• 46:49
  You're looking at it, buddy. And they we have this running
• 46:52
  joke like we called it Club Walmart.
• 46:55
  And so everybody wants to go to Walmart and hang out in Ruston,
• 46:58
  LA, or near LA. Tech Yep.
• 47:01
  Walmart was the place, man. Yeah.
• 47:03
  It was the movie theater was 35 minutes away.
• 47:06
  I was like, where am I, Marvin? What did you get me into here?
• 47:10
  Oh my God. Yeah, it was a culture shock,
• 47:15
  man. But you know what?
• 47:17
  One, I needed it because it's settled my soul.
• 47:23
  And then two, I absolutely love my professors.
• 47:30
  They made me fall in love with education, Tell.
• 47:32
  Me more before we get to professors.
• 47:33
  I love that. I do want to hear about that.
• 47:35
  What do you mean when you say it's settled your soul again?
• 47:38
  You look you for someone who has this auditory issue.
• 47:41
  You, you auditorily, you speak some really like banger quotes
• 47:45
  to me. Man, I love that it's settled
• 47:47
  your soul. What's that mean?
• 47:49
  Yeah, so before this, I was really stressed out, you know,
• 47:54
  dealing with a lot with family and needed to get away again.
• 47:58
  This is coming off of working so long, so hard, feeling like a
• 48:04
  failure. You know, I feel like I let
• 48:06
  Coach Al down. Oh yeah, sure.
• 48:10
  Right. Because I was like, man, I could
• 48:11
  have done this and I could have done that, and my career just
• 48:13
  wasn't what it was supposed to be.
• 48:15
  Or was it? Right.
• 48:18
  And it was tough for me. But when I got to Grambling,
• 48:22
  everything slowed down because, you know, Louisiana, no.
• 48:26
  No, it's slower buddy. It's a slower pace of life, and
• 48:30
  again, I don't want to be offensive to anybody who's in
• 48:32
  Louisiana, and I don't. There's no, no derogatory
• 48:35
  connotations behind that, I promise you.
• 48:37
  It was just a slower pace because everything up north was
• 48:39
  boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And so it slowed my heartbeat
• 48:44
  down. It slowed my mind down, it
• 48:46
  slowed my spirit down and allowed me to settle in a place
• 48:50
  where I could finally think, you know, and figure out what it is
• 48:55
  that I needed to do for myself. Instead of just, I don't want to
• 48:58
  put words in your mouth, but I'm, I'm hearing instead of
• 49:01
  always reacting, that's a very, you know, again, big swath
• 49:06
  comparisons here. Northeast, you know, it's
• 49:07
  there's so much speed. You're reacting.
• 49:09
  A lot of times here, you could actually stop for a beat, think
• 49:12
  about things and then move forward.
• 49:15
  OK, yeah, that makes sense for a guy who's lived in Chicago and
• 49:18
  grew up in small town Alabama. Buddy, trust me, I'm with you
• 49:20
  100%, no offense at all. I'm for people who take offense.
• 49:25
  It's generally people who like in my example, Chicago and
• 49:28
  Alabama, who only have lived in Chicago and they don't know
• 49:30
  anything else. Like, what do you mean slow
• 49:32
  down? We do our own thinking.
• 49:33
  It's like, yeah, it's not what we're talking about.
• 49:35
  And if you someone in Alabama goes, what do you mean that
• 49:37
  things are fast, We get things done.
• 49:38
  It's like, yeah, you haven't been in Chicago.
• 49:39
  You know, it's just a cultural difference, man.
• 49:42
  And it's not, it's not opposite or right or wrong.
• 49:46
  It's just it's different and all these things play into it.
• 49:50
  Society of like, what stores, whether you only have a Walmart,
• 49:53
  theaters, you know, 35 minutes away, there's no bowling out
• 49:56
  things that you just take for granted.
• 49:57
  In Chicago, I can hit 10 bowling alleys within 10 miles.
• 50:00
  You know, it's just a difference in culture of that.
• 50:04
  So I get what you're saying there.
• 50:05
  So then you said your professors really like show to help to
• 50:12
  teach you a love of learning. Yeah.
• 50:15
  Absolutely. I had some really, really tough
• 50:19
  professors and I'm in psychology at this time and these these
• 50:24
  professors, they were tough, but they were inspiring, right?
• 50:30
  They they want, they helped you to want to learn and that didn't
• 50:34
  that's just kind of so I've got one professor, Doctor Ray
• 50:37
  Foster, rest in peace. He's like one of my favorite
• 50:41
  professors of all time. Ray Foster left John Hopkins
• 50:45
  University to come teach at Grambling, Right.
• 50:48
  And he used to work with BF Skinner, right?
• 50:53
  Yeah, one of the world renowned psychologist.
• 50:55
  And so he's the one that's teaching me about behavioral
• 50:58
  psychology. And I went and I went and hung
• 51:00
  out at Professor Ray's house, Foster's house.
• 51:04
  He's got a Buffalo in the backyard.
• 51:07
  Like, yeah, a real Buffalo. Like a real, like a live
• 51:11
  Buffalo. A live Buffalo.
• 51:12
  Got up. That was his.
• 51:14
  Pet Buffalo? Yeah, it was his pet.
• 51:15
  He was. He was doing behavioral
• 51:18
  modifications or I guess you could call training on the
• 51:21
  Buffalo to make him basically domesticate the animal.
• 51:25
  No, he did. That's crazy.
• 51:30
  That's crazy. Wait, so you hold on.
• 51:32
  OK, again, I'm painting this picture of this kid from
• 51:35
  Philly's kid from Jersey, goes to Louisiana, goes to his
• 51:41
  professor house, walk back there and is like, oh, that's a weird
• 51:44
  cow. What is that?
• 51:46
  And why do you even have a cow, by the way?
• 51:48
  No, that's a Buffalo. And by the way, I'm trying to
• 51:50
  domesticate it. You had to be just like, what am
• 51:54
  I? Right, Yeah, I was, I was like,
• 51:56
  what is happening right now? But it was so cool and, and he
• 52:00
  he said, you know, obviously we could get close to it because it
• 52:02
  was still territorial at the time, but.
• 52:05
  Not domesticated yet. Right.
• 52:07
  So don't go, don't go too close. And so that was the first time I
• 52:10
  seen a Buffalo in person. They're huge, right?
• 52:12
  I've never seen one. Maybe I've seen one at a zoo,
• 52:14
  but not not like close enough. But all I've ever heard is like,
• 52:17
  they're, they're huge. Yeah, they are.
• 52:20
  Yeah, Buffalo are really big and I'm.
• 52:22
  I'm looking at this thing. I'm like, if this thing charges,
• 52:25
  we're. All dead.
• 52:25
  They're gone. Yeah.
• 52:26
  Yeah. So that and then he had all kind
• 52:29
  of birds and cats and dogs obviously on the inside.
• 52:32
  Birds are flying around inside the house.
• 52:34
  Just yeah. This was an I don't know if
• 52:37
  would you call me centric. This is a crazy dude, man.
• 52:39
  I mean, come on. He was, he was very, how do I
• 52:44
  say this? Like, I guess you could the best
• 52:47
  way I could have analogize it or just kind of give you a visual.
• 52:50
  He was like a a freed hippie. Like.
• 52:54
  He had that, he had that long Gray hair that kind of just
• 52:57
  flowed. He would just be like, hey,
• 52:59
  what's up, man? What's up?
• 53:00
  The type of type of, but let me tell you, he was incredibly
• 53:06
  intelligent, right? Incredibly intelligent guy.
• 53:10
  And so he was, he was just one of my professors, man.
• 53:13
  I had another guy, he was a statistician.
• 53:15
  He was a stats professor, and he was one of the first African
• 53:19
  Americans to graduate from Harvard University.
• 53:21
  Great. I did dude.
• 53:23
  I had some professors. Yeah, holy.
• 53:27
  So yeah, that's how. I'm glad, your friend said.
• 53:29
  Hey, we're going to Gremlin. Hop in.
• 53:31
  Yeah. Seriously man that's so cool.
• 53:35
  How did track go? Not as well as I wanted to for
• 53:39
  me, like as far as the way that I normally would have kind of
• 53:45
  pushed myself forward, right. I don't know why it was it was
• 53:48
  it got tough. The team was different, not bad,
• 53:52
  not good, but different. You know, where I came from in
• 53:58
  Pennsauken, there was, we hung out, there was extreme
• 54:03
  camaraderie. We were always fighting for each
• 54:06
  other. And so when I got to Gremlin I,
• 54:09
  there was, this was my first taste of this is more of a
• 54:13
  business than anything else, right?
• 54:16
  And Coach Tarka, I'm going to tell you one thing he did do was
• 54:21
  make sure his athletes graduated right.
• 54:24
  They had one of the highest graduation rates at Grambling
• 54:27
  State University and we had one of the highest GP as as a team.
• 54:31
  So he ensured that we were graduating.
• 54:34
  And I guess like the the synergy, it was so different for
• 54:37
  me. It became so difficult for me to
• 54:39
  kind of connect with people. Not that maybe anything buddy
• 54:41
  was doing anything wrong. It just I just wasn't connecting
• 54:45
  as well. I wasn't working as hard.
• 54:47
  I did OK. You know, I still ran some
• 54:50
  pretty fast times, but it is far as my standard was concerned.
• 54:54
  I felt like I should have done a lot better than what I did at.
• 54:57
  You know, hearing that story makes me not jealous, but like,
• 55:01
  makes me remark about how hard it is to get all things aligned
• 55:04
  right. Like, so you get there and your
• 55:06
  academic life seems to be like, oh, it's rolling.
• 55:09
  You know, you got these great professors.
• 55:10
  You're learning like, oh, man, I like to learn.
• 55:13
  Like that part of your life seems to be rolling pretty good.
• 55:16
  And then the track life, not as congruent, not, not not
• 55:20
  screeching to a halt, it's still there, but not flowing like it
• 55:24
  maybe it did in high school with Coach Alec.
• 55:26
  It's just having multiple things go well in a positive trajectory
• 55:31
  is hard. You know, getting one thing to
• 55:33
  go in a positive trajectory is hard.
• 55:34
  So to get multiple things to line up, it's just, you know,
• 55:36
  hearing that story, it's like, man, when I see people or know
• 55:40
  of people who get multiple things going the right way, it's
• 55:42
  like, hey, I hope you know how special that is because I don't
• 55:44
  think that's the norm, you know? Yeah.
• 55:47
  So, OK, so we hear where track is, we hear where academics is.
• 55:51
  I'm still not hearing I'm going to be a track coach.
• 55:55
  I'm still not hearing that. That's in your head, really is.
• 55:58
  So here's some fun stuff for you ready again, I'm not I'm not
• 56:02
  thinking about I'm going to be a track coach at this point, but
• 56:05
  because even even though my track career hadn't wasn't going
• 56:08
  the way I wanted it to go and. You don't think you're still
• 56:10
  going pro? No, no, no.
• 56:12
  OK. God bless.
• 56:13
  You. Well, a little, yeah, a little.
• 56:16
  That's not ruled out. So I mean I'm gonna tell you why
• 56:20
  it's not ruled out is I started to move towards the multi
• 56:24
  events. Oh, really?
• 56:26
  Yes. Oh, that's right.
• 56:27
  Because you jumped in, sprinted, you even did some hurdling.
• 56:29
  OK, OK, OK Anna. Anna actually anchored the
• 56:31
  distance mentally a few times in high school.
• 56:34
  OK, not very well. Let me let me add I was there.
• 56:38
  I was I I could run enough to to try to get us in a position
• 56:40
  right. I love that caveat.
• 56:42
  Not that one. Right.
• 56:44
  I don't want any phone calls guys.
• 56:47
  No, no. So it's, it's I, I realized that
• 56:50
  maybe in my last year, I was like, alright, well, let me try
• 56:52
  this. And I started, I felt like I
• 56:55
  could do well. Now what's crazy about it is you
• 56:58
  know, the coach did throw me in one multi event like a
• 57:00
  heptathlon or something like that or a pentathlon, one of
• 57:02
  those heptathlon in in at Arkansas State.
