Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #330: Curtis Taylor-University of Oregon | From Oakland Hoops to Sprint Coaching Greatness

Transcript

#330: Curtis Taylor-University of Oregon | From Oakland Hoops to Sprint Coaching Greatness · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

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  You're listening to the Gil Athletics Connections podcast
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  with host Mike Cunningham. Track and field world UNL tuned
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  in to our humble servant Mike Cunningham for another
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  extraordinary message for Gil Athletics Connections.
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  All right, let's go. We're going to let it fly.
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  I love that. Here we are back on the Gill
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  Athletics Connections Podcast. So humble to be your host, Mike
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  Cunningham here at the Gill Connections Podcast.
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  And you know, I feel like this one's going to be jam packed.
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  So I'm going to go super, super minimal with my intro.
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  We're going to hop right into it.
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  Help me welcome from the University of Oregon, the
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  assistant coach there, the wise and wonderful Mr. Curtis Taylor.
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  Curtis, how are you, Sir? Fantastic.
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  Better now that I'm here with you.
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  No, brother. You humble me, my friend.
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  How's everything going there in Oregon?
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  We got a few wildfires and this little smoky and thunderstorms
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  today and it's 96. So usually you guys come up here
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  and get the thunderstorms when it's 47, but today we got a
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  trifecta smoke, heat and rain. Dude I thought Oregon was heaven
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  on earth that this doesn't sound that good.
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  It is heaven on earth. It's just, you know, you got all
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  those things in heaven as well. That's right.
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  That's a good point. It's a good point.
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  Well, man, I am super pumped. Thank you so much for joining us
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  here. We're going to dive into your
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  background, which, you know, I know from a little bit of
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  experience of just so varied and I love the different experiences
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  you've had. And of course, you know,
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  everybody's going to want to know how's it like at Oregon and
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  all that kind of stuff, because of course, you know, Oregon's a
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  great big part of our track and field lore and life and culture.
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  So of course, we'll, we'll dive into that.
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  But before we get to Oregon, let's get in our Wayback Machine
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  and Curtis assuming. And we know what Assuming does,
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  right, that you are a track athlete.
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  Where does where does track start for you?
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  Wow, great question. So I used to play basketball
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  when I went to high school like every other kid in Oakland.
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  Oakland's a big basketball hot bed, and that's where I'm from.
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  I used to play basketball. And at that time they didn't
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  have any transfer rules. So our head coach left.
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  I went to Bishop O'Dowd High School, our head coach left and
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  we got a new head coach. And without the transfer rules,
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  he brought his entire team over from the high school where he
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  was previously coaching it. And so he was like, Hey, you
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  could play junior varsity if you want to keep playing.
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  Now this is, I was going into the 11th grade.
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  I'm like, I'm not going to be in the 11th grade going down from
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  varsity to junior varsity. I'm not going to do it.
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  And then I was like, what do I do now?
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  And I was, I thought to myself, I've always been relatively
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  fast. Maybe I'll try track.
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  So me and my buddies who also got cut, we all, we all are
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  quit. We also all decided to run track
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  and that's where I started doing it.
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  And and then my dad, my dad just passed away a couple of months
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  ago and he used to take us to every track meet, West Coast
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  Relays, the USAUSSR meets, all that stuff.
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  Because in the Bay Area you had all that with Stanford, Cal,
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  Modesto, you know, for West Coast and Fresno Relays and
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  this, that and the other. And so we're at track meets all
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  the time. And so I was familiar with
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  track, loved it. You know, this is when you put
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  50,000 people in the stands for a track meet.
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  So that's how I got started in track.
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  Tried to go to Cal initially. Coach Hunt, who's been a great
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  guy for me, didn't, didn't acknowledge me, didn't return
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  any of my texts. Well, wasn't text back then, any
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  of my phone calls or any of that kind of stuff.
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  So I end up going to UC Davis with the great John Rochester.
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  He was my coach, real influential person.
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  USA track and field and the late doctor Mel Ramey, who was a
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  jumps coach. I was a jumper.
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  I was a long jumper, triple jumper, used to run the hurdle
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  hurdles, the 100 and it relays and it just kind of grew from
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  there. So goes step back to high
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  school. That's so interesting that you
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  had a track background but didn't do track until the whole
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  basketball fiasco happened. Right.
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  What, as you were looking at going to college, you're looking
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  at Cal and UC Davis and things like that, What were you at that
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  time as a, you know, 1718 year old kid at that time?
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  What were you thinking of? I'm going to major in this.
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  I'm going to become a doctor, a lawyer, a business owner.
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  What were you thinking about becoming as an adult?
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  I thought I was going to play in the NBA.
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  Oh no. Even after women, Even for the
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  whole. New.
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  Year fiasco. I played basketball every year
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  of my every day of my life until I got to be about 23.
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  Now, you know, you got to remember I grew up with, they
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  were a little younger than me, but Brian Shaw and Tony Jackson,
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  you know those guys, fantastic. Gary Payton and Jason Kidd, I
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  remember refereeing their games and just people like that.
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  And so it was the culture in Oakland was basketball.
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  You played basketball, baseball, some people played football.
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  Track wasn't part of the culture back then.
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  So, but you go to UC Davis, I mean a fantastic school, What
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  what did you end up majoring in? Oh, Kanice.
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  Yeah, OK. I was a kines major.
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  I also got my master's degree in kinesiology as well.
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  Kinesiology with an emphasis on century motor skill acquisition,
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  biomic and bio mechanics. So.
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  Why that if you were going to be an NBA player, that doesn't
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  sound like something. Oh no, by that point, this I
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  went back to get my major, my master's 10 years later.
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  Oh, wow. OK.
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  All right. So, you know, I've been out and
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  I decided I caught the coaching bug and I decided, hey, might as
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  well go learn about it. I wrote my, my thesis, my, my
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  graduate paper. It wasn't a thesis at that time
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  on speed development. It's out there somewhere.
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  I gave it to somebody because I didn't really care about it and
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  think about it at the time, you know, and somebody has it or
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  seen parts of it. I want to, yeah, as I say, I
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  want to double click on that for a second, but let me catch up to
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  that. So when is it?
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  During Davis you caught the coaching bug?
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  Or after you graduated? Here's what happened.
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  So I got out of college and I came back home to live with my
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  parents. I didn't know what I was going
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  to do in particular. I was did some exercise
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  Physiology before when I was trying to be.
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  I was a physical therapy aid before I did the whole physical
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  therapy thing. But my brother was in a
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  parochial school St. the Saint Pascals.
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  And at these these Catholic schools, schools like that, your
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  parents have to pay extra money for you to do things on top of
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  on top of regular tuition. So I was living there and my
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  mother was like, hey, you can't be living here for free.
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  Instead of us paying money to the school to have your brother
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  go there, you need to go help out with the track team.
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  And so she kind of forced me to go out there and I had some
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  great kids there. I don't know what happened.
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  And that's when I caught the bug.
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  So I was like working with these kids.
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  And then three of them graduated and went on the high school.
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  And the high school coach was like, hey, can you come with
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  them, you know, and help out here?
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  And then we had my first California State champion was
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  that year, Michelle Deku. And she was a hurdler.
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  And I don't know how I figured it out.
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  It was just me and my friends. I had never hurdled in my life
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  and still haven't heard of it to this day.
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  So she did great and won the 100 hurdles and the 300 hurdles in
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  the high school. And then I was smitten.
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  I was the guards were off. I was doing whatever I could do
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  to track to be a track coach. So you said you didn't know how
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  you figured it out. You know, typically we coach at
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  least at least initially when we get into coaching how we were
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  coached because that's, that's all we know now.
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  You had some amazing influences. Those two individuals you spoke
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  at, at Davis. I'd like to hear more about them
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  because, you know, I've heard their names in a lot of places
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  and, and in a lot of ways, what kind of influence did they have
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  on you to to where you be eventually became a track coach?
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  Well, they taught me to use the science of it.
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  Doctor. Doctor Mel Ramey was a civil
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  engineer and he was one of the guys who did a lot of the
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  research on force plates and whatnot for jumpers with USA
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  track and field or back when it was the athletics Congress and
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  all those kinds of things. And so he taught me how to he
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  coached from a science perspective.
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  So it made me want to learn more about that.
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  And then coach, coach Rochester was he was, had gone to Cal
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  State Hayward too. And he was, you know, knew all
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  the guys that actually I ended up working with who were the Cal
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  State. Hayward was a great division two
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  power track and field powerhouse with great jumpers.
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  Jim Santos was a great coach down there.
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  And Doctor Donald Chu, who was along with Coach Rad and some
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  other people, is one of The Pioneers of plyometrics.
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  Well, not pioneers, but bringing it over from the Eastern Bloc
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  type thing. And so all those guys encouraged
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  me to not coach from the way I was coached, but coach from a an
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  angle of science. And then in my master's program,
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  it was the same type of thing. But anyway, back then, I just
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  use my science, my background. I learned a lot doing before I
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  took all my licensing and stuff to be a physical therapy,
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  physical therapist. I learned a lot from that job
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  too, how the body works together and different kinds of thing.
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  I learned a lot of it in my undergrad, but it was actually
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  put into function. It's one thing of learning
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  things in a book or learning things from writing papers and
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  stuff like that. It's another thing with the
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  applications. Two different things.
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  How did you, I'm going to say, accept the science based
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  background, assuming your high school experience, which was
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  was, I'm going to say only two years your junior and senior
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  year. How did you like sometimes that
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  can be more methodical and maybe, maybe boring might be a
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  word for it as an athlete and you just want to rah, rah, rah.
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  Let me go run hard, let me go, let me go run so hard to throw
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  up and all that kind of stuff. How did you like see like, oh,
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  wait, this, this actually makes sense on what we're doing.
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  Because I wasn't getting any better.
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  I was like, there's got to be a better way to do it.
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  And my high school coach, great guy, but he used to have us run
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  like I was a sprinter and jumper and we used to run like repeat
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  six hundreds for every practice. I didn't know better.
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  We did him because he told us to do it and it just never worked
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  out for me. So I was like, there's got to be
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  a better way to do this. Yeah, very similar.
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  My, my first three years of high school track, we literally, and,
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  and I love my high school coaches.
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  I mean, there's, I love them to death, but you know, they didn't
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  know any better. And so we did what they thought
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  was right. So the first three years we
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  literally ran our events every day, every day and went home.
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  So you know, I ran the 408 hundred, the mile, the two mile
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  and the four by 8:00 every single day my senior year, much
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  more similar to yours. We got a new coaching staff.
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  So for football, which means in small town Alabama, we got a
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  whole new coaching staff for every sport and we did 400 meter
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  repeats almost every day. I I can't remember another
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  workout we did. It was literally every single
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  day. So I got better because the
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  stimulus, you know, I got the stimulus to the body, but I
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  certainly didn't. I didn't get good or as good as
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  I could you get. Strong.
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  You get strong, but you don't get better.
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  Yeah, yeah. So you're.
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  Stronger I can I can run slow longer.
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  Yeah, yeah. And.
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  Certainly and and my high school head coach was also the football
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  coach, so that tells you something right there.
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  Not knocking football coaches or track coaches, but he was a
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  football coach who did track because he had to.
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  Yeah, same, same. Ours was the quarterback coach
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  exactly. And I certainly, I don't know
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  how I stuck with track because I certainly didn't fall in love
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  with track doing 400 meter repeats every single day, that's
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  for sure. It's like.
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  A strong soul survive. Go ahead.
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  I'm sorry, I was. Going to say maybe the only the
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  strong soul survive even though it was you know, slogging
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  through 4 hundreds. I still enjoy track and field.
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  Some form of fashion. Well, I think the, it's, it's a,
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  one of the things that I like about track and field is that
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  it's, it's a self determining sport.
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  Like I hear this all the time. Even now when we get kids who do
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  football on track, is that everybody who sits on the bench
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  in a basketball game or a football game or a baseball game
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  is like, hey, I can beat those guys if I just got an
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  opportunity. And that's their opinion.
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  But in track, you get an opportunity to always a chance
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  to get better. And I think that's one of the
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  things that lures people to track.
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  It's amazing to me. Like we have kids even here at
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  Oregon who are like, they know they're never going to win, like
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  they're never going to win a race.
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  And they train just as hard and do just as much work and their
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  commitment is the same as the guy that's, you know, conference
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  champion or NCAA champion or something like that.
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  And that's always what the quote UN quote, the romantic side of
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  track and field is that there's, you know, always the hope of
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  tomorrow it'll be better and next meet up, I'll PR next meet,
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  I'll do this. And so I think that's the bait.
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  That's what that's what gets them hooked and then brings it
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  back you. Know it, it's and it's
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  generalizing because this isn't every track athlete, but you
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  know, there's other sports you mentioned the footballs and
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  basketball where I can have an excuse like, oh, you know why
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  I'm not as good a quarterback with my offensive lines not as
• 14:34
  good or my receivers don't catch or the point guard didn't pass
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  me the ball. That's why I don't score as
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  much. But in track, boy, it's hard to,
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  it's hard to have excuses when pretty much everybody gets a a
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  watch on them and a tape measure on them and we know exactly how
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  good or maybe average you might be.
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  So it takes that special person knowing like, hey, there's going
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  to be no one to make excuses to but but myself because I'm the
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  one who's going to be running or jumping or throwing out there.
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  Big facts. Big facts.
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  So you start coaching the middle school in the high school, you
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  get a state champion, you Start learning the hurdles.
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  And now I love your words there. The bug is bit you're you're a
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  you're a coach. OK, how do I continue to pursue
• 15:17
  this is what I want to be now as a as an adult?
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  Well it was crazy. I started getting all my jobs
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  like so then I I transferred to a new company I was working
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  with. I went took my exams and my
• 15:32
  board stuff and got licensed as a therapist.
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  So but I would only take jobs at companies who would hire me
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  where I could be off at 3:00 because I had to be back home
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  for track practice at 3:30. So you are busy.
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  And I was like, Nah, I can't do this.
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  I can't work that shift. I can't be here on Saturdays.
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  I just, I just can't do it. And so it just kind of developed
• 15:58
  from them. But I always goes to track.
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  Obviously, you know, any quality track coach, let's see any track
• 16:08
  coach pretty much. But any quality track coach for
• 16:11
  sure from the in the late 80s to the 2000 early 2000s did
• 16:19
  probably made $0.25 an hour coaching.
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  Like you didn't make any money. And a lot of times if you made
• 16:27
  money, you were better off. You lost a lot of money.
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  You're paying for kids to travel and buying kids shoes and all
• 16:34
  that kind of stuff. So you have to have a real job.
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  And you know, and that's what it became.
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  It was just different things. I did all kind of businesses and
• 16:45
  different kind of stuff. I did construction, I did a lot,
• 16:48
  a lot of different jobs and you know, it was just to, to
• 16:53
  supplement my track stuff. Was it all like was your intent
• 16:57
  back then to be a full time coach, whether that was the find
• 17:01
  a high school that would hire you as a therapist or athletic
• 17:04
  trainer or something like that and coach or to eventually get
• 17:07
  into college? Well, here was The funny thing.
• 17:13
  So we used to, we used to use Merritt College.
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  I don't know if you, yeah, you know, Merritt College.
• 17:19
  We used to use Merritt College before you guys put in the nice
• 17:22
  surface and equipment and all that kind of stuff.
• 17:25
  It was an old rubberized track that had been, people talk about
• 17:30
  training on a bad track, this track somewhere that poured
• 17:32
  gasoline on part of it and set it on fire.
• 17:35
  So where the fire jumped, it had big patches in the track.
• 17:39
  But it was good for us because then I could go down there and
• 17:42
  spray paint all of the marks that I needed and nobody cared.
• 17:46
  But the the head coach at that time was Maurice Compton and the
• 17:51
  Oakland public school system, OOUSD and the Peralta Community
• 17:56
  College system has great benefits and they paid well.
• 18:02
  And so my goal was to get a job where I was the head coach and
• 18:06
  got a tenure teaching position at one of these junior college.
