Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #320: Jeff Bovee-Illinois State University

Transcript

#320: Jeff Bovee-Illinois State University · 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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  Here we go. You're back here on the Gil
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  Connections Podcast. Man, I'm just so glad again that
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  you would hit play today to listen to these amazing men and
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  women who choose to be track and field coaches.
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  And today we've got the the King Cardinal himself.
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  Help me welcome from Illinois State University.
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  He had to try. I don't know why we're not doing
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  this in person now that I think about this.
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  You're a stone's throw away. Help me welcome the wise, the
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  wonderful Mr. Jeff Bovy. Jeff, how are you, Sir?
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  Hey, I'm, I'm great, great to be here with you, Mike.
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  And, you know, looking forward to having a, a nice chat and,
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  and I'd have to say my AD would say, Hey, we're not the
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  Cardinals, we're the Redbirds. But you know, I think, I think
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  you can see they look very similar with that mascot there
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  behind me. But no, we're we're really
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  excited to be here today. You know, that's just
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  embarrassing on my part because, you know, I called you the King
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  Cardinal and I should have said the King Redbird because in our
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  sales team we have 12344 individuals that are all
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  Illinois State alums. Three of them went were under
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  you. We had an another one who's
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  coming here in July. He's not an Illinois State red
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  bird. He went to Carthage up in
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  Wisconsin and they are some form of red bird as well.
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  So that he, yeah, I feel like that's just Illinois State
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  adjacent there. So I should have had that right.
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  Shame on me for calling you Cardinals there.
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  Of course you're the red birds. And again, because you're King
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  red bird, I should have actually had you come over and we could
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  have a red bird reunion while we did the the podcast.
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  So you might be you might be the closest person to me that is
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  still remote for the interview I'm just thinking about.
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  That yeah, no, you've got a great crew over there for sure,
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  a lot of former grades, all Americans, and you got a a
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  wonderful group of guys and, you know, excited to see them
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  staying in the sport. You know, like, that's just one
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  thing that I'm really proud about is people that choose to
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  stay in the sport and to teach young people and, you know,
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  spread the love around in the world that we all work in.
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  Yeah, I agree with that 100%. You know, our sport, while it's
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  the number one thing for us and you and you know, guys have made
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  careers out of this, but in in the real scope of things, you
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  know, sport and track and field is this big in our lives.
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  We have all these other things, right?
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  So when I see a program or a coach who has a lineage, whether
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  they have a lot of athletes that went into coaching or a lot of
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  athletes that went into coaching or stayed in the industry, like
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  stayed in the sport. Like, you know, we got our guys
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  here with Tim and Peyton and and he's brand new.
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  Max, I should probably know his name, but he's only he's only
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  been here weeks and I've been gone that week.
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  So I get all excuses there and I think that says a lot about
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  leadership. So I do that really, I have a
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  lot of respect for when I see that coaching family tree,
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  whether it's in coaching or in the industry here.
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  So I'm excited to learn more about that leadership and how
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  you got into it and and what are you doing?
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  What are you doing at Redbird? Because you've been there a long
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  time and I love that. So I'm excited to dive into that
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  as well. Yeah.
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  All right. How long have you been in
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  Illinois State now? I think I'm going on year 20 so
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  I I got here in O 6. You Oh, that's interesting.
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  So we're going to go in order. So I'm a little bit out of order
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  right now. You started in O 6.
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  I started at Gill in O 6. I think I, I think I yeah.
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  You were at Troy before that? Yeah, you can be mistaken to
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  know not know my history, Troy. Several years ago, I came here
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  from Las Vegas, so I was at Mississippi State.
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  I quit coaching, went to Vegas and played poker for a year and
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  then came back to the real world and landed here in Champaign,
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  IL. Yeah, yeah, that's cool.
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  Well, let's learn how you got to here in Bloomington.
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  To the red birds. Let's start with, let's get in
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  our Wayback Machine here. Jeff, you know, somewhere track
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  and field had to start for. Well, I'm assuming you were an
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  athlete. That's not a great assumption
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  because we've had many great coaches who were not athletes.
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  But you start where? Where starts for you?
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  Where does track and field the sport?
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  Where does that start for you? Yeah, so the interesting story
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  there is I kind of fell into it. My middle school, junior high,
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  we didn't have cross country or track.
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  I grew up in Glendale, AZ and yeah, so I grew up in Arizona
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  and we had a lot of sports at school, but we did not have
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  track or cross country. We had a thing called a field
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  day. And so it was like a one day
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  track meet with all the elementary schools and they'd
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  have the softball throw and standing long jump.
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  And the marathon was like a, a three quarter mile run.
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  They called it the marathon. And so I would do all the events
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  I do the 60, the softball throw, the long jump in, in the, the
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  marathon. And so I just liked all of them.
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  I'm like, let me just do this and do that.
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  And then sometime I think right after 8th grade, I, I did summer
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  TAC is what they called it back then.
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  USA track. Oh yeah.
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  So I did, I did that. I was on the Arizona Puma track
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  club. We had pretty good club team
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  there and and I started having some success and.
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  Were you doing any other sports though?
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  Were you playing soccer or basketball or anything?
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  Yeah, I was, I was playing soccer.
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  I played baseball for 9 years. I did the football.
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  Football was my first love, but I was pretty small.
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  So my my eventual high school track coach came to me in summer
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  gym right before freshman year. He's like, hey, you know, I hear
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  you're pretty fast, you should come out and run cross country.
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  And I said, well, what's that he's like?
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  You've never run cross country. I had no idea.
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  I had no idea the longest run I'd ever done was maybe 2 miles
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  up up to that point. And he's like, well, why don't
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  you come out and run with some of the guys?
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  We're going for a run. And you know, well, it's July in
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  Arizona, so it's 110°. That.
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  And it was middle of the afternoon and I'm like, well,
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  you know, I've never met you before and I've never met these
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  guys, but let me call my mom and see if I can go.
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  And so I called her up with a school phone.
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  She's like, yeah, yeah, sure, no problem.
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  And so I jump in this van and we drive to the the local desert
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  mountain that was close by and we go for a run.
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  This is the start of a movie where a kid gets We don't see
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  that kid anymore. I got in a van, we went to the
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  desert. 110 and you survived. Thank God.
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  So I ran with a couple guys and we got done and the the coach
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  was waiting for us out at the end and he's like, hey, you got
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  to run cross country. He's like, you just ran with the
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  best two guys in the high school.
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  I'm like, well, I know they were trying to drop me and I wasn't
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  too happy about that. So I had, you know, so it got a
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  little competitive and it was like a four mile run.
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  I had never gone more than two miles before the.
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  Day. And he's like, yeah, you can't
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  play football. You're you've got some potential
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  in this sport. Did you just feel like crap
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  after that 4 miles? I'm thinking like the longest
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  you've ever run by double 110°. These dudes were, you know,
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  they, you don't want to get shown up by the new stranger
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  kid. You know, who's this kid?
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  We're the, we're the cross country runners here.
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  I mean, I just feel like you had to be like dehydrated sweating.
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  Like what am I doing here guys? I, I was just mostly just mad.
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  These guys are trying to drop me.
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  So I I think my competitive juice just kind of kicked in.
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  Yeah, because I could see, you know, if I put 100 kids in that
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  scenario, I think 99 of them would be like, yeah, I'm going
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  to play football. This sucks.
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  But that competitiveness in you was like, yeah, guys, I'm just
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  mad at you. What the heck, man?
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  Wow, they ended up becoming, you know, good friends and my high
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  school coach, Brian Bogan, he he had a ton of success coaching at
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  my high school and a couple others after I I finished up and
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  just a huge mentor for me. He was in Arizona, alumnus of
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  Arizona. He was a pole Walter.
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  He he was a field event guy, but he had a tremendous
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  understanding of bio mechanics and, you know, strength and
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  conditioning And he he coached all the different events on the
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  team. I'd say distance running.
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  He probably knew the least amount about, but yet still
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  very, very lethal in his understanding of that and, and
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  how much he would learn and soak up.
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  But he really gave me and, and some of the other guys on the
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  team a lot of input into the things that we're doing as we
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  went through the years of high school.
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  And so I think that's where I really developed my love and
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  passion for the sport was just being able to have that, you
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  know, that that kind of relationship with my coach and
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  get so much back from the sport and the travel and going to
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  different states, whether it's summer track or the high school
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  season. And and a lot of my close
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  friends actually came from this border and and still do to this
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  day. So yeah, that's kind of where it
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  all started for me. What kind of track athlete were
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  you? And what I mean by that is were
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  you the kind of guys you always had a very influential coach
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  that, you know, talked about by McCann?
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  Like he knew a lot of things, not just, you know, go run
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  circles, you know, go throw that ball far.
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  You know, he, he knew some things here.
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  Were you the kind of kid at staying in high school here with
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  me? Were you the kind of kid that
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  asked a lot of questions And not, not like, you know, there's
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  different ways of answering of asking questions, but you know,
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  like curiosity of like, hey, so why, why did we do that
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  yesterday? And now we're doing this or, and
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  this is kind of my experience and I could be just, you know,
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  off base here. Were you the type of athlete
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  that was just like, all right, you know, almost like, you know
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  where they say in football C ball, hit ball where it's like,
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  oh, run, OK, run, go do two months, OK, 22 miles, do quarter
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  repeats, OK, do quarter. Like no questions.
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  Just what do you want me to do? And I'm going to drop the hammer
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  and get it done. I think early on when I was a
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  beginner in the sport and didn't know anything about distance
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  training, I just inherently trusted him and what we did and
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  he said go do this and I would just do everything 100%.
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  I didn't understand, you know, percentages and efforts and what
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  this is supposed to feel like and what that's supposed to feel
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  like. I just went right Like I had a
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  switch and I just, it was always on, which was not always a good
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  thing. Oh, so you're the kid that was
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  going too fast on recovery runs and stuff?
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  Is that what you're telling me? Yeah, I do it right.
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  And so I had to learn the hard way.
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  And, you know, I think as I got into, say, junior senior of high
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  school, that's when I started to ask a lot of questions or, and,
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  or go to him and say, hey, because I, I know my body and
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  what works for me. I think, you know, what do you
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  think about potentially doing this in training over the next
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  few weeks? And he was always open to that
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  discussion. But I had to go through the
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  training for a while before I even knew how I was supposed to
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  feel and what I was supposed to do, you know?
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  Where did where did you learn that?
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  So first of all, I commend you, you, you had to have some
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  advanced physical maturity. And what I mean by that is it's,
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  that's one of the hardest. I think one of the hardest
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  things of coaching is to get a, an athlete, a kid to understand
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  their body and whether it's a movement event like a pole vault
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  or high jump or just, you know, hey, I'm not we ain't doing 10
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  miles a day, boss. The the body is depleted, right?
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  That's super hard. But then also when you started
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  like being comfortable and you've earned some trust and,
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  and respect from coach as well of like, hey, coach today
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  instead of X, can I do Y because of this reason?
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  Where did you learn? Like are you, are you reading,
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  you know, back in the day, Runner's World magazine or you
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  know, there wasn't a lot of opportunities for us.
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  We're about the same age. There wasn't a lot of
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  opportunities for us to go learn coaching at that point in time.
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  Where, where did you learn that? And I picked that up.
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  Well, yeah, my coach was a huge father sport.
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  His his dad was a coach in Los Angeles and had won the
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  California State championship a couple times.
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  And he went to West Hollywood High School and he was a student
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  sport. And so when I'd go to his house,
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  he had all the track and field news out on coffee room table.
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  And I would just, I, as soon as I saw that newest issue come
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  out, I, I was reading it front to back from the minute I picked
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  it up. And I would just every month
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  like, Hey, what's the new one coming in?
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  And, and, and so I, I would read that.
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  But then, yeah, he started recommending books and I started
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  reading some training theory books.
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  I started reading just biographies, whether it be the
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  Jim Ryan book, In Search of Gold or whatever it might be.
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  I, I was just wanting, I mean, I wish that we had, you know, the
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  access of the Internet that we have today.