• 57:07
  Yep, Yep. Yeah.
• 57:09
  We competed out there and I, I didn't know I was going to be
• 57:11
  doing hep. He was just like the day before,
• 57:14
  Hey, Kyle, you're doing the hep. I was like, wait, what?
• 57:16
  What is that? Never thrown a shot but never
• 57:19
  cobalted. But I was like, you know, I'll
• 57:22
  just score where I can. Wow, Yeah.
• 57:25
  How did you so? I don't know.
• 57:29
  That's interesting. I I have similar stories from
• 57:33
  when I coached college back in the day in the in the late 90s
• 57:36
  where we had to, sadly we had done that where we'd maybe put a
• 57:40
  kid in a position at a meet that either hadn't done the event or
• 57:44
  had not done it properly enough to be able to to safely do that
• 57:48
  event. I hope that's not happening
• 57:50
  today though. I bet it is.
• 57:51
  It is how did you navigate those events that you had done?
• 57:55
  Like you'd only seen like, oh, I saw a teammate do or I was at a
• 57:58
  meet and I saw a guy pole vault. How do you how do you even like
• 58:02
  begin to think about what you're going to do there at the actual
• 58:05
  meet? I just asked a question.
• 58:07
  I just went to the guys who were doing it really well, say, hey,
• 58:10
  what do I do here? That's really simple that I
• 58:12
  could help that could help me. Dude, OK, I love that because
• 58:15
  again, that shows your humility. I mean, think about this.
• 58:19
  You're a college athlete. You're you're good.
• 58:21
  You're not some slouch here. You know, you're decent sprints
• 58:24
  and stuff. You know, you hold your own and
• 58:26
  and you go to all these guys who know what they're doing, at
• 58:29
  least you think they do. And, and go and go, hey guys, I
• 58:33
  know nothing. What's what's one thing I need
• 58:36
  to know here like that? That shows some humility, buddy.
• 58:38
  I mean, it's easy to be like whatever, man.
• 58:40
  I'll figure out. I don't need to talk to them.
• 58:42
  That that was, again, this is painting that picture of that
• 58:44
  humility side of you, Kyle. I love that.
• 58:46
  That's really cool. I appreciate that.
• 58:48
  Yeah. How did it go?
• 58:50
  Not not as bad as I thought it would have.
• 58:52
  Really. Yeah, so again, I hadn't jumped
• 58:55
  in years, but I had run and I still had a little, you know,
• 58:59
  hurdle in me. Yeah, yeah.
• 59:02
  So end result I ended up beating our top multi eventer on a team
• 59:10
  by 100 points event. So I was like this is not too
• 59:14
  bad and. The the bar is low, especially
• 59:17
  back then in SWAC and miacs and stuff and other conferences by
• 59:21
  the way of multi events, cuz even like I I was what what year
• 59:25
  is this for you 2000 and. 2002. Yeah, so I coached an SEC in O4
• 59:32
  and O5, and even in SEC the decathlon was not like you could
• 59:37
  get an eighth place point at conference and be like 6000
• 59:40
  something. So, you know overall now it's
• 59:43
  totally even in the SWAC, it's totally different.
• 59:45
  I mean to score it's holy crap, you got to be an athlete, you
• 59:47
  know, so the bar is low here of that and that's why we did some
• 59:52
  things like this where it's like, hey Kyle, you're a pretty
• 59:53
  good athlete let's throw you in there and see what happens,
• 59:55
  buddy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 59:57
  I'm not diminishing, I'm just painting the picture of where
• 1:00:00
  the. Multis were, yeah.
• 1:00:01
  I I get it because I I think I ended up finishing 5th or 6th
• 1:00:04
  overall or something like that. Did you fall in love with the
• 1:00:07
  multi? Sometimes that multi can be
• 1:00:08
  like, oh man, this is what's been missing my whole life.
• 1:00:11
  Or it could have been like, good, I don't ever want to do
• 1:00:13
  that again. Oh no, I had a ball.
• 1:00:15
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a ball, man.
• 1:00:18
  I'm I'm going to tell you. And then I was like, oh, why
• 1:00:20
  didn't I do this sooner? Exactly.
• 1:00:24
  So, and it's crazy part is like I'm, I'm trying to get ready
• 1:00:28
  because I'm like, all right, well, now I'm moving into
• 1:00:30
  decathlete, you know, decathlon for the spring and I went to
• 1:00:34
  throw the javelin and I didn't have a coach to help me throw
• 1:00:36
  the javelin. I'm trying to figure it out on
• 1:00:37
  my own because we're in slack and we don't have a lot of
• 1:00:40
  coaches, right? And I went to throw it and then
• 1:00:44
  I think I stepped in a hole as I as I threw it and I tore the
• 1:00:49
  muscles straight across my back. No, Oh no to.
• 1:00:54
  Be out for the conference. Was this your last year or your
• 1:00:58
  senior year? Oh no.
• 1:01:01
  I couldn't even sit up on my own.
• 1:01:04
  I had to go to the hospital and they were like, yeah, you tore
• 1:01:06
  your muscles on me. So.
• 1:01:09
  It took me 3 months to be able to sit up on my own again.
• 1:01:14
  Oh dude, you you, you did it bad.
• 1:01:16
  Yeah, I probably should have had surgery, but I just didn't.
• 1:01:19
  Did did, did you or maybe even do you have animosity towards
• 1:01:23
  whether it's the multis or javelin because of that, because
• 1:01:27
  there's you could easily look back and tell your story of
• 1:01:28
  like, man, if I that wouldn't happen, I could have done this
• 1:01:31
  and this and this and have a little bit of animosity towards
• 1:01:33
  it. You know, I'm a firm believer in
• 1:01:36
  and I know this sounds so cliche.
• 1:01:37
  Things happen for a reason. And ironically, now my daughter
• 1:01:41
  is a javelin thrower. Be careful.
• 1:01:45
  And she's actually, she's actually getting pretty good at
• 1:01:47
  it. Yeah, Good, good, good.
• 1:01:49
  She's actually she went to the Nationals for youth track and
• 1:01:51
  field in the. Javelin.
• 1:01:52
  Nice, nice, nice. No, I don't have.
• 1:01:54
  I don't have any animosity. I think for a while I was kind
• 1:01:58
  of like down on myself, like I felt like I just didn't do
• 1:02:01
  enough, I didn't train hard enough, etcetera.
• 1:02:03
  And that that whole thing was. Kind of.
• 1:02:05
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know.
• 1:02:07
  So terrible way to end your senior year.
• 1:02:13
  What what are we thinking? We're getting close to
• 1:02:15
  graduating to graduation. What are we thinking?
• 1:02:17
  Cuz I get I'm still not hearing I am going to go, I'm going to
• 1:02:21
  go teach psychology and be a track coach or something.
• 1:02:23
  I'm not hearing any of that. I'm hearing great experiences
• 1:02:26
  and some not so great ones, you know, the injuries and things
• 1:02:28
  like that, where where we go, We, we, we, we always know this
• 1:02:32
  is a track and field coaching podcast.
• 1:02:34
  Eventually we got to get there. Keep us.
• 1:02:35
  Going, yeah, you know, everybody's like get to the.
• 1:02:38
  Point right now. No, no, no.
• 1:02:39
  I'm. Joking, no.
• 1:02:41
  So I graduated and I I can't figure out life because I don't
• 1:02:44
  know what I want to do here. Graduate with a psychology
• 1:02:46
  degree. I did graduate with a psychology
• 1:02:48
  degree. And is that one of the the
• 1:02:50
  degrees where it's boy, if this sounds offensive, please push
• 1:02:54
  back here where it's worthless without a masters degree,
• 1:02:57
  without a second. Yeah, okay, that's I thought was
• 1:02:59
  one of those words like, yeah, you got to go on an undergrad.
• 1:03:02
  Psychology gives you nothing, basically nothing.
• 1:03:04
  Yeah, yeah, that's a gross overstatement, but.
• 1:03:07
  Essentially it is true though. That to be in the profession,
• 1:03:10
  right? Yeah, right.
• 1:03:11
  Yeah. So it's like a almost like a
• 1:03:12
  general degree, right. And like, what do you do with
• 1:03:14
  this? Yeah.
• 1:03:14
  So I was gonna go to grad school.
• 1:03:15
  I was actually gonna major in neuroscience.
• 1:03:18
  Yeah. Holy crap too.
• 1:03:19
  Yeah, I. Love the brain I love.
• 1:03:21
  The behavior, yeah, that's. Right, Yeah.
• 1:03:23
  Ended up doing some grad school, working some odd jobs and then I
• 1:03:26
  ended up in the school system working as an IS an in school
• 1:03:30
  suspension. Corps all down there.
• 1:03:33
  Yeah, all down in Georgia. At this point.
• 1:03:35
  Right, so. Transporting a little.
• 1:03:36
  Wait, how'd you get to Georgia? We're in Grambling.
• 1:03:39
  Yeah, so Gram, I got married at one point, right.
• 1:03:44
  And so my first marriage, she, my first wife, she was from
• 1:03:49
  Georgia. Okay, moved out here.
• 1:03:51
  To got it sorry, okay, no, just that that's right.
• 1:03:53
  I just want to make sure where we're at geography.
• 1:03:55
  Okay so you're in Georgia kind of not an uncommon story kind of
• 1:03:59
  doing things to survive. I get a job, I take a grad class
• 1:04:03
  because think about going there, okay?
• 1:04:05
  This is fairly normal here, okay?
• 1:04:08
  Right. So I'm there and I moved to
• 1:04:10
  Georgia and I ended up, you know, doing some jobs here and
• 1:04:13
  there, working some, and then I ended up in the school system as
• 1:04:16
  an in school suspension. Coordinator, any thought of
• 1:04:19
  going back home? No.
• 1:04:22
  Yeah, OK. Yeah, no, I I did not want to go
• 1:04:25
  back. I don't like the cold.
• 1:04:26
  Yeah, OK. That, that would be my excuse.
• 1:04:28
  But you grew up in it, so. I never enjoyed it while I was
• 1:04:32
  there. We had some great snow football
• 1:04:34
  games out there and if. It ain't worth it, I.
• 1:04:37
  Just wouldn't. I didn't want to go back home.
• 1:04:39
  There was a lot of stress and trauma back home in my.
• 1:04:41
  Mind. Sure.
• 1:04:42
  That's a great point. Yeah.
• 1:04:43
  We, we, it's funny, we always talk about going back home, but
• 1:04:46
  going back home brings other things with it as well.
• 1:04:48
  So. OK.
• 1:04:49
  And you got used to, you know, January and it's still like 60.
• 1:04:53
  That's right. That's a good feeling.
• 1:04:55
  And then if you spend a summer in Louisiana, you realize you
• 1:04:58
  really. There's there's heat, Yeah,
• 1:05:01
  yeah, yeah. Well, so are you when you're in
• 1:05:04
  Georgia. Are you in Lithia Springs or
• 1:05:06
  somewhere? Else I'm in Douglasville, GA at
• 1:05:08
  the time, but I'm working in Fairburn, GA, around where I
• 1:05:12
  live now, right? But I at the time I had like,
• 1:05:15
  you know, spent little spurts trying to help out little kids
• 1:05:19
  and my son's born. I'm trying to coach him up and
• 1:05:21
  things, football, all these different things, right?
• 1:05:23
  I get. It and so I was just really
• 1:05:25
  coaching on the side on my own to, you know, to specific kids,
• 1:05:30
  it's kind of little one on ones and you know, etcetera.
• 1:05:33
  Send up in this ISS position and I'm coaching track at the middle
• 1:05:38
  school, Renaissance Middle School, and we won the the
• 1:05:42
  middle school championship. First time we'd ever beaten.
• 1:05:47
  They had ever won it because it was a kind of a newer school.
• 1:05:49
  So first time they had ever won it.
• 1:05:51
  We actually beat. I don't know if you remember
• 1:05:53
  Eric Berry. Football player.
• 1:05:57
  Tennessee, right? His younger brothers were on a
• 1:06:00
  track team, a rival track team. And ironically, because they're
• 1:06:05
  we're all in it. The berries are all here and
• 1:06:07
  everybody knows the berries, man.