• 18:09
  That was my goal. Now it's like I can get this
• 18:12
  job, I can coach, I can run my own program and I once I get my
• 18:17
  tenure, I can do whatever I want and they're not going to be able
• 18:21
  to fire me. So that was my goal.
• 18:24
  After a while, you know, I have businesses and stuff like that.
• 18:27
  Like I was saying, I did consulting and I did fairly well
• 18:31
  with that, but I just wanted to be a coach.
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  And you know things, it's funny how in life where you mentally
• 18:41
  put your energy and then things start arriving that you didn't
• 18:46
  expect. And that's what happened to me.
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  Like everything started falling into place.
• 18:50
  It was crazy and like I needed something and somehow out of
• 18:54
  somewhere I have to use, you know, not to get religious or
• 18:58
  political, but I have to say that God or whoever is in charge
• 19:02
  of it, like pretty much said, I hear what you're looking for.
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  Here you go. And it was, it was crazy, man.
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  It was like divine intervention 100% of the way.
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  What's an example of that? You're thinking of a certain
• 19:18
  specific story. Give me be specific for me.
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  So, you know, Tony Wells, one of my mentors, will probably talk
• 19:26
  about that later. I hope so.
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  And they started that. What was it called then?
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  Not USA Track and Field and whatever came after, before USA
• 19:42
  Track and Field and after the Athletics Congress, whatever it
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  was. Then they started having this
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  elite elite women's elite junior women's summer program training
• 19:59
  camp in Colorado Springs. So I had a really good athlete,
• 20:04
  another one of those. California State champion kids
• 20:08
  and she got invited. You had to run.
• 20:10
  They had a standard of Marks and if you ran that they would pay
• 20:13
  for you to come out to Colorado Springs and do some research
• 20:17
  with them in the in the summertime for a week.
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  They had the hurdles camp for a week and the springs camp a
• 20:25
  week. And so I met Tony out there and
• 20:29
  you know, that's a whole nother. That's a three hour segment on
• 20:33
  its own. That guy's a was a beast.
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  Tony told me, you know, after I've been there because I
• 20:39
  started having really good kids every year.
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  And so I went there every year until I became a clinician.
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  And then I became a clinician there because I've been there
• 20:47
  for so long. And every summer and one of
• 20:50
  those summers, I can't remember which one, maybe 93 or 94, Tony
• 20:54
  was like, hey, man, you got to stop doing these high school
• 20:58
  kids. You need to raise your own.
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  And I was like, what do you mean?
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  He said when you're in high school, that and I, I was having
• 21:05
  a problem with this. When you're in high school, you
• 21:08
  know, you have hundreds of kids on the team, but a lot of them
• 21:12
  just want to be there for, you know, to put on their resume.
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  I did track and, you know, stuff like that.
• 21:19
  And they're not really serious. And it kind of takes away from
• 21:22
  the serious kids, which is fine. But Tony was like, you know,
• 21:28
  you'll, you'll have more success as a coach.
• 21:30
  You know, for some reason he took me under his wing for
• 21:32
  everything. And I, I was blessed with that.
• 21:37
  And so he said you got to start raising your own.
• 21:41
  So what happened was, and this is how the East Oaks and the
• 21:44
  EOYDC track club, which was one of the for 10-15 years, we did a
• 21:51
  great job, man. Everything fell into place with
• 21:54
  that. My my high school, a girl that I
• 21:58
  went to junior high high school and college with was the
• 22:02
  director of the East Oakland Youth Development Center.
• 22:05
  And all they really had in there is a gym.
• 22:07
  Now, if you ever go look at any documentary on Oakland, every
• 22:11
  great player out of Oakland came to that gym to play and Raiders
• 22:15
  were done is over by the Coliseum.
• 22:17
  So the Hoopers would come by, the Warriors, the Raiders,
• 22:20
  everybody would come to the center.
• 22:23
  And it was a big to do so all the kids in the neighborhood.
• 22:25
  So we started a program there and I asked Regina, I said, can
• 22:29
  you run, Regina? Susan Regina Jackson, who was so
• 22:33
  influential in Oakland, they named the street after the
• 22:36
  street that the youth center is on is named after Regina Jackson
• 22:40
  Way. And Regina said, yeah, you can
• 22:43
  use it, but I don't have any money.
• 22:45
  We don't have a track. We don't have any access.
• 22:48
  So in my mind I was like, OK, we'll just use the gym on
• 22:51
  Mondays and Fridays to do our weight workouts and not our
• 22:55
  weight workouts, but our power stuff run.
• 22:57
  And but I was like when I started, I was like, I need.
• 23:01
  So first of all, Regina was the first blessing.
• 23:03
  Me and Tony was the first blessing.
• 23:05
  Regina was the second blessing. She was like, you can do what
• 23:08
  you can, and then that's like, we need some weights in here.
• 23:13
  We got to figure out how to put a weight room in here and this
• 23:16
  kind of thing. I asked Regina and Regina said
• 23:18
  we still don't have any money. We don't have money for that.
• 23:21
  Nothing's changed. So I got a phone call from
• 23:25
  somebody just like, hey, some gym, you know, random gym
• 23:31
  closing down and they're giving away all their equipment, all
• 23:34
  you got. To get a.
• 23:36
  Get a trailer and come and pick it up.
• 23:38
  So I got weight benches and bars and a lot of tonnage and stuff
• 23:44
  and it just happened. Like, how are we going to get to
• 23:47
  the meats? And then I went flip pitched a
• 23:50
  proposal to Southwest and so did she.
• 23:53
  And because we were in an economically depressed area,
• 23:56
  they gave us vouchers for travel and they sponsored us and with
• 24:01
  the PSAT, the SAT program, what is the name of that company?
• 24:06
  I hate because they're we, they came in and did SAT tutoring for
• 24:11
  free twice a week. So the kids had to go.
• 24:14
  It was mandatory that they do SAT tutoring and it was just one
• 24:18
  thing like that after another. I mean, from Fleet Feet, I don't
• 24:23
  know if you remember that company they had, they used to
• 24:26
  give us apparel and, and help us out to, you know, financially to
• 24:30
  go to the meats and then the kids started getting good.
• 24:32
  So everywhere we went like Simplot or National Scholastic
• 24:36
  Championships or whatever, they would pay for our plane flights
• 24:39
  also on top of everything else, whatever we couldn't get from
• 24:42
  our vouchers and they would give us hotel rooms and things.
• 24:46
  It's just everything just started working.
• 24:48
  I mean, it was crazy and I was just thinking it was this was
• 24:52
  just a seed in my mind that Tony had planted and somehow it all
• 24:56
  came to fruition so. That's so cool.
• 25:00
  I, I love Tony and never met Tony and so I want to talk more
• 25:05
  about him. I was blessed we had Carol Smith
• 25:08
  Gilbert on the show maybe a year ago and one of the topics I
• 25:13
  really wanted to talk with her was her mentor, Tony Wells.
• 25:15
  So definitely want to make sure. Let's let's talk about Tony here
• 25:19
  a little bit. And the question I have leading
• 25:21
  up to Tony is what are you doing at this point, at this point up
• 25:26
  to when you meet Tony? Because I know Tony is going to
• 25:28
  be the real, maybe the real answer here are what are you
• 25:31
  doing coaching education wise? Is it all centered around all
• 25:34
  the therapy stuff that you're learning?
• 25:36
  Are you doing any, you know, level 1 would have maybe started
• 25:39
  back then? Any clinics?
• 25:42
  You know what's crazy is I've, I've been a, I've been a, a
• 25:49
  Level 3 instructor, I've been a level three clinician where I
• 25:55
  spoke out, spoken and done all these things.
• 25:58
  I have never been to level 1 nor level 2.
• 26:00
  I've done Level 3. I've done level 2 as a
• 26:04
  presenter. I've never done any of that.
• 26:07
  OK. Were you doing any clinics or
• 26:10
  anything like that? The first clinic I ever went to
• 26:14
  was in 93. I did a Lauren Seagrave, did a
• 26:18
  clinic and Las Vegas. And so I learned a little bit
• 26:25
  from that, but I never really went to any conventions.
• 26:27
  I was just kind of winging it and it was crazy because the
• 26:30
  kids were still winning, everyone good and running fast.
• 26:34
  But the thing that really opened my mind is that when we went up
• 26:36
  to Colorado Springs, I remember the first day I met Tony, I was
• 26:39
  lost. And then he saw some guy came up
• 26:45
  in the USA, Jack, and I'm like, hey, I'm trying to find this
• 26:49
  building. He says, oh, you must be here
• 26:50
  for the thing, just follow me. And I said, yeah, I'm up here.
• 26:53
  I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
• 26:55
  He said what you should be doing is trying to figure out what
• 26:57
  you're doing right and then figure out work it backwards
• 27:01
  from there. And I thought OK.
• 27:03
  That's different. I had all kind of questions
• 27:06
  because I read stuff like I wasn't doing any clinics, but I
• 27:09
  would read stuff and try to find articles and stuff like that.
• 27:13
  And I asked him a question about some fall training because
• 27:17
  everybody kept telling me like the kids need to do cross
• 27:20
  country and run 6 hundreds on the grass and all the stuff.
• 27:23
  So that was my first question I remember asking.
• 27:26
  And you know, this is a Sprint camp.
• 27:28
  And so I was like, hey, what do you think is better doing cross
• 27:31
  country or doing 6 hundreds or something like that on the grass
• 27:35
  in the fall? He was like, why do either?
• 27:37
  And I'm like, what do you mean? He said if you can tell me why I
• 27:41
  should do this, I'll do it. But if you can't tell me why,
• 27:45
  then you need to figure out what the whys are of everything.
• 27:49
  They had this huge library out here.
• 27:53
  Tony. Tony Vini was one of the
• 27:55
  clinicians too. And what's my guy's name?
• 28:00
  He passed away recently. He's Hard V Hill, huh.
• 28:05
  Joe V Hill. No, no, no, no.
• 28:08
  He was a little God Dang. He was a great coach, too.
• 28:12
  He was worked at Florida. His name will come back to me.
• 28:15
  He's a little older than all of us.
• 28:17
  OK, now I forgot where I was going with this.
• 28:22
  The the library. Oh, yeah.
• 28:24
  And they had this big library where they had all of these, all
• 28:28
  of the, and I found it and they had all of these articles from
• 28:32
  the sport Athletica, the, the Russian, the Russian plays some
• 28:36
  East German stuff and all of these different books and
• 28:41
  Australian track and field. They used to have all of these
• 28:43
  articles like the science was a big thing.
• 28:46
  It's not a big thing. Now that's political.
• 28:49
  And I don't want to get into that too much unless you want to
• 28:52
  dive into it. But now people just watch people
• 28:55
  do drills and stuff on the Internet.
• 28:57
  And one of the things, as a side note, one of the things that I
• 29:00
  find interesting is that I'll do a clinic and I'll talk about
• 29:06
  some theories and, and you know, what positions you are in as a
• 29:11
  coach, not positions of athletes and how you figure your way out
• 29:15
  of them. And my biggest thing is to be
• 29:17
  task, task specific and whatever you're doing.
• 29:20
  It's funny because me and Carol just went over this, We had a
• 29:23
  conversation about this last night and nobody writes down
• 29:28
  anything. Then I'm like, for instance, one
• 29:30
  day and I do this sometime just to see what the response is.
• 29:34
  And I say the other day we were doing 5 * 300 and the Pinterest
• 29:38
  started going, oh, here's the workout, this one.
• 29:43
  And so we got so much of that stuff online that there's no
• 29:48
  people don't read articles anymore.
• 29:50
  I can, you know, older coaches send me articles and science and
• 29:54
  research stuff all the time. But anyway.
• 29:57
  I hold on, hold on, because this, that actually just came up
• 30:00
  the other day on on Twitter and Facebook, Sammy dabs had a very
• 30:06
  similar comment to what you just said there.
• 30:08
  He's like, you know, I'm kind of paraphrasing here, Sammy, if
• 30:11
  you're listening to this, you know, kind of tired of doing
• 30:14
  clinics and, and sessions and stuff because no one wants to
• 30:17
  know. I'm going to call it the base of
• 30:18
  it. You know, the why, if you will,
• 30:20
  they want the workouts And you know, and I, what I said to him
• 30:23
  is the same I would say to you, Curtis is I get that.
• 30:27
  And you're right, some people, not all, some only want the
• 30:31
  workouts. They haven't understood how
• 30:34
  important the why is. But if you if, if people like
• 30:39
  you and Sammy and others give up teaching is what you're really
• 30:43
  doing when you're presenting, you're teaching.
• 30:45
  If you give up teaching younger coaches and newer coaches the
• 30:49
  right ways to think about and then to prescribe workouts,
• 30:53
  well, then it will just continue to go down the wrong path.
• 30:56
  And it'll only be articles of what the workouts are, what we
• 31:00
  do with this athlete and this athlete.
• 31:01
  And that's not going to get us anywhere in in aggregate for our
• 31:04
  field. So my encouragement is, is to
• 31:05
  continue. I understand some coaches only
• 31:09
  want workouts, but other coaches maybe don't know.
• 31:11
  They need to know the why and they hear Someone Like You or
• 31:13
  Sammy, etcetera, and they start down there.
• 31:16
  That's what happened to me. I had no clue about how to
• 31:17
  coach. And then I went to a clinic in
• 31:20
  Marshall Goss, who, you know, love him to death.
• 31:22
  Former. Yeah, you know, Marshall and he
• 31:24
  did a hurdle clinic and I was like, and I was 2 I think 2:00
• 31:27
  at least one year, year into coach, maybe two years.
• 31:29
  And I was like, oh, wait a minute, like you can actually
• 31:31
  coach this. It's not just throw the hurdles
• 31:34
  up and have them do 5 by 5 or what not.
• 31:36
  Like there's actual coaching. And that set me on my journey,
• 31:39
  which was, you know, pretty decent little, little career
• 31:41
  that I had. But so don't.
• 31:43
  My encouragement to you is to continue teaching the right
• 31:45
  things the right way and that will be an aggregate positive
• 31:49
  for our profession. And and don't give up.
• 31:52
  No, no, no, I agree with you 100%.
• 31:55
  I'm not giving up. I'm making, I'm making the point
• 31:58
  to that when we went to this, we went to this camp, like I would
• 32:04
  leave camp literally with a stack of papers this big, just
• 32:08
  different articles of random stuff.
• 32:10
  And then they got mad at us because we were using up too
• 32:13
  much of their paper because first it was just me and a
• 32:16
  couple of the other coaches and then everybody started going in
• 32:19
  there. So I have, well, not anymore.
• 32:21
  I still have stacks and stacks of articles, but people, my
• 32:25
  friends come over here, even up here to Oregon in my old office,
• 32:28
  I still have a a whole storage of articles and books and stuff.
• 32:32
  And people come in here like my mentees and people like that
• 32:35
  come in here and steal them and they don't ever.
• 32:38
  I'll bring it back to you, Coach.
• 32:39
  I was like, don't even tell me that because you're not going.
• 32:41
  To it's gone. See.
• 32:43
  You it's like when you loan somebody money, talk about it,
• 32:45
  I'll pay you back. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not
• 32:48
  going. To only lend money you can lose
• 32:51
  or something like if. You're prepared to lose allow
• 32:56
  that much so Curtis one of the. You know, after, you know,
• 33:00
  almost six years, going on six years here and 300 plus
• 33:03
  interviews from, you know, from Mouse and Carol to Judd Logan's
• 33:08
  and everything in between. You know, one of the, I must say
• 33:12
  responsibilities I sometimes feel is, you know, this
• 33:15
  Evergreen content that we're creating.
• 33:17
  Like, you know, here going through your story, 20 years
• 33:19
  from now, someone is going to be able to hear your story, at
• 33:22
  least how it was up to 2025 and feel inspired or motivated or
• 33:28
  have a better understanding of you.
• 33:29
  They thought they knew who Coach Taylor was and they're going to
• 33:32
  have a better understanding. So one of the things that I, you
• 33:35
  know, it's just inevitable. I, I don't know why I feel bad
• 33:37
  because there's nothing I can do.