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  I would have been soaking all that up at a much younger age
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  nonetheless. But then you also start to meet
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  coaches from other high school teams or you know, I started
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  then be getting recruited by college coaches and you start
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  talking about training and what are other people doing what I
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  was doing club track in the summer and asking what you know
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  the runners from other schools did, etcetera.
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  And so, you know, information was getting passed around, maybe
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  not as easily as it is today, but certainly finding our ways
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  to do that. We're you mentioned you played
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  nine years of baseball and football and things like that,
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  Did you do any other sports in high school or did you just
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  focus on cross country and track and field?
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  Yeah, I wanted to, I wanted to do football in the worst way.
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  I love football, but again, decided to go out for cross
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  country. So I ended up, yeah, just focus
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  on that. But I was a big time into
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  physical education, end up becoming a physical education
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  major in college. And so I took all kinds of
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  different, you know, courses, activity courses and, and, and
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  that thing. Yeah, I was getting that because
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  you, you went very full bore into reading books, you know,
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  some of the Jim Ryan story, things like that.
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  I was wondering if there were other like, are you also reading
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  the Walter Payton story or things like that?
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  But you're, you're, it sounds like you're getting as, as the
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  9th grade goes into senior year, you're getting very focused on
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  track and field. Yeah, I mean, I still had a
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  passion for, you know, sport, whether it be, you know, college
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  basketball or, you know, whatever it might be on TV,
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  football and whatnot. I was a sport fanatic, collected
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  baseball cards. It was an avid baseball card
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  collector for many, many years and was really into that still
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  in into high school. But but yeah, I'd definitely say
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  I did hone in rather quickly on a lot of that.
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  And I'd have to say credit to my, my high school coach, who he
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  just, you know, and it wasn't just me.
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  I mean, there were so many others that he drew into the,
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  into the, the sport and he could recruit well on, on the school
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  campus, getting great athletes to come out from other sports.
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  And he had a great got to fly flying around.
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  But yeah, no, he, he just had a great reward system to, you
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  know, some kids that weren't as intrinsically motivated were
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  more extrinsically motivated. He would give a hat out for your
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  first PR and then a pin to put on the hat for your second PR.
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  If you broke the last record, he'd buy you a code.
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  If you set a school record, you know, he would just kind of up
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  the bar on different gifts that he would use with his own salary
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  that he made from his position. And he just, next thing you
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  know, everybody's walking around campus with all these cool hats
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  and shirts and coats and different things that the the
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  coach would basically pay for out of his own pocket.
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  I see that a lot today with, you know, dog tags and patches and
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  stickers and things and those are so cool.
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  I love that this guy. I don't know, I don't know that
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  I heard. I feel like that's more of a
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  recent issue that, you know, recent could be 10 years, but
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  that feels like a more recent thing.
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  This guy was kind of a there's no timeline on this, but I'm
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  gonna say an early pioneer like he, he understood kids and the,
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  and it sounds like he understood the recruiting aspect too,
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  because when you said those kids were walking around the
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  hallways, you know, other kids are like, wait a minute, Tommy's
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  got that. I won't, I won't.
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  How do I get that? You know.
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  Right. And it was we're.
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  Smart. So you get the swag right and
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  you're like, oh that's cool. But then if you had more things
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  with the swag like other pins or whatever, he started to have
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  like top 10 pins and school record pins.
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  And, you know, every year I was like, oh, we got this new thing
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  we're going to implement here. And so quickly, you know, he had
• 16:35
  so many athletes go on Division One athletes, junior college.
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  You know, it was a big scene in Arizona.
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  But yeah, he he developed a lot of great athletes, not just at
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  at Glendale Cactus, but at at Tolleson High School and and
• 16:48
  elsewhere. So yeah.
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  That's so cool. You obviously had a great
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  relationship with coach and he obviously was very creative and
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  inventive. Can you think of a a story like
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  there's usually in those kind of relationships, some kind of like
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  funny, like, oh, I remember when coach did X or we did this to
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  coach. Can you think of like a a funny
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  story that like just, you know, years later, it's still kind of
• 17:11
  top of mind to you? Well, the thing that was
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  different about Coach Morgan, he, he just would, he just loved
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  being around people and having fun and making things an
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  adventure. And so he grew up in California,
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  as I mentioned. And so every year he would take
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  us out to California. One year we went to Magic
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  Mountain. One year we went to the beach
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  and his parents live pretty close to the beach.
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  So we'd stay at their house and, and, and go to the beach.
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  And then another thing that we did on an annual basis is we
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  would go and stay in Flagstaff and stay for a week in the
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  dorms. And then we would, we would have
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  a hike the the Grand Canyon that was like our end of the week.
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  Thing is, we would drive up at like 5:00 in the morning and
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  he'd find a different trail. We would hike down, stay down
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  there and jump in the water or whatever for a while.
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  And then we would run, slash, walk back up and get, get, get
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  back up there before it got dark at night.
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  So it was a long day, but it was an annual thing that we did
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  every year. Yeah.
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  It sounds like you had a blast in high school.
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  I mean, Sue, these are way cool things man.
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  Yeah, yeah, it was. It was so much fun.
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  You, you mentioned you grew up in Arizona.
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  You know, when someone finds out that I grew up in Alabama, they
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  always ask me, oh, Alabama or Auburn.
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  I tell them I went to the greatest school in the world,
• 18:33
  Troy University. What did you grow up?
• 18:35
  Did you grow up in Arizona? Arizona State.
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  Arizona, you're Arizona. It's a Wildcat, all right.
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  Good. It's a cool campus.
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  I like that school. All right.
• 18:43
  Senior year, you start looking at the next level, meaning
• 18:47
  college and whether you're recruited or not.
• 18:48
  You already kind of told us you were recruited.
• 18:51
  Talk to us about kind of kind of a three-part question.
• 18:54
  So what was that process like for you?
• 18:56
  What did you go in as a major? What were you thinking of?
• 19:01
  And this, those, these, these two questions are kind of tied
• 19:03
  together. What did you end up?
• 19:04
  What did you start your majoring at?
• 19:06
  And what did you think you wanted to become, whether it was
• 19:08
  a, you know, astronaut, doctor, lawyer, you know, all the things
• 19:11
  we think we want to be. And at this point, senior year,
• 19:15
  is coaching anywhere in your mind at this point?
• 19:19
  Coaching was not at the forefront of my mind at that
• 19:24
  point. I was looking at business, in
• 19:27
  particular accounting. I'm not really sure exactly why
• 19:31
  I was thinking about that because nobody in my family.
• 19:33
  Yeah, I was going to ask. Yeah, yeah.
• 19:34
  Yeah. No, not at all.
• 19:35
  My, my, I guess my dad was a small business owner when we, I
• 19:39
  was born in upstate New York and we moved to Arizona when I was
• 19:42
  10. Yeah, dude.
• 19:45
  And we had family out in Arizona, so we moved there.
• 19:47
  But yeah, my dad was a small business owner.
• 19:49
  And so maybe maybe from that aspect it, it had me thinking
• 19:52
  about business and I really had no idea where that might lead
• 19:56
  to. So, but honestly, I declared
• 20:01
  undeclared. Honestly, I was thinking
• 20:02
  business but wasn't 100% sure. So I just kind of went in and
• 20:06
  said, hey, I'll just take Gen. eds for a year or two and figure
• 20:08
  it out. Because you, you mentioned like
• 20:10
  physical Ed too, like so that's somewhere in there too.
• 20:13
  And you're like, well, those two aren't really compatible.
• 20:16
  You know there's no PE business degree.
• 20:18
  There's not and, and I was thinking teaching, but I, I had
• 20:23
  some people discouraging me from that.
• 20:25
  I don't know, because of, you know, maybe financially it
• 20:28
  wasn't as lucrative or whatever. I don't know what exactly the
• 20:32
  hold up was. Boy you.
• 20:33
  Showed them. So I eventually by sophomore
• 20:38
  year of college, I realized that education was the route that I
• 20:43
  that I had the passion for and it was somewhere freshman
• 20:47
  sophomore year with Dave Murray. Dave Murray was the head coach
• 20:51
  at US of Arizona. Yeah.
• 20:53
  And I would go visit Dave often in his office.
• 20:56
  And I said, you know, that'd be a pretty cool job to, to have
• 20:59
  that job that Dave, that Dave's got there.
• 21:01
  So I asked you if you're a Wildcat or a Sun Devil.
• 21:04
  You went to the University of Arizona.
• 21:06
  Of course you're a Wildcat. And Dave Murray legend, by the
• 21:09
  way, was your coach. That's so cool.
• 21:13
  Yeah. That that's what always is so
• 21:16
  interesting to me is when the like idea of like, wait a
• 21:20
  minute, you've had it in front of you.
• 21:22
  You had your high school coach in front of you the whole time.
• 21:25
  You had Dave Murray in front of you.
• 21:26
  And then one day, like you said, you're sitting off and I was
• 21:28
  like, wait a minute, this guy's actually this is a job.
• 21:31
  Like wait a minute, maybe I could do this.
• 21:32
  Like that's always interesting to me.
• 21:34
  Like the the thing has been in front of your face the whole
• 21:36
  time. And eventually you kind of, you
• 21:37
  know, for like a better term, wake up.
• 21:38
  Be like, what? I could do this instead of it
• 21:40
  being done to me, I could do this.
• 21:41
  I could be a coach. That's cool.
• 21:44
  Yeah, it certainly started there.
• 21:46
  And, and so then I went down into the physical education
• 21:49
  major with the coaching minor and actually did a biology minor
• 21:53
  as well, which ended up working out well for me later on.
• 21:57
  Is that my first full time teaching position?
• 22:00
  But back close to my hometown was in biology and general
• 22:04
  science. And so that's how I got my foot
• 22:06
  in the door with my first full time teaching job.
• 22:09
  So you ran your whole time at Arizona?
• 22:10
  Yep. Five years.
• 22:12
  Yep. Dude, so how do you?
• 22:13
  I mean, I can't think of much worse places to be a distance
• 22:18
  runner specifically than Arizona.
• 22:22
  Like you mentioned, your first introduction to this was 110
• 22:24
  degrees, 4 miles, you know, getting just hammered by the
• 22:28
  teammates. How do you and OK, and I I back
• 22:33
  up and say, and the lots of amazing distance runners have
• 22:35
  come out of that situation as well.
• 22:38
  How do you like, it feels like you have to be extra vigilant
• 22:42
  about your training, your maybe your diet, obviously your
• 22:46
  hydration. How do you just navigate that as
• 22:49
  you think about high school and college and like some of those
• 22:51
  hottest temperatures? How do you, how did you navigate
• 22:53
  that without just, you know, dying of a heat stroke?
• 22:57
  Well, I mean, you definitely need to have water, you know,
• 23:00
  and stops. You know, Coach Murray would,
• 23:03
  you know, if we, if we were doing a, a loop course, he would
• 23:06
  stop every few miles and make sure we could stop and get
• 23:09
  water. If we, if we had an afternoon
• 23:11
  practice for, for example, sometimes we would just go early
• 23:14
  in the morning in those warmer days, we'd go at 56 AM.
• 23:18
  And so that would certainly make it a lot easier.
• 23:21
  But then you got to think about, you know, you're talking about
• 23:23
  the hottest months of the year, but during, you know, October
• 23:27
  through March, you can't find a better place to be.
• 23:29
  Oh, that's a. Good point.
• 23:30
  Is your training, I mean it's fantastic.
• 23:33
  You can be outside training all all year round.
• 23:35
  So in in one sense, yeah, you have an extreme heat, but then
• 23:39
  the other half of the year you're in the most wonderful
• 23:42
  place you can possibly be. Yeah, I'm thinking the extreme.
• 23:45
  You're right. I've been there during the
• 23:46
  extremes. That's what I'm thinking.
• 23:47
  It's like, dude, how would you go run 8910 mile?
• 23:50
  You know, how would you do quarter?
• 23:51
  I just, I would just pass out. And also it's me too, so of
• 23:55
  course I would pass out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 23:56
  Yeah. We'd also, you know, during the,
• 23:59
  you know, later spring track season when we get in April and
• 24:03
  May and June, we would practice under the light.