• 1:06:08
  He's outstanding athletes. I'm just.
• 1:06:10
  Like, Oh my God, it's like a whole family.
• 1:06:12
  Just what do you feed these kids?
• 1:06:14
  So ended up beating, you know, their team and winning
• 1:06:17
  championship. And the principal at the time
• 1:06:20
  for Langston Hughes High School, before, while it was being
• 1:06:25
  built, was stationed at the middle school where I was.
• 1:06:30
  And so I talked to him. I said, hey, when you go up to
• 1:06:33
  the high school, I want to coach track.
• 1:06:35
  He pushed me to get my teaching certification or at least a
• 1:06:38
  provisional so that I could teach in the school.
• 1:06:42
  He goes up to Langston High School, high School, and brings
• 1:06:45
  me with him. I was the very first track coach
• 1:06:48
  in Langston. Hughes High School, is that
• 1:06:49
  right? Yeah, so coach Kevin Foster, I'm
• 1:06:52
  sure everybody knows the most dynamic, one of the most dynamic
• 1:06:56
  coaches and you know, in in the state, if not in the world.
• 1:07:01
  Me and him started working together.
• 1:07:02
  I wrote, we, we, I asked him to come over with it with me there
• 1:07:05
  at Langston Hughes. And obviously you've seen the
• 1:07:07
  trajectory of Langston Hughes, of course, at least Lake Gleaton
• 1:07:11
  and all the other guys. But that program I I worked and
• 1:07:15
  started that program believe. That so it's funny, we just had
• 1:07:19
  a coach on the podcast that he's in his first year of a new
• 1:07:22
  school, of the school is new. And that fascinates me because
• 1:07:27
  like it any coaching position that we have, 99.99% of them are
• 1:07:33
  we're taking over for somebody, whether that somebody was
• 1:07:35
  amazing and and had the the check team great trajectory or
• 1:07:41
  not, right? There's everything in between.
• 1:07:44
  But when you start a new school, there's all these things like
• 1:07:48
  everything is brand new, right? Like like when you when you take
• 1:07:51
  over into the program, there's uniforms, you might have to buy
• 1:07:53
  some more, there's school records you hopefully break some
• 1:07:56
  more. There's maybe some a coaching
• 1:07:59
  staff, you know, coach or two on staff for you.
• 1:08:02
  Tell me about opening up a brand new school because I mean,
• 1:08:05
  uniforms, everything I just mentioned schedule.
• 1:08:08
  You have no schedule. There's just nothing.
• 1:08:11
  How that just seems like the hardest thing to do as a track
• 1:08:15
  and field coach, but maybe the most rewarding because
• 1:08:18
  everything has your fingerprints on it.
• 1:08:20
  Everything. Yeah.
• 1:08:22
  And and it's hard and I'll tell you to any anybody who's opening
• 1:08:25
  up a brand new program, if you're not organized there,
• 1:08:30
  there was no way you make it. Right.
• 1:08:31
  Yeah, yeah. How do you even show up to a
• 1:08:32
  meet if you're not organized right?
• 1:08:33
  You don't. And so, you know, we luckily
• 1:08:36
  there was an athletic director. He was a very interesting
• 1:08:38
  person. We had a different set of
• 1:08:40
  opinions a lot of times, but he at least tried to put me in a
• 1:08:44
  position to win, right. But it's like when you open up
• 1:08:47
  that school, you got to figure out what the uniforms are going
• 1:08:50
  to look like. Are the colors going to match
• 1:08:52
  what is You know what what meets you're going to go to because
• 1:08:55
  you don't really know who's. Going to be on your team.
• 1:08:59
  You haven't even turning sprinters.
• 1:09:00
  Just nobody, right? What's the culture?
• 1:09:03
  There's zero culture. Well there actually there's
• 1:09:05
  never 0 culture, but there is a cult.
• 1:09:07
  There's no culture of like positive track and field.
• 1:09:09
  Right. There's nothing.
• 1:09:10
  And you're like, hey, what do we have over here?
• 1:09:14
  Luckily I had some really good sprinters, right and like really
• 1:09:20
  good hurdlers and believe it or not, like I had a 14 second
• 1:09:23
  hurdler in the school. Right off the bat.
• 1:09:25
  Yeah, right at the bat. So they rezoned with another
• 1:09:27
  school called Creekside. And so a couple, I got a couple
• 1:09:29
  of those athletes that come over.
• 1:09:31
  I was like, right, But it's the culture itself, right?
• 1:09:35
  Trying to figure out, hey, who are you?
• 1:09:36
  Who are they? Who's this school going to be?
• 1:09:41
  You know, and one of the things that I did try to impress, you
• 1:09:44
  know, I did work get the football team out there.
• 1:09:47
  I just wanted to talk to them and say, hey, listen, all I want
• 1:09:50
  you to do is just give me your best.
• 1:09:52
  Sound familiar? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:54
  Little Coach Al Fingerprints, Yeah.
• 1:09:56
  And so we we had really great relationships.
• 1:09:59
  Ironically, now one of my athletes is from that, from
• 1:10:04
  those years I was there at Langston.
• 1:10:05
  Hughes is coaching at Langston Hughes.
• 1:10:07
  Nice, love that. So that's kind of cool.
• 1:10:10
  I get to see him and compete against him.
• 1:10:11
  That's cool. That is always like a you know,
• 1:10:16
  they have red flags, green flag of like, oh, you have athletes
• 1:10:19
  that are that are going on to become coaching.
• 1:10:22
  That's a direct reflection of you, buddy.
• 1:10:23
  Like they they saw something positive in you.
• 1:10:25
  They wanted to go be that. That's so cool, man.
• 1:10:27
  I love that that's. Cool.
• 1:10:28
  That's kind of cool. We talk a lot of mess to each
• 1:10:31
  other. We're in.
• 1:10:31
  All in fun, right? Yeah.
• 1:10:33
  I'm coming to kick your butt. See, but it, you know, he calls
• 1:10:36
  me, I mean, I coach what you think about this, Hey, I've got
• 1:10:39
  this thing going on, you know, what are your thoughts?
• 1:10:41
  And so we we bounce ideas back and forth off each other.
• 1:10:44
  What'd you say? The the straight, the flowing
• 1:10:46
  through Coach Al. This is the conversations you
• 1:10:48
  have with Coach Al, and now you're having them with your
• 1:10:50
  former athlete, now a coach man. Absolutely, man.
• 1:10:54
  And I'm, I am a direct result of the way Coach Al coach.
• 1:10:58
  And I told him when I, when I was able to and dumped him into
• 1:11:03
  the Hall of Fame, that it was because of him.
• 1:11:09
  I am the way I am, you know, and I coach the way I do because of
• 1:11:14
  him. And I try to model and enhance
• 1:11:16
  what he taught me. That's cool.
• 1:11:18
  You know, so that's how I got into that's how the coaching
• 1:11:22
  started and I've been kind of on a roll like the the actual full
• 1:11:25
  time rolling rolling rolling coach and not just a part time
• 1:11:28
  one-on-one here and there. You've just been doing it for
• 1:11:32
  years now. So what do you you, you kind of
• 1:11:35
  started this avenue. I want to kind of go down it a
• 1:11:36
  little bit farther. You said, you know, hey, if
• 1:11:39
  you're starting a new program, you know, a new school
• 1:11:42
  completely, you don't even have, you know, your school record is
• 1:11:44
  0 because there's been no competition.
• 1:11:46
  You better be organized. What other since you've done it,
• 1:11:48
  and I know you know, in in lots of parts of our country, I know
• 1:11:54
  specifically, like in Florida and Texas, lots of schools are
• 1:11:56
  popping up. What advice if someone's
• 1:11:58
  listening right now and they're this spring is going to be their
• 1:12:01
  first track season for their school ever.
• 1:12:03
  What other advice would you have for somebody who's starting from
• 1:12:06
  scratch? You know, maybe they have help
• 1:12:10
  with their uniform because they have an AD right?
• 1:12:12
  So they DS helping with uniform stuff like that, but more about
• 1:12:14
  maybe recruitment for the team and culture building of the
• 1:12:19
  team. Because because I, I stopped
• 1:12:21
  myself, I said there was 0 culture.
• 1:12:22
  That's not true. Because you made a great point.
• 1:12:24
  These kids are coming from somewhere.
• 1:12:26
  Then they, they, they either were on someone else's track
• 1:12:28
  team and now they're on your school, or they were not on a
• 1:12:30
  track team, but they still were at some other school that they
• 1:12:33
  bring a culture. Now you have to be the leader of
• 1:12:35
  that culture. What other advice would you have
• 1:12:37
  for someone who this spring is about to be Ground Zero?
• 1:12:40
  Never had a track team at this school ever.
• 1:12:44
  What what? What other pieces of advice
• 1:12:46
  would you have? The first piece of advice I
• 1:12:48
  would give you is to educate yourself on who you are, right?
• 1:12:53
  Because the kids are going to see inauthenticity or
• 1:12:56
  authenticity, right? They'll see both sides of that
• 1:12:59
  fence. And if if you're trying to be
• 1:13:01
  something that you're not and you know you're not, the kids
• 1:13:03
  will see it 100%. So first of all, figure out who
• 1:13:07
  you are and then figure out who you'd like to be if it's not
• 1:13:10
  somebody that you think is capable or you think it's, you
• 1:13:14
  know, not quite where you should be along the way, right?
• 1:13:19
  And then once you figure out who you are, then you get to spread
• 1:13:23
  that culture to other people because the kids are listening
• 1:13:27
  to everything that you do. Notice I didn't say everything
• 1:13:29
  you say they're listening to everything that you do.
• 1:13:32
  And so one of the things I've noticed is that you, if you say,
• 1:13:34
  hey, guys, be on time to practice.
• 1:13:36
  But if you consistently show up late, guess who's going to show
• 1:13:38
  up late if you leave after you say you're going to leave, You
• 1:13:43
  know, that's that's another example of all right, and we're
• 1:13:45
  leaving at 7:30, but you leave at 7:35.
• 1:13:47
  That's telling the kids to be there at 7:35, right?
• 1:13:51
  And it's so it's always these little things.
• 1:13:52
  And so one of the questions that I ask all the time, and this is
• 1:13:55
  something I use in my athletes, I say, hey, raise your hand if
• 1:13:57
  you've ever been bitten by an elephant.
• 1:13:59
  And of course, everybody goes, what?
• 1:14:00
  No, nobody's ever been bitten by an elephant.
• 1:14:02
  And I go, raise your hand if you ever been bitten by a mosquito.
• 1:14:05
  And of course, everybody raised their hand.
• 1:14:07
  And I said, see, it's always the small things that come and bite
• 1:14:09
  you, dude. That's so good.
• 1:14:13
  But it's the truth, right? It's the small things that come
• 1:14:16
  and bite us. And so if, if, if you're
• 1:14:17
  starting out, figure out where the small things are that you
• 1:14:21
  know, you need to get right. And that's that's what really
• 1:14:25
  establishes the culture because culture is just what you do on a
• 1:14:28
  daily basis, whether somebody's looking or not.
• 1:14:31
  That's. Right.
• 1:14:32
  And so if you find those small things in, in your and whatever
• 1:14:37
  it is that you do and get those things right, everything else
• 1:14:40
  will fall into place. The other piece of advice I
• 1:14:42
  would give is just make sure you give yourself and others some
• 1:14:45
  grace, right? Don't beat yourself up if you
• 1:14:48
  don't get it right. Just make the adjustment.
• 1:14:51
  And as a matter of fact, if you aren't making mistakes, you
• 1:14:54
  probably aren't doing it right. Failure is not a failure is not
• 1:14:59
  a, it's not a bad thing. If you really have this like
• 1:15:02
  negative connotation about the word failure, we should be
• 1:15:05
  failing. Failure is just working towards
• 1:15:08
  something to get better at doing it, and I don't.
• 1:15:11
  The only time you ever start out on top is when you're digging a
• 1:15:13
  hole. Where do you go?
• 1:15:16
  I love these, man. Yeah, dude.