• 33:39
  There's some coaches V Hill, Tony Wells, which is where I'm
• 33:43
  going with this that, you know, I'm, I'm kind of sad that I
• 33:46
  didn't, I didn't start this podcast 10 years ago and get
• 33:50
  people like that to show future coaches, young coaches, new
• 33:54
  coaches, you know, some of these great, amazing men and women
• 33:57
  that we've had in our profession.
• 33:59
  So it was real special when I got to talk with Carol about
• 34:02
  Tony. I want to know more.
• 34:04
  I kind of want to double click in there to the influence of
• 34:07
  Tony. It's it's it's amazing that your
• 34:10
  first almost sentence from Tony was like this.
• 34:13
  I mean, just kind of like a clear the air, you know, a
• 34:17
  message from God, if you will. It's like, hey, man, why you
• 34:19
  looking at what you're not supposed to be doing?
• 34:21
  Why you look at what you are doing and move from there.
• 34:23
  And it's like, holy crap, that's just a whole different way of
• 34:25
  thinking about it. Can you tell us more about did
• 34:27
  you know who Tony Wells was before you went there?
• 34:30
  And then give us some more, you know, the influence that he had
• 34:33
  on you. To be honest, I had no idea who
• 34:37
  Tony Wills was. I was, I just started really
• 34:41
  coaching seriously and I can't even remember my first year
• 34:44
  being here. Tony Veni swears.
• 34:46
  It was 80 something and I'm thinking it was more like the
• 34:49
  early 90s. But I just, we got an
• 34:53
  invitation, you know, she wanted to go.
• 34:57
  I wanted to learn, so I just went.
• 34:59
  So I didn't know who he was. And like I said, when I saw him,
• 35:02
  I was just like, hey, this guy got AUSA jacket.
• 35:04
  He looks like he knows where he's going.
• 35:07
  I'm going to follow him. And for whatever reasons, I
• 35:10
  asked all the right questions and he took an interest in me
• 35:14
  and like, we talked on a regular basis and I really, everything
• 35:21
  he said to me, coming from a science background, everything
• 35:26
  he said, he said resonated with me.
• 35:29
  I didn't know if it was right or wrong, but it sounded right
• 35:32
  because that's what I came from. Like, remember I told you my
• 35:36
  high school coach Rochester was all right.
• 35:38
  And I, I was, I wasn't the greatest and most compliant
• 35:41
  college athlete. And that's one of the things I,
• 35:44
  I try not to get mad at the kids about because I'm like, Hey,
• 35:48
  there's, you know, there's the basic cat and mouse game here.
• 35:51
  Like we do bad. You're supposed to chastise us
• 35:55
  for doing bad. We're going to, we're supposed
• 35:57
  to try to get away with stuff and you're supposed to try to
• 36:00
  catch us. That's pretty much how it works.
• 36:02
  And so my conversations with them are always like, Hey, we
• 36:07
  need to get on the same page. And so learning about, and
• 36:14
  that's the kind of guy I was in, in college, I was trying to get
• 36:17
  away with stuff. So learning about, Hey, there's
• 36:19
  actually some method to the madness and from the science
• 36:23
  people that I got, like I said, coach V and and the and coach
• 36:28
  Ramey started me on the right path with all of this kind of
• 36:31
  stuff. Remember, this is before I'd
• 36:33
  even gotten the gotten into Graduate School.
• 36:36
  So it was. Oh, right, yeah.
• 36:39
  Yeah, so I hadn't even started with that.
• 36:42
  And so I just wanted to learn. And he he was there to help me.
• 36:48
  And I, I just intuitively, that's why I'm saying all of
• 36:52
  this stuff, I, I've been, I've been blessed.
• 36:55
  All of this stuff just kind of just started crystallizing.
• 36:58
  Everything just started coming together.
• 37:00
  And you know, Tony was a big part of that.
• 37:05
  Tony encouraged me to like for the wise of track and foot.
• 37:09
  I think I did a clinic on that. Matter of fact, I'm sure that,
• 37:13
  you know, you need to figure out what you're looking for, even if
• 37:16
  you're you know, in your coaching, not even in the
• 37:19
  philosophy like in your day-to-day, like why are you
• 37:22
  doing this workout? What do you expect to get out of
• 37:24
  it? And how does it affect people?
• 37:27
  You know, And that's to me was always big thing.
• 37:31
  And that's like, to me, it's a pillar to, you know, any success
• 37:34
  that I've ever been able to have is based on trying to figure out
• 37:38
  why we do this and what is the expected outcome of it.
• 37:43
  Yeah, I love that. And I love, you know, talking
• 37:45
  about the Venies and Tony Wells and stuff because I think
• 37:49
  there's just so many coaches out there right now.
• 37:52
  I'm not, not, I think I know there are so many coaches out
• 37:54
  there that were affected by like a Tony Wells that don't even
• 37:58
  know it. They think they, you know, oh, I
• 38:00
  learned a lot from Curtis or I learned a lot from Carol and
• 38:02
  they did from, from both of you 2 in this example.
• 38:05
  But where did you guys learn that stuff from?
• 38:07
  And that's from guys like Tony Wells who poured into you, thank
• 38:10
  goodness, so that you can pour into others and eventually those
• 38:14
  mentees will pour into others. It's kind of like, you know,
• 38:16
  the, you know, the shoulders that we stand on, it just
• 38:19
  continues to, to grow. So I love anytime a guy like
• 38:22
  Tony Wells is, is in the picture to make sure we're giving him
• 38:25
  the flowers that he was due and is due with his influence,
• 38:29
  positive influence in, in our coaching profession.
• 38:31
  So just love him and love what he did and love, love who he
• 38:34
  poured into. So I I love that fact for you.
• 38:38
  Yeah, he's, he's fantastic. He would be smiling right now
• 38:41
  because what's happened, what's happened in track and field now
• 38:45
  is that people are learning to do all of the things that he
• 38:48
  said, like he used to do stuff like he would buy, not buy.
• 38:52
  And I remember we all did this one time, which was ridiculous.
• 38:56
  But he would buy, get these articles and then he'd buy a
• 38:59
  translation book and go through like he'd get an article from
• 39:03
  the Italian coaches or. Oh wow.
• 39:06
  German coaches and he would get a book.
• 39:08
  He was not a borderline genius. He was a genius when it came to
• 39:12
  a lot of things. He did all kind of stuff, man.
• 39:14
  He coached football. He'd beat my ass in chess.
• 39:17
  He was a great chess player. He just did everything.
• 39:21
  But he would get these articles and he would get a book for
• 39:24
  whatever. You know, it's not like you can
• 39:26
  do it now and go to, you know, ChatGPT or or Google Translate
• 39:33
  or anything like that. He'd just go word for word.
• 39:35
  He would spend his evening just life in these kinds of things,
• 39:39
  man, and he would let you know. But he was so far ahead of his
• 39:43
  time like in this, why I say would be proud now.
• 39:46
  Like we look at when I first started with him and I remember
• 39:52
  my first really well. There was a girl Michelle, I was
• 39:54
  telling you about. And then there was beast of
• 39:56
  Grant who turned into a a little bit of international hurdler,
• 40:00
  but she was decent. And when when we were coaching
• 40:07
  visa, she was a hurdler. And I used to go to Tony for
• 40:10
  advice and Tony would have all of this stuff figured out.
• 40:14
  He'd be like, here's here's what I'd do with my hurdler stuff you
• 40:17
  wouldn't share with anybody. And he just show me and we go
• 40:20
  through there. And it was so task specific.
• 40:22
  You want to run this fast, you know, at over a certain amount
• 40:26
  of time. You know, just how many sticks
• 40:29
  you should put down, just how far you should put them apart.
• 40:31
  And then he would explain to me the theories behind it, which
• 40:34
  made total sense. And so we would go back and
• 40:37
  forth with these kinds of things.
• 40:39
  And now I see everybody's using all of these things, the double
• 40:43
  knee down start like we used to, a little high school team used
• 40:47
  to this back in the early 90s, we used to do dynamic warm up.
• 40:52
  Nobody was doing that. Everybody would go run, run a
• 40:55
  mile, run 4 laps, and then sit down and do some static
• 40:59
  stretching. We used to be doing dynamic warm
• 41:02
  up and the kids, other kids would be laughing and stuff like
• 41:06
  that. And the coach would say, you
• 41:08
  know this, even when I came here and I first started at Oregon,
• 41:13
  nobody was doing all this stuff. And I was friends with a lot of
• 41:16
  the big coaches because they had come to the center or to the
• 41:20
  junior college to recruit, right?
• 41:22
  I known those guys for years near like, ah, it's not gonna
• 41:25
  work here. You're not gonna do any of that
• 41:27
  kind of stuff. And immediately when we started
• 41:30
  making a little bit of noise because Oregon, you know, is not
• 41:33
  known for sprinting, hasn't been, we had, you know, Harry
• 41:36
  Jerome and Otis Davis back in the 50s and 60s.
• 41:40
  And then after that, we had basically nobody for many years
• 41:44
  until English and, and you know, Robert came and did a great job
• 41:48
  with a lot of things and then and then allowed him to do what
• 41:53
  he wanted to do. And then when he got the head
• 41:55
  coach, he brought me over there. But that's a whole nother story.
• 41:58
  We'll get into the baby or maybe not, but now I sit and I watch
• 42:02
  the warm ups. Everybody's doing dynamic warm
• 42:05
  ups. Everybody.
• 42:06
  You know, we used to get our little kids inside a little tape
• 42:09
  measures. If they didn't have tape
• 42:10
  measure, they have a string with marker marked on the white
• 42:14
  string and they pull that out and measure.
• 42:16
  And people used to know, you know, 1-2 feet, 3 feet or 2 1/2
• 42:20
  feet or whatever. Now everybody's doing tape
• 42:23
  measure. Everybody's doing like all of
• 42:26
  these things that Tony was basically a pioneer.
• 42:29
  Like everybody's doing them now now.
• 42:31
  And so it's it's a testament to how how positive and how how
• 42:39
  knowledgeable and how talented he was in the the way that he
• 42:44
  approached things in a positive manner that everyone has
• 42:47
  basically adopted this. And I was like, I didn't think
• 42:50
  he was going to have this kind of input on, you know, at the
• 42:55
  time I was just like, this is my guy and nobody knows except me
• 42:58
  and Carol and and me and Carol used to meet up and talk about
• 43:05
  things and just do stuff tracking.
• 43:07
  Carol wanted to be, you know, and she'll tell yourself at one
• 43:10
  point, Carol always, and she probably still feels this way,
• 43:13
  but she's like, I want to be the greatest track coach that ever
• 43:16
  lived. And.
• 43:19
  And she's on her way to doing. Yeah.
• 43:22
  Great things, man. Yeah, Yeah.
• 43:23
  She told us a great story. You know, she was actually going
• 43:25
  to go to Hollywood. She was going to be, I believe
• 43:27
  in editor. And she goes, Tony goes, no,
• 43:29
  you're going to be a track coach.
• 43:30
  And she's like, all right, yes, Sir.
• 43:32
  I was like, well, thank goodness he said that to you.
• 43:35
  Yeah, man, Tony. Tony was influential and I used
• 43:39
  to talk to him about stuff. Then when I started getting
• 43:41
  better kids, it became tougher. What?
• 43:45
  Why is that? Well, because it's like, I think
• 43:49
  you get to a point where you're mentoring somebody where you're
• 43:54
  happy for them, but it's kind of like now this person is kind of
• 43:59
  a rival. And it doesn't, it's not in a
• 44:01
  bad way. It's just normal human, normal
• 44:04
  human competition. Like I'm not trying to be better
• 44:08
  than you. I love you.
• 44:09
  You're my guy. And he was kind of like, OK, now
• 44:11
  I got to step my game up a little bit.
• 44:14
  And so, you know, it was, I mean, it was not bad.
• 44:17
  I'm not saying anything negative about him at all.
• 44:20
  It just the dynamics of our relationship changed where it
• 44:23
  was kind of like we were here instead of being like so far off
• 44:28
  the scale, so. Yeah, that makes sense.
• 44:31
  That makes sense, especially in our sport, which is very, like
• 44:33
  you said, not only the coaches are typically very competitive
• 44:36
  people, but the whole aspect of the sport is competitive.
• 44:40
  It's does did my kid beat your kid and what what happens in the
• 44:43
  next round. So yeah, that that makes.
• 44:44
  Some sense, right? And this is all your friends and
• 44:47
  stuff. And I try to be happy with, you
• 44:49
  know, I've, I've rationalized it because not about Tony, but just
• 44:53
  about these kind of things. Everybody wants to be the best
• 44:56
  and everybody wants to prove their theories.
• 44:59
  Because at the end of the day, for me, track is like a big
• 45:03
  science project. So it's like I take this kid, I
• 45:07
  look at all the parameters, I got to figure out how to make
• 45:11
  them better. And this is a big project.
• 45:13
  So, you know, there's a lot of things that influence, you know,
• 45:16
  wind and weather, different kinds of weather, whether it's
• 45:21
  warm or rainy or cold, and you know, all these different kinds
• 45:25
  of things. So I don't always get the
• 45:27
  results that I want, but I always have a goal to get to.
• 45:31
  And so as coaches, I realized that I got to my goal and even
• 45:39
  though your person was better than me, that doesn't mean that
• 45:43
  I didn't achieve what I needed to achieve.
• 45:45
  I tell the kids all the time, I'm like there's 8 to 9 lanes in
• 45:49
  any given race. If you're a sprinter, by
• 45:52
  definition, one person is going to win and there's going to be 7
• 45:55
  or 8 losers. If you did the best that you
• 45:58
  could do and you achieve the goals that we have set and you
• 46:00
  come in six or seven plays, you're a winner.
• 46:03
  Like this is what our goal was. And I make goal.
• 46:06
  Goal setting is one of the big things for me that the kids need
• 46:09
  to set goals and figure out how to how to how to achieve them.
• 46:13
  And it's my job as a coach to have them realize what's a
• 46:16
  reasonable goal. Like, you know, I had a a kid
• 46:20
  this year who had run 1120 and their goal was to run 1080.
• 46:25
  And I was like, this is not going to happen.
• 46:28
  Like this is nothing against you, but we have to process this
• 46:32
  out and see how we can make it happen first.
• 46:35
  Now, I'm not saying it's never going to happen, but for you to
• 46:38
  jump down 4/10 of a second in one year is a lot, you know?
• 46:44
  And these kinds of things are challenging.
• 46:46
  Kids run, you know, fast in high school.
• 46:48
  If you're 1120, that's super fast for a high school runner.
• 46:52
  For a college runner, it's not easy to run 1120 because 1120 in
• 46:57
  college means you're going to be behind a lot of the time.
• 47:00
  You're going to be behind some people, you'll win some races,
• 47:02
  but you run 1150 in high school, you're going to win practically
• 47:06
  every race you ever run. You know, maybe at state meet or
• 47:11
  Nike outdoors or balance or something like that.
• 47:15
  You'll, you know, you'll be tested.
• 47:17
  But other than that, you know, and those are basically All Star
• 47:21
  meets. I don't think the kids feel one
• 47:22
  way or another, whether they win or lose because it's just like,
• 47:26
  you know, we've been invited out here, they flew us out here,
• 47:29
  they're putting us up, They're having all of these things for
• 47:32
  us. So I don't think the kids really
• 47:33
  care. And that's where the guidance of
• 47:36
  a coach is needed, right? To like that 1120 to 1080
• 47:40
  example you gave, it's like, you know, you probably have maybe
• 47:42
  had a conversation or could have the conversation of like, you
• 47:44
  know, if you ran 12:20, we might talk about 1180.
• 47:47
  But the time is different. Once you get to some marks, the
• 47:50
  percentage is a lot smaller. That just doesn't happen.
• 47:53
  You know, over time, like you said, it's not never.
• 47:56
  But you know, if we're talking about a one year goal, boy that
• 47:59
  would be some other things would have to happen there.
• 48:01
  You know it to catch the wind just right and all these kind of
• 48:03
  things. What what you mentioned goal
• 48:05
  setting, Where did you where did you learn that from and why is
• 48:09
  that such an important part of your your program?