• 24:06
  Sometimes we go at 8910 o'clock. That's kind of cool.
• 24:10
  That would be. That'd be a lot of fun.
• 24:12
  Yeah. So that just seems kind of cool.
• 24:13
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 24:14
  Exactly. What did you end up becoming in
• 24:16
  in the distance side? Meaning were you more of a
• 24:18
  Miller 3K guy who were steeple 510?
• 24:22
  Did you go all the way up to 10? What kind of you know, you
• 24:24
  probably distance runners tend to almost had all of them.
• 24:27
  Maybe not the steeple all the time, but but tended like, you
• 24:30
  know, you are a you are a 5K guy who also runs A10 or something
• 24:34
  like that. What what was your kind of
• 24:35
  niche? Yeah, I, I was primarily 815
• 24:39
  hundred in, in high school. I, I, I did some of the longer
• 24:45
  distance, but I, I was primarily 408 hundred and a little bit of
• 24:49
  the 16. I had the range in cross
• 24:51
  country, but in high school, my coach Bogan really we focused on
• 24:57
  the 4 by 400. Like that was the bread and
• 24:59
  butter of our team. And so everybody want to be on
• 25:01
  that team. We won the state title three
• 25:03
  years in a row and you know, so I really wanted to be on that
• 25:07
  team. So I just, I'm really focused on
• 25:09
  the 408 hundred and then in college I had to move up because
• 25:12
  I it wasn't going to be a top, you know, NCAA athlete in the
• 25:16
  400. So the writing was on the wall
• 25:19
  there, so. But you're, you're a true mid
• 25:21
  distance guy. Then if you, you know, you said
• 25:23
  you moved up, you only moved up to the 8:15.
• 25:25
  You didn't go to the the 10 for crying out loud.
• 25:27
  Yeah, I ran the 3K once outdoor and I thought it was the longest
• 25:30
  race ever, but I did run cross country.
• 25:33
  We ran 10K Quite. A bit you.
• 25:35
  Know so when I was a top five guy, probably in my last three
• 25:39
  years, so, so I, I could do it. But once we flipped to track
• 25:43
  season, I couldn't wait to get on the spikes and run fast.
• 25:47
  You know, like that was that's where I, you know, really, I
• 25:51
  would say had my most fun was when we could turn the turn the
• 25:54
  gears over. A little bit.
• 25:55
  That is always fun. I agree with that.
• 25:56
  That's cool. I love that.
• 25:57
  All right, so you go through four years Arizona, you start
• 26:00
  out thinking kind of business and you know, dad's a small
• 26:03
  business owner. Love that.
• 26:04
  I have so much respect for people who own their own
• 26:06
  businesses. It's it's amazing, so much
• 26:09
  Hutzpah that you have to have for that.
• 26:11
  And then you start, you see a coach Murray, I get a legend in
• 26:14
  our profession and you start thinking like, wait a minute,
• 26:17
  maybe this is what I should be doing.
• 26:19
  So you said you changed your major to physical education.
• 26:22
  You get a minor in biology and coaching.
• 26:25
  Do you start? So those last couple of years as
• 26:28
  you're kind of like, OK, this is what I'm going to become.
• 26:30
  I'm become a teacher slash coach.
• 26:32
  You know something in that realm.
• 26:33
  Did you start? And you, you always had a, a way
• 26:37
  of looking at workouts and stuff from high school, but did you
• 26:41
  start looking even more into that?
• 26:43
  You're I, I imagine you probably, you know, you still
• 26:45
  read and you know those kind of things.
• 26:47
  But now are you like Pepper and Coach Murray with questions of
• 26:50
  like, hey, did you? Why next week should we do you
• 26:53
  know, or you still kind of, you know, Coach Murray's his own
• 26:56
  personality here, sit back even with that decision of becoming a
• 27:00
  coach and teacher. I think again, you know going
• 27:04
  in, I mean when I, when I arrived to U of AI mean there
• 27:08
  was a so many good distance runners at that time.
• 27:12
  I mean, we had Mark Davis, we had Matt Giusto, Simon
• 27:17
  Gutierrez, man, you can go down line Doug Heron.
• 27:24
  It's been a while, Quaid. And like I, I was just soaking
• 27:28
  it up. I was so excited to be a part of
• 27:30
  that group and to just learn. And the seniors and the juniors
• 27:34
  on that team just kind of took me and the other young guys
• 27:36
  under their under their wing. And I was just talk to them all
• 27:42
  the time and, and asking them questions.
• 27:44
  And, and, you know, I would say probably by sophomore, junior
• 27:48
  years when I started going in to coach after I'd been working
• 27:53
  with them. And, you know, then I, I felt
• 27:55
  like maybe I'd earned my stripes on the team by then, that I felt
• 27:59
  like I could develop that relationship with my coach.
• 28:02
  And, and that was something that was really important to me
• 28:05
  because I had that with my high school coach.
• 28:07
  I really wanted that with Coach Murray.
• 28:09
  And so the same thing I tell my athletes here at Illinois State,
• 28:14
  you know, if you want a special relationship with your coach,
• 28:17
  you know, you got to put the effort into that just as much as
• 28:20
  as they've got to put the effort into that.
• 28:21
  And it's you can't always be waiting for your coach to come
• 28:26
  knocking on your door. Like if you want something, it's
• 28:28
  just like your goals and life and in the sport, like if, if
• 28:32
  you want something, you've got to you got to be doing what you
• 28:36
  got to. You got to go for it.
• 28:38
  You know, you got to raise the expectation of yourself and,
• 28:42
  and, and raise the expectation of your coach.
• 28:44
  You know, like you, you've got to challenge your coach to be a
• 28:47
  better coach for you because you're a different person than
• 28:50
  anybody else that's been through that program.
• 28:52
  And so it's a reciprocal relationship.
• 28:54
  And I think I really started to learn that, you know, as I
• 28:58
  started going through my years at Arizona.
• 29:00
  And, and so, yeah, it's one of those things.
• 29:03
  And I really enjoyed later on as I got into my last couple years
• 29:06
  at Arizona, giving back to some of the younger guys coming
• 29:10
  through. But one thing that I really love
• 29:12
  to do is host other recruits. And so when we'd have recruits
• 29:17
  come through the door is to find out what they were doing with
• 29:21
  their coaches at their high school to help them become as
• 29:24
  good as they were there. And you start to learn that
• 29:27
  there is no one way to do things.
• 29:29
  And, and just because we do it this way doesn't mean that you
• 29:32
  can't have success doing it some other way.
• 29:34
  And, and so how do you blend this new information with what
• 29:39
  you already know? And how do you, how do you make
• 29:41
  that work for either me at the time when I was training or as a
• 29:45
  coach now, you know, just because they do X at whatever
• 29:50
  university and that seems to work for them.
• 29:52
  Is that the right thing to do here at Illinois State based on
• 29:56
  our topography, based on our facilities or based on our
• 30:00
  weather conditions or, you know, whatever it might be, you got to
• 30:03
  figure out how do you make that work at your current place that
• 30:07
  you're at? It's interesting that you had a
• 30:09
  natural curiosity in regards to you didn't use this word, but it
• 30:14
  is what it was recruiting. Like, you know, you hosted those
• 30:17
  kids and things like that. But then also with that natural
• 30:21
  curiosity, you had the ability when you're hosting kids and
• 30:24
  things like that, you're practicing for your future job.
• 30:27
  Like you didn't know it, but you know, you were like you were
• 30:29
  recruiting, you were learning things.
• 30:31
  I'm sure today you still use things you learned, whether it's
• 30:34
  a question, the way to ask the question or make sure you show
• 30:37
  them the cafeteria or whatever. You just, you kind of learn
• 30:39
  those things as an undergrad without even realizing that,
• 30:42
  hey, this is this is the future, Jeff.
• 30:44
  You're going to be doing this for a living, buddy.
• 30:47
  I I couldn't wait till because we would host, you know, Mike
• 30:50
  Maynard was a throws coach at the time and Fred Harvey was our
• 30:52
  Sprint coach and coach Murray, of course, a distance coach.
• 30:56
  And you know, Bob Myers was a high jump coach.
• 30:58
  Anyway, we'd have these big recruiting weekends and so we'd
• 31:02
  go to this big dinner at tgi Friday's, whatever.
• 31:06
  We'd have 20 people there. And I just love that, you know,
• 31:09
  'cause you'd have, you know, field event recruits and you'd
• 31:12
  have the throwers and you'd have the distance and the sprints.
• 31:15
  And so, and then and then we go to a basketball game, you know,
• 31:19
  and, and get to be a part of a great, you know, at the time,
• 31:22
  PAC 10, PAC 12 conference game that was, you know, it's hard to
• 31:27
  lose on a recruit when you take him to a game like that.
• 31:30
  Yeah, what? What was your what what was fun
• 31:34
  for you about that? And what I mean by that is at at
• 31:36
  first I thought you liked, I'm going to use the word peppering
• 31:40
  the the distance recruits. So like, hey, So what are you
• 31:42
  guys doing? Oh, OK, I see.
• 31:43
  Oh, wow, you guys are basically the same PR, but you do, you
• 31:46
  know, to dumb it down. You're a a high mileage guy and
• 31:49
  you're a low mileage guy, but you just mentioned like, you
• 31:51
  know, how cool it was to go and you had throwers and jumpers.
• 31:55
  Was it just like a a curiosity of people and involved in our
• 31:59
  sport or what? What was it?
• 32:02
  Yeah, like, I mean, as you just go about that learning process,
• 32:06
  you know, you start to realize there's a lot of connections
• 32:09
  between different events. Even though a thrower doesn't
• 32:15
  want to go out and run a mile, let alone 10, nor does a
• 32:19
  business runner want to go in the weight room and try to squat
• 32:22
  £500. You know what, when you're
• 32:25
  talking about Physiology and bio mechanics and movement patterns
• 32:30
  and different things like that and what it takes to be
• 32:32
  successful and the different intangible qualities like, you
• 32:36
  know, the, the motivation between great athletes is not
• 32:40
  different by there's, there's always things that you know.
• 32:44
  And so I would just, I was always curious what made
• 32:48
  somebody so good at what they do?
• 32:49
  It wasn't just on our own team. I remember, you know, lifting
• 32:54
  with a a great baseball pitcher that ended up winning World
• 32:57
  Series games for the Minnesota Twins.
• 32:59
  And I would work out with him. I'm just so curious like to get
• 33:03
  to know him and what motivated him and, and so my strength.
• 33:08
  In addition, coach was a phenomenal coach and he was a
• 33:11
  triple jumper in college, Very, very successful triple jumper
• 33:15
  and just all the new things that he introduced me to with the
• 33:19
  plyometrics. I hadn't done a lot of that up
• 33:21
  to that point of my training age.
• 33:24
  And man, that made a huge difference in my trajectories
• 33:27
  when we started introducing some of these, you know, basic forms
• 33:32
  of plyometrics and maybe not as invasive as maybe some other
• 33:35
  event area athletes to do, but I, I was doing box jumps and I
• 33:39
  was doing some things and I, I definitely saw the value in
• 33:44
  that. And so I've been able to, you
• 33:46
  know, kind of figure out how to implement that into the distance
• 33:49
  runners and it, and again, it just depends on the distance
• 33:51
  runner because not all of them are going to do a lot of plows,
• 33:54
  but some do. And you know, especially the
• 33:56
  middle distance runners that we have here.
• 33:59
  I think in an alternate universe, you're the host of a
• 34:02
  podcast like this because that is a lot of the reason that I
• 34:05
  started this podcast. 1, I wanted to uplift and honor
• 34:08
  coaches for what you do and the impact that you make not only in
• 34:11
  our sport, but our young people in society.
• 34:13
  But 2 is I'm just so curious about people.
• 34:17
  When people ask me about my career as a poker, as a
• 34:21
  professional poker player, I tell them that most of my game,
• 34:24
  because I always think, oh, you must be good at math.
• 34:26
  I am not good at math, trust me. Most of my game was sitting down
• 34:30
  at a table with 7 to 8 other people and finding out where are
• 34:33
  you from, what do you do? Why are you here?