• 1:15:20
  Well, I love that. And I would amplify in
• 1:15:23
  generalities, not specifically towards starting a new track
• 1:15:27
  program at a new school, although yes, for that is giving
• 1:15:30
  people grace, man. You know, going back to our
• 1:15:32
  conversation about social media, etcetera, boy, if we can't give,
• 1:15:36
  I honestly think if you can't give someone else grace, I
• 1:15:39
  actually think it's kind of an inverse.
• 1:15:40
  It's like you have a hard time giving yourself grace.
• 1:15:43
  And I think we need to have that more with it within ourselves
• 1:15:47
  and with our our other people, strangers or not, whether
• 1:15:50
  they're in our network or not. I mean, people make mistakes and
• 1:15:52
  we need to forgive them and thank God, 'cause you know, I
• 1:15:54
  don't think I'm here where I am today.
• 1:15:56
  If someone hadn't forgiven me and given me a second, third,
• 1:15:58
  4th, 5th, 6th chance. I think that's, that's lovely.
• 1:16:02
  I love that. OK, I I have to think because
• 1:16:06
  I've never had this experience. I've had the experience like I
• 1:16:08
  can still remember the first track meet I went to as a coach.
• 1:16:12
  I can remember that I have to believe the first track meet as
• 1:16:16
  a coach of a brand new, no one has ever seen this school on the
• 1:16:20
  track. What was the first?
• 1:16:21
  Can you remember? Like what was the 1st at links
• 1:16:23
  and Hughes track meet that you went to?
• 1:16:24
  What was that like? Like every the 100 meter dash
• 1:16:27
  goes off and it's like boom, school record.
• 1:16:29
  Second heat goes off boom, that's now the school record.
• 1:16:31
  Like it's just school record. A palooza baby.
• 1:16:33
  There's it feels like there'd be so much positive in that first
• 1:16:36
  meeting no matter what happens. Ironically, you don't think
• 1:16:39
  about that at all. Is that right?
• 1:16:41
  No, you don't, right. And again, it, I guess it's
• 1:16:43
  maybe because the way we did things, it's like we aren't
• 1:16:48
  worried about breaking records. We're worried about becoming the
• 1:16:52
  best versions of ourselves, right.
• 1:16:54
  And again, if, if, if I want to give advice to somebody starting
• 1:16:57
  a new school, get people around you that have that type of
• 1:17:01
  mentality where it's about serving and about your vision to
• 1:17:06
  be the best person you can possibly be.
• 1:17:09
  Trophies will come and go, medals will come and go,
• 1:17:13
  recognition will come and go. But I'm going to tell you the
• 1:17:16
  thing that I remember most from high school.
• 1:17:18
  Did you hear me once mention the medal that I got or a trophy
• 1:17:21
  that, hey, we won the state championship?
• 1:17:23
  Yeah, great. Cool.
• 1:17:25
  I couldn't care less. You know, it was about spending
• 1:17:28
  time with my friends and my coaches.
• 1:17:29
  And you just have to remember, like, it's all still a game At
• 1:17:33
  the end of the day, it's really still all a game.
• 1:17:36
  And if they aren't having fun and we're putting too much
• 1:17:39
  pressure on them to get all these different accolades, then
• 1:17:44
  we're doing it wrong. And so to that point that the
• 1:17:47
  irony is we weren't even thinking about records.
• 1:17:50
  At least I wasn't. I'm just like, dude, that was a
• 1:17:53
  great run. Let's do it again, right?
• 1:17:55
  So we were just, we were working to compete right where we were
• 1:18:01
  with what we had. And I think we did a darn good
• 1:18:04
  job of it. How many years at Langston?
• 1:18:09
  Where do we go next and why? Yeah, we did three years at
• 1:18:13
  Langston and then. Are you, I'm so sorry because
• 1:18:16
  you started with ISS but you got your certificate.
• 1:18:20
  Are you teaching classes now or I am what?
• 1:18:23
  What are you teaching? I was teaching business.
• 1:18:25
  I was teaching computer networking and computers at the
• 1:18:28
  time. Yeah, OK, cool.
• 1:18:30
  Yeah. All right.
• 1:18:31
  So keep going. So three years.
• 1:18:32
  Yep. Yeah, I spent three years there
• 1:18:33
  and ended up moving on to through some other situations
• 1:18:40
  and spent some time in the private sector again doing going
• 1:18:42
  private training again, just doing some things and then ended
• 1:18:46
  up coaching football, believe it or not.
• 1:18:48
  Is that right? Yeah.
• 1:18:50
  End up coaching football, Little League football for a few years.
• 1:18:54
  Yeah, I loved it. It was fun.
• 1:18:55
  I coached from 6 to 12 man. Dude, when I so I coached high
• 1:19:00
  school for a couple year track and then coached college and
• 1:19:03
  probably loved high school coaching more than college and
• 1:19:07
  loved college. It was fantastic.
• 1:19:09
  Like I said, went to the SEC. It was great, So amazing
• 1:19:11
  athletes, amazing people, still friends to this day in my life.
• 1:19:16
  But I, I tried when I first got here, actually to Gil, IA local
• 1:19:21
  club team asked me to help and I tried and I, I can't do it, man.
• 1:19:26
  I just can't do little kids, man.
• 1:19:27
  It's just they're I don't have the patience.
• 1:19:29
  And so now as my kid, you know, they've grown up, you know, they
• 1:19:32
  did all the sports, right? Soccer, football, T-ball, all
• 1:19:36
  this kind of stuff, right? Basketball.
• 1:19:38
  I I made sure after every practice and every competition,
• 1:19:42
  I'd go up to whoever the adults were that were coaching, shake
• 1:19:44
  their hand and tell them thank you.
• 1:19:46
  It's like, because I can't do this, man.
• 1:19:48
  So thank you for doing this. So when you say I coached, you
• 1:19:52
  know, little kid, I'm like, I'm like, oh, God, I, I can't do it,
• 1:19:54
  but thank God you can. Yeah, or there would just be no
• 1:19:57
  organized sports for little kids because I just can't do it, bro.
• 1:20:01
  Again, your patience levels just must be out the roof.
• 1:20:04
  Well, you know what, it's, it's not very different than the high
• 1:20:08
  schoolers. Now, some people might go, oh,
• 1:20:10
  you just got to come, you got to explain it a little bit more.
• 1:20:12
  Yeah, you do. You have to make it very, very
• 1:20:14
  simple. So reminder is that I grew up
• 1:20:18
  and I still work on the auditory processing disorder.
• 1:20:22
  And so because of that, I should call a condition or obstacle.
• 1:20:27
  I teach in a very simple way because I know what it feels
• 1:20:30
  like to not understand. And so I was just, even though
• 1:20:34
  this condition has had me in a chokehold for the longest, it's
• 1:20:37
  ultimately caused an effect on how I coach and how I teach.
• 1:20:41
  And so I would make things extremely simple, to the point
• 1:20:44
  where you could understand one and if you needed to, where one
• 1:20:48
  came from, right? And well, don't they say like, I
• 1:20:51
  actually kind of learned this through like my mentor Boosh
• 1:20:53
  exonator. Like the the more simple you can
• 1:20:56
  explain it actually shows how much you know it as well.
• 1:20:59
  Yeah. Like if you got to hide behind
• 1:21:00
  these big words and your fancy degrees, it's like you're
• 1:21:03
  actually, you probably don't really understand it well enough
• 1:21:05
  to teach. You know what it was it can you
• 1:21:08
  beat a fifth grade? Are you smarter than 1/5 grade?
• 1:21:09
  If you can't teach 1/5 grader this, you don't really know it
• 1:21:12
  then so you're. Going step further.
• 1:21:14
  You're kind of going from this from not only educational
• 1:21:17
  experience, but your own personal experience.
• 1:21:19
  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:21:22
  And actually you some people say 1/5 grader, you know what if you
• 1:21:24
  can't teach it to a 7 year old or a five year old, do you
• 1:21:27
  really know it? Yeah, right.
• 1:21:29
  That just makes me feel like I don't know anything in this
• 1:21:31
  world, Kyle, to be real Frank, because I can't teach a
• 1:21:32
  kindergarten. You could, you could give it
• 1:21:36
  enough time and, and practice. You could, you could teach
• 1:21:40
  anything. And so I always look at it like
• 1:21:42
  this, right? Like think about a five year old
• 1:21:45
  and how much they don't know, right.
• 1:21:47
  And, and so some coaches like, Oh yeah, you know, keep your
• 1:21:49
  foot in a dorsiflex position. Hey, put your, put your toe
• 1:21:54
  towards your knee, right? Something simple like that.
• 1:21:57
  It's like, all right, well, put your foot straight down.
• 1:21:59
  Yeah, it's simple. Like you don't have to
• 1:22:02
  overcomplicate life and you don't have to overcomplicate
• 1:22:04
  coaching. How come in using coaching as an
• 1:22:07
  example, then I think about track clinics and stuff like
• 1:22:10
  that, how come it feels like we're always searching for that
• 1:22:13
  dorsiflexion word. And like, like if someone were
• 1:22:16
  to, if two people were to give the exact same talk and one
• 1:22:21
  said, yeah, make sure all your spinners, whatever dorsiflex and
• 1:22:24
  the other said, hey, just tell them to put their toes to their
• 1:22:27
  knees. The, the one that's a
• 1:22:29
  dorsiflexion would get rated higher.
• 1:22:31
  Like, Oh yeah, I learned so much.
• 1:22:33
  This guy is a little simplistic, but in reality, the simplistic
• 1:22:35
  is, is probably the winner here. Like in regards to teaching more
• 1:22:38
  and understanding more. It feels like we're always in
• 1:22:41
  search of the the Super smart guy.
• 1:22:43
  Yeah, and that. And what did this basic
• 1:22:45
  psychology tell us? If it sounds complicated, it
• 1:22:48
  must be true. And nothing could be further
• 1:22:52
  from the truth. And to be honest with you, if
• 1:22:54
  you really look at the way the world is developed and the world
• 1:22:57
  operates, it is the simple things that rule over the
• 1:23:00
  complex. Every complex rule in this world
• 1:23:04
  is governed by some simple principle.
• 1:23:06
  Can. You give me an example.
• 1:23:08
  I feel like I'm putting on the spot here a little bit, but.
• 1:23:12
  Yeah. So let's use like.
• 1:23:16
  Let's use physics for example, right?
• 1:23:19
  OK, remember I went to high school and College in Alabama,
• 1:23:22
  so let's be nice here. And I'll just use physics.
• 1:23:26
  You know, people can get down to the complexity and the numbers
• 1:23:30
  behind physics, right? You can go, well, gravity is
• 1:23:32
  9.81 meters per second squared and that's how it falls, blah,
• 1:23:36
  blah, blah, blah, blah, right? OK, great.
• 1:23:38
  And then they might ask a very complex question will do thing,
• 1:23:41
  does gravity have an impact on a feather versus a brick, right.
• 1:23:46
  And they do all these tests, but the simple answer is this.
• 1:23:50
  It doesn't matter how much weight it has if you remove the
• 1:23:53
  air out of the out of the equation.
• 1:23:56
  So something that's simple as removing air or putting
• 1:24:00
  something in the vacuum allows things to fall at the exact same
• 1:24:03
  speed. OK, OK, OK.
• 1:24:04
  It's very simple, simple example, right?
• 1:24:06
  Or you can be really complex and go, hey, this, this, this and
• 1:24:10
  that. And you could also talk about
• 1:24:12
  Newton's laws, for example, right?
• 1:24:14
  You can look at all these different criteria and all these
• 1:24:17
  different numbers and go, hey, is is simply governed by what
• 1:24:21
  goes up, must come down, right? Right, right, right.
• 1:24:24
  That's a that's a simple thing. Or you look at these very simple
• 1:24:27
  equations and you might add them go, hey, this is governed by
• 1:24:30
  this. Forget all the quantum theories,
• 1:24:32
  it's still governed by XY and Z. OK, all right.
• 1:24:37
  I don't go too deep on it, but. No, no, you're you're deep
• 1:24:39
  enough. Trust me.
• 1:24:40
  Deep enough. OK.