• 48:11
  Goal setting is one of the things that I, I, I've read
• 48:15
  about. And then in one of those camps
• 48:17
  that I was telling you about, every summer we used to have
• 48:19
  different sports psychologist come out.
• 48:21
  Doctor Jim Gordon was one of the main ones and Doctor Rich, they
• 48:26
  used to come out and they used to talk about how you set your
• 48:31
  mind up, like your mind has to be working in a certain kind of
• 48:34
  a way for you to be able to be successful.
• 48:36
  You can't come out and have no goals unless you're mega
• 48:39
  talented. Like I mean, as a sidebar, there
• 48:43
  are some kids and this is one of the hard parts of the sport.
• 48:45
  There's some kids that could come out and you could say jog 3
• 48:48
  times around the building, climb up on the top and jump down and
• 48:52
  then they'll go to the track, meet and run the school, record
• 48:54
  our national leader because they're just that talented.
• 48:58
  It doesn't matter what you do. But for the rest of the kids you
• 49:02
  got to you got to have, there has to be a mindset.
• 49:05
  And so they talk about that and putting positive energy in and
• 49:10
  writing down your goals so you can see directly what you're
• 49:13
  trying to do. And I need to have goals as a
• 49:15
  coach. And that's what's important for
• 49:18
  me is that I need to say, hey, this person can run this fast.
• 49:22
  This is what's so and so strive frequency is we need to turn
• 49:25
  that up a notch to whatever it needs to be for them to run so
• 49:28
  fast or this person has a length problem.
• 49:31
  We need to deal with that. And so you can do the same
• 49:35
  workouts and the same training like whatever between two people
• 49:39
  and they can be emphasized entirely different.
• 49:42
  So I can look for a certain workout with somebody and I
• 49:46
  could say this is what you're working on and you're working on
• 49:49
  something different, but it could be the exact same workout,
• 49:53
  different mindset. So that's why I think goal
• 49:56
  setting is huge and I think it's a big thing to do because the
• 50:00
  kids need to know where they're going.
• 50:02
  How do you and we're going to get back on your timeline here
• 50:05
  in a second. I think this is an important
• 50:07
  topic to continue going down. How do you as the coach exercise
• 50:11
  that goal setting for your kids? And what I mean that like what I
• 50:14
  mean by that is are you meeting with them once a year at the
• 50:18
  beginning? Do you have them write it down?
• 50:20
  Is it quarterly meetings? How are you?
• 50:22
  How do you like somewhere someone right now someone's
• 50:25
  listening and they're like, well, yeah, you know, I've
• 50:26
  always, I've always said goal setting's important, but I don't
• 50:29
  actually how to implement that. How do you today in 2025,
• 50:32
  because I'm sure it's iterated throughout your career, How do
• 50:35
  you today best actually do the goal setting with your athletes?
• 50:40
  Well, two things. One of the things is that you
• 50:44
  have to, you have to look at goal setting as being like a
• 50:48
  part of practice. So you have to provide time to
• 50:53
  go to do your goal setting stuff like you can't just say, well,
• 50:56
  I'm not going to do it because we have too much other stuff to
• 50:59
  do, which I've done before. I'm I'm somewhat guilty of that.
• 51:03
  But what I try to do is put in, Hey, we're going to lift today
• 51:07
  and then we're going to go watch film.
• 51:10
  And then we, we do this every after every meet and sometimes
• 51:14
  after a week. But after every meet, we pretty
• 51:17
  much watch film and then we'll go over the film like very is,
• 51:23
  is very highly technical and specific.
• 51:25
  Like, Hey, your foot is not getting underneath you here.
• 51:28
  You're looping your back foot in the blocks.
• 51:31
  You're doing these kinds of things.
• 51:33
  And we'll look at everybody's race and go over the thing.
• 51:35
  If it's good, there's a lot of stuff we have to review, but
• 51:39
  we'll go over that. These are the things that you
• 51:41
  need to work on. This is where we have problems.
• 51:44
  And The thing is that sometimes the kids aren't flexible enough
• 51:47
  to do it. Sometimes they're not strong
• 51:49
  enough to do it, but they know that we're doing these things to
• 51:52
  accomplish that goal, and we do those fairly often.
• 51:58
  We'll do individual sessions once every so often.
• 52:06
  It's harder to do because if you got 15 kids, that's hard because
• 52:10
  you got to pull one out of practice or you got to do one at
• 52:13
  a time and the kids got school and study hall and, you know,
• 52:17
  tutoring and all these kinds of things.
• 52:20
  But we'll definitely approach that.
• 52:22
  And so every one of my kids pretty much can tell you what
• 52:27
  they're doing wrong. So it.
• 52:29
  It it's not necessarily a a year beginning thing.
• 52:33
  I'm hearing you. It's sprinkled out throughout
• 52:35
  your entire plan. Yeah, and this is where this is
• 52:39
  where you don't become good friends with the kids sometimes.
• 52:42
  It's like we started talking about this in October and we're
• 52:45
  in May and we still haven't cleaned this problem up.
• 52:50
  And the kids, I know, I know, you know, but the kids know
• 52:53
  because it's not something you just sprung on them and made
• 52:55
  talk about. Well, I wish you would have told
• 52:57
  me in October and we could have fixed this early, so.
• 53:00
  So are you, are your goals and, and maybe it's different based
• 53:04
  on the athlete, you know, maybe a freshman is different than a
• 53:06
  senior, etcetera. But I'm hearing your goals are
• 53:09
  less. I want to run 1080.
• 53:13
  I want to be an all American and more of the technical side of
• 53:17
  it. I want to.
• 53:18
  I want to be better in block to do whatever I'm going to do in
• 53:21
  the 100. My blocks have to be better
• 53:23
  because I loop in the back, blah blah blah blah.
• 53:25
  Those become the goals. Or is it a combination of both?
• 53:28
  Those are those are the higher level goals like you talk about
• 53:31
  the basic goals that we start off with.
• 53:33
  Everybody has to write a goal sheet down.
• 53:37
  OK, this is what I want to run in 100.
• 53:39
  This is what I want to run into two.
• 53:41
  This is what I run around the four hurdles, whatever.
• 53:44
  Then they have placement goals. I want to win PAC twelves or I
• 53:47
  want to win the NC as or I want to win whatever.
• 53:51
  So they have a set of goals. We read them, make copies of
• 53:55
  them, give them back to the kids.
• 53:56
  Every now and then we'll pull out and say, hey, I thought you
• 53:58
  said your goal was this, that and the other.
• 54:00
  We're trending away from that. We need to fix these things up
• 54:04
  or address some of these issues. Then we do training goals.
• 54:12
  So like if we do a test, say we do, we do 30 flight tests or
• 54:17
  overhead and back or standing long jump or something like
• 54:21
  that, and we'll record those. And mainly for the 30 flight
• 54:24
  tests, I'm like, hey, this predicts that you can do this,
• 54:27
  this, this and of this. So these are our goals for right
• 54:31
  now. These are intermediary goals
• 54:33
  until we hit your goal. Now if you say you want to run
• 54:36
  1080 and to run 1080, I'm just throwing a number out there and
• 54:40
  run 1080 is means you're going to have to run 3/2/95 on your 30
• 54:45
  flying you're at 3:15. We got a long way to go.
• 54:48
  So let's look at the 315 goals 1st and work our way down.
• 54:53
  So there's various sets of goals, just like various steps
• 54:57
  that you need to take to get to where you want to go.
• 55:00
  I like how I want to make sure I pointed this out.
• 55:03
  I like how you use the goal setting as accountability for
• 55:06
  athletes as well. You know, hey, when we sat down,
• 55:09
  you wrote this down. I didn't write this down.
• 55:10
  You said you want to do XY and Z.
• 55:12
  Here we are. We're like, I think you said
• 55:14
  we're trending away from that. That's a very nice way of saying
• 55:16
  that. By the way, when you're trending
• 55:17
  away from that, let's get back on to it.
• 55:21
  So I love that accountability now, like a like a very good
• 55:24
  coach. You already like answered my
• 55:25
  very next question that I wanted to make sure that we oh.
• 55:28
  Let me tell you one more thing. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to
• 55:30
  interrupt you. One more thing that it just
• 55:33
  crossed my mind Go. The other thing that we do that
• 55:36
  is popular and isn't popular, that depends on the day is or
• 55:42
  the group is. I get the kids to stand up in
• 55:45
  front of the group and read their goals out because now, now
• 55:51
  it's like as a group, yeah. Yeah.
• 55:56
  So if you see somebody doing something or that their behavior
• 55:59
  isn't the such that you know they're going to be able to
• 56:03
  reach their goals, you need to try to pull some people over and
• 56:06
  speak to them. If they're your friends or a
• 56:08
  teammate or you can say something, it shouldn't be.
• 56:10
  We should be able to police each other, not just the coaches
• 56:13
  coming down on the kids. We talk a lot about culture and
• 56:17
  how do we hold each other accountable and there's a great
• 56:20
  like actual action step people can take.
• 56:22
  So it's it's great and you should have the the coach to
• 56:25
  athlete goal setting and accountability.
• 56:28
  Now staying in front of your team, staying in front of the
• 56:30
  people you want to be on the four by one with the four by
• 56:32
  four with and that'll help that that just I feel like that was
• 56:35
  just naturally like, wait a minute, Susie, you told me you
• 56:38
  want to be XY and Z and I saw you at the party at 1:00 or
• 56:41
  whatever. You know that example like
• 56:43
  that's not that's not going to help us and help you.
• 56:45
  Yeah, that's that's great. I love that.
• 56:47
  Thanks for adding that. That's really perfect.
• 56:48
  That's that's another the key thing someone's going to be here
• 56:51
  right now and, and be able to implement that into their
• 56:53
  program and their culture. So as I was saying, you were,
• 56:57
  you know, you're always one step ahead of me.
• 56:59
  My follow up question was going to be what about you in goal
• 57:02
  setting? What do you do?
• 57:05
  I assume you're not doing technical, you know, I want to
• 57:07
  make sure you know my fly 30s are any good anymore.
• 57:11
  But what do you do, if anything, at this point in your career for
• 57:14
  goal setting, whether it's the coaching, like actual, you know,
• 57:17
  the XS and OS of the athlete or team goals or how many points
• 57:22
  your team scores, Do you sit down with yourself and do some
• 57:24
  goal setting? Well, I do some personal goal
• 57:29
  setting, which we'll get into a little bit after we do this, but
• 57:34
  for each kid, one, excuse me, a Tony Wellsism is that you should
• 57:43
  know all the details about your kids.
• 57:46
  And this is one of the things I have to do every year.
• 57:48
  And we talk about details. You should know their trochanter
• 57:52
  length, stride frequency, block settings, all these kinds of
• 57:57
  things so you can make the determination on what you need
• 58:00
  to do next. Like there's basic math.
• 58:03
  I did this, this presentation for the USA track and field,
• 58:08
  cross country, the USFTCCA, whatever all the letters are.
• 58:14
  I did a presentation one year and basically it was about
• 58:18
  taking those things and manipulating those numbers to
• 58:22
  get what you want. So, you know, if, and we talked
• 58:27
  about this a little bit earlier, if your stride length is down
• 58:31
  and your frequency is where it wants to be, you got to figure
• 58:34
  out a way or plan to do these kinds of things.
• 58:37
  And if your athlete is even the athlete of the type and the
• 58:40
  bodybuild to be able to accomplish the goals that you
• 58:43
  want to accomplish. So for me, it's very important
• 58:45
  that for every, every kid that I have, and we have a system here
• 58:50
  now which is good that really helps this out.
• 58:53
  But every, every athlete that I have, I need to know all of
• 58:57
  those numbers and I need to be able to go down.
• 59:00
  Well here we have an office downstairs where we have ATV
• 59:04
  computer screen in and we can pull up all the videos.
• 59:07
  We take probably something out of every practice, whether it's
• 59:16
  block stars or Sprint mechanics or something.
• 59:19
  And then it's up to me and you know, our other Sprint coach
• 59:26
  doctor identity, she comes down and we'll look at them and
• 59:31
  we'll, we'll, we'll find out what's going on with each and we
• 59:36
  send them to the kids. The kids get to take a look at
• 59:39
  them and see what they think is going right or they think is
• 59:42
  going wrong and then we'll discuss it.
• 59:44
  But it's my responsibility as a coach and her responsibility as
• 59:48
  a coach to be able to look at these things and be able to
• 59:51
  break down and say, hey, this was her stride length, stride
• 59:54
  frequency here. This is where position why she
• 59:58
  was missing. And that those are the other
• 59:59
  things that I need to know as a coach.
• 1:00:02
  Like what are the the general flaws?
• 1:00:04
  Not necessarily always what's going on with stride length and
• 1:00:08
  stride frequency, but what's causing those things to be
• 1:00:11
  limited or? To to the numbers too large,
• 1:00:15
  like without getting too technical, you obviously you
• 1:00:19
  don't want this either one of those things to be the maximum.
• 1:00:22
  You need those numbers at optimums and you know, you need
• 1:00:25
  to figure out why if they're not, why they're not and what
• 1:00:28
  you can do about it. So that's my responsibility as a
• 1:00:32
  coach and my other responsibility is just to be
• 1:00:35
  there, to be present. And it's easy to be at practice
• 1:00:39
  and not at practice. It's like some days it's like,
• 1:00:43
  let me go in here and so on and so forth.
• 1:00:46
  And you know, because it's just, you know, it's a long run like
• 1:00:51
  NC as are a long run. And there's a reason why they,
• 1:00:54
  the college kids get tired when they come to worlds or they come
• 1:00:57
  to because you got this indoor thing you got all fall, your
• 1:01:01
  training like the professionals won't start training till
• 1:01:03
  November ish. And, you know, they take their
• 1:01:06
  time slow. They don't take indoors
• 1:01:07
  seriously. This is, you know, indoors is
• 1:01:10
  our bread and butter. So we got to do that and then
• 1:01:12
  come back again for outdoors and then do usas.
• 1:01:15
  And then if you're fortunate to make a team, it's hard to hold
• 1:01:18
  it together that long. So hard, not impossible that,
• 1:01:22
  but it is hard you're you're. Not impossible.
• 1:01:25
  That's right. OK, Let's get back on our
• 1:01:26
  timeline here. You said your goal was, OK, I
• 1:01:30
  want to be one of these community colleges that are
• 1:01:33
  teaching and getting tenure and tenure and coaching so I can do
• 1:01:37
  my thing. And you mentioned somewhere
• 1:01:39
  around where we left off was when you started working on your
• 1:01:41
  masters, and that's part of your tenure there in the California
• 1:01:44
  community system, if I remember correctly.
• 1:01:48
  Yeah. So pick us up there.
• 1:01:50
  OK, so where was I? So.
• 1:01:54
  Merritt College around there somewhere, I think.
• 1:01:56
  I started, yeah, I started very good, very good knowledge.
• 1:02:01
  I started, I started the club. Club was going well and
• 1:02:06
  everything. We got more, we got a lot of
• 1:02:08
  kids from the area in the in the community and whatnot.
• 1:02:12
  And then we need a place to practice.
• 1:02:14
  And remember I was telling you, we used to practice that merit
• 1:02:17
  and the track was bad and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:02:19
  And but it was actually turned out to be a blessing for us.
• 1:02:25
  And then they asked me, Well, then, you know, they're giving
• 1:02:29
  me a key to the, to the, the shed.
• 1:02:33
  And then then the guy who's the the key master basically for the
• 1:02:43
  for the college called me up on the phone.
• 1:02:46
  I don't know where he got my phone number.
• 1:02:48
  He's like, hey, this is so and so I need you to come down and
• 1:02:51
  open the container up. We don't have the things.
• 1:02:54
  And now married is like 5 minutes from my house.
• 1:02:57
  I'm like, yeah, no problem. I'll run over.
• 1:03:00
  So I go down there and I open the shed up and he's like, this
• 1:03:03
  is where the lost key is. I'm keeping this key and I'm not
• 1:03:05
  giving it back to you. That was his job, the key.
• 1:03:09
  He had the key, right? He set me up.
• 1:03:11
  He wanted the key back, so he got the key back.
• 1:03:15
  And then I was like, we have nowhere to practice now.