• 34:35
  How long you been here? You know the person, like what,
• 34:37
  what did you know what, why'd you get into that career?
• 34:39
  You know, those kind of things. I'm just fascinated.
• 34:42
  I've always, this is, I'm a tangent person, Jeff.
• 34:44
  So this, you know, we'll rain back in here somewhere.
• 34:48
  I thought because I've always wanted to be an author as well.
• 34:51
  I thought what would be cool and maybe it's only cool to me.
• 34:54
  I've thought because I fly a lot, I was like, you know, it
• 34:56
  would be kind of cool. What if there's just a random
• 34:58
  flight Last night I flew home from Eugene.
• 35:01
  And so from Eugene to Dallas, I was like, what if I, I took a, a
• 35:06
  business card for everybody and said, Hey, I want to write a
• 35:09
  book about this flight. You know, American Airlines
• 35:12
  flight 1452, whatever the heck the airlines was.
• 35:15
  And the book is just the 100 to 125, whatever people in there
• 35:19
  and just, you know, what were they doing in Eugene?
• 35:20
  Why are they going to Dallas? You know, there's so many
• 35:23
  avenues around that now. There's been a lot of track
• 35:26
  people because we were all coming home from Nike Outdoor
• 35:28
  Nationals and things like that. But I just like, man, I look in
• 35:31
  a plane and I'm like, there's 120 super unique people and
• 35:36
  individuals and I love that. But what I also love is that at
• 35:40
  its core, we're all, we have all have a lot of similarities as
• 35:43
  well. Like we're not 120 super unique.
• 35:46
  Like I know nothing about. I don't have anything to relate
• 35:49
  to you, Jeff, at all. That's not true at all.
• 35:51
  We all have a lot of connections, by the way.
• 35:54
  That's why we named the podcast the Connections podcast that I
• 35:57
  think is just fascinating that just, you know, that should be
• 36:00
  driving us together and not a part like we we like to do right
• 36:04
  now in society. So yeah, I think you you were
• 36:06
  supposed to be the host of this podcast.
• 36:07
  You're supposed to go interview and no.
• 36:09
  But I think people a valid point though.
• 36:11
  I mean, the, you know, it seems the most successful coaches are
• 36:17
  the, the ones that are the most curious, you know?
• 36:19
  Curious. Yeah, just, I mean, I, I, I, I
• 36:24
  don't want to drop names, but there's a, there's a coach
• 36:27
  that's very successful here in the Midwest and he's been
• 36:30
  coaching for almost 30 years. He probably knows more than me
• 36:35
  and 100,000 other people, right? But he is also the very one
• 36:40
  person that is still going around asking all the questions
• 36:43
  about what this coach is. And it's not just coaches in any
• 36:47
  one event area. And I just find that so
• 36:50
  interesting. And it's like, of course, he's
• 36:52
  like one of the greatest coaches because he's always trying to
• 36:55
  learn more. Curiosity is a superpower.
• 36:58
  I don't know why it took me this long in my life.
• 37:00
  I wish I'd have known that as a high schooler.
• 37:02
  But curiosity is a superpower. You don't like to drop names?
• 37:06
  Well, I do, I almost called it the Gill shout out podcast, by
• 37:09
  the way, one of the most impressive things in the world,
• 37:11
  you know, two people that I look up to a lot and one of them is,
• 37:14
  you know, dear to me, like my, my mentor, mentor Bouchek Snyder
• 37:18
  and Oh my gosh, Vince Anderson. I'm getting old, Jeff.
• 37:22
  The names don't come as quick as they used to.
• 37:25
  And Vince Anderson, we were all at the TTFCA, the Texas Track
• 37:29
  and Field Coaches Association clinic few years ago.
• 37:32
  Three probably maybe it's pre COVID, so 6-7 years ago.
• 37:35
  And you know, they're both speaking and whatnot.
• 37:37
  And Vince goes to speak and I wanted to pop in just to see
• 37:41
  like, oh, how many people are like, are you know, they, they
• 37:42
  all should be listening to this guy.
• 37:44
  Like how many people actually showed up and all that kind of
• 37:46
  stuff. And I open the door to look into
• 37:47
  the room and 10 rows back there's Boo schex later now, not
• 37:51
  just Boo listening and paying attention writing notes like had
• 37:55
  his notebook. And I was like, first of all,
• 37:57
  these guys have been friends forever.
• 37:59
  They they have to, you know, they talk shop all the time.
• 38:00
  They know what the other person knows.
• 38:02
  Second of all, that he he doesn't need to be in here.
• 38:05
  And what's he doing? He is in there taking notes.
• 38:08
  I was, I remember snapping a picture and putting it on
• 38:10
  Twitter and I was like, you want to be one of the greatest
• 38:12
  coaches in the world, emulate this guy right here.
• 38:15
  He ain't too good to be listening to Vince or anybody
• 38:17
  else that's on that stage. That is so, so impressive.
• 38:20
  I, I hope I have that that I keep that curiosity for the rest
• 38:25
  of my life, the rest of my life. I really do.
• 38:28
  OK, let's get out of college. There's a reason why this is,
• 38:31
  you know, average length is an hour and 45.
• 38:33
  And it's it's typically me and my tangents in my mouth here,
• 38:36
  Jeff. So, you know, just smack me in
• 38:38
  the head and get me back on track here.
• 38:40
  All right, We are senior year. We we graduate.
• 38:43
  What? So we know we're going to become
• 38:45
  a coach, a teacher. That's, you know, that's what we
• 38:47
  changed our major to. What's our first first step?
• 38:50
  Yeah, so my first step was I started, I moved back to my
• 38:55
  hometown in Glendale and I started teaching at a school in
• 38:59
  the same school district that I went to and coaching.
• 39:03
  And again, I my first job was teaching science and biology,
• 39:08
  and I was there for two years now.
• 39:11
  You didn't you didn't coach at your same high school.
• 39:13
  No. OK, so I was, I'm always curious
• 39:16
  about athletes that come back and coach under their their
• 39:19
  former coach. You didn't have that.
• 39:21
  No. By then my coach had moved out
• 39:23
  of the district to a different school and I did coach with him
• 39:28
  for one year while I taught in the school district that I went
• 39:33
  to. But then I was able to get a
• 39:34
  coaching position back in the same school district that I was
• 39:38
  teaching in. Kind of Long story short, I was
• 39:41
  basically there for a couple years before I then got into
• 39:44
  college coaching so. You're teaching, you're
• 39:48
  coaching. The number one question when I
• 39:50
  used to teach USATF level ones, the number one question I get
• 39:54
  from every high school coach was how do I coach college?
• 39:56
  I was just out in Oregon for a Nike Outdoor Nationals and two
• 40:00
  different guys in two different situations asked me that exact
• 40:02
  same question. And typically I'll tell them I
• 40:04
  was like, why? This is what I told them in
• 40:06
  Eugene. I was like, why?
• 40:07
  Why? Why do you want to, especially
• 40:08
  in today in 2025, why you're making a teacher salary, which
• 40:12
  could be better? I agree and it should be better.
• 40:14
  But you know, typically pretty nice and typically more than
• 40:17
  what our college coaches are making.
• 40:18
  You have the fall off. If you're not a distance coach,
• 40:21
  you're not going around the country recruiting like, you
• 40:24
  know, being a high school teacher coach.
• 40:27
  Not a bad gig. What was it about the the
• 40:31
  college side that had an allure for you?
• 40:35
  Yeah, I think goes back to the those moments when I was sitting
• 40:39
  in Coach Murray's office and I just, I, I, I really wanted to
• 40:45
  take on that challenge and see what I could do with an
• 40:48
  opportunity to coach collegiately.
• 40:51
  And you know, being in Arizona, there was only at the time 3
• 40:57
  universities that even had a track of field and, and they
• 41:00
  were all Division One, it was Arizona, Arizona State and
• 41:02
  Northern Arizona. There's a lot of junior
• 41:04
  colleges, but there's limited opportunities, basically.
• 41:08
  And so when another one of my big mentors, Tom Akers, Tom was
• 41:15
  somebody who was one of my professors at Arizona University
• 41:18
  of Arizona. And so when he became the head
• 41:21
  coach at Eastern Illinois, he said, hey, you've always been
• 41:25
  talking about want to be a college coach.
• 41:27
  Here's your chance. So I was his first graduate
• 41:30
  assistant coach at EIU. Dude, that's crazy.
• 41:36
  Because when you said Tom Akers, you actually made me question
• 41:38
  myself a little bit as like, wait a minute, I know Tom Akers
• 41:41
  as the Eastern Illinois head coach, but we're talking about
• 41:43
  Arizona. He was one of your professors.
• 41:47
  Yeah. That's crazy.
• 41:50
  I I mean, just the, the, the luck of it all, honestly, You
• 41:53
  know that, that he has to be a professor of yours.
• 41:55
  He has to get out here to become the head coach of Eastern
• 41:58
  Illinois, which he was the head coach there for a long time.
• 42:00
  He was the first when I first got into coaching, I coached
• 42:03
  high school up in Chicago and the first kid that I had that
• 42:06
  was recruitable. You have that quality for
• 42:08
  Division One. Tom was the first guy that
• 42:10
  reached out to to recruit my kid.
• 42:13
  So I Tom has always had a place in my heart of like, wow, like,
• 42:16
  you know, like I have a kid that could go to college.
• 42:18
  I guess it's pretty cool. And Tom was Tom was the man man,
• 42:20
  I love that. That's so cool.
• 42:22
  So I love that you did start out in high school because I love to
• 42:26
  bust the myth that high school coaches cannot coach college.
• 42:30
  I just, you know, every high school coach we've had here on
• 42:33
  this podcast, they do a lot of the same things that you're
• 42:37
  doing as a college coach. They're recruiting the hallways,
• 42:40
  you know, they worry about, you know, how do you motivate kids?
• 42:43
  I mean, it's just, I just don't like that myth.
• 42:46
  And it's amazing to me how many great coaches yours including
• 42:48
  that we're learning that started out on the high school side.
• 42:51
  So I I love that That's your, your origin story, if you will.
• 42:54
  That's, that's pretty cool. So you go to eastern, so you're
• 42:57
  from Arizona, Glendale, which I've been to great place.
• 43:01
  Tucson. Love, love Tucson.
• 43:03
  I'm a big Fred Harvey fan, so I like to go out there a lot.
• 43:06
  And you go to Charleston, IL No, no, no shade to my friends in
• 43:12
  Charleston. One of our team mates here on
• 43:15
  our basketball side was a thrower for EIU and we've had a
• 43:18
  lots of EIU alum that work here. But it's not Arizona.
• 43:22
  What did you think when you came here to the the Midwest of the
• 43:24
  Midwest, brother? Yeah.
• 43:26
  No, it was. Silence.
• 43:31
  I, well, what's crazy about it? And I, I really did come to love
• 43:36
  Eastern Illinois. Charleston was a big change,
• 43:39
  100%, and it was a leap of faith because it was August.
• 43:43
  I quit my teaching job. I didn't have a place to live.
• 43:47
  I think you've been accepted into the grad program quite yet.
• 43:51
  But I trusted Tom so much. He just said, hey, we'll get it
• 43:55
  taken care of. And he was in the midst of
• 43:57
  moving himself and his family. So when I first got there, I
• 44:01
  reached out. John McInerney was the cross
• 44:04
  country coach And I, I, I pulled into town, there was like one
• 44:08
  stop light, which I found amazing that there was only one
• 44:11
  stop light. Maybe there's a few more than
• 44:13
  that, but there weren't many. And I drove through town in a
• 44:16
  matter of 5 minutes and I, I went all the way through town
• 44:19
  and I'm like, wow, I just got through it.
• 44:21
  Where's the rest of it? So I turned around and I stopped
• 44:27
  at the one gas station that I saw and I had to call Coach Mack
• 44:31
  and he's supposed to be putting me up for a couple nights
• 44:34
  because I had nowhere to stay. And so I get, I get on the pay
• 44:37
  phone. I, I lock my car.