• 1:24:41
  How do we get to Lithia Springs? Yeah, so, all right, I'm going
• 1:24:48
  to try to say this. I'm going to make sure I'm, I'm,
• 1:24:50
  I stay on the top level here. So we go and we I'm, I'm
• 1:24:53
  coaching, I'm actually coaching football and I'm coaching youth
• 1:24:56
  track at the same time, doing some things throughout the
• 1:25:00
  years. And I ended up when I one of the
• 1:25:02
  football teams I was coaching for he, he wanted to do some
• 1:25:06
  training over at New Manchester High School.
• 1:25:09
  New Manchester is another school age to coach at.
• 1:25:12
  And so they yeah, you could use our track or us asking them can
• 1:25:14
  we use their track for youth? He said.
• 1:25:16
  You can use our track and become a coach to jumpers for us.
• 1:25:19
  I was saying, OK, that's fair exchange.
• 1:25:21
  Now I go over there, I'm coaching high school track and
• 1:25:24
  I'm coaching U track. I'm out there on the track for
• 1:25:26
  five hours. Forever, Yeah.
• 1:25:28
  Yeah, so it's high school track from 3:30 to to 5:30 and I'm on
• 1:25:31
  U track from six 6 to 830. Yeah, I'm.
• 1:25:35
  I'm out there for hours. And this is after working all
• 1:25:38
  day. Spent a few.
• 1:25:40
  Spent five years at New Manchester High School and over
• 1:25:45
  the last three years produced 5 jump champions, right?
• 1:25:51
  For our state champions in the jumps.
• 1:25:53
  There's a lot of stuff happening at New Manchester and then one
• 1:25:56
  of the Lithia Springs coaches talks to me and says hey, they
• 1:26:01
  were coming from Langston Hughes.
• 1:26:03
  It's wild, right? One of the Langston Hughes
• 1:26:04
  coaches is getting ready to move over to Lithia.
• 1:26:07
  I used to coach football with one of the guys.
• 1:26:09
  He says hey man, I'm moving over here.
• 1:26:11
  I think it's exciting, It's really peaceful.
• 1:26:13
  It's a lot of stuff, you know, just an opportunity I want to
• 1:26:16
  give you. The program over here sounds
• 1:26:19
  interesting. I don't really want to leave my
• 1:26:21
  kids, but let me think about it as I've got a really tight
• 1:26:25
  connection with all of my my athletes.
• 1:26:27
  And so I've got one kids, a junior.
• 1:26:30
  He's about to be a senior and he's the reigning state champ
• 1:26:33
  right now. He's a 23 foot 5 long jumper,
• 1:26:36
  right? He's getting ready, prepping to
• 1:26:38
  go 24 high 25. We're getting ready for the
• 1:26:40
  season and I talked to him. I just said, hey, Jay, I've got
• 1:26:45
  an offer on the table, but I want to get your get your
• 1:26:48
  thoughts on it because you know you mean a lot to me and I don't
• 1:26:51
  want to make this decision without you buying out of
• 1:26:55
  respect. And so I had a conversation with
• 1:26:57
  him. We had a long talk.
• 1:26:58
  He said, coach, you need to be happy too.
• 1:27:01
  Said to me, this is what he said to me.
• 1:27:03
  I said who are you, kid? That's a mature kid, yeah.
• 1:27:06
  Said who are you? And so I said, you know, you're
• 1:27:09
  right, cuz I typically I will put others, but I, I decided to
• 1:27:12
  go and say, hey, let me take a chance.
• 1:27:15
  I feel like in my heart that this is a necessary move.
• 1:27:18
  And it was a big jump for me. It was a leap of faith.
• 1:27:23
  And so I moved over to Lithia Springs this year and cross
• 1:27:27
  country and we're getting ready for the spring season now.
• 1:27:31
  So this is my first year at Lithia Springs.
• 1:27:33
  And of course this past weekend, cuz the pits are all crazy and
• 1:27:39
  this is kind of cool too, cleaning up the pits, getting it
• 1:27:42
  ready, things like that. And I went to one of the local,
• 1:27:47
  what do you call those, one of the local retail chains that has
• 1:27:56
  a lot of supplies for home repair and play like that,
• 1:28:01
  right? Because I don't know if we're
• 1:28:02
  allowed to say any. Names.
• 1:28:03
  Oh yeah, you can say whatever you want.
• 1:28:04
  Ace Hardware, Home Depot. Yeah.
• 1:28:05
  OK, so yeah, what the? They don't, they don't compete
• 1:28:07
  with us. I don't care.
• 1:28:11
  So, so I appreciate that though. Thanks.
• 1:28:12
  But. I just want to be fair, right?
• 1:28:13
  And so the, the cool part is, you know, first of all, I'm
• 1:28:16
  culture cross country within a second.
• 1:28:18
  I'm, I'm trying to get everything prepared for the
• 1:28:19
  spring because the jumpers had need some coaching and whatnot.
• 1:28:24
  So I go to Home Depot. I'm like, hey guys, we're about
• 1:28:26
  4-6 inches low. We need about 10 cubic yards of
• 1:28:30
  sand. Now mind you, that's about 2500.
• 1:28:33
  Three, $1000. Home Depot says they can give us
• 1:28:36
  about a pallet, which is about 56 bags.
• 1:28:38
  We need close to 500. Holy.
• 1:28:40
  So I go to Lowe's, Lowe's. I talked to them, they said,
• 1:28:43
  hey, we got you covered, we'll handle it.
• 1:28:46
  Wow. They just agreed to donate the
• 1:28:48
  entire 10 cubic. So nice.
• 1:28:52
  To the program and of course we're going to do nice little
• 1:28:54
  promo for them and say thank you and but it's going to keep the
• 1:28:57
  kids safe. And the reason why I did that
• 1:28:59
  again, the the pit was 4 to 6 inches low.
• 1:29:01
  It's probably 6 inches low, lower than what it needs to be.
• 1:29:04
  Last year before I got there a girl was jumping in the pit and
• 1:29:07
  she tore her AC. Yeah, it's not good.
• 1:29:09
  Yeah, so I was like, I'm not going to have that.
• 1:29:11
  And for the safety of the kids. So Lowe's actually, it was like,
• 1:29:14
  hey, we want the kids to be safe.
• 1:29:15
  They agreed to it. And so now we're going to get
• 1:29:17
  the sand that we need for the pit.
• 1:29:19
  Not only that, our cross country team is they had a team average
• 1:29:25
  boys like on the 24 minute side, right?
• 1:29:27
  And you know, programs really never have cross country
• 1:29:31
  coaching and the girls are averaging like 29 minutes,
• 1:29:35
  right? The girls now are got a lot
• 1:29:38
  faster. I have one girl, she finished in
• 1:29:39
  the top ten in our county championship, and then the boys
• 1:29:45
  team average has dropped by 5 minutes.
• 1:29:47
  Wow. Dude, awesome.
• 1:29:50
  I'm excited, I know. So now I'm at Lithia and now
• 1:29:54
  we've got an opportunity to work and build up these teams in a
• 1:30:00
  major way. And so I think now that we've
• 1:30:02
  got the staff, I'm excited about what this what's going to happen
• 1:30:06
  this spring. Yeah, cross country.
• 1:30:08
  How do you, with such a variety of experiences all the way back
• 1:30:13
  to when you were an athlete yourself, how do you at today's
• 1:30:18
  stage and age, work all that into your culture?
• 1:30:22
  You know, culture is not something that's static, right?
• 1:30:24
  You learn some things from other people.
• 1:30:26
  You, you realize like, oh, maybe I was a little too tough on
• 1:30:28
  this. So that drops off your, your,
• 1:30:30
  your priority list. How do you continue to build
• 1:30:35
  your culture while at the same time being open that the culture
• 1:30:39
  can change in positive ways, obviously.
• 1:30:42
  Yeah, the buy in matters, right? And again, it it's what what the
• 1:30:45
  little things you represent. And so one of the things that I
• 1:30:49
  ultimately made sure of was that I wanted the kids to know that I
• 1:30:53
  care about them, right? All the other stuff.
• 1:30:57
  And I actually said this out loud, matter of fact, like a
• 1:31:00
  week ago, before we walked into the county championship, I told
• 1:31:02
  him, I said I couldn't care less about that county championship
• 1:31:06
  trophy or any other trophy or any of these other medals.
• 1:31:09
  They're going to be cool. But what you guys are going to
• 1:31:12
  remember is sitting here in this circle with each other, you're
• 1:31:16
  going to remember the smiles, the laughs, the time somebody
• 1:31:19
  fell down the steps and you helped pick them up and you
• 1:31:22
  laughed while you were helping to pick them up, the time you
• 1:31:24
  sprayed water on each other. You can remember all of that
• 1:31:27
  stuff and that's that's what you got to keep focus on.
• 1:31:31
  And I told him straight like this.
• 1:31:32
  I said, don't miss the point. I understand at first.
• 1:31:35
  What do you mean? Coach said don't miss the point.
• 1:31:37
  It's like this is this is life right here.
• 1:31:40
  Like all the cars, all the houses, all the boats, all the
• 1:31:43
  toys, all these things, they fade away.
• 1:31:46
  But nothing compares to knowing that you have somebody by your
• 1:31:51
  side when it really matters. You can't buy that.
• 1:31:54
  True, and so that's why they're like they they go above and
• 1:31:59
  beyond now and it's starting with the cross country team, but
• 1:32:02
  also instill in them the belief that Coach Al is still to me,
• 1:32:07
  guys, you don't have to be afraid of being successful and
• 1:32:13
  sometimes you get bullied for being great or what are you
• 1:32:18
  doing all that? You don't have to do all that.
• 1:32:20
  That's OK to be excellent, you know.
• 1:32:25
  It's sad that our young people need to hear that because you're
• 1:32:30
  right, you know, there's a reason why try hard is a
• 1:32:33
  negative word. It's like, man, literally we're
• 1:32:35
  telling people that try hard at something that that's a bad
• 1:32:37
  thing. That's rude.
• 1:32:38
  Exactly. That's ridiculous, right?
• 1:32:40
  It's like, but young people are hearing this on a daily basis
• 1:32:43
  and yes, they're hearing it from social media as well.
• 1:32:46
  That's part of that issue. So then you as a leader, as a
• 1:32:49
  coach, a parent, a neighbor, you need to be that positive side of
• 1:32:53
  things. They need to hear people like
• 1:32:55
  you on social media being positive and telling them that
• 1:32:58
  it's you don't, you don't have to say you're sorry for trying
• 1:33:02
  hard. You don't say you're sorry for
• 1:33:03
  trying to be excellent, etcetera.
• 1:33:05
  Yeah, you're, you're you're right back there.
• 1:33:07
  What are you doing throughout this time with coaching
• 1:33:10
  education And for coaching education, I typically kind of
• 1:33:14
  put that in two different buckets, formal and informal.
• 1:33:16
  The formal is like the USATF level ones, level twos,
• 1:33:19
  USTFCCCA, Altius, things like that.
• 1:33:23
  And then the informal is more peer-to-peer like you're calling
• 1:33:27
  Coach Al back up and like, hey man, I'm thinking about doing
• 1:33:29
  this. What are you doing coaching
• 1:33:30
  education throughout your career?
• 1:33:32
  I do a little bit of both. So I do the I'm looking actually
• 1:33:35
  to work on my level twos. I've done Level 1 so long ago.
• 1:33:38
  It's just a matter of trying to match up my schedule with that
• 1:33:41
  Level 2 class. I'm constantly doing that, but
• 1:33:44
  we've got like, you know, complete trackandfield.com
• 1:33:46
  listening to different things. I'm also trying to challenge
• 1:33:49
  myself, but at the same time, I believe in mentorship.
• 1:33:53
  Even if you don't have a direct connection with the individual,
• 1:33:56
  you can get mentored through books or through videos or
• 1:33:58
  whatever. And so I've always of the
• 1:34:01
  mindset, I do not know everything.
• 1:34:04
  And if I feel like I ever, if I ever feel like I know
• 1:34:06
  everything, I'm a stop coaching, right?
• 1:34:09
  That doesn't mean I need to put in all these advanced
• 1:34:11
  techniques. I need to find things that
• 1:34:13
  we're, we're the principles, right?