• 1:03:17
  And then Coach Compton and he asked me, he's like, hey, do you
• 1:03:25
  want a job here? We need another coach so we can
• 1:03:28
  come on and coach. You can come on and help coach
• 1:03:31
  here. So I was like, sure bet I'd love
• 1:03:33
  to coach some of these JC kids. So I started coaching JC there.
• 1:03:37
  And then I went over to San Francisco City College with Doug
• 1:03:41
  O Yang because he had gotten a lot of my kids from Skyline.
• 1:03:45
  So, you know, I, I had helped out at Skyline.
• 1:03:48
  I, I coached, Oh, we didn't get into that.
• 1:03:50
  I coached for three years at Skyline.
• 1:03:52
  Some of the best years of my life, some of the most talented
• 1:03:55
  athletes ever. We had like 5 state champions in
• 1:03:59
  three years. And in California, it's hard to
• 1:04:01
  have a state. Yeah, holy cow.
• 1:04:04
  Because it's just one division. It's not like AD 123456, it's
• 1:04:09
  like everybody's got to make it through the the rounds and get
• 1:04:13
  down there. And so a lot of those kids
• 1:04:18
  didn't have the grades. And so they ended up going to
• 1:04:20
  San Francisco City College. And so Doug, who's one of my
• 1:04:25
  personal mentors and a great guy, Doug O Yang, Doug asked me
• 1:04:28
  to come up and help help him at San Francisco City.
• 1:04:32
  And I did that and had a couple of JC state champs and some good
• 1:04:37
  things down there and won a couple of titles, came back to
• 1:04:43
  merit. And then Coach Compton, just
• 1:04:46
  because it was closer And you know, Coach Compton said they
• 1:04:51
  their jobs going to open up at Laney and you know, I'm going to
• 1:04:55
  refer you to it. And Doug said the same thing
• 1:04:58
  because Doug had actually gone to Laney and Proverb Jacobs, who
• 1:05:03
  was was the former head coach at Laney, he had recommended me
• 1:05:07
  too. So everybody was like, all
• 1:05:08
  things were pointed like just go ahead and apply for this job and
• 1:05:13
  the job's yours. Then I have one of the people
• 1:05:16
  and I don't know if this is, I guess the statue of limitations
• 1:05:20
  is over for this, but I have one of the one of the people call me
• 1:05:24
  up and give me all the interview questions.
• 1:05:26
  So I was prepared to the interview.
• 1:05:28
  They wanted me to have this job. Like I said, things just started
• 1:05:31
  falling into place, man. And so, yeah, I got the job and.
• 1:05:38
  If you didn't get the job, what's wrong with you?
• 1:05:41
  Yeah, I'd have done something. I had to have done something
• 1:05:43
  really stupid and offensive in my in my interview.
• 1:05:47
  So yeah, that's how I got to to to the JC and then I got the
• 1:05:53
  job. It was a full time position,
• 1:05:56
  tenure track and everything. Like I can honestly say, and I
• 1:06:02
  was telling somebody this story yesterday.
• 1:06:04
  Ironically, I can honestly say that I never had one single day
• 1:06:09
  when I was coaching at Laney that I did not want to go to
• 1:06:12
  work. Never had a day like that.
• 1:06:15
  There's some days, you know, for every other job that I've been
• 1:06:19
  in and this job, there's a lot of pressure here and that's a
• 1:06:22
  whole nother story. It's not a bad thing.
• 1:06:24
  It's part of the culture here at the University of Oregon.
• 1:06:27
  But while I was there, I just, it was just every day was a
• 1:06:32
  great day. And it seems like I look back on
• 1:06:35
  it, it seems like every day was sunny, there was no rain.
• 1:06:38
  It's just a great experience for me and I was happy to have
• 1:06:42
  gotten it so. Can you, you know, I love one of
• 1:06:46
  our goals here is, you know, we have coaches from all levels.
• 1:06:49
  So high school, D1D2D3 and AIA junior college, etcetera.
• 1:06:54
  You might be, and you know, I have all grace that after 300
• 1:06:58
  and something interviews, I do not remember every single one,
• 1:07:00
  but I'm pretty sure you're one of the first California
• 1:07:04
  Community College coaches, someone who spent a long time in
• 1:07:06
  that system. Can you explain to us a little
• 1:07:09
  bit That's a unique system. We've had several junior college
• 1:07:12
  NJCA coaches on, but we haven't really maybe explored or haven't
• 1:07:17
  done in a long time the California Community College
• 1:07:20
  system. Can you explain some of the
• 1:07:21
  uniquenesses around recruiting the the, the state meet that
• 1:07:27
  kind of stuff, you know, the North Cal, so Cal State me
• 1:07:29
  things like that. Can you give us a little bit of
• 1:07:30
  a background on the union? This is there.
• 1:07:33
  Well, one of the things about California community colleges
• 1:07:37
  you, you can't really come, come recruit like there's the area
• 1:07:43
  codes. Like now there's been more area
• 1:07:45
  codes added. Like you can't call on your
• 1:07:47
  phone, any of your phones because they can ask you.
• 1:07:50
  Like I could call four O 5, four O 5.
• 1:07:56
  I could call, excuse me, 5, one O 925, but I couldn't call seven
• 1:08:02
  O 7. Now these people are all boarded
• 1:08:04
  against each other. I couldn't call 415, but I could
• 1:08:08
  call 65-O. So there's certain numbers that
• 1:08:11
  you can, if someone that you recruit lives in one of those
• 1:08:15
  area codes, you can't recruit them.
• 1:08:17
  Like I can't go down and get kids from LA and recruit them.
• 1:08:20
  Now they can come up here and show up here, but you can't do
• 1:08:26
  that. Like, you know, we had, when I
• 1:08:28
  first came there, they had kids from Jamaica and kids, they
• 1:08:33
  weren't very good, but they were still Jamaicans.
• 1:08:35
  And we had a girl from Tonga. And I was like, how can we even
• 1:08:40
  get these kids here? They don't even speak English,
• 1:08:43
  like, you know, And so we got a new president and the president
• 1:08:46
  was like, we're not having any more than shenanigans.
• 1:08:48
  We're going to get in trouble. There's a lot of there's a lot
• 1:08:53
  of rule breaking. If there's rules, there's rule
• 1:08:55
  breakings, right? But the.
• 1:08:59
  Recruiting is hard there. So I got a lot of kids from, you
• 1:09:02
  know, just a local area. I knew a lot of people.
• 1:09:04
  And then I had the feeder system because I still had the club so
• 1:09:09
  I could still I could get kids that weren't academically
• 1:09:12
  eligible or ready for college athletically or academically.
• 1:09:18
  But yeah, it's a challenge, man. You got conference and then you
• 1:09:23
  got conference championship and then you got nor Cal trials nor
• 1:09:26
  Cal finals and then you have the state meet is all on one day.
• 1:09:29
  It's not a two day meet in California.
• 1:09:31
  It's just like they take the top four from the north and the top
• 1:09:34
  four from the South and you just go battle it out.
• 1:09:40
  Yeah, it's just like it's very, very California ish.
• 1:09:44
  So, so on the area code thing, which they can't do that today,
• 1:09:48
  right? I mean, because area codes
• 1:09:50
  travel today, they must. I don't think they could do that
• 1:09:52
  today. That's what it was when I.
• 1:09:54
  Left. They must do like zip codes or
• 1:09:55
  something now. They'll do zip codes, they'll do
• 1:09:58
  all kinds of stuff. Or they might have just got rid
• 1:10:01
  of it totally. I.
• 1:10:03
  Last my memory serves, and I certainly haven't seen like an
• 1:10:06
  influx of, you know, the other 49 states into the California
• 1:10:10
  community system. But so by rule, you had to
• 1:10:13
  recruit by area code. But if a if a kid from Miami
• 1:10:17
  calls you or shows up you you could recruit that kid.
• 1:10:21
  I can recruit, they could be on the team, but they got to pay
• 1:10:23
  out of state fees because California Community College is
• 1:10:27
  extremely cheap and used to be free and last I heard they were
• 1:10:31
  talking about going back to free.
• 1:10:32
  Wow or low level, so they don't want if you're out of state, you
• 1:10:36
  got to pay extra. I had a kid from Portland one
• 1:10:38
  time who had to they got to do all of the stuff themselves.
• 1:10:41
  Like you could tell them what they need to do, but you can't
• 1:10:43
  do it for them about all these waivers and do all this kind of
• 1:10:48
  a thing and so. So they really put the community
• 1:10:51
  in Community College they wanted from that local community.
• 1:10:55
  Yeah, they want it from because there's taxes like I still have
• 1:10:59
  a house out there and they and they raise your taxes every year
• 1:11:04
  to pay for some sort of a bond. Like we just Laney just got a
• 1:11:08
  new track and a new football field and now they pass some
• 1:11:12
  sort of a bond where Jack my taxes up for an extra $20 a
• 1:11:17
  year. So.
• 1:11:18
  Hey, because that's only 20. That's good.
• 1:11:20
  That's not bad. Today's world.
• 1:11:22
  OK, So that's the recruiting aspect.
• 1:11:24
  And then instead of having a national championship like an
• 1:11:27
  NJCAA or NCAA, you guys had called a Norcal versus Socal
• 1:11:32
  state meet and that was your national championship, right?
• 1:11:35
  The the winners of that didn't go on to the NJCAA national
• 1:11:39
  championship or anything. No, not at all.
• 1:11:41
  That's the end of the championship for us.
• 1:11:43
  We ended up getting end up getting ranked with the rest of
• 1:11:46
  the team like Fred Bear. Do you remember Fred Bear?
• 1:11:49
  Yeah, of course. Fred does some sort of ranking
• 1:11:53
  every year. I used to.
• 1:11:54
  I have not seen Fred for 8-9 years, so I don't know what he
• 1:11:58
  how at what level. He's still involved in that.
• 1:12:01
  But there's a Frank Bear or a Fred Bear or Fred Bear type that
• 1:12:06
  does all these things. So he mixes everything together.
• 1:12:09
  Yeah, perfect. And the California Community
• 1:12:12
  College system, this is from the outsiders perspective, was
• 1:12:16
  unique in the sense of like every coach taught, right, like
• 1:12:19
  you, like it was a I'll say I don't know if it was a
• 1:12:22
  requirement or almost a requirement.
• 1:12:23
  You had to have a master's and teach.
• 1:12:26
  You had to you you have a track class and then you have a track
• 1:12:30
  adjunct class maybe where you do weight.
• 1:12:32
  But what's it? While I was there, I taught
• 1:12:35
  tennis, badminton, aerobics. I had a walking class, weight
• 1:12:45
  training, basketball, something else, one more class that I
• 1:12:53
  taught all those classes. And so they'd mix them in there
• 1:12:55
  and I love those classes, man. You meet a lot of the people in
• 1:12:58
  the community and stuff, especially the tennis.
• 1:13:00
  I love tennis. And then we have a little team
• 1:13:02
  and I used to coach on the tennis team and you know, these
• 1:13:06
  kinds of things. I've coached every sport, man,
• 1:13:08
  Tennis, basketball, football, track, you know, at some at some
• 1:13:14
  point in time. I thought you had to teach.
• 1:13:18
  I was like, I thought you was going to tell you were going to
• 1:13:19
  tell me you taught a Kineese class or.
• 1:13:22
  I did teach a kineese class. That's what I forgot I took.
• 1:13:25
  I taught a kineese class and I taught a health class.
• 1:13:28
  I started getting fixated on the sports classes.
• 1:13:31
  Yeah, I taught those too. Well obviously Laney has a big
• 1:13:37
  place in your heart. You said every day was sun
• 1:13:39
  shining and smiling and all that.
• 1:13:41
  How many years at Laney and why leave?
• 1:13:45
  Why leave? Why leave was a good question.
• 1:13:47
  It's it's a, it's a 222 pronged answer.
• 1:13:55
  So Robert became a good friend of mine.
• 1:14:00
  Robert had some of my kids that went down to UCLA, some of my
• 1:14:04
  good kids and I remember he coached.
• 1:14:07
  I don't, you probably won't remember Renee Williams.
• 1:14:09
  She was a 21 foot long jumper and a 44 foot triple jumper and
• 1:14:14
  Robert was having trouble with Renee.
• 1:14:16
  Renee. And Robert was like how can you
• 1:14:18
  coach this girl? Man, she's terrible.
• 1:14:23
  And I was like she's a great kid, You just got to be used to
• 1:14:25
  her. And then we talked it out and we
• 1:14:28
  became good friends. So Robert called me up and
• 1:14:33
  Robert asked me. He said I might be getting a job
• 1:14:36
  in North Carolina. And so he's like, do you want to
• 1:14:39
  go? I was like, absolutely not.
• 1:14:42
  And he's like, why not? And I was like, I don't want to
• 1:14:44
  move to North Carolina. I don't want to do that.
• 1:14:47
  I'm not familiar. I looked at places there but I
• 1:14:50
  said I'm not going. To go, but that's a great point.
• 1:14:54
  Your entire career is kind of within this, a very small
• 1:14:58
  geographical footprint up to this point.
• 1:15:00
  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. San Francisco Bay Area, that was
• 1:15:03
  everything. And so so then Robert said, what
• 1:15:08
  if I get the job at Oregon? They're trying to give me the
• 1:15:11
  job at Oregon. I said, well, I might consider
• 1:15:13
  it. And then so I had a fiance at
• 1:15:16
  the time and she was like, we need to go to Oregon.
• 1:15:19
  We need to go to Oregon. I'm like, I don't want to go to
• 1:15:21
  Oregon. I'm involved.
• 1:15:22
  I got roots to the community here.
• 1:15:24
  If I go to Oregon, it's not going to be a lot to do.
• 1:15:26
  It's cold and everything. And so she kept forcing it on
• 1:15:30
  me. And then Robert didn't hire
• 1:15:33
  anybody. And I was like, why don't you
• 1:15:34
  hire somebody for the job, Rob? And Rob was like, I'm not hiring
• 1:15:37
  nobody until you take this job. And he went a whole year with no
• 1:15:41
  assistant. And so finally she talked me
• 1:15:46
  into it. I said let's go.
• 1:15:47
  And I said I'll go for a year. So I got a year.
• 1:15:50
  They gave me a year to knock off at Laney and said, you know,
• 1:15:55
  take your year off, we'll let you come back after year.
• 1:15:58
  Wow, that says a lot what they thought about you too.
• 1:16:01
  Yeah, yeah. Now it's both places.
• 1:16:06
  And so I came up here and then things went well our first year,
• 1:16:12
  and then I had some established some great relationships with
• 1:16:15
  the kids. My fiance hated it.
• 1:16:19
  She left and moved to Arizona, which well we get into that at
• 1:16:24
  another point in time but she left and so I stayed and then I
• 1:16:31
  went and applied. Then they asked me to come back
• 1:16:33
  to Laney 2 years later and then I went back and applied again
• 1:16:36
  and got the job and then the kids asked me not to leave so I
• 1:16:41
  do. You know, I'm trying to imagine
• 1:16:45
  the social media chatter if you would have left Oregon to go
• 1:16:51
  back to Laney for for many reasons that are true and then
• 1:16:57
  many reasons that people don't understand the reality of some
• 1:16:59
  things. Oregon in track and field world
• 1:17:02
  is the Mecca. And what I mean by that is
• 1:17:05
  everybody would want to work there.
• 1:17:07
  It's perfect. Nothing ever is wrong.
• 1:17:10
  You guys want for nothing. All this, all these thing.
• 1:17:13
  And I say that's actually not true because I I still remember
• 1:17:17
  visiting Robert one day and going out to practice and he's
• 1:17:20
  turning his own pits. And I was like, Rob, I was like,
• 1:17:23
  if I were to have asked 100 coaches, who do you think turns
• 1:17:27
  pits at Oregon? Zero would have said the head
• 1:17:29
  coach. They would have said you have
• 1:17:31
  100 managers that do that. Or, you know, it's Oregon.
• 1:17:34
  It just happens on its own. Whatever.
• 1:17:36
  Right. They got automatic pits, yeah.