• 44:40
  I'm staying right in front of it, but I lock it because I'm
• 44:42
  from a bigger city. And that's what you do.
• 44:44
  But I'm, I'm on the phone talking to coach Mack and a, a
• 44:47
  guy pulls up in a car that had no top on it.
• 44:50
  Cars running, radio's blasting. And he walks into the store and
• 44:55
  I'm like on the phone. I say, hey, Coach Mack, you
• 44:57
  won't believe this. This is.
• 45:02
  Crazy. And he'd like pause.
• 45:04
  It was like a 5 second pause. It's like, yeah, what's the
• 45:06
  problem? He was waiting for you to add
• 45:09
  the part that you wouldn't believe.
• 45:10
  He's like. Like where I, where I grew up,
• 45:13
  that car would probably not be there by the time he came out.
• 45:16
  So anyway, that was my introduction to Charleston.
• 45:20
  That's. Funny.
• 45:21
  And I know, but it was a great, it was a great time there and
• 45:24
  learned so much and, and yeah, got my master's degree and.
• 45:30
  Was that Tom's? Because you mentioned he was
• 45:31
  moving out. Was that Tom's first year?
• 45:33
  So were you with Tom the first year?
• 45:35
  Oh, wow. Wow, You really did take a leap
• 45:37
  of faith because this wasn't like Tom had been there for five
• 45:40
  years. So, you know, like, oh, I trust
• 45:42
  him. He's been there.
• 45:43
  You know, he knows the lay of the land, everything.
• 45:45
  He was learning Charleston just as much as you were, really.
• 45:48
  Yes and no. He was the assistant coach there
• 45:50
  from, you know, for many years and so he had a gap.
• 45:55
  He was eight years there then, then left for about 5 years when
• 46:00
  I met him in Tucson and then he came back.
• 46:02
  He was very familiar with the scene already.
• 46:04
  OK, did not know that. I was thinking this was his
• 46:06
  first foray out there. OK, what did you learn the
• 46:11
  difference in your GA? That's a you know, even in small
• 46:15
  schools, which you know, G as have much more typically have
• 46:17
  much more responsibilities than a quote UN quote big school GA.
• 46:21
  It's all about staffing is what it really is.
• 46:25
  But, but even as Aga, it's different than a full time.
• 46:28
  No matter how involved you were. What did you learn?
• 46:31
  As you, you know, you're, you're not that far out of college,
• 46:34
  right? So you're, you know, there's,
• 46:35
  there's still a part of you that's a college kid in that
• 46:37
  sense. But you did teach so that
• 46:39
  that's, you know, adulthood stuff and coach high school
• 46:41
  kids. And now you're GA in at at
• 46:43
  Eastern Illinois. What was some of the more
• 46:45
  immediate like, Oh, this is different.
• 46:47
  OK, I don't get to do this anymore or I have to do this
• 46:51
  now. Were there any like immediate
• 46:52
  stark differences? Yeah, I mean, obviously being
• 46:58
  from a, a power conference school to then a mid major, it
• 47:01
  was the, the, the the budget was much different.
• 47:05
  How far you travelled was, was different, fewer coaching, you
• 47:11
  know, staff members and that kind of thing.
• 47:14
  But what I but what I, even though there are some
• 47:17
  limitations, there were some things that were even vastly
• 47:21
  opportunistic in the sense of how much of A family it was and,
• 47:27
  and how, how much the the team could overcome some of the, the
• 47:32
  lack of resources and some other ways, you know, and, and they
• 47:36
  were just so and very successful.
• 47:39
  I mean, Tom built a program, he won 40 or 50 conference
• 47:43
  championships and had so many all Americans over the course of
• 47:47
  time. And, you know, he created that
• 47:49
  environment, you know, and it remind me a lot of what my high
• 47:52
  school coach had done as well. Very different styles, but yet
• 47:59
  same results in in creating kind of that family feel.
• 48:03
  And, you know, like the athletes just responded to so much to
• 48:07
  coach Akers and wanted to perform not only for the their
• 48:10
  teammates, but for him and for the pride of university.
• 48:14
  And, you know, and and they had some good facilities, the
• 48:17
  outdoor facilities very good. And you know, there's a lot of
• 48:20
  great competition Midwest. So even though they couldn't go
• 48:22
  very far, they had everything that they needed.
• 48:24
  And and so I learned, you know, how to do things with a little
• 48:28
  bit less. And I think, you know, that was
• 48:31
  a valuable experience for me in my coaching journey to, you
• 48:36
  know, have that high school coaching experience than, you
• 48:39
  know, a mid major coaching experience and and then the next
• 48:44
  step was a junior college coaching experience.
• 48:46
  Well, before we get there, so a couple more questions here at
• 48:49
  Eastern because you know, you mentioned Tom and just have to
• 48:51
  give Thomas flowers. I put Tom up there a lot with
• 48:54
  like a Dean Hayes, you know, two different individuals, but Boyd
• 48:57
  both stayed at universities for a long time.
• 48:59
  Both had a lot of success. I remember when he called to
• 49:03
  talk about my my hurdler, you know, when we talked about like
• 49:07
  how many, you know, conference, you know, how many team wins and
• 49:09
  things like that and just being so like, holy cow, because it's,
• 49:13
  it's hard to win. Winning is hard.
• 49:15
  So when you win one conference championship, like that's a big
• 49:18
  deal. That's hard.
• 49:20
  And Tom did it over and over and over again.
• 49:26
  And don't be mistaken, even though some of the scores are
• 49:28
  just crazy of how big he won as well.
• 49:30
  Those were hard. Everyone was hard.
• 49:32
  There was so much that went into it.
• 49:33
  So always loved and and impressed with what Tom did and
• 49:37
  the staff that he always had and the kids.
• 49:39
  I mean, it's, it's quite amazing.
• 49:41
  Is, is really, really impressive there what Tom Akers did at
• 49:44
  Eastern Illinois. You know, Aga should be, it's
• 49:50
  not mostly, but it should be an opportunity that after your year
• 49:55
  or two year of grad work, you then decide if you're going to
• 49:58
  go into coaching. I think the majority do go into
• 50:01
  coaching, but you should that should be like a tryout period.
• 50:04
  You obviously didn't decide to go on.
• 50:08
  No, no, no thoughts after the the GA period of going back to
• 50:11
  coach high school and coach there at all?
• 50:13
  Or was it always like there or did that like cement the yeah,
• 50:16
  OK, I'm, I'm, I'm plowing forward as a college track
• 50:19
  coach. You know, coming right out, I'll
• 50:22
  be honest, like I applied for so many jobs and got nowhere and
• 50:27
  you know, in the process to be honest.
• 50:29
  And I was looking for coaching, you know, if it was a high
• 50:32
  school, if it was small college, if it was big university, I was
• 50:37
  open to any and all. I just wanted to work with young
• 50:40
  people and, and work, you know, being a sport and, and so ended
• 50:45
  up having an opportunity. The one and only interview that
• 50:48
  I got was at Parkland Junior College.
• 50:50
  Is that right? That's right, yeah.
• 50:53
  Wow. OK, so before we bridge to
• 50:55
  Parkland and now for guys and guys I don't know, Parkland.
• 50:58
  Parkland is right here. Literally I, I was going to say,
• 51:02
  is it faster for me to get to the Illinois campus or Parkland?
• 51:05
  Both of them are within like 8 minutes.
• 51:06
  So they're both super fast here. But you stayed here and you
• 51:11
  know, spoiler alert, we know you're in Bloomington.
• 51:12
  So that's, you know, basically a suburb of Champaign.
• 51:15
  That's probably really offensive to Bloomington people.
• 51:16
  Sorry. They're two very distinct towns,
• 51:19
  blah, blah, blah. How did you deal with the
• 51:22
  weather? I'm just thinking, you know, I
• 51:24
  asked that question about like, how do you just even manage
• 51:27
  running and being an athlete in 110°?
• 51:30
  I think it's 24/7. It's obviously not.
• 51:32
  But then you came here and you've, I mean, was this like
• 51:35
  the first time you had like real snow, real cold?
• 51:38
  Well, like I said, I was in upstate New York until I was 10.
• 51:42
  Oh, I didn't know how old real. Yeah, I was young, but I saw
• 51:45
  some, you know, bad winters. And so, yeah, you know, the
• 51:48
  winters aren't amazingly fun. But again, flip it around.
• 51:52
  You get from March until October is great.
• 51:56
  What a what a green endorsement. You know, they're not great.
• 52:00
  You had to, maybe you got to instead of had to, you got to
• 52:06
  like change some of your training.
• 52:08
  I mean, you like you didn't have to worry about practicing at
• 52:11
  night under the lights and things like that.
• 52:13
  More of the training day was available to you.
• 52:18
  It was, except for during the colder winter months and, you
• 52:22
  know, when I was at Parkland, I was coaching sprints and hurdles
• 52:26
  and, and jumps as well as the distance runner.
• 52:29
  So that was an opportunity for me to, I guess, widen my scope
• 52:36
  of, of coaching into other events.
• 52:38
  And eventually I hired some assistant coaches and some of
• 52:42
  that, you know, I, I, I gave to them and, and I was able to
• 52:45
  focus a little bit more on some of the jumps in the distance
• 52:49
  after a while. But I, I really enjoyed coaching
• 52:52
  the high jump in particular as an area we had in, in a five
• 52:58
  year span, we had about 5 male high jumpers over 7 feet there
• 53:03
  at Parkland. And you know, we had quite a few
• 53:06
  go on to Division One programs around the country.
• 53:10
  And, and so, you know, we, we started to develop a really good
• 53:12
  program. Unfortunately, you know, after
• 53:15
  my last year, they decided to, to drop the, the program.
• 53:18
  So, but we we really had a pretty good run there for a
• 53:21
  while. One of my most satisfying jobs
• 53:25
  that I had coaching was coach at the junior college level.
• 53:28
  I just it, it, it affected me deeply in a very positive way
• 53:33
  when you were there, by the way, in, in one of the cooler
• 53:36
  mascots, by the way, the cobras. I, I do really quite enjoy
• 53:39
  Parkland's mascot there. So you get the job there.
• 53:45
  Again, here's a stark difference.
• 53:47
  You know you you can you're coming from high school coaching
• 53:51
  and then you go into college coaching a four year college
• 53:55
  coaching and then you go junior college.
• 53:58
  Those are, you know, all birds of the same feather but
• 54:01
  different colors here. You know, recruiting's
• 54:03
  differently. You are also trying to get your
• 54:05
  kids recruited like you weren't. It's kind of an amalgamation
• 54:07
  actually of high school and four year.
• 54:09
  I think that's part of what I liked you to be honest with you.
• 54:11
  So it's so hard. You're always recruiting 1
• 54:13
  aspect to the other. How did you, I want to say,
• 54:16
  learn that? How did you adapt?
• 54:17
  I mean, you obviously did fairly well.
• 54:18
  You had a bunch of good high jumpers and other athletes as
• 54:21
  well. But how did you navigate that
• 54:23
  new space of coaching? You're getting a real education
• 54:25
  of all track and field coaching in these years.
• 54:29
  Yeah, I would say, you know, my learning, you know, I see a lot
• 54:35
  of young coaches now they, they might be at A, at a university
• 54:39
  underneath a mentor for several years before they then go on and
• 54:43
  take on their coaching role. And I think that's a wonderful
• 54:46
  way to go about it. Mine was almost like I, I just
• 54:49
  kind of got thrown into it and I had to learn from experience of
• 54:55
  trial and error and of course talking to people whenever I
• 54:58
  could. But I, you know, I had a high
• 55:00
  school teaching job on the side. That was my side job with my
• 55:04
  high school. The junior college was a part
• 55:06
  time paid position. So I was basically working 2
• 55:09
  full time jobs because I was recruiting.
• 55:12
  I was, you know, traveling with the teams on the weekends, but I
• 55:14
  was teaching 7:30 to three, 3:30 every day.
• 55:19
  So then I would coach and recruit until later at 9.