• 1:34:16
  We're the principles and so I'll go on YouTube and one of my
• 1:34:19
  favorite jumps coaches, John Shepard.
• 1:34:21
  He coaches in the UK, right? He's an outstanding.
• 1:34:24
  If you haven't had John Shepard, he might need to talk to him
• 1:34:26
  too. That dude knows his stuff with
• 1:34:28
  long jump, right? And so I learned a lot about
• 1:34:30
  long jump or triple jump just from him, you know?
• 1:34:33
  Then you got MMM, Caton or Mike Caton.
• 1:34:36
  I can't know his last name. Caton.
• 1:34:39
  He's a hurdle coach, right? He's got the ace coaching
• 1:34:41
  method. I'm like, all right, cool.
• 1:34:44
  Then you got Coach Kenny out there at CMU Central Methodist
• 1:34:47
  University, right? Like that dude is the hurdle
• 1:34:50
  king. So I'm just like, I watch and
• 1:34:52
  you got coaches like Kevin Foster, who's nearby.
• 1:34:54
  I can talk to him and say, hey, coach, what you think about
• 1:34:56
  this, right? Or I'm watching as they're doing
• 1:34:58
  things. But I don't take a bunch of
• 1:35:01
  complexity and say, let me add this in the mix.
• 1:35:04
  I take what's out there and figure out what works for the
• 1:35:07
  team in its simplest form. And typically what happens is
• 1:35:11
  those develop into or they, they you uncover principles that
• 1:35:14
  don't change. Principles don't change, the
• 1:35:17
  techniques do. And so if you have fundamental
• 1:35:20
  principles that you abide by, but a better technique to
• 1:35:23
  achieve that, what comes about then we add that.
• 1:35:26
  I'm willing to experiment with little things here and here to
• 1:35:30
  see what works, but it's ultimately about the athlete I
• 1:35:33
  have in front of me at the same time.
• 1:35:35
  So there's a combination for me. There's theory, learning the the
• 1:35:38
  theory and the conceptualized nature of track and field.
• 1:35:42
  And then there's the application of the practicality.
• 1:35:45
  What are these coaches doing based on what they're seeing?
• 1:35:47
  And let me see, have you experiment this?
• 1:35:50
  What is your experiment resulting in?
• 1:35:52
  All right, cool. I see that that has some
• 1:35:53
  results. Let me see how that works and
• 1:35:55
  see if I can replicate that where we are.
• 1:35:57
  And I'll do it on a very small scale, you know, usually with,
• 1:36:02
  you know, some of my more advanced kids, just to see how
• 1:36:04
  it affects them in little spaces.
• 1:36:06
  And if it doesn't work, then we get away from it really quickly,
• 1:36:09
  right? But I'm willing to experiment
• 1:36:11
  all the way up into championship phase.
• 1:36:13
  And that's how I do things. I think it was recently, I think
• 1:36:16
  it was Steve Magnus on Twitter that talked about that.
• 1:36:18
  The best coaches actually learn a lot of different systems.
• 1:36:22
  And then to your point, what reminded me of that is how you
• 1:36:24
  said that. And then they coach to the kid
• 1:36:26
  that's in front of them because that, you know, Joey in 2025 is
• 1:36:29
  going to be different than Tommy in 2028 and Lisa back in 2023.
• 1:36:34
  You know, they're they're they're all individual
• 1:36:35
  differently kids. So if you only coach towards one
• 1:36:39
  style of philosophy, that means by just percentage wise, you're,
• 1:36:42
  you're alienating somebody or maybe not alienating is not the
• 1:36:45
  right word. You're not able to get them to,
• 1:36:47
  to maximize their performance. They may still improve because
• 1:36:50
  you're stressing the body and recovering and things like that.
• 1:36:53
  But to actually maximize the performance, they might have
• 1:36:55
  needed to be a different system. And because you only follow one
• 1:36:59
  system, you, you miss out on that your kids aren't getting as
• 1:37:01
  well as they, they could. I, I think I, I think I went
• 1:37:05
  more towards the one system as a coach.
• 1:37:06
  I was kind of a one way or the highway kind of guys.
• 1:37:10
  I can't, you know, the kids still got better because again,
• 1:37:12
  stress and recovery and adaptation and things like that.
• 1:37:15
  But I bet you there were kids in my system that could have gotten
• 1:37:18
  better if I was like, oh, maybe this one needs a little bit more
• 1:37:20
  tempo or mileage or whatever, you know, depending on on the
• 1:37:23
  event. Yeah, it does matter.
• 1:37:25
  And you do have to cater to the athletes in front of you, like I
• 1:37:28
  said. And I think that one of those
• 1:37:29
  things is it comes with knowing your athlete.
• 1:37:33
  And if you don't spend time with them, then how do you know what
• 1:37:36
  they're capable of, right? Yeah, that that's hard when we
• 1:37:40
  have such limited time. I mean, even if you get a full 4
• 1:37:42
  years, that's not a lot of time that that's that's hard.
• 1:37:45
  So you got to really be paying attention to that person to
• 1:37:48
  learn them. Yeah, that's a good, that's a
• 1:37:50
  good lesson. Most people don't ever take the
• 1:37:51
  time to do that. Yeah.
• 1:37:52
  So that's like, hey, even if I I feel like this, right, 10
• 1:37:56
  minutes doesn't sound like a long time, but if you do 10
• 1:37:59
  minutes a day over 4 years, you've accumulated so much time
• 1:38:03
  with that athlete. Great point.
• 1:38:05
  Right. Versus an hour a month.
• 1:38:08
  Yeah, it. Seems like, oh it's I feel like
• 1:38:11
  no, you're not getting anywhere. 10 minutes a day will get you
• 1:38:13
  further than an hour a month will.
• 1:38:15
  On the call, I like the kind of the drip, drip methodology, if
• 1:38:17
  you will. Yeah, I love that it's.
• 1:38:18
  Momentum. OK, wrap us up here.
• 1:38:22
  You know I can't have you on the show and not ask you this
• 1:38:24
  question. A coach from Georgia, I don't
• 1:38:27
  know much about this, but you know I know everything because
• 1:38:30
  of Twitter, right? But I know everything, but I
• 1:38:32
  don't know it very deep. And I think I actually might be
• 1:38:34
  in attendance this year. So I'm I'm really interested.
• 1:38:37
  What's your experience or what's your take on the changes for the
• 1:38:41
  Georgia high School state championship?
• 1:38:44
  Now, one of the cool thing, yeah, I know you, you, I know
• 1:38:47
  you. See, I don't give these guys and
• 1:38:48
  gals no heads up, guys. So he had no clue I was going to
• 1:38:51
  actually go approach this. And he's free to say no comment
• 1:38:54
  and we'll move and wrap up the show.
• 1:38:56
  But it's at the University of Georgia.
• 1:38:57
  That's why I'm super excited because we're actually doing the
• 1:38:59
  University of Georgia's new track right now and they're
• 1:39:02
  going to host the state meet, which I think is phenomenal for
• 1:39:04
  high school athletes in the state of Georgia to be at this
• 1:39:06
  world class. They are building an amazing
• 1:39:09
  track complex there at the University of Georgia.
• 1:39:11
  So I think that's really cool. And then SCCS are just down the
• 1:39:14
  road in Auburn like that weekend.
• 1:39:15
  So I'm like, oh cool. I can just make a cool little.
• 1:39:17
  Yeah, exactly right. So I'm like, oh, I'll go to the
• 1:39:19
  Georgia high school state meet and meet with coaches and then
• 1:39:21
  head down to SCCS and do the same.
• 1:39:24
  But I know there's some controversy because it is fairly
• 1:39:28
  different than what we've done in Georgia high school state
• 1:39:31
  meets in the past. I think we're losing some
• 1:39:33
  attempts and maybe we're losing some athletes that qualify for
• 1:39:36
  the state meet. I'm not real sure.
• 1:39:37
  Maybe as far as what you know can give us an overview and
• 1:39:40
  what's your opinion in on the changes?
• 1:39:42
  Yeah. So that just to clarify that the
• 1:39:44
  changes right now from what I see, we're moving from two or
• 1:39:48
  three days of competition to 1. Correct.
• 1:39:53
  Yep, that's right. Yep.
• 1:39:54
  Yeah, that was a good question that came up right.
• 1:39:56
  Yep, that's tough, right? You're you're dealing with a
• 1:40:01
  concern and the concern is the trials and finals in one day for
• 1:40:08
  certain events, which puts a lot more on the legs and it works
• 1:40:12
  out better for teams who have depth right.
• 1:40:16
  And I'm going to be honest with you here and I'm probably.
• 1:40:19
  Is going to get a little slack for saying this, but I can't
• 1:40:21
  I've got to be authentic. I think this is a direct swipe
• 1:40:27
  at Sprint heavy schools, right? Because you've got teams that
• 1:40:36
  are, that can score a lot in the shorter sprints and that that
• 1:40:39
  takes away from their, their potency, right?
• 1:40:44
  And it also takes away from teams that are have, have, don't
• 1:40:48
  have as much depth. If you got more depth, you can
• 1:40:51
  spread it out and you can't, you don't have to worry about as
• 1:40:54
  many events. But if you got 5 talented kids
• 1:40:59
  and you know, they're in the major events where especially
• 1:41:02
  like a Sprint heavy and they got trials and finals plus jumps,
• 1:41:04
  because typically your sprinters are your jumpers, it takes them
• 1:41:07
  out, right? And so it cannibalizes excellent
• 1:41:11
  competition, in my opinion. And so I think what they're the,
• 1:41:17
  the, the idea sounds great. It can be done.
• 1:41:24
  It may even be able to be done safely, right, because we've got
• 1:41:28
  several, several states that do single, single events right or
• 1:41:32
  single day. I think one of the concerns
• 1:41:37
  again is, is for me is what impact is it going to have on
• 1:41:40
  the athletes or especially the elite athletes who are depended
• 1:41:46
  upon to take on three or four events versus the kid who has
• 1:41:51
  one? So it's it's a 3 or 4 day meet.
• 1:41:54
  And so every day is one class like 2A is all Tuesday.
• 1:41:59
  Because that was another part of the, you know, once you start,
• 1:42:02
  I'm going to say bickering. And that actually kind of
• 1:42:05
  demotes what you just said. I apologize for that word.
• 1:42:07
  Then you start finding other things to add to it's like, oh,
• 1:42:09
  it's during the weekday because of graduation or something like
• 1:42:12
  that. But I'm also like, who cares
• 1:42:15
  guys? Like whether it's a Saturday or
• 1:42:16
  Tuesday, I know it affects class.
• 1:42:18
  I'm not belittleing that, but I'm also like we have other
• 1:42:21
  sports that we do on these weekdays.
• 1:42:22
  Let's it's your state meet. We're not asking you do your
• 1:42:24
  conference meet or whatever, but so, so is that is that what it
• 1:42:28
  is though? So Tuesday, all Tuesday is 2A
• 1:42:30
  and all Thursday is 3A and that kind of thing or?
• 1:42:34
  Yeah. So I believe there's two classes
• 1:42:36
  on each day. OK, OK.
• 1:42:38
  Great because we have like. And they do the whole shebang.
• 1:42:41
  They do prelims all the way to the 4 by 4 finals.
• 1:42:43
  We're going to have a state champion at the end of that day.
• 1:42:46
  All in one day. You know, last, I think it was
• 1:42:48
  last year, 2024, I'm pretty sure I went out and I thought it'd be
• 1:42:54
  a great idea. And then I actually had to make
• 1:42:56
  good on and do it. I interviewed 1 high school
• 1:42:59
  coach from every state, all 50, actually 51 because I included
• 1:43:02
  Washington, DC. And we talked about their state
• 1:43:05
  meet, you know, how you qualify, what events you do and things
• 1:43:08
  like that. And it's funny, I can't remember
• 1:43:10
  who my coach from Georgia was, but I do remember them saying
• 1:43:13
  the caveat like, well, this is what it is today.
• 1:43:15
  It's probably going to change where we're talking about
• 1:43:17
  changing it. And so here's obviously what the
• 1:43:19
  change was. But I say that to say that, you
• 1:43:21
  know, out of 51 state meets, man, was I surprised that how
• 1:43:27
  different the, the, the pendulum swings, right?