• 1:17:38
  Exactly, exactly. A lot of people don't from the
• 1:17:43
  outside looking in, don't realize that every institution,
• 1:17:45
  Oregon, USC, Georgia, Florida, it doesn't matter, everywhere in
• 1:17:48
  between has their pun intended hurdles to get over.
• 1:17:53
  You still got to get kids into school.
• 1:17:54
  You got, you got to attract kids to like just like your attitude
• 1:17:58
  of going up there like man, it's cold or you got to attract kids
• 1:18:02
  to that as well. Not nowhere in this country is
• 1:18:04
  it perfect. 100%. It's just not.
• 1:18:07
  And and that includes a great place like Eugene OR as well.
• 1:18:12
  Exactly. So go ahead, go, go.
• 1:18:15
  No. No, no, I just, I don't think
• 1:18:17
  people understand that. And it's a lot.
• 1:18:20
  It's a lot to do, but yeah, I, I ended up making it work.
• 1:18:26
  But they, they've, they've done a lot of things for us and tried
• 1:18:30
  to make our jobs easier. But it's, it's a, it's a tougher
• 1:18:33
  job than most. And we've set up a good model
• 1:18:37
  for everything else. And a lot of people you know
• 1:18:40
  have shared this model and have Excel with it and done a really
• 1:18:44
  good job. We're we're staring at the 2026
• 1:18:48
  season. What year at Oregon will this be
• 1:18:51
  coming up in 26 for? You wow, that's I started in
• 1:18:56
  1414 season 2612 it'll either be season third, it'll be the 13 I
• 1:19:04
  because you count 14. Yeah, yeah, I, I lose that math
• 1:19:07
  too. I'm with you on that.
• 1:19:08
  OK. All right, so so 12.
• 1:19:09
  And in one year, I didn't coach because of the pandemic, right?
• 1:19:12
  Right, right. Yeah.
• 1:19:13
  We count that though. Yeah.
• 1:19:15
  What have you? Like so you came from.
• 1:19:19
  I don't want to, I don't want to overstate this, but you came
• 1:19:23
  from a fairly meager background, meaning coaching at the club.
• 1:19:28
  You had no track. You were, you know, you'd go to
• 1:19:30
  the gym Mondays and Fridays. I, I know the Community College
• 1:19:33
  system. You already said, you know, one
• 1:19:34
  track was the American track was burnt and things like that.
• 1:19:38
  And then you get to a great facility and great budgets and
• 1:19:41
  things like that. What have you had to change
• 1:19:46
  about yourself, Your, your, your oh, not outcome, but how you
• 1:19:51
  view things during your 10 plus years at Oregon?
• 1:19:57
  Well, the first thing that I noticed like is a pendulum
• 1:20:01
  swing. So here we don't have anything
• 1:20:08
  like Eleni like, and we didn't care.
• 1:20:12
  So Eleni, here's the story once again.
• 1:20:15
  The the the. Hopefully the statute of
• 1:20:19
  limitation that run out on this one as well.
• 1:20:22
  But we used to get $15 a day per diem like when we had a track
• 1:20:27
  meet. So I give the kids their per
• 1:20:30
  diem and the kids wouldn't, hey, you guys want to go get some
• 1:20:34
  sandwiches? Nope.
• 1:20:36
  You want to do something? They were pocketing the per
• 1:20:38
  diem. They wouldn't eat, they wouldn't
• 1:20:40
  buy water for the track meet or anything like that.
• 1:20:42
  And I'd be like, somebody's going to get hurt.
• 1:20:45
  What I did was I stopped giving the kids the per diem and I
• 1:20:50
  would take the per diem money and go to one of the big box
• 1:20:55
  stores and get Gatorade and peanut butter and bread and
• 1:20:59
  orange juice and granola bars and a whole bunch of stuff like
• 1:21:04
  that. And we get and bought some ice
• 1:21:06
  chests And we used to throw it all in the ice chest.
• 1:21:09
  And they used to go and kids would be making sandwich, you
• 1:21:13
  know, some lunch meat and stuff like that.
• 1:21:16
  And the kids would be making sandwich after sandwich after
• 1:21:19
  sandwich to a point where I was like, you know, somebody would
• 1:21:22
  run the hurdles and they'd be done like that's the first event
• 1:21:24
  and they'd be done for the rest of the day and then sit there
• 1:21:27
  and eat the sandwiches. And then the four by four kids
• 1:21:29
  would have no food. And so I'd be like, you guys got
• 1:21:33
  to be more cognizant of who's eating and who hasn't and stuff
• 1:21:38
  like that. Or we wanted some backpacks.
• 1:21:40
  I got some sort of a deal with Nike where they would give us
• 1:21:43
  stuff cheaper, but it wasn't free, you know?
• 1:21:47
  And so we do 5050 raffle at the football games.
• 1:21:51
  Like, you know, we were supposed to give half to the football
• 1:21:54
  team and half to the track team, but it was the football, the
• 1:21:57
  track girls were selling the raffle tickets.
• 1:21:59
  So I give the football team certain amount of money and then
• 1:22:02
  I keep the rest for ourselves. But they got money too.
• 1:22:08
  And so we'd be doing that. And we get a, you know, by the
• 1:22:10
  end of football season, they get a hat and a backpack and maybe
• 1:22:14
  we get some new uniforms and stuff like that.
• 1:22:16
  The kids love that. I still have some of those
• 1:22:18
  backpacks here and they love the backpacks and they love the hat.
• 1:22:22
  And then when I came here was pendulum swing back this way.
• 1:22:26
  I hate this stuff. We get too much stuff.
• 1:22:28
  I don't want any more of it now. I was like, do you know what we
• 1:22:33
  had to do to get a hat? Like it'd be out in the rain and
• 1:22:37
  you know, you're standing out there and selling stuff to
• 1:22:40
  people. It was just different.
• 1:22:42
  And so my experience there was not the drive, the hunger drive
• 1:22:49
  wasn't there. But we at that time, we didn't
• 1:22:53
  have a lot of sprinters. We had when I first got here, we
• 1:22:55
  had like 6 or 7 kids. And that's different today.
• 1:22:58
  Yeah, right. Well, yeah, yeah, it's a little
• 1:23:02
  different. Yeah, meaning the the culture of
• 1:23:04
  sprints and hurdles at at the University of Oregon that that's
• 1:23:07
  fairly radically different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:23:10
  How do you, you know, again, I, I, I almost called the podcast,
• 1:23:14
  the Mythbusters podcast Curtis, because I just like to, I like
• 1:23:17
  to bust myths. And again, one of those myths,
• 1:23:19
  this isn't knocking down Oregon because I have a lot of love and
• 1:23:22
  admiration for the university and athletic department.
• 1:23:24
  I mean, we, we've been honored and blessed to have chosen from
• 1:23:27
  Gil equipment before I even got here.
• 1:23:29
  So I'm just, you know, I'm always very grateful for their
• 1:23:32
  for their choosing, but I'd like for people to see reality.
• 1:23:36
  So, you know, one of the myths is, you know, Oregon doesn't
• 1:23:39
  even have to recruit. You just go out and pick the
• 1:23:42
  however many kids you're going to have for this year 567, you
• 1:23:44
  know, freshman, but that's not true.
• 1:23:46
  You have a lot of competitors out there.
• 1:23:47
  You know that. Do you have to like I would
• 1:23:50
  imagine I'm putting myself in an 1817 eighteen year old shoe.
• 1:23:55
  I'm I'm good enough to be recruited by an Oregon, which
• 1:23:57
  means I'm good enough to be recruited by a lot of other
• 1:23:59
  institutions. Even if I didn't want to go to
• 1:24:03
  Oregon, I feel like I would if you offered an official visit, I
• 1:24:07
  would take an official visit, Curtis, just to see, you know, I
• 1:24:10
  hear all this stuff that's great.
• 1:24:12
  I'm not going, but I'm going to go see it.
• 1:24:14
  That's a waste of your time, resources, etcetera.
• 1:24:16
  Do you have to be extra like diligent on who you bring in for
• 1:24:23
  official to make sure they're actually seriously considering
• 1:24:25
  university? Or am I just completely off base
• 1:24:27
  that that doesn't even happen? So I could go more into detail
• 1:24:31
  with the whole thing, but I'm going to answer the last
• 1:24:34
  question first, is that there's certain kids.
• 1:24:38
  I've been able to get a profile of the kind of kids that we can
• 1:24:41
  get here. And if you're really good, the
• 1:24:46
  profile doesn't matter. We're going to bring you in
• 1:24:48
  regardless if you're good enough, even if I know in my
• 1:24:53
  heart we're not going to get you.
• 1:24:56
  You're right, a bunch of kids want to come to Oregon because
• 1:25:00
  they see the uniforms, they see the stadium, they see all of
• 1:25:04
  this stuff, but they're not really interested in coming
• 1:25:07
  here. They just want to come on the
• 1:25:08
  visit. We get a lot of that.
• 1:25:10
  It's a challenging place and I'm debating whether to get into
• 1:25:16
  this or not. But how how all of this started?
• 1:25:23
  Again, it was one of those perfect storm type things.
• 1:25:28
  USC was having problems, Cal and and Stanford never were strong.
• 1:25:32
  That let me back up a little bit.
• 1:25:35
  Most schools are successful when they have a hotbed in their,
• 1:25:40
  their, their backyard course. Texas schools, all the schools
• 1:25:44
  in the South, they got all those fast kids and they're Sprint
• 1:25:48
  oriented. Even the worst kids in the SEC
• 1:25:51
  are better than most kids in other places.
• 1:25:54
  So we have to compete against that.
• 1:26:00
  And you know, there's they want to kids want to go to school
• 1:26:04
  there. They want to go where it's hot,
• 1:26:05
  they want to go where it's ethnically diverse.
• 1:26:10
  There's a lot of things that happened.
• 1:26:13
  So I have to get kids that want to come here and maybe aren't as
• 1:26:17
  great as the other kids. Like some of these kids that
• 1:26:20
  came out were 11 Deja Stevens. Deja was 1178, 2318 once she ran
• 1:26:33
  it once in 54 some change. She split 50 point for us, ran
• 1:26:38
  22 O 9, which is still one of the fastest collegiate times
• 1:26:42
  ever, and 1077 Wendy Levin flat. She made the Olympic team as a
• 1:26:49
  sophomore here, 56th or 7th in the final out of lane one.
• 1:26:55
  But those weren't, I mean, there were plenty of girls ahead of
• 1:26:57
  her on the list. There were, there were.
• 1:27:01
  And so my point being that I didn't.
• 1:27:04
  She was AJC kid and I'm familiar with the JC system, so she fit
• 1:27:09
  my profile. So I was heavy and hard on her.
• 1:27:11
  Or Hannah Cunliffe or Alesia Johnson or Sasha Wallace.
• 1:27:21
  What happened to coach in high school?
• 1:27:22
  I knew she was going to be really good.
• 1:27:25
  Robert actually recruited her more than I did.
• 1:27:27
  The only really great kids we had come in here who are great
• 1:27:30
  off the bat. Jenna was very good high
• 1:27:33
  schooler, but she wasn't great. And Ariana Washington was great
• 1:27:39
  in high school. But Kimber Nelson, who set the
• 1:27:42
  National in the 60, won a couple of titles.
• 1:27:45
  She was 11501149 in Jamaica as a collegiate kid.
• 1:27:52
  She transferred out AU tech and came up here so and ran Teen 88
• 1:27:58
  and made the Jamaican Pro Championships team.
• 1:28:01
  And, you know, those are the kind of kids that I know we're
• 1:28:04
  going to get the girl Alana. We signed it like we signed a
• 1:28:08
  lot of good kids and we had a lot of good kids on the string
• 1:28:13
  that never made it because of academics or otherwise.
• 1:28:17
  And, you know, but we have to pick and choose because I know
• 1:28:21
  who's going to come here. And you know, it's hard when
• 1:28:24
  everybody's saying, why, why don't you recruit this kid?
• 1:28:26
  I'm like, because they'll never come here.
• 1:28:28
  And you hit the nail on the head.
• 1:28:29
  You spend time and resources and everybody's always like, I'm not
• 1:28:34
  never take no for an answer, but I'm like, we only have a certain
• 1:28:37
  amount of time and I'd rather spend money on people who may
• 1:28:40
  come here and who have an opportunity that they find
• 1:28:44
  advantageous as opposed to somebody just like all my
• 1:28:47
  friends are going, I want to, I want to do the photo shoot.
• 1:28:50
  Like there's little kids who want to come here and do the
• 1:28:52
  photo shoot right with the uniforms on.
• 1:28:56
  Yeah, I, you know, there's no bigger fan of track coaches than
• 1:28:59
  this guy right here. And I still sometimes have to
• 1:29:02
  push back on a coach who says, you know, oh, it doesn't matter
• 1:29:05
  where I go. I'll be successful as a
• 1:29:08
  recruiter. And it's like, oh, what?
• 1:29:10
  What is successful at Tiffin University over there, Miami
• 1:29:14
  University, North Dakota State, it's it's all different because
• 1:29:18
  of the school, what you can get into school, your location, your
• 1:29:20
  facilities, what your head coach wants.
• 1:29:23
  You know, some head coaches are like, yeah, yeah, we're going to
• 1:29:25
  be distance and and throws. So you're not going to be
• 1:29:29
  Curtis. You could go to that institution
• 1:29:30
  and they give you 1 scholarship and it's like, yeah, you're not
• 1:29:32
  going to have, you know, 12 girls running flat.
• 1:29:36
  I don't care how great you are there, you're not going to get
• 1:29:38
  the money for it to, to recruit. Every place is is different and
• 1:29:42
  you got to be able to the, the good coaches are the ones who
• 1:29:44
  adapt and go, OK, I got to coach, I got to recruit this
• 1:29:47
  type of athlete to this place, this different kind of athlete
• 1:29:50
  over here and then coach them up to be really, really good.
• 1:29:53
  But the ones that just think they can be good because of who
• 1:29:55
  they are, it's like there's a go try that in Syracuse, see how
• 1:29:58
  that works. What worked for you down there
• 1:30:00
  in LA? That's not going to play up in
• 1:30:02
  Syracuse. It's different in every place.
• 1:30:06
  Yeah, that's what it is. These things don't necessarily
• 1:30:09
  work out like it should be. It just it's got to play itself
• 1:30:14
  out in in according to where you are and who you're against.
• 1:30:20
  Like I've told people like if you're in Texas, Texas is a hard
• 1:30:24
  place because there's a hierarchy there.
• 1:30:27
  So like people are generally going to go to Texas first, then
• 1:30:30
  maybe A and M. So Texas, Texas A&M are 121A1B
• 1:30:35
  and then Baylor comes in, arrives around 2:00 and then
• 1:30:39
  Texas Tech 2A2B and then you got TCU.
• 1:30:43
  Who's on the rise now. And then you got SNU and you got
• 1:30:47
  Houston and you got all these people.
• 1:30:50
  But if you're Houston or your TCU or Steven F Austin or one of
• 1:30:57
  those kinds of schools, you know you're not going to get the
• 1:31:01
  kids. They will come to all of those
• 1:31:03
  schools before they come to your school.
• 1:31:06
  And when we were started, when we were started here, like I was
• 1:31:15
  saying before, USC wasn't doing that good, Cal wasn't doing the
• 1:31:18
  great job. Stanford, you know, they're all,
• 1:31:21
  they're all good. Edrick did a great job at
• 1:31:23
  Stanford, but they weren't like a number one choice.
• 1:31:26
  UCLA had kind of fallen down a little bit at that particular
• 1:31:30
  time. And so it was easier for kids to
• 1:31:35
  come to Oregon. Oregon was, you know, a mystery
• 1:31:38
  school. And then we had set up things in
• 1:31:41
  Northern California to where I had transferred my club off to
• 1:31:45
  one of my assistant coaches. And and so we were still strong
• 1:31:49
  in Northern California, good athletes coming out of there.
• 1:31:53
  So we would pick some of the Northern California kids, Akisha
• 1:31:55
  Baker and Ginoba and Sasha Wallace and some other people
• 1:32:03
  that came all won national championships and did well out
• 1:32:06
  of Northern California that people didn't necessarily want
• 1:32:09
  because they weren't on everyone's radar.