• 55:22
  I did that for about 5 years. So it was, it was a great
• 55:27
  learning opportunity, but I, I really had to just kind of
• 55:30
  develop those relationships with a lot of the coaches in Illinois
• 55:34
  because I'd only been here for a year when I was at EIU.
• 55:38
  It was a one year master's program.
• 55:40
  So I was learning so many new, developing new relationships to,
• 55:46
  to, to start that recruiting process.
• 55:48
  And so, yeah, I was just going to meets whenever I could and on
• 55:53
  the phone and e-mail and all that.
• 55:55
  What? What did you get that master's
• 55:57
  in? Athletic Administration.
• 56:00
  OK, got it. And you mentioned you hired
• 56:04
  assistant coaches to take over some of those responsibilities.
• 56:06
  So when you first got there, were you the only coach?
• 56:10
  Yeah, for a few months and then I was able to hire 1.
• 56:13
  I had one assistant in the first year and then I think I had,
• 56:17
  yeah, I had two by the 2nd year. How, how, how do you?
• 56:24
  Being a teacher is extremely hard.
• 56:25
  So you're teaching from, you know, seven to three.
• 56:27
  What What was it? High school?
• 56:29
  Yeah. What?
• 56:30
  What high school did you teach at out here?
• 56:31
  Champaign Central. You were essential.
• 56:34
  That's so cool. So that alone would be like
• 56:38
  you're busy a full time job, you're grading, you're teaching.
• 56:41
  I mean that's that alone, just seven to three full time job and
• 56:44
  then you hop just north a little bit, right and and you coach
• 56:49
  that alone is a full time job. And part of that full time job
• 56:53
  there is you're always trying to recruit kids to your team and
• 56:55
  you're always trying to recruit kids off your team.
• 56:58
  You know, you're trying to take mention the the relationships
• 57:00
  with other schools and stuff. Yeah.
• 57:03
  How in the world did you? You were literally working
• 57:08
  almost 24/7. Like you got a few hours of
• 57:10
  sleep every once in a while and that's about it.
• 57:12
  Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, certainly I I just loved it.
• 57:17
  I wanted to help our, you know, young men and women have
• 57:21
  opportunities when they got their degree to move on and and
• 57:25
  I was motivated to have success and to and to win.
• 57:28
  I wanted to win championships. And, you know, if you're going
• 57:30
  to spend your time doing something, you know, I feel like
• 57:34
  you need to really throw yourself at it to do it as well
• 57:38
  as you possibly can. There's no, you know, halfway.
• 57:42
  There's no 90% Like this is what we're doing.
• 57:45
  Stay there because I agree with that to a, to a, to a degree I
• 57:50
  agree with that. But you're not able to do that.
• 57:53
  You're not able to throw yourself 100% in the teaching.
• 57:57
  You were not able to throw yourself 100%.
• 58:00
  There's only one Jeff. There's no splitting, there's no
• 58:01
  cloning. So were there ever like
• 58:04
  frustration times? And like I'm trying to think of
• 58:07
  like, you know, your one of your high jumpers really needs to
• 58:09
  talk to you at 11 in the morning, you know, for whatever
• 58:12
  reason, you know, it's JUCO, It's just coaching, not even
• 58:15
  JUCO, just coaching. And you're in the middle of
• 58:17
  class, man. I'll, I'll call you in my free
• 58:18
  period if I can. And if not, I'll see you at 3:30
• 58:21
  or whatnot. Were there like frustrations?
• 58:24
  Over time, eventually that's what it got to right.
• 58:26
  And so I knew something had to shift.
• 58:30
  I, you know, I couldn't do this indefinitely.
• 58:33
  And and I was hoping to find a full time opportunity there at
• 58:38
  at the junior college and it just didn't present itself.
• 58:41
  They didn't have full time coaches there in general.
• 58:44
  So, you know, it was, it was time to make a shift at some
• 58:48
  point because of that very reason that I, I wanted to fully
• 58:51
  invest my time full time into coaching because I find myself
• 58:56
  spending more time even in my teaching hours, thinking about a
• 59:01
  workout. Right, right, right.
• 59:03
  What recruit I needed to be following up with or whatever it
• 59:06
  was. I'm like, I think, I think it's
• 59:08
  probably fair to everybody involved here if I.
• 59:10
  Did. Full time.
• 59:12
  And I like that, that really I'm not hearing that there was
• 59:15
  necessarily any internal debate about this.
• 59:17
  But if you ever were debating of like am IA teacher or am IA
• 59:21
  coach, you it doesn't sound like you were at practice thinking
• 59:24
  about the second period grading plan.
• 59:27
  You know, it was more like you were in second period thinking,
• 59:30
  OK, I need to do this work out. You know, so your, your own
• 59:33
  attention span showed you like you're supposed to be a coach,
• 59:37
  not necessarily a high school teacher.
• 59:39
  Yeah. How did you before we move on to
• 59:42
  the next opportunity, How did you you're a distance guy and
• 59:47
  and you're a coach. I should say that first
• 59:49
  foremost, but you're all all your experience so far has been
• 59:53
  in the distance primarily. How did you you you you start
• 59:59
  coaching sprints and jumps and hurdles and and by the way,
• 1:00:01
  successfully. Like I remember we recruited you
• 1:00:05
  had two twins, Derocco and and Derico, if I remember their
• 1:00:09
  names right, two hurdlers from I think O'Fallon if I'm not maybe
• 1:00:13
  getting kids mixed up here, but we were.
• 1:00:16
  Danville, who was there, was a hurdler from O'Fallon.
• 1:00:18
  Maybe he didn't go to Parkland. Ralph Holmes.
• 1:00:22
  Yes, Oh my God, great memory. I recruited all those kids when
• 1:00:26
  I was at Troy. So I mean, they were like, you
• 1:00:28
  had good kids. How did you from this distance
• 1:00:32
  background like So what was the first step that it can be
• 1:00:36
  daunting to have a long jumper in front of you and you're like,
• 1:00:38
  all right, I got to figure this out.
• 1:00:39
  How did you figure out and educate yourself so you can
• 1:00:42
  educate the kids these other events?
• 1:00:45
  Well, I think when you when you asked that, the first thought
• 1:00:50
  that came to mind was my high school coach, Coach Bogan,
• 1:00:53
  because he he had to do that with so many different events
• 1:00:58
  that he didn't really know. And I saw him go through his
• 1:01:00
  process. And so you don't know what you
• 1:01:04
  don't know. And I think, you know, talking
• 1:01:06
  to the student athletes is just being real with them about your
• 1:01:10
  background is that, hey, we're going to be learning some things
• 1:01:13
  together here. And then you just start talking
• 1:01:15
  to as many people as you possibly can to learn as much as
• 1:01:18
  you can. And, you know, and, and the old
• 1:01:22
  principle that I follow is less is more.
• 1:01:24
  And, and so like especially with a jumper or a sprinter, you
• 1:01:30
  know, I mean, obviously it's a lot more complicated than that.
• 1:01:34
  But yet at the same time, you know, if you, if you want to get
• 1:01:37
  more out of somebody, you got to, you know, not over train,
• 1:01:41
  you got to have a healthy athlete, you need to focus on
• 1:01:46
  the most important things. And if you miss some smaller
• 1:01:49
  things like, yeah, we're we're going to build on that.
• 1:01:51
  We're going to implement that a little bit more down the road.
• 1:01:55
  Because now I, I realize like, hey, I can be doing these other
• 1:01:57
  things as well. But like, this is what I do know
• 1:02:00
  that we need to be doing, and we're going to start with that
• 1:02:03
  and kind of build the pyramid from there.
• 1:02:07
  You know, we're going to talk specifically about coaching
• 1:02:10
  track and field, but in life in general, that quote, you just
• 1:02:15
  said that statement, less is more is really invaluable.
• 1:02:18
  Like a lot of our young coaches could start their coaching
• 1:02:22
  education journey by that first. Less is more because we try to
• 1:02:25
  just pack and build everything in and, and sometimes it's it's,
• 1:02:29
  it's the bad ego part of us that does that.
• 1:02:31
  Because it's like, I want to show that I, I know it all and
• 1:02:34
  that I or that I, I know enough for this athlete or my head
• 1:02:37
  coach. I can, I want to show them that
• 1:02:38
  I know everything. And it's like, yeah, less is
• 1:02:42
  more. That's how you hurt kids.
• 1:02:43
  That's how you burn out, by the way, things like that.
• 1:02:45
  So I, I love that, that statement.
• 1:02:48
  So you just kind of attacked it. First of all, you had some
• 1:02:50
  background educationally wise in regards to bio mechanics,
• 1:02:53
  biology, things like that. So you just kind of attacked it
• 1:02:55
  like the, OK, I'm, I'm not going to be the greatest jumps coach
• 1:02:58
  in the world. It's not necessarily my passion,
• 1:02:59
  but I, I know enough to help this kid and we're going to keep
• 1:03:02
  him healthy. And they're going to they're
• 1:03:03
  going to be able to show up on the line when, when the the meat
• 1:03:05
  is ready. Right.
• 1:03:06
  But then you, you know, we go to a meet and I remember going to
• 1:03:10
  Western Illinois is an early spring outdoor meet and I had
• 1:03:15
  two guys high jumping 7 feet and Larry Wizorak was there with
• 1:03:21
  Iowa and Coach Wiz was coaching the high jump.
• 1:03:25
  And so here's 2 distance coaches coach in the high jump, right?
• 1:03:29
  And so he had a couple really good jumpers.
• 1:03:32
  And so we got chatting one day. I'd never met him before that
• 1:03:35
  meet and I was just asking him like, hey, what do you do?
• 1:03:39
  And you know, what should I be doing?
• 1:03:41
  This is some things we've been doing.
• 1:03:42
  What am I missing? And like you just start
• 1:03:45
  developing those relationships and realizing that, hey, there's
• 1:03:50
  so much more that you can do. But how do you like, cuz this is
• 1:03:55
  where we're at now. Like we can't just all of a
• 1:03:56
  sudden start doing all these other things.
• 1:03:58
  Like, what are some smaller things that we could slowly
• 1:04:01
  start to implement into what we're already doing to be
• 1:04:04
  successful so that we stay healthy and we can get better?
• 1:04:07
  But you're not so burned. You're not burning them down so
• 1:04:10
  much that they're just, they have no legs to go jump, right?
• 1:04:14
  And so just trying to find that fine balance.
• 1:04:17
  How do you drop the ego and ask someone else?
• 1:04:21
  Like when you asked like whiz there as an example, which
• 1:04:24
  that's fascinating because, and I don't know if that made it
• 1:04:27
  easier or harder because it's like, Oh, well, this is a
• 1:04:30
  distance guy too. Like we know the high jump is
• 1:04:33
  secondary on our list, not our primary.
• 1:04:35
  So maybe that made it easier. And maybe, but I can see some
• 1:04:37
  people saying, well, why would you even ask him?
• 1:04:39
  Why didn't you go ask the, the, the quote UN quote, real high
• 1:04:42
  jump coaches or whatever. But how do you, how do you drop
• 1:04:45
  the ego to ask for that help? Because once you start asking
• 1:04:48
  questions of like, hey, So what do you guys do?
• 1:04:50
  Everybody knows what you're doing.
• 1:04:50
  You're, you're, you're like, Hey, I'm, I need some help here,
• 1:04:53
  right? You're, you're kind of asking
• 1:04:54
  for help. How do you drop that ego?
• 1:04:56
  And has that help because some of us have, you know, we build
• 1:05:00
  up this wall again. I want to be known as the the
• 1:05:02
  number one guy. I want to be known as the guy
• 1:05:04
  who knows it all. So I can't be asking other
• 1:05:07
  people, especially a distance coach, about high jumping.
• 1:05:10
  Are you kidding me? How do you drop that ego so that
• 1:05:12
  you're learning, so that you can do better for your athletes?
• 1:05:16
  I I just think you have to realize that there's somebody
• 1:05:19
  that's always better than you. I mean, I was at the NCAME, you
• 1:05:23
  know, our preliminary round down in, in College Station couple
• 1:05:27
  weeks ago and I, I see Andy Powell walking around and like,
• 1:05:30
  man, like I have 100 questions I want to ask that guy right now.