• 1:43:32
  I really, I honestly, when I started that project, Kyle, I
• 1:43:34
  thought, dude, it's going to be like, there's going to be maybe
• 1:43:37
  two or three different kinds of state meets.
• 1:43:39
  And, and that's what everybody doesn't.
• 1:43:41
  Oh my God, because of landmass, you know, like like Hawaii, they
• 1:43:45
  do these meets and then they all they have like little mini state
• 1:43:48
  meets of their islands and then they all come together for their
• 1:43:50
  state meeting. Montana, you know, that state is
• 1:43:54
  a really big freaking state east to West.
• 1:43:57
  So it's hard to get everybody at the state meet.
• 1:43:58
  New York, New York, NY. Well, no, you Philly and Jersey,
• 1:44:03
  never mind. But in your area, I must say New
• 1:44:05
  York, you're not New York, NY. This, this tripped me out.
• 1:44:09
  They don't even do a team titles for their state meet.
• 1:44:13
  No one wins a state, right, Right.
• 1:44:17
  Bro, when the coach was telling me this, I honestly, because you
• 1:44:20
  know, I can't, I don't have time to Fact Check what people tell.
• 1:44:22
  I had to take it on full basis of what they're telling me on
• 1:44:24
  these states, right? And this guy, great coach.
• 1:44:26
  I shouldn't say I don't be little.
• 1:44:28
  He's great guy, great coach. He's like, yeah, we don't do
• 1:44:30
  state titles and we don't do team title.
• 1:44:32
  We do it's all individual. And I was like, I was like, all
• 1:44:35
  right, bro, look, I was like, either this is the greatest
• 1:44:37
  troll in the world. You're making a great joke, and
• 1:44:39
  I'm good for that. I love jokes.
• 1:44:40
  I go or this is the craziest thing I've ever heard in the
• 1:44:43
  whole world. He's like, no, I'm dead serious.
• 1:44:44
  No, no, no state titles. No, no, no team.
• 1:44:48
  You just, you're from Section 4. You go run the 400.
• 1:44:51
  You won the 400. Good job.
• 1:44:52
  No 10 points to your team. It's weird.
• 1:44:54
  Only state, by the way, every other state gives a state team
• 1:44:57
  title like New York. Should I say all that to say,
• 1:45:00
  when I heard about some of the Georgia changes, I was like, oh,
• 1:45:03
  guys, we do this. This is quite common.
• 1:45:05
  I think Florida does a full day state meet.
• 1:45:09
  Texas does, but a little different because it's finals
• 1:45:11
  only. There's no prelims at the state
• 1:45:13
  meet. They do those and then the
• 1:45:14
  districts and regionals and things like that.
• 1:45:16
  But here I, I do remember this. This is what the the Georgia
• 1:45:20
  track change reminds me of NCAA Division one.
• 1:45:26
  They made a air quotes here controversial change for TVA few
• 1:45:31
  years ago where it went to a four day meet.
• 1:45:33
  And so for call it 3 hours, nothing.
• 1:45:36
  But the women are going to be on Thursday for three hours and
• 1:45:39
  then on Friday, 3 hours roughly nothing but men.
• 1:45:43
  And then Saturday, here's all the finals for the women.
• 1:45:45
  Boom, we're giving out a national title on Saturday.
• 1:45:48
  I'm not I got my days mixed up there.
• 1:45:50
  But you you get what I'm saying It's women, men, women, men.
• 1:45:52
  Yeah, and it's only three it's three hours for TV.
• 1:45:55
  And so the big it's only women meaning so there's not like, oh,
• 1:45:58
  the 100 meter dash goes women goes off and then boom, the men
• 1:46:01
  and then, you know, the women 15.
• 1:46:03
  So there's there's, you know, built it like, no, there's no
• 1:46:06
  time like 115 hundred 200, whatever the, you know, schedule
• 1:46:09
  is, right? And the, the the cry, the the
• 1:46:13
  cry fouls were the how are kids going to double?
• 1:46:17
  How are they going to go with 100?
• 1:46:18
  How's a kid going to go 100 two 104 by 1?
• 1:46:21
  And to your point, maybe that one of those people are also a
• 1:46:23
  long jumper. They're going to do that all in
• 1:46:25
  one day, in about 3 hours, right?
• 1:46:27
  That is going to kill Sprint schools.
• 1:46:29
  That is going to kids are going to get hurt, whatever, blah,
• 1:46:32
  blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Dude, we are running faster than
• 1:46:37
  ever on the NCAA. We are jumping farther than ever
• 1:46:41
  in the NCAA. Kids are still doubling and
• 1:46:44
  winning. Kids are resilient.
• 1:46:49
  They are. These Georgia kids are going to
• 1:46:50
  figure and by the way, so are coaches.
• 1:46:53
  You guys and gals are going to figure out how to set schedules
• 1:46:57
  up, how to when, when a kid, some kid isn't going to be able
• 1:47:00
  to double. You're, you're right, some kids
• 1:47:02
  not going to physically is not going to be able to do a 124 by
• 1:47:05
  1 or something. And you're like, well, we're
• 1:47:06
  going to make the decisions here 104 by 1.
• 1:47:09
  Same with the, the, the, the distance kids.
• 1:47:11
  Do they have they have some kind of prelims right or no like
• 1:47:15
  maybe not? Only for like the 800 I.
• 1:47:18
  Believe yeah. Remember there was something
• 1:47:20
  with that. Now what?
• 1:47:21
  What you are doing in Georgia that I do like.
• 1:47:24
  This is hard to agree with. I think for all your field
• 1:47:26
  events they're getting 4 attempts and that's it.
• 1:47:29
  Yes, I have a problem with that. Sort of.
• 1:47:31
  I agree. Well, OK, what's your sort of?
• 1:47:33
  Because I do have a problem with that.
• 1:47:34
  So my sort of is 6 jumps is a lot, right?
• 1:47:40
  However, if you've got time to recover, you're OK, right,
• 1:47:43
  right, right. So I'll give you a prime
• 1:47:46
  example. We, we went to, we have 6 jumps,
• 1:47:49
  we have prelims and then in the finals, right?
• 1:47:51
  For the last few years, my kid, I'll just talk about a new
• 1:47:55
  Manchester. He won the freaking state
• 1:47:57
  championship on his 6th jump. Right.
• 1:48:00
  Right now, granted, he should have done it before then because
• 1:48:03
  he was one of the best jumper, but it took him time to get a
• 1:48:06
  rhythm, get the shakes out, etcetera, etcetera, right.
• 1:48:09
  That's part of the event. It is opposite of all right, if
• 1:48:12
  you know you got 4, there's no push immediately, right?
• 1:48:14
  So I'm like, I'm kind of on the fence.
• 1:48:16
  I get it. I think 6 could be a lot and
• 1:48:19
  it's give more opportunities for kids to get hurt.
• 1:48:22
  I don't really see too much improvement over 6 jumps
• 1:48:25
  honestly because after the 4th 1 the the law diminishing return
• 1:48:29
  shows up. I'm kind of with you.
• 1:48:32
  I, I think, sorry to cut you off.
• 1:48:34
  I'm kind of, I'm kind of changing my mind here a little
• 1:48:36
  bit. So the reason I said I had a
• 1:48:37
  problem with it is because that's not how the sport is done
• 1:48:39
  today. Every competition is 3 and
• 1:48:42
  three. The top 9 go or top 8 go on to
• 1:48:44
  get three more. That's how we figure out 1st
• 1:48:46
  through 8th place or whatever, right.
• 1:48:48
  However, I do have, you know, I am part of the group that says
• 1:48:51
  our sport is not conducted properly in today's world, that
• 1:48:57
  This is why we can't, it's the most participated sport in the,
• 1:49:00
  in the, in the, in the country When you need to take boys and
• 1:49:03
  girls together on the high school and men and women
• 1:49:05
  together in college, nobody participates in any other sport
• 1:49:07
  more than track and field. So you're more liable when you
• 1:49:10
  walk through Walmart, you're more liable to bump into
• 1:49:13
  somebody who did some form of track and field in high school
• 1:49:15
  or college then you are to someone who played football or
• 1:49:18
  baseball, Right. But yet we can't get those
• 1:49:21
  people who have done our sport to come to a meet.
• 1:49:24
  No one's in the stands, guys, let's be real here, right?
• 1:49:27
  So we need to do our sport differently.
• 1:49:29
  So the four makes sense to me actually, because I'm saying
• 1:49:32
  like, Oh well, why? Why sit?
• 1:49:34
  Why can't everybody just do four?
• 1:49:35
  You're still going to have the dramatic guy or gal who wins on
• 1:49:38
  the 4th jump. It's just now the 4th down
• 1:49:40
  instead of the six, right, Because it's the last one.
• 1:49:42
  You're still going to get that, that build up.
• 1:49:44
  But I understand build up and rhythm, but I don't get that in
• 1:49:46
  the 100. I don't get to run the 104 times
• 1:49:48
  and then go pop a big fit, you know, thank God, right, because
• 1:49:51
  you'd be dead. But you know, so yeah, so that
• 1:49:53
  that one's going to be I don't remember.
• 1:49:56
  I my, my memory doesn't. My memory doesn't remember.
• 1:49:59
  I'm not remembering any other state that does 4.
• 1:50:03
  I believe when we did that bonus of all the 50 states that
• 1:50:08
  everybody did do the the traditional 3 + 3.
• 1:50:11
  So that that is that might be a a unique to Georgia situation
• 1:50:14
  now. Yeah, there are, there are
• 1:50:16
  certain meats. We have 4, you know, just it
• 1:50:18
  most of the time it's over the summer just in case, you know,
• 1:50:20
  we're trying to get kids in and everybody's trying to like boost
• 1:50:25
  our rhythm. Might be a tune up meet or
• 1:50:26
  something like that. I'm I'm OK with the four.
• 1:50:30
  Like I'm, I honestly rather be just three or six at this point.
• 1:50:34
  And if we're going to go to one day, just call it 3 because
• 1:50:37
  like, you know, I got a kid again.
• 1:50:39
  He graduate, he's at University of Florida now.
• 1:50:40
  Nick Cross White, he was like one of the top 10 jumpers in the
• 1:50:43
  country at his time. He had to do 6 jumps for 666
• 1:50:46
  jumps for long and he's doing a high jump.
• 1:50:49
  I had to sit him down, you know, during the long, I do pop one,
• 1:50:53
  sit down until the finals, pop one.
• 1:50:55
  But not every kid can do that. We're forgetting the throws,
• 1:50:57
  though. We're staying very jump story,
• 1:50:59
  but they don't you know, they don't typically a a shot putter
• 1:51:01
  does not have to worry about. I also have to do the four by
• 1:51:03
  one or or whatnot. So but but I don't see a world
• 1:51:06
  like would it would it? I don't know.
• 1:51:08
  This comes with a question. Would it be weird that the shot
• 1:51:10
  put discus gets 6 but our jumpers and get 40 by the way,
• 1:51:14
  because now you're you're high jump and pole vault is also
• 1:51:17
  unique. There's no four or six.
• 1:51:18
  We ain't talking about that at all.
• 1:51:19
  That's no one's talking about doing.
• 1:51:20
  No one's talking about doing 2 attempts at each bar versus 3.
• 1:51:23
  No one's. We actually did try that I think
• 1:51:25
  in the professional level maybe a decade ago.
• 1:51:28
  And that was just you predict. Yeah.
• 1:51:29
  It did not go well. Yeah.
• 1:51:31
  So ironically the Georgia Park and Rec Association does a state
• 1:51:37
  meet and they do 2 attempts for the youth.
• 1:51:40
  Is that right? But for the bars you can't.
• 1:51:41
  Stand it. Yeah.
• 1:51:43
  No, they do 2 attempts. I absolutely hate it.
• 1:51:47
  That's, I mean, again, thinking about we need to package our
• 1:51:51
  sport differently. It's like, I don't know, on one
• 1:51:53
  hand I don't like that right, because I mean, any little thing
• 1:51:55
  drops that bar. So you feel like the third
• 1:51:57
  attempt is a really important part.