• 1:32:13
  And so, but once SC got better and Stanford started doing a
• 1:32:19
  little better, which is harder to get kids into, and UCLA
• 1:32:23
  Curtis came and he picked off a few people.
• 1:32:25
  I remember I recruited this kid real hard.
• 1:32:28
  Cameron, what is Cam's last name?
• 1:32:32
  It's not Wheeler. That's a different 1.
• 1:32:34
  Whatever Cam's last name is, I have to remember now.
• 1:32:37
  He went to UCLA. He ran 45 for for them.
• 1:32:39
  And I wanted him out of high school.
• 1:32:42
  And he was basically committed. And then when I called him up
• 1:32:44
  and I was like, what's it going to be dog?
• 1:32:47
  And he was like, I'm going to UCLA coach.
• 1:32:49
  And I was like, why UCLA? Well, he was in the house, why
• 1:32:52
  should UCLA? He said, because it's closer.
• 1:32:54
  I'm like, it's not closer. It's the same distance from and
• 1:32:58
  normally I don't ask kids why, but Robert wanted me to ask him
• 1:33:01
  why and said it's the same distance from, you know, UCLA to
• 1:33:05
  Witch Costa. What it's Sunny or some whatever
• 1:33:09
  they come up with. So it's a very challenging
• 1:33:13
  situation. Yeah.
• 1:33:14
  So it's a little bit different and kids are looking for
• 1:33:17
  different things, but you have kids not come for reasons and
• 1:33:20
  some that come for reasons and it's a little bit different all
• 1:33:23
  the time. So another myth and the one that
• 1:33:27
  I push back a lot, and it certainly has been amplified
• 1:33:31
  because of the whole roster limits and things like that, is
• 1:33:34
  that you, Curtis Taylor, I'm going to make you the
• 1:33:36
  representative of all power for coaches here.
• 1:33:40
  You do not want to develop athletes anymore.
• 1:33:43
  You only want ready made, hit the ground running, all
• 1:33:46
  Americans. There's no more development of
• 1:33:49
  athletes in the power for in the that power for division.
• 1:33:54
  So I love your examples of 1150 kids and 1170 kids and not not
• 1:33:59
  the 1110 out of high school necessarily or the 50 point, you
• 1:34:02
  know, 54.4 by 4 split who ends up going 50 point you develop.
• 1:34:07
  I push back on that because even if you were to get 11 flat out
• 1:34:11
  of high school, Curtis, you've got to make her a 1090 kid to
• 1:34:14
  win or a 1080 kid. And that's development again
• 1:34:17
  that we talked about earlier about that percentage, which as
• 1:34:19
  you get better and better, the percentage is harder 109011 flat
• 1:34:24
  to 1090. You've done an amazing job.
• 1:34:27
  So there is developments. Do you think is your experience
• 1:34:31
  so far And as you kind of look at your crystal ball AT20262027
• 1:34:36
  with the roster limits and I don't remember how many
• 1:34:39
  necessarily, how many kids Oregon with the cold in the
• 1:34:42
  roster pre roster limits. Do you think it's going to do
• 1:34:47
  you think that myth is going to become more and more true where
• 1:34:50
  you're only going to be able to get you just using the women's
• 1:34:52
  100 meter dash, you're only going to be able to afford 11111
• 1:34:55
  kids. And I'm sorry if you're 11:30, I
• 1:34:57
  just don't we don't have a spot for you.
• 1:34:58
  Or does the development like you've been doing still have a
• 1:35:02
  place in the roster limit world that's coming up or is here, I
• 1:35:06
  guess? What two things?
• 1:35:09
  1 is that? Yeah, they're going to, it
• 1:35:16
  depends on what you do as a school.
• 1:35:19
  So schools are going to do exactly what you said they're
• 1:35:23
  going to go through. They're going to go through
• 1:35:29
  picking the way they run their program.
• 1:35:33
  So I think you hit the nail on the head.
• 1:35:36
  Maybe you go, you know, distance and throws or distance and
• 1:35:40
  multis or multis and jumps or jumps and sprints or whatever
• 1:35:46
  you do and you put your emphasis on that.
• 1:35:50
  So for example, you have, let's see, 3040, let's call 4545
• 1:36:03
  scholarships. And here's here's the biggest
• 1:36:07
  problem is that schools can make a decision where they want to
• 1:36:10
  fund all of the scholarships or whether they want to just fund a
• 1:36:14
  certain percent. Some kids schools are going to
• 1:36:16
  stick with the 18 and 12.6. So if I'm a Sprint school, I'm
• 1:36:26
  going to throw a lot of money at the sprints.
• 1:36:30
  So, you know, throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, see what
• 1:36:33
  sticks. You know, you get some kids.
• 1:36:35
  And with the transfer portal being accessible like it is in
• 1:36:38
  the kids, you can go ahead and transfer out, you know, and some
• 1:36:42
  kids will transfer out. But if you're a distance coach
• 1:36:48
  at that kind of a program, you know, you're not going to get a
• 1:36:51
  lot of people. So as a head coach, you say,
• 1:36:54
  hey, we're going sprints, hurdles, jumps.
• 1:36:59
  The distance kids that we're bringing in, we need them to be
• 1:37:01
  ready to score because you're not going to have a lot of them.
• 1:37:05
  Right. And so, and it works both ways.
• 1:37:07
  If you went the opposite way, we need them ready to score.
• 1:37:10
  But the harder part is that you could bring distance kids in
• 1:37:18
  here who are ready to score that aren't at the same level the
• 1:37:24
  Sprint kids are. Like, if you're able, if you
• 1:37:26
  could score at the NCA meet, you're probably one of the top
• 1:37:30
  20 kids in the world. Yeah, sure.
• 1:37:32
  Right. In the sprints.
• 1:37:33
  Yeah, for sure. You could be a regular person
• 1:37:36
  and have some sort of a weird tactical race and and be a
• 1:37:41
  scorer, you know, or make it through and make it on and not
• 1:37:45
  even be that great and not someone that you would go out
• 1:37:49
  and you would covet out of out of high school, right?
• 1:37:52
  Right. And the second thing is like
• 1:37:54
  what we did here is we layered kids like and what I mean by
• 1:37:59
  that is we get kids like we had, I don't know if you remember
• 1:38:03
  Jasmine Todd, we had, we had Jenna and we had her group Jenna
• 1:38:07
  and Phyllis. And then after that we had
• 1:38:09
  Jasmine and Ariana and then Hannah and then Deja and then
• 1:38:16
  Kimball. Like we had kids where we always
• 1:38:18
  had a kid who was coming up behind them and they weren't
• 1:38:21
  great kids. They were developmental kids.
• 1:38:23
  Mackenzie Dunmore, Alexis Guster, some of the all these
• 1:38:29
  are 50 point quarter milers. Like we held the the national
• 1:38:33
  record at three different times in the four by four.
• 1:38:35
  That's right. And then held it one year.
• 1:38:37
  We held the national record in the four by 1/4 by two 4x4
• 1:38:43
  Sprint medley, distance medley. And that was, you know, those
• 1:38:49
  were just kids that were here, you know, and they were just, we
• 1:38:53
  didn't go out to set these records.
• 1:38:55
  We just did it one day. One day we set two of those
• 1:38:57
  records and we were just playing around.
• 1:38:59
  We were at spring break and threw some kids out there and
• 1:39:03
  you know, we had all those records until Edrick broke,
• 1:39:05
  broken with Malfred and all of those guys.
• 1:39:09
  And then of course, you know the great job that the Johnson boys
• 1:39:12
  are doing down there at Arkansas and they took one of our records
• 1:39:16
  off that 320. But anyway, but those were
• 1:39:22
  layered kids. Not to talk about the
• 1:39:24
  accomplishments or anything, but that just came up after another.
• 1:39:28
  Now, if you don't have that, you're banking on some kid that,
• 1:39:32
  you know, first of all, you're banking on a kid, which is
• 1:39:35
  always one of the reasons why I never was real thrilled about
• 1:39:38
  coming to Division One is like, I don't want to base what I eat
• 1:39:42
  on a 18 year old. So that's always been a thing.
• 1:39:49
  But yeah, it's going to be hard and it's going to go both
• 1:39:52
  directions where, you know, you, you, you bring on somebody and
• 1:39:57
  you don't give them time to develop because you want to keep
• 1:40:00
  that roster spot open or you want to keep the money, one or
• 1:40:03
  the other. But, you know, I had an
• 1:40:06
  experience with the coach not too long ago where I was
• 1:40:09
  recruiting a kid and they were recruiting a kid.
• 1:40:11
  And, you know, they made a better offer than we did.
• 1:40:15
  And I asked the coach, I mean, this is a friend of mine, so it
• 1:40:18
  wasn't a personal thing, but it was a friend of mine.
• 1:40:20
  And it was like. What, what made you decide to
• 1:40:25
  offer this person that amount of money?
• 1:40:27
  They're like, you know, well, I got a bunch of scholarships.
• 1:40:30
  So if they didn't pan out, that's fine.
• 1:40:33
  You know, we'll get somebody else.
• 1:40:35
  And that's the mentality that's out there.
• 1:40:38
  And it has to be it's, it's a business.
• 1:40:41
  I mean, you know, and I, I have to tell parents this all the
• 1:40:44
  time when I recruit them. It's like you guys got to
• 1:40:47
  remember that, you know, as much as we like you and as much as
• 1:40:50
  things are going on, you're basically at a job that's going
• 1:40:53
  to pay you, you know, 90 bucks an hour or something crazy.
• 1:40:58
  You're there two days a week and you're getting a two days a
• 1:41:00
  week, You're there five days a week for two hours and you're
• 1:41:04
  making 100 plus $1000 a year worth of services and
• 1:41:08
  educational expenses. And you know, we're here to make
• 1:41:15
  sure you graduate and to make sure you get better in track and
• 1:41:17
  field. This is a, you know, you can't
• 1:41:20
  lose sight of that. And as much as you like to say
• 1:41:25
  that is for the kids and it should be, it's getting less and
• 1:41:29
  less so just because of these things and this it's football
• 1:41:33
  driven so. You mentioned scoring, so you've
• 1:41:38
  got this globally for incidentally thing happening,
• 1:41:42
  these roster limits and I LS all that kind of stuff.
• 1:41:44
  But Oregon, along with a couple of our West Coast friends,
• 1:41:48
  you've also now joined the Big 10 and you know, I'm right here
• 1:41:51
  in Champaign, IL, University of Illinois, we're in Big 10
• 1:41:54
  country. I still can't wrap my head when
• 1:41:55
  I heard, you know, I guess almost two years ago now, Big 10
• 1:42:00
  outdoor track championships at University of Oregon.
• 1:42:03
  That was just so weird to me. But you've had to go into a
• 1:42:06
  whole new conference. How has that, if at all, has
• 1:42:09
  that affected your recruiting and your coaching?
• 1:42:12
  How how is that? Or is it just like, you know
• 1:42:14
  what? It's another 10 teams, Mike.
• 1:42:16
  I still got to be the best because they're all thinking
• 1:42:18
  good. Well, I don't, I don't really
• 1:42:24
  know how to it's it's challenging.
• 1:42:26
  Like I said, we're we're coach to coach and so this is not like
• 1:42:31
  you and I were having a coast to coast conversation.
• 1:42:33
  Anybody who looks at this moving forward, it's not going to be
• 1:42:37
  like Oregon so much or Big 10, Big 12 so much.
• 1:42:41
  But so I'm going to be honest about it and say that it makes
• 1:42:46
  no sense to me when you got someone coming from the PAC 12
• 1:42:50
  conference going to the Atlantic Coast Conference.
• 1:42:53
  It's like you're going from one coast to the other and you
• 1:42:56
  expect these kids. Matter of fact, Side Story, I
• 1:43:01
  have. So there's coaches that coach
• 1:43:04
  here at the school that live in my neighborhood.
• 1:43:07
  So one night we were just sitting out.
• 1:43:08
  It was hot and we had the lounge chairs out.
• 1:43:11
  We're sitting out in front. And one of the coaches from
• 1:43:14
  another sport, she was weird. Somebody asked us who was just
• 1:43:19
  sitting out there with us. They were like, hey, what do you
• 1:43:22
  think about these kids moving into the schools, moving to a
• 1:43:25
  new conference? And I said, I think it's
• 1:43:26
  ridiculous. And they're like, why so?
• 1:43:31
  And I was like, I don't think the athletic standpoint of it is
• 1:43:36
  bad. I just think it's hard for the
• 1:43:38
  kids. And then they were like, what do
• 1:43:40
  you mean by that? I said, well, think about this.
• 1:43:43
  We play someone like softball or volleyball that plays two games
• 1:43:48
  on a weekend. They play on Thursday and
• 1:43:50
  Saturday and they got to fly out to Rutgers and play and then
• 1:43:56
  they finish Saturday, Sunday afternoon and then they got to
• 1:43:59
  fly back. They get back here about two or
• 1:44:01
  3:00 in the morning, and then they got class Monday morning.
• 1:44:07
  I mean, that's unfair. And we expect them to stay
• 1:44:10
  eligible and get good grades. And we're flying them all, all
• 1:44:12
  around the country. And football has charters, so
• 1:44:16
  it's easier for them. But they're not going to charter
• 1:44:18
  to lacrosse and they're not going to charter softball.
• 1:44:22
  Well, maybe softball, but you know, most of these sports
• 1:44:25
  aren't going to get chartered soccer for sure.
• 1:44:30
  And so it makes it hard on the kids.
• 1:44:34
  And so that's how I feel about it.
• 1:44:36
  I mean, I understand where this is going.
• 1:44:39
  Like in 10 years I expected to be at a point where there's just
• 1:44:44
  going to be two big divisions. There's going to be a West Coast
• 1:44:48
  W Division and the East Division and they're going to have some
• 1:44:51
  sort of a top top eight playoff or something out of that
• 1:44:56
  division and then break it down to a national championship
• 1:44:58
  because football way, you know, is the tail that wags the dog
• 1:45:03
  and you know. Yeah, I think you hit the nail
• 1:45:06
  on the head there. You know, for track and cross
• 1:45:08
  country, I don't think it matters because it's only, you
• 1:45:11
  know, if you take all three sports, it's only three meets a
• 1:45:13
  year and you're already, you know, traveling to Penn Relays
• 1:45:15
  or something like that to come to Champaign for the Big 10
• 1:45:17
  championships. It's not like you have to come
• 1:45:19
  several times throughout the year.
• 1:45:21
  You could stay West Coast and then come out for the Big 10.
• 1:45:24
  But for our baseball volleyballs, Oh my goodness.
• 1:45:28
  I can't imagine the amount of game in basketballs, the games
• 1:45:31
  they play that going, you know, using the UCLA and Rutgers.
• 1:45:37
  I just, I don't know how that that works and expect kids to
• 1:45:40
  still study. I don't either.
• 1:45:42
  They're like, you can't get further across the country then
• 1:45:46
  going from UCLA to Rutgers. Like, the only thing worse would
• 1:45:49
  be going from Seattle to Miami, Yeah.
• 1:45:52
  Right. That would be crazy and.
• 1:45:55
  And I just don't understand like, you know, growing up, you
• 1:45:58
  mentioned growing up where you grew and up there in Oakland,
• 1:46:01
  you know, Raiders fans and A's and things like that.
• 1:46:04
  How does someone growing up in LA growing up a, whether a USC
• 1:46:09
  or UCLA fan, how do they get excited for the Rutgers game or
• 1:46:13
  the Maryland game or even the Illinois game?
• 1:46:17
  Those are non existent people, you know, they want to go up
• 1:46:21
  against the Washington because they're up the road and you
• 1:46:23
  know, Fresno States and things like that.
• 1:46:25
  Just the, I just thought the regionality of collegiate sports
• 1:46:29
  was always kind of the special side of it because of the
• 1:46:31
  rivalries and things like that. And just seems like this is has
• 1:46:35
  lost all all aspects of that. Yeah, I, I believe so.
• 1:46:39
  I think it's, I think it's just just a mess, man.