• 1:05:36
  You know, so I, I think, you know, you got to just put the
• 1:05:40
  ego aside and, and realize that there's somebody that's probably
• 1:05:44
  doing things in ways that could, could benefit you.
• 1:05:47
  And it's about how you ask your questions.
• 1:05:49
  And it's about when you know, like the timing is, is kind of a
• 1:05:54
  critical time. Asking questions at the in say
• 1:05:56
  preliminary round may not be the best time, but maybe at a small
• 1:06:01
  meet in Macomb, IL at at the beginning of the spring is a
• 1:06:05
  little bit easier. I don't know, I think timing is
• 1:06:08
  everything though, right? And, and sometimes you, you, you
• 1:06:11
  know, somebody that knows somebody and they introduce you
• 1:06:13
  and you say, hey, you know, I've got this athlete like this is
• 1:06:17
  what we're doing. Like there's this, I feel like
• 1:06:19
  there's something missing, like what, you know, what do you
• 1:06:22
  think? You know, what do you think I am
• 1:06:23
  missing here? And, and so sometimes I those
• 1:06:26
  little like, like nuanced things really make the biggest
• 1:06:29
  difference in your coaching is the art.
• 1:06:31
  You know, we all can like read and take all that, you know,
• 1:06:36
  general training model and, and say, Hey, this is this is our
• 1:06:40
  recipe. But it's like, how do you change
• 1:06:42
  that recipe at the right time and make sure that you get the
• 1:06:46
  you get the most out of that athlete, you know?
• 1:06:48
  That's where where I see at the high school state clinics and
• 1:06:51
  USTFCCCA where some of the real meat happens, amazing
• 1:06:56
  presentations and you should be front and center and watching
• 1:06:58
  all those presentations. But the conversations that
• 1:07:01
  happened right outside those meeting rooms, right on almost
• 1:07:04
  like in the corners of the hallway, you see these groups of
• 1:07:06
  people and it's like, well, I know they're not all distance
• 1:07:08
  coach. There's a there's a jumps coach
• 1:07:10
  in there somewhere and you can start asking those quick, Hey,
• 1:07:12
  how did you do this? I saw your athlete, you know,
• 1:07:15
  did so much better this year. How did that go?
• 1:07:16
  Hey, I've been dealing with this one kid.
• 1:07:18
  I can't get them to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:07:20
  Those questions are those conversations.
• 1:07:23
  I think are that's what I call, you know, there's formal and
• 1:07:25
  informal coaches Ed this. That's the informal side, the
• 1:07:28
  peer-to-peer. And it's neither are more
• 1:07:31
  important than the other. They're both extremely really
• 1:07:34
  important. So I love that.
• 1:07:35
  So you didn't at at a College Station at the finals of the OR
• 1:07:39
  I guess the semi, I don't know, I, I give up on this regional
• 1:07:42
  meet. You didn't go during the finals
• 1:07:45
  or whatever it is of the 1500. You didn't go running over to
• 1:07:47
  Powell and ask him questions because he had like 2020 kids
• 1:07:50
  and that freaking thing or something like that.
• 1:07:52
  He was too busy. But no, you know, he, he'd
• 1:07:55
  probably be the first person to, to talk to you.
• 1:07:58
  But yeah, I, I've talked to him for sure in the past.
• 1:08:02
  Now, you know, But yeah, I think most coaches are willing to
• 1:08:06
  share. I think it's all about yeah,
• 1:08:08
  going about it at the right time.
• 1:08:10
  And by the way, the ones that aren't, you might not want to
• 1:08:14
  really know what they say anyway.
• 1:08:16
  The good news is that is measured in my experience is
• 1:08:19
  very, very small of someone who thinks they have secrets in this
• 1:08:22
  profession. So, so if they think they do
• 1:08:24
  have secrets that well, that you, you probably don't want to
• 1:08:27
  know them, go, go find someone else like a, a Bouchex Knight or
• 1:08:29
  AU Andy Powell, etcetera. OK, so you are literally burning
• 1:08:35
  the candles at both ends. Man, I, I just can't imagine
• 1:08:39
  working full time as a teacher. That's a, that ain't working
• 1:08:43
  full time as a sales guy grading.
• 1:08:45
  My wife is a long term sub. So I have gotten a much better
• 1:08:48
  picture of what full time teachers do man.
• 1:08:51
  So again, that alone is a full time job.
• 1:08:53
  And then on top of that, coaching junior college track
• 1:08:56
  and field, you're looking for a more full time coaching job.
• 1:09:00
  You're in the second period thinking about the workouts for
• 1:09:02
  that afternoon. You're like, you know, I'd like
• 1:09:03
  to be working on that workout at at 9:00 in the morning, not, you
• 1:09:07
  know, teaching biology. What's the next step from
• 1:09:10
  Parkland Community College? Yeah, so I kind of was in a, you
• 1:09:15
  know, after he said working 8090 hour weeks for quite a while.
• 1:09:19
  We had our first child, my wife and I had our first child and
• 1:09:24
  she had a thriving practice there in in the Champaign Urbana
• 1:09:28
  area. And, and so I actually stepped
• 1:09:31
  away from coaching and took a academic position at EU of I
• 1:09:35
  just teaching advising in the kinesiology department.
• 1:09:38
  So I did that for three years and somewhere along year 2 in
• 1:09:45
  that journey, I was sitting at my desk and I remember this
• 1:09:50
  distinctly. I was, I had a undergrad student
• 1:09:53
  in front of me and they're trying to explore what career
• 1:09:57
  path they want to go down. And I said, you know, you got to
• 1:09:59
  follow your passions. You got to follow your dreams.
• 1:10:03
  I was giving this great speech and I got, they left the office
• 1:10:07
  and then I looked at, I stopped and I thought, man, like, I'm
• 1:10:11
  not even doing that. I'm not doing what it is that I
• 1:10:14
  love to be doing. And I enjoyed the position
• 1:10:17
  tremendously. I really did.
• 1:10:18
  I loved working there at the university, but I was not
• 1:10:22
  coaching and I felt like this huge void was there.
• 1:10:26
  And so, you know, eventually that that had me looking for an
• 1:10:31
  opportunity, and that's when I ended up teaching and coaching
• 1:10:34
  in Central College in Pella, Iowa Division 3.
• 1:10:40
  You know, Jeff, I feel like I know you, and now I feel like I
• 1:10:42
  don't know anything about you. Had no clue.
• 1:10:44
  OK. Love that story of sitting in
• 1:10:48
  your office in telling that kid that because I'd like to, when
• 1:10:52
  people are telling stories, I'm a visual guy, so I'm kind of
• 1:10:54
  playing the movie in my head and I kind of took the kid out and
• 1:10:57
  put a mirror in there. I knew exactly where you're
• 1:10:59
  going when you're saying I was like, you weren't talking to
• 1:11:02
  that kid, but you were talking to yourself of like, wait a
• 1:11:05
  minute, what am I doing here? This is great now, but this
• 1:11:08
  ain't this ain't my passion. This ain't what I was put on
• 1:11:10
  earth to do. So I love that.
• 1:11:12
  And I do have to give a small caveat, you in or not caveat.
• 1:11:14
  But I want to explore just real quick because you mentioned it
• 1:11:17
  and it is important. So a year after you stepped away
• 1:11:20
  from Parkland and went to U of I as a teacher, Parkland dropped
• 1:11:24
  the program after you, not while you were there the year.
• 1:11:28
  After as soon as I left they dropped the program.
• 1:11:32
  Right, OK. And what a mistake.
• 1:11:33
  I just can't believe, I mean, for an athletic program today
• 1:11:39
  that does well, like their volleyball team is always doing
• 1:11:41
  really well, that Champagne Urbana is a great area in the
• 1:11:44
  Midwest is a great area for track and field.
• 1:11:46
  I, I truly wish that they, they could bring it back and do it
• 1:11:49
  maybe differently. They don't necessarily have to
• 1:11:51
  have, you know, all the events and things like that, which I
• 1:11:52
  would love for them to have, but they could have a successful
• 1:11:56
  junior college program right here in Champagne at Parkland
• 1:12:00
  Community College. So I just hate that they dropped
• 1:12:02
  the program and wish that they would make the right decision
• 1:12:04
  and bring it back. So I just wanted to point that
• 1:12:06
  out. OK, So you go to U of I, you're
• 1:12:08
  there for three years and then you go to Central and Pella I, I
• 1:12:13
  thought you were staying. I thought this was the, the lead
• 1:12:15
  to Illinois State. You go all the way out, all the
• 1:12:18
  way. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a
• 1:12:21
  hall, it's a drive. So you go to Central and that's
• 1:12:23
  Division 3. Correct.
• 1:12:25
  So at this point, and you're still you're still young in your
• 1:12:29
  career here at this point, let's be real here.
• 1:12:32
  You've got high school coaching under your belt, You've got four
• 1:12:35
  year Division One under your belt, you've got junior college
• 1:12:38
  under your belt. And now you learn Division
• 1:12:41
  Three. That's that's quite a an array
• 1:12:45
  of really, you know, same sport, different avenues of how it gets
• 1:12:49
  meted out. What what do you think?
• 1:12:52
  Yeah. What do you think about Division
• 1:12:53
  3? I loved it.
• 1:12:55
  Yeah. Division 3, so different than my
• 1:13:00
  experience as a student athlete. Central and Pella, beautiful
• 1:13:05
  town, you know, wonderful people to work with.
• 1:13:08
  They they're very successful even to this day.
• 1:13:10
  Joe Dunham's over there doing a fantastic job with that program.
• 1:13:15
  Kevin Singer was the head track coach.
• 1:13:17
  I was a head cross country assistant track coach when I was
• 1:13:20
  there and Kevin had a great thing going on the trackside.
• 1:13:23
  We really started developed a cross country program and, and I
• 1:13:27
  was there for three years and actually loved it.
• 1:13:29
  And the drive and the passion that those young men and women
• 1:13:35
  had was amazing. You know, they, we were able to
• 1:13:39
  squeeze out everything we possibly could.
• 1:13:41
  And, and, and I, they were doing it for all the right reasons.
• 1:13:43
  Like there wasn't because of scholarship money.
• 1:13:45
  It wasn't because of really any other reason than they just
• 1:13:50
  loved the sport and I could I could relate to that in so many
• 1:13:55
  ways and and it was nice in in so many respects to not the
• 1:14:01
  scholarship part of things can be a challenge as a as a coach.
• 1:14:06
  It's not, you know, it's it's nice to have it so you can
• 1:14:09
  recruit talent, but it it can, you know, get in the in the
• 1:14:13
  middle of some of those relationships at times.
• 1:14:15
  And it's not the fun part of why I do this for for at least on my
• 1:14:20
  end of things. And it was nice that the
• 1:14:21
  Division Three level that that was never a part of that and you
• 1:14:25
  could just go and enjoy the sport together.
• 1:14:28
  I like how you put that about the scholarships and in my head
• 1:14:32
  I was like, yeah, you know, you're not buying athletes.
• 1:14:35
  And that's a very today 2025 statement within IL and things
• 1:14:39
  like that. However, when we and a lot of us
• 1:14:43
  still are under this operation where we have, you know, 10
• 1:14:46
  scholarships that we've got to met out a whole team, it just
• 1:14:51
  kind of hit me when, you know, when people talk about buying
• 1:14:53
  athletes today because I don't like that statement because it's
• 1:14:55
  not true. I don't know that we were doing
• 1:14:58
  it any like I'm just thinking of my career when I coached and
• 1:15:01
  recruited and you know, I'd offer a kid 30% and I really
• 1:15:05
  wanted them, but that's, you know, that's where I felt their
• 1:15:07
  value was. And they'd come back and say,
• 1:15:08
  well, Bovey at Illinois State offered me 50%.
• 1:15:11
  I'm like, well, I really, I do need this high jumper for crying
• 1:15:14
  out loud. So now I've got to go 60%.
• 1:15:16
  Like that was buying an athlete. Let's be real here.