• 1:51:59
  But I'm also like, man, if you want to speed up the event, it's
• 1:52:01
  a it's a 5050. You make or no make, let's move
• 1:52:03
  on. And you know, I don't.
• 1:52:05
  I don't know I. Think they may be moving to
• 1:52:07
  three now but don't. They may have moved to three in
• 1:52:10
  the last year or two, but they were.
• 1:52:11
  They were two for a long time. So what I hear from you is you
• 1:52:14
  are cautiously optimistic about you.
• 1:52:19
  You, I don't hear you writing it off saying it's all garbage.
• 1:52:22
  But you, you have some reservations, but you're going
• 1:52:24
  to do what you do best. You're going to adapt.
• 1:52:25
  You're going to get your kids to adapt.
• 1:52:26
  And we're going to compete for state titles.
• 1:52:30
  That's that's where I'm at with it.
• 1:52:31
  Like, what are we going to do? Like the decision has been made.
• 1:52:34
  Yeah, what are you going to do? Right.
• 1:52:36
  And it's an experiment. You're going to boycott this
• 1:52:38
  work. I think the bonus part of this
• 1:52:41
  is that you see. What you're going to say then I
• 1:52:44
  want to ask you what you mean about experiment.
• 1:52:45
  Yeah, Sorry. I.
• 1:52:46
  Think the bonus part is that you get all the college coaches and
• 1:52:50
  all the fans at one location during that week.
• 1:52:53
  You get all the classes because right now we're all segments.
• 1:52:55
  You were all yeah, yeah, yeah, Michigan does that and I'm not
• 1:52:58
  I'm like, I'm how do you as a college coach?
• 1:52:59
  I'm like, how would you recruit that?
• 1:53:01
  Yeah, I like that. What do you mean?
• 1:53:03
  That's an it's an experiment. Is this like a one year 2 year
• 1:53:05
  trial and or what? Who knows Because remember a few
• 1:53:09
  years ago our state, the way we qualify for state changed and
• 1:53:15
  the state meet how it was. It used to be all boys at one
• 1:53:18
  location and all girls at one location.
• 1:53:20
  The girls used to compete in Albany and the boys used to
• 1:53:22
  compete at Jefferson. That's right, I forgot.
• 1:53:24
  That was all classes. And then we went to this split
• 1:53:27
  where there were four locations and now we're back all at 1:00.
• 1:53:30
  But it's all girls and girls and boys and all classes.
• 1:53:33
  So it's, you know, so. I when I recruited, it was the
• 1:53:37
  boys and girls. I remember that I, I don't think
• 1:53:39
  I knew about the all classes and, and on this new where one
• 1:53:44
  class all the way through, it's boys and girls together.
• 1:53:47
  So there is some built in, there's some help for in
• 1:53:50
  between, you know. You know, that's what time.
• 1:53:53
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some built in rest I guess, if
• 1:53:56
  you will. And that's why I said I think it
• 1:53:57
  works it it'll work for those classes.
• 1:53:59
  What I think is going to Mace up is if the weather is not great.
• 1:54:02
  Oh yeah, yeah, well that is always the bugaboo with outdoor
• 1:54:07
  track and field for sure. For sure.
• 1:54:09
  So what do you do if you get into and you you get delayed for
• 1:54:12
  four hours? Now somebody's finishing at 2:00
• 1:54:14
  or 3:00 in the morning. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:54:15
  Welcome to the NCAA. Been there, done that.
• 1:54:18
  Done high jump at 1:00 AM before and javelin.
• 1:54:20
  Yep, that's never, it's never fun for so many reasons.
• 1:54:25
  Dude, Kyle, this was a lot of fun, man.
• 1:54:27
  Oh. Yeah.
• 1:54:27
  And I knew it would again, just from our call it our back and
• 1:54:31
  forth on Twitter, just from our experience with Twitter, I was
• 1:54:33
  like, man, this is going to be a lot of fun.
• 1:54:34
  This is a dude that I feel like is a lot like me and vice versa.
• 1:54:38
  So I knew this would be a lot of fun.
• 1:54:39
  You, what a great background, man.
• 1:54:41
  Really, really proud of you. You know, when we have mentors
• 1:54:47
  and important people in our lives, it's one thing to say I
• 1:54:51
  want to live like that person or I want to live to exemplify that
• 1:54:56
  person. You're doing it, bro.
• 1:54:58
  Coach Al, you said you got to help induct him into the Hall of
• 1:55:01
  Fame. I don't know how long ago that
• 1:55:03
  was. But, you know, that's the kind
• 1:55:04
  of guy I like to do these challenges.
• 1:55:06
  And you seem to have already lived up to this.
• 1:55:08
  So maybe this challenge has already been accepted and
• 1:55:10
  completed. Like I never want to be the
• 1:55:14
  person who says great things about someone after they pass
• 1:55:18
  and I haven't said it to them while they're here, you know,
• 1:55:21
  give you know, what do they call it?
• 1:55:22
  Giving flowers. So you know, I was when someone
• 1:55:26
  has such a outsized aspect of their life, I always tell the
• 1:55:30
  person, hey, you need to call coach owl or text them or
• 1:55:33
  e-mail, I don't care the modem, but you need to make sure that
• 1:55:36
  person knows before they pass away.
• 1:55:39
  And then you tell me how great he was.
• 1:55:40
  You know, it's like that person needs to hear that.
• 1:55:42
  And it seems like you maybe you already have personally accepted
• 1:55:46
  and done that challenge. So I love that.
• 1:55:48
  And I think if you're listening, if you have a coach Al in your
• 1:55:51
  life, again, don't wait. Tell that person, that mentor,
• 1:55:55
  that person that you stand on their shoulders that has done so
• 1:55:57
  much for you. Tell them how much you love
• 1:55:59
  them, how grateful you are. Thank you for what they have
• 1:56:02
  poured into you because much like Kyle here, you're a
• 1:56:05
  conduit, you're a straight you. You what they poured into you,
• 1:56:07
  you are now pouring into other young people.
• 1:56:09
  And I think that's, that's really stinking fantastic.
• 1:56:12
  But me and Kyle, I'm just so proud of you, dude.
• 1:56:13
  You are positively affecting young people the way you were
• 1:56:17
  positively affected back in the day.
• 1:56:18
  I love your story, but what A twist.
• 1:56:21
  The whole Northeast guy going down to freaking Louisiana.
• 1:56:24
  Man, that just that threw me for a loop.
• 1:56:25
  I loved it, man. I'm just so just enamored with
• 1:56:29
  your story. Thank you, man.
• 1:56:31
  I appreciate the time and effort.
• 1:56:33
  And here's something also crazy and I just just to let you know
• 1:56:36
  the depth and the breadth of a coach AL's touch Coach Willie
• 1:56:41
  Sewell over at Drew High School in in in Riverdale, GA, one of
• 1:56:46
  my best friends. He coaches the same way.
• 1:56:48
  We that's one of my team mates that we came up together.
• 1:56:52
  And then Coach Clinton Tab, they call him Buddy up at Pennsauken
• 1:56:57
  High School. He's that's also my teammate.
• 1:57:00
  That's the one I want to state championship with.
• 1:57:02
  So now he's coaching at Pennsauken, one of the dynamic
• 1:57:06
  state championship programs up there, up there.
• 1:57:09
  So it's like Coach Alice, there are so many of us that now
• 1:57:13
  coach, you know, and and try to make an impact on his next
• 1:57:17
  generation. It's because he took the time to
• 1:57:19
  show up for us and now we try to show up for other people.
• 1:57:22
  So he's got, he's got grandkids, I can say now and the grand
• 1:57:26
  coaching grandkids at this point.
• 1:57:28
  That is that's fascinating to me that that tree of influence that
• 1:57:33
  you mentioned there because somebody coached Coach Al,
• 1:57:35
  right? So now Coach Al coached you guys
• 1:57:36
  and you guys are now coaching affecting young people.
• 1:57:38
  You talked about your athlete that you have is now coaching.
• 1:57:41
  I mean, it's just, I love that that tree or that spider web.
• 1:57:45
  They again, that's the positive influence a coach makes.
• 1:57:48
  You know, we, I think we, I can't remember if we said this
• 1:57:51
  on the record or not, but you know, 99% of the kids that we
• 1:57:53
  coach, everybody who's listening that you're a track and field
• 1:57:55
  coach, 99% of the kids you coach are not going to go on to become
• 1:57:58
  pro. Even though Kyle probably still
• 1:58:00
  thinks he's got a shot. This, this guy's a little, he
• 1:58:02
  was a little delirious on this pro thing, but 99% of your kids
• 1:58:07
  are not going to go on to become pro track and field athletes,
• 1:58:09
  but 100% of them, they're going to go on to become moms and dads
• 1:58:13
  and business owners and teachers and coaches.
• 1:58:15
  And that, that positive impact that you make on them, that is
• 1:58:18
  the real impact you make on society because they're going to
• 1:58:20
  be the people that everybody else has to interact with.
• 1:58:23
  And because of your mentorship, you're coaching your leadership
• 1:58:27
  that makes society better. And Kyle, you've certainly lived
• 1:58:29
  that out to this point in your life.
• 1:58:30
  What's cool is this is still, You're still young, my friend.
• 1:58:34
  You said Coach AL's at Rutger, so he's still going.
• 1:58:36
  You've got a long time in front of you.
• 1:58:38
  And so it's going to be cool to watch from the sidelines as you
• 1:58:40
  continue to make these positive impacts on young people.
• 1:58:43
  Man, really proud of. Yeah.
• 1:58:44
  I appreciate it, man. And maybe one day I'll get to
• 1:58:46
  compete against Coach out. That'll be the that'll be the
• 1:58:48
  ultimate fun, right? I love it.
• 1:58:52
  I bet he's he's ready. He's he's waiting for you.
• 1:58:54
  I just know it. I just know.
• 1:58:56
  And we are waiting for you to come back next week, man.
• 1:58:58
  We'll do this all over again. Just having an absolute blast.
• 1:59:00
  We are staring season 7/20/26 in the eye.
• 1:59:04
  It's feels like it's going to be tomorrow.
• 1:59:06
  That will be our, what was that, 7th year?
• 1:59:08
  So yeah, we've finished up six years here.
• 1:59:10
  I've got some awesome people to kick off January already got
• 1:59:13
  them in the hopper here. I think you're going to really
• 1:59:15
  love and enjoy Season 7. We're going to continue trying
• 1:59:17
  to bring you value as you continue to listen to us here on
• 1:59:20
  the Gil Connections podcast and these amazing stories of these
• 1:59:23
  men and women that choose to be attractive.
• 1:59:25
  Thanks again for being here. Thank you, Kyle.
• 1:59:26
  We'll talk to you guys next week.
• 1:59:28
  See you. If it goes to appreciate the
• 1:59:31
  coach the ones that point people most every season needs a voice
• 1:59:35
  of reason speaking the growth you got to prep before you carry
• 1:59:38
  the load ice coffee to the soul. For those of us who stay on the
• 1:59:41
  go proper hand off to stay in the zone which you packing for
• 1:59:44
  the road. There's more than one way to go
• 1:59:46
  taking those that's paying you're told it ain't practice If
• 1:59:49
  you're perfect Saint Clair it can't happen until you listen
• 1:59:52
  with both is can't mentor without a mentor of years of
• 1:59:55
  experience. You can reinvent those years
• 1:59:57
  Every plan's got to stand and deliver to.
• 2:00:00
  And the price sacrifice can you give up you It's a choice and
• 2:00:03
  the fight not a win or lose. It's not a ploy boy device.
• 2:00:06
  Y'all can make more moves. It's not about how to it's all
• 2:00:09
  about why you don't know till you know who you are inside
• 2:00:12
  6,000,000 waste of time choose none.
• 2:00:14
  So y'all cross finish line, the work ain't done so we learn from
• 2:00:18
  the experts but y'all got to put in the leg work.
• 2:00:20
  Guild athletics use the network. It's all about connections put
• 2:00:24
  together for the profession to where every track coach could be
• 2:00:26
  blessing.