• 1:46:44
  And so, and not a mess per SE like, but I think what's
• 1:46:50
  happening is we've lost we've lost the edge back back in this
• 1:46:56
  will kind of put it all together for you.
• 1:46:58
  One of the things that I told my fiance when she was, she was
• 1:47:04
  trying to coax me into going coming up here was I was like,
• 1:47:10
  there's no, there's no, I don't, there's no kids to help.
• 1:47:16
  It's not the same way. I'm not trying to help these
• 1:47:19
  kids climb up the ladder and do all the things that that we do
• 1:47:26
  here. There's not, there's not a lot
• 1:47:28
  about it. And so I want to help kids.
• 1:47:31
  And that was one of the reasons I love track and I wanted to do
• 1:47:34
  all the track stuff for sure. But at the same time it was, it
• 1:47:40
  was enhanced by trying to help kids grow up and get out of the
• 1:47:43
  thing. Like all of my all, almost all
• 1:47:46
  of my junior college kids, I'd probably say 85% of them all
• 1:47:51
  graduated and then a lot of them went on to grad school.
• 1:47:54
  And, you know, a couple of them are doctors and attorneys now
• 1:47:58
  and kids that probably just never got wouldn't have had the
• 1:48:02
  opportunity, right. And so part of coaching is
• 1:48:05
  providing opportunity. But what's happening now is that
• 1:48:09
  which makes it hard is that we've gone past the educational
• 1:48:13
  part and the opportunity part to just, you know, being a, a
• 1:48:17
  finance, a cash cap. And that's not nothing against I
• 1:48:21
  support all of these people are just doing their job.
• 1:48:24
  Our AD Rob is, you know, he's doing his job and does a great
• 1:48:29
  job and tries to make things on balance for the for the school
• 1:48:34
  and you know, these people like that.
• 1:48:37
  And so everybody's doing what they're supposed to do.
• 1:48:41
  And so it's the, it's the not the people as much as it's the
• 1:48:45
  structure that's been developed. And like, you know, Mike, if
• 1:48:49
  they told you they were going to give you $5,000,000 to do
• 1:48:52
  something, you'd have to really consider it, you know what I'm
• 1:48:57
  saying? You'd have to be like,
• 1:48:59
  $5,000,000 is a lot of money. It's something I got to take
• 1:49:02
  seriously. It's not something I'm just
• 1:49:03
  going to say, no, I'd never do that.
• 1:49:05
  It's like, let me sleep on this a little bit and figure out, you
• 1:49:09
  know where this is going, right? Yeah, 'cause you're not doing
• 1:49:12
  anything amoral in the sense of you're not hurting kids,
• 1:49:14
  physically hurting kids and you're not being asked to push
• 1:49:19
  down someone else. It's, hey, we're going to give
• 1:49:21
  you a lot of money to go be the best you can be in whatever
• 1:49:23
  sport specifically you're in the athletic department that you can
• 1:49:26
  be. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
• 1:49:27
  A lot of sense. Go ahead.
• 1:49:30
  I'm sorry. Well, I was going to say we're
• 1:49:31
  getting here our time. I want to be respectful of your
• 1:49:33
  time. I'm so grateful for you, Curtis.
• 1:49:37
  I like to ask this as kind of my last question to lead into
• 1:49:41
  finalizing here. You know, as you look into your
• 1:49:43
  crystal ball and look into the future and you get to define
• 1:49:47
  what the future is, if it's whether it's one year or five
• 1:49:49
  years ahead, What's got you excited about yours, your kids,
• 1:49:53
  your the program there, University of Oregon, What's got
• 1:49:55
  you excited as you look ahead to the future here?
• 1:49:59
  Well, I, I the future's unknown. So what I always look for.
• 1:50:06
  And like, I don't know how this is going to shake out.
• 1:50:09
  Like, you couldn't have told me we were going to miss a whole
• 1:50:11
  year for. Yeah, for a quarantine for the
• 1:50:15
  virus. And then we were going to give
• 1:50:17
  everybody, you know, because people can be five years and six
• 1:50:21
  years and, you know, you got hurt and then there was a
• 1:50:24
  quarantine. So now you get to come back for
• 1:50:26
  indoors. Like there are kids that are
• 1:50:28
  just finishing their, their quarantine stuff for, you know,
• 1:50:34
  just this last indoor season and, you know, the, the transfer
• 1:50:42
  portal and the, the roster limits and all this stuff.
• 1:50:46
  I don't know what's going to happen.
• 1:50:47
  So I just have to be excited about the group of kids that I
• 1:50:52
  have that are coming in and just to make them better.
• 1:50:57
  And that's, you know, that's the thing.
• 1:50:59
  Get them, you know, thinking in the in the right way for not
• 1:51:04
  just track and field, but for life and just trying to get some
• 1:51:08
  better people, better kids make them better kids, not get some.
• 1:51:11
  I have good kids and kind of de emphasize, you know, be
• 1:51:17
  successful at any cost because nowadays there's so many options
• 1:51:22
  out there, man, like, you know, kids are using ChatGPT.
• 1:51:25
  We talked about that earlier and writing papers for themselves,
• 1:51:28
  and, you know, it's been made easy for him and just to get him
• 1:51:32
  to embrace trying to do some things that are a little more
• 1:51:34
  challenging for him. But that's what I see out there
• 1:51:38
  for me. I don't know, you know, what
• 1:51:40
  else is going on. I got, you know, like I said, a
• 1:51:43
  good group of kids coming in or a few kids coming in that I'm
• 1:51:47
  excited about. And I love my kids that are
• 1:51:51
  coming back. You're not great, but we're
• 1:51:54
  good. Yeah.
• 1:51:56
  You got high standards, so you're good is pretty stinking
• 1:51:59
  high, but I know you're great is it's a different pedestal.
• 1:52:03
  Yeah, we, we hopefully they'll get there.
• 1:52:05
  They're all young and they're, they're, they're hungry.
• 1:52:08
  So we'll see what happens. Man, I'm looking forward to that
• 1:52:11
  part of everything. So.
• 1:52:14
  I love it, man. Well, as we wrap up, did we miss
• 1:52:15
  anything? I think we did pretty good.
• 1:52:17
  What do you think? No, I think we pretty much did
• 1:52:19
  it. I love it, man.
• 1:52:21
  I love your journey, man. I love this basketball kid for
• 1:52:25
  you're. You're still a big basketball
• 1:52:26
  fan. Yeah, not as much as I used to
• 1:52:30
  be. I'm still, I'm still a huge, I
• 1:52:31
  used to be a really big college basketball fan, but I'm not so
• 1:52:34
  much anymore because the kids only stay.
• 1:52:36
  You can't get close to a team because is only there for so
• 1:52:41
  long. And you know, then they're gone
• 1:52:43
  and you get to liking a kid and next thing you know they're
• 1:52:45
  playing for the Indiana Pacers and you know, just they're out.
• 1:52:51
  But professional basketball, I still like, you know, the hard
• 1:52:54
  thing And I'll, I'm going to say this right quick if we got an
• 1:52:56
  extra minute. The hard thing is me and Cava.
• 1:52:58
  Cava is one of my cava Tober is one of my friends.
• 1:53:02
  We talk music all the time. We're friends off of the off of
• 1:53:05
  the track and about music things.
• 1:53:07
  And then one of the things is like back in the day when you
• 1:53:12
  use that Prince or James Brown or Michael Jackson or people who
• 1:53:17
  are really good and famous and they used to make record, they
• 1:53:22
  would they would be making music even if they weren't getting
• 1:53:25
  paid. Their goal was to be a good
• 1:53:27
  musician, athletes, Michael Jordan and and magic and and
• 1:53:34
  those guys, they didn't play to be famous.
• 1:53:37
  They played because they love the sport and they want to be
• 1:53:39
  really good. Jim Brown or anybody you can go
• 1:53:41
  back, back in the day, they weren't getting paid a ton of
• 1:53:44
  money. They were getting paid, you
• 1:53:45
  know, relative amount better than people, but they played
• 1:53:48
  because they wanted to play. The people nowadays are doing
• 1:53:52
  stuff because they want to be famous, because they want to be,
• 1:53:56
  you know, do these things and they're there.
• 1:53:58
  It's tough. That's the part that I'm not,
• 1:54:01
  I'm not coaching like you won't see me on, you know, doing a
• 1:54:04
  bunch of not a podcast. I'll do a podcast because I like
• 1:54:08
  talking to people, but I'm not like here, here's the way you'd
• 1:54:11
  execute a perfect block start, you know, and things like that.
• 1:54:15
  And I'd like to see the sport go back to where people are running
• 1:54:19
  because of the love of running and not running because they
• 1:54:22
  want to be famous. They want a contract and get
• 1:54:24
  money. Like, you know, and you hear
• 1:54:26
  that a lot when you recruit that, you know, I want to go,
• 1:54:31
  one of my one of my red flags is when I recruit somebody and they
• 1:54:36
  tell me, yeah, I want to go pro and be in the Olympics.
• 1:54:39
  And I'm like, how about we just win the NCAA title and see what
• 1:54:43
  happens from there. Try to win the NCAA title.
• 1:54:46
  And it's not a bad thing to have, but it's just it's
• 1:54:50
  different. And that's part of me being a a
• 1:54:52
  older guy is, you know, I've seen different.
• 1:54:55
  So I know different, different looks different.
• 1:54:58
  But, you know, I may be out out of touch now.
• 1:55:02
  You know, people get out of touch real fast and don't
• 1:55:05
  realize that they're out of touch.
• 1:55:07
  Yeah, well, I think, you know, it's funny you talked about, you
• 1:55:10
  know, a James Brown or a Michael Jordan.
• 1:55:14
  You know, they they would have played whether they're making
• 1:55:17
  millions or not, whether they're famous or not.
• 1:55:19
  I I kind of get that sense from you.
• 1:55:21
  I don't know now after hearing this entire journey, Curtis.
• 1:55:24
  If if I read the the old news thing come across tomorrow and
• 1:55:28
  it said Curtis Taylor leaves the Oregon, it goes back to Laney.
• 1:55:31
  I don't know that I'd be surprised.
• 1:55:32
  You're you're kind of that guy that you're I'm sure you're I'm
• 1:55:35
  not sure. I know you're very grateful,
• 1:55:37
  very humble to be at Oregon, but you're a coach's coach.
• 1:55:40
  You you you want to coach. If you're if I'm going to coach
• 1:55:42
  middle schoolers, you're going to coach them really awesome.
• 1:55:44
  If you're going to coach great NC, probably all Americans,
• 1:55:48
  you're going to coach them. I I think that that of you.
• 1:55:51
  I appreciate that. That's what I tried to do is I,
• 1:55:54
  I, I try to go where the need is.
• 1:55:58
  And so one of the things I know that you know, is that kids,
• 1:56:04
  kids need support and kids like structure.
• 1:56:08
  You don't give them, they, they say they don't and they try to
• 1:56:11
  rebel against it. But if you don't have any
• 1:56:13
  structure, they don't know where to go and they don't know what
• 1:56:15
  to do. So I think that part of things
• 1:56:18
  is never going to change. And I think that we have to, you
• 1:56:24
  know, as a coaching community, we have to build up structure
• 1:56:27
  and build up, build up the kids to where they understand where
• 1:56:32
  they're supposed to go. And like I said, everybody's not
• 1:56:35
  going to make it to the Olympics.
• 1:56:36
  Everyone's not going to be a top three in the United States,
• 1:56:38
  which is the hardest place to do it.
• 1:56:40
  Everybody's not going to get a contract.
• 1:56:42
  And sometimes even you get a contract, maybe it's just
• 1:56:45
  apparel only or 20,000 bucks a year or some, enough to pay your
• 1:56:49
  bills. You know, it's not going to be
• 1:56:51
  enough to live on. So you're very fortunate if
• 1:56:54
  you're one of those people. But the thing you know, and I
• 1:56:56
  was talking to a recruit the other night, I said the thing
• 1:56:59
  they can never take away from you is your education.
• 1:57:02
  So you know. I love it, man.
• 1:57:05
  I I tell you what, it's just it's interesting.
• 1:57:10
  This is interesting to see your journey and where you are today.
• 1:57:13
  And I think hopefully we busted maybe one of the myths to of,
• 1:57:16
  you know, all, all the Oregon coaches are just the most, you
• 1:57:20
  know, gold, everything's gold. You get everything and not,
• 1:57:23
  you're not appreciative, etcetera.
• 1:57:25
  I get just a huge sense of humbleness from you, man, And
• 1:57:29
  I'm just really grateful for your time today.
• 1:57:31
  I mean, the most of most valuable thing you can give me.
• 1:57:33
  And you know, Oregon's given us a lot.
• 1:57:35
  Again, very humbled for university.
• 1:57:36
  Organic Choices is your time, my man, And I know you're busy and
• 1:57:39
  I'm truly grateful for your your time with us today.
• 1:57:43
  No problem man. I was glad we could finally do
• 1:57:45
  this. I know we've talked about it for
• 1:57:47
  a while. And then I was like, I got to
• 1:57:49
  get this done. You know me, I'm a I'm I'm a
• 1:57:53
  recruiter. I was I was a natural recruiter.
• 1:57:55
  So I'm going to keep recruiting and I'm just glad this is a
• 1:57:56
  good. Need for me, I need you man.
• 1:57:58
  You want to give that up, go up here and recruit.
• 1:58:02
  Yeah, my wife, who's from Big 10 country here, would not move to
• 1:58:05
  Big 10 Country West. So we'll just have to do it in
• 1:58:08
  spirit. My friend Curtis, thank you so
• 1:58:11
  much, man. I am super grateful for you
• 1:58:12
  again, just humbled by you and and I'm so proud to be able to
• 1:58:16
  share your journey with our listeners because I think it's
• 1:58:18
  going to help a lot of people. So thank you so much for being
• 1:58:21
  here today with us. No problem, thanks for having
• 1:58:23
  me. And thank you guys for being
• 1:58:24
  here once again. I hope you guys had a lot of
• 1:58:26
  fun. I think this is one of these
• 1:58:27
  episodes that you you listen to again and again.
• 1:58:30
  There's a lot of great topics about not only recruiting, which
• 1:58:33
  of course is the recruiting to me is like that, the writing
• 1:58:36
  down the 5 by 300 workout that's important and things like that.
• 1:58:39
  And he gave you some great insights.
• 1:58:40
  But you know, talking about leadership, talking about
• 1:58:42
  mentorship when we had a great, I'm always very, very proud to
• 1:58:46
  be able to talk about a man like Tony Wells, things like that.
• 1:58:48
  I think those are the kind of things you need to go back and
• 1:58:51
  rewind, listen to what he said cuz I think it'll help you today
• 1:58:54
  and tomorrow for the rest of your spirit.
• 1:58:55
  So join us next week. We'll do it all over again and
• 1:58:57
  have some fun. See you guys.
• 1:59:00
  The goals to appreciate the coach the ones that point people
• 1:59:03
  most every season needs a voice of reason speaking the growth
• 1:59:06
  you got to prep before you carry the load ice coffee to the soul
• 1:59:10
  For those of us stay on the go proper handoff to stay in the
• 1:59:13
  zone which you packing for the road.
• 1:59:15
  There's more than one way to go. Taking notes that's paying you
• 1:59:17
  told it ain't practice if your purpose Saint Clair it can't
• 1:59:20
  happen until you listen with both is can't mentor without a
• 1:59:24
  mentor of experience. You can reinvent those years.
• 1:59:27
  Every plan's got to stand and deliver to the price sacrifice.
• 1:59:31
  Can you give up you. It's a choice and a fight, not a
• 1:59:34
  win or lose. It's not a ploy boy device.
• 1:59:36
  Y'all can make more moves. It's not about how to, it's all
• 1:59:39
  about why you don't know till you know who you are inside
• 1:59:42
  6,000,000. Waste of time, choose none.
• 1:59:44
  So y'all cross finish line, the work ain't done so we learn from
• 1:59:47
  the experts but y'all got to put in the leg work your athletic,
• 1:59:51
  choose the network. It's all about connections put
• 1:59:53
  together for the profession to where every track coach could be
• 1:59:56
  blessing.