• 1:15:19
  Like it wasn't that did that kid in that example didn't say, Hey,
• 1:15:23
  you know, Bovey offered me 50. But Mike, well, I really like
• 1:15:25
  you and your school better. So I'm going to take 30 that
• 1:15:27
  that that happens, that it happened.
• 1:15:30
  But that's not the majority. The majority was you get into
• 1:15:32
  this little freaking bidding war or whatever.
• 1:15:35
  So in D3 you don't have that because it's all financial need
• 1:15:38
  and and need based. I've said this many times, you
• 1:15:43
  know, here on the Guild connections podcast, we work
• 1:15:45
  very hard at having people that represent all divisions.
• 1:15:48
  So high school, D1D2D3 and AI JUCO elite summer summer club,
• 1:15:53
  club coaches, middle school, etcetera.
• 1:15:56
  And I'll always say it in regards to our college coaches,
• 1:15:59
  you know, the D3 coaches that I have on here, they always seem
• 1:16:03
  just a little happier than all my other coaches.
• 1:16:05
  They just seem to have a bigger smile and just seem a little
• 1:16:09
  less stressed. And they're still, I mean, go
• 1:16:11
  look at D3 nationals. They're still out putting some
• 1:16:13
  amazing friggin athletes here. You still got to coach your butt
• 1:16:16
  off to win a title and win any all American certificate in
• 1:16:20
  Division Three. And I do sometimes wonder, you
• 1:16:22
  know, this would be if you counted from the from when I
• 1:16:25
  started today, this be like close to my 30th year, right at
• 1:16:27
  my 30th year coaching. And I always wonder, I wonder if
• 1:16:30
  I'd have figured it out by now. I wonder if I'd have figured it
• 1:16:32
  out some point in my career is like, you know what, just go D3,
• 1:16:34
  man. You get paid pretty well, still
• 1:16:37
  get to coach kids. You you start the fall a little
• 1:16:40
  bit later. There's these breaks in the
• 1:16:43
  middle. I'm like, man, I don't know,
• 1:16:44
  man. I think D3 maybe they're going
• 1:16:47
  to end up becoming like the biggest winners of all this
• 1:16:51
  change in incident of LA and they're already our biggest
• 1:16:54
  division as far as number of programs.
• 1:16:55
  They have more programs than division two or Division One,
• 1:16:58
  maybe Division Three. Maybe the light gets shined on
• 1:17:01
  Division Three and people realize like, man, this is the
• 1:17:03
  golden goose and it's been here the whole whole time.
• 1:17:05
  So, so did you, because you came from with a little hiatus in
• 1:17:10
  University of Illinois. You came from JUCO, which is
• 1:17:12
  very scholarship intensive. And what I mean by that is
• 1:17:15
  you're giving out scholarships and you are trying to help
• 1:17:17
  people get scholarships. So you're like, it's a tug of
• 1:17:20
  war. You're always talking
• 1:17:21
  scholarship to yeah, have you applied?
• 1:17:24
  Have you put your FAFSA in? Like that was more of your
• 1:17:26
  conversations right at D3? Yeah, right.
• 1:17:30
  You know, and, and grassroots recruiting.
• 1:17:32
  I mean, it was, you know, Kevin Sanger showed me the way on not,
• 1:17:37
  you know, when you're when you're junior college, you can
• 1:17:41
  recruit the best that's out there.
• 1:17:44
  Sometimes I got the grades, sometimes I don't have the
• 1:17:46
  grades, but you're trying to get the best Division Three.
• 1:17:49
  You're always trying to get the best there too, but you're also
• 1:17:52
  trying to get numbers. And so he showed me like just we
• 1:17:56
  basically, I felt like I went to every single high school in the
• 1:17:59
  state of Iowa over the course of three years.
• 1:18:01
  I had done a school visit and it was just like there'd be weeks
• 1:18:05
  or weeks for two days. We'd just be out on the road
• 1:18:08
  going from one school the next and just, hey, anybody that
• 1:18:11
  wants to do the sport, let's do this.
• 1:18:12
  And yeah, it was way different. But I think again, it gave me a
• 1:18:18
  whole new perspective on recruiting in like, you know,
• 1:18:22
  the, the weekly letters and the, the, the, you know, so many
• 1:18:27
  smaller little details of recruiting.
• 1:18:30
  I never would have learned had I not had an opportunity.
• 1:18:33
  And, you know, but I still had to have a a high standard as far
• 1:18:38
  as like my coaching and my expectations and my student
• 1:18:41
  athletes. It's never changed no matter
• 1:18:44
  what level I've coached at high school, junior college, Division
• 1:18:47
  Three, Division One. I do the things the way that I
• 1:18:50
  think that I need to be doing them and have the same
• 1:18:52
  expectations of what it takes to be a part of the program.
• 1:18:56
  And and so it, you know, we just kind of did that within the
• 1:19:01
  model that we could fit that into there at Central College.
• 1:19:05
  I'm amazed at what coaches get done today.
• 1:19:08
  Like when you look at what's happening in track and field
• 1:19:10
  today in 2025, you know, you mentioned we were together in
• 1:19:13
  College Station. Yeah, I just look at the results
• 1:19:15
  of of those events and it's crazy.
• 1:19:17
  I just got back from Nike Outdoor Nationals up in Eugene.
• 1:19:20
  I mean, just crazy. I mean just crazy like things we
• 1:19:23
  never thought someone of that age, whether it's a high school
• 1:19:26
  kid or a middle school kid with some middle school sprinters
• 1:19:28
  this weekend that were just, I mean, just ludicrous to seniors,
• 1:19:32
  to professionals, etcetera. And yet I think, you know, when
• 1:19:37
  you look at it, all of it down kind of at its nature of what it
• 1:19:40
  is involved and things like that, maybe the best coaches we
• 1:19:43
  have are on D3. You know, those those D3 kids,
• 1:19:46
  like you said, a lot of them not maybe not most and maybe not
• 1:19:51
  definitely not all aren't getting recruited by D1 schools.
• 1:19:55
  But then you go look at the D3 national meet and I bet you
• 1:20:00
  every single kid who's an all American and maybe for sure like
• 1:20:03
  the top three of Division 3A Division One school would take
• 1:20:06
  them in a heartbeat. Like those guys and gals in
• 1:20:08
  Division Three are coaching. They're tailored.
• 1:20:11
  You talk about real development in our sport.
• 1:20:13
  Holy cow, you better be a developer.
• 1:20:15
  There is no. You know, getting a made
• 1:20:17
  athlete, there's no getting made athlete in Division One either.
• 1:20:19
  By the way, I don't like that myth either.
• 1:20:21
  No kid is coming out of high school and they're immediately a
• 1:20:24
  national champ at the NCAA. So you're developing no matter
• 1:20:27
  what. But it's just that D3 level.
• 1:20:29
  Like I said, I just sometimes I wonders, like, I wonder if I'd
• 1:20:31
  have figured it out by now. All right, Jeff, so you're
• 1:20:35
  enjoying D3. You're you're succeeding in D3,
• 1:20:41
  but maybe you have D1 or bust mentality.
• 1:20:44
  I don't know what. What do we go after after
• 1:20:45
  Central? You know, I think in my younger
• 1:20:50
  years I thought, you know, especially coming right out of
• 1:20:53
  college, I'm like, oh, I really want to be a Division One coach,
• 1:20:57
  etcetera, etcetera. But then after those other
• 1:21:00
  experiences, high school, junior college, Division 3, I really
• 1:21:04
  got to the point where, you know, I'm really happy.
• 1:21:07
  Like I, I could be at central or Division Three, the rest of my
• 1:21:11
  coaching career. I'm not looking for the next
• 1:21:14
  thing. And, and, and as soon as you,
• 1:21:16
  you start to kind of have that mentality, that's when somebody
• 1:21:19
  knocks on your door. And so Illinois State, you know,
• 1:21:23
  reached out and, and I, and I definitely wanted to listen just
• 1:21:27
  because I had seen Illinois State for many years being in
• 1:21:31
  the, in the Illinois area at EIU and at Parkland, having sent
• 1:21:36
  athletes here to see what kind of, you know, facilities and
• 1:21:41
  education that it had and the opportunities to win here.
• 1:21:44
  So I definitely was going to listen, you know, and just the
• 1:21:48
  opportunity was presented to me and I, I jumped at it.
• 1:21:52
  I really wanted to see what I could do at the Division One
• 1:21:55
  level. Well, I want to spend these last
• 1:21:57
  few minutes talking about this because you mentioned at the top
• 1:22:00
  of the show that you've been there for 20 years, which, Yeah,
• 1:22:03
  I remember a few years ago at USTFCA was with a group of
• 1:22:06
  coaches and we were talking about coaches that have been in
• 1:22:08
  a program for a long amount of time.
• 1:22:10
  And, you know, there's some real quick, obvious ones like a mouse
• 1:22:13
  and Curtis Fry back then. But after we all kind of got out
• 1:22:16
  about 78910 coaches, you know, it got real quiet.
• 1:22:20
  Like we had to really think about.
• 1:22:21
  But what about so and so? Yeah, no, they've been there, I
• 1:22:24
  guess 17 And what about so and so?
• 1:22:26
  No, just got there three years ago.
• 1:22:27
  Like it, it's, it's a a rarity. It's more rare that someone has
• 1:22:32
  been at an institution for 10 plus years, 20 years and close
• 1:22:36
  on your year here that it is the guys who've been there 345 and
• 1:22:40
  by the way, no judgement. I I was I, I coached for 10
• 1:22:42
  years and I was at 5 different places.
• 1:22:43
  So trust me, I'm not pointing fingers here.
• 1:22:45
  I'm just it's just amazing to me.
• 1:22:47
  So a couple quick questions. You've been there 20 years.
• 1:22:49
  You started in O 6. Did you go there as the head
• 1:22:52
  coach? I came here as the assistant to
• 1:22:55
  track and field and head cross country coach.
• 1:22:57
  Under was it John? Elvis Ford.
• 1:23:00
  Elvis Ford John was before Elvis, right?
• 1:23:02
  John. Coghlan retired around 2002.
• 1:23:06
  Thousand and One and then Jeff Pig took over.
• 1:23:10
  That's right. Yeah, Jeff was there.
• 1:23:12
  That's right. And then, then Elvis Ford took
• 1:23:14
  over. I think it was 2002 or 2003.
• 1:23:19
  OK. Is when Elvis came in.
• 1:23:22
  I remember John because I was coaching high school in Chicago,
• 1:23:25
  979697 right around that time frame and I he was the high jump
• 1:23:29
  group. I probably watched a video that
• 1:23:31
  he did of high jumping. So he became the high jump
• 1:23:32
  group. I was like, oh, this guy must
• 1:23:33
  know everything about high jump. That's just what I assumed with
• 1:23:36
  him. OK, so you start out as the
• 1:23:38
  assistant and O 6 how many years before you became the head
• 1:23:41
  coach? Would have been eight years, I
• 1:23:45
  believe. So 2014 you became the head
• 1:23:47
  coach. Yeah, 1415 so.
• 1:23:50
  You're so you're about 10 years so let's you know I'm from
• 1:23:53
  Alabama. So what you can use easy math
• 1:23:55
  roughly 10 years as an assistant, roughly 10 years as
• 1:23:57
  the head coach is what we say. OK, so let's go to when you
• 1:24:02
  became the head coach because that's always fascinating to me.
• 1:24:04
  And this is your you're the head coach at Parkland.
• 1:24:08
  But that was a part time job. I'm not dismissing it, but this
• 1:24:11
  is your first full time head coaching job.
• 1:24:15
  I'm always fascinated by that. Now you've had a lot of
• 1:24:17
  different experiences. Sometimes we have yeah, I call
• 1:24:20
  them kids, guys and gals that that are on the show.
• 1:24:22
  And, you know, after their after two years of coaching, they
• 1:24:24
  become a head coach and I'm like, Oh my God, how how like
• 1:24:27
  you've been coaching at this point for, I don't know.
• 1:24:30
  We'll attend at Illinois State. Three what, probably 15-17 years
• 1:24:35
  at that point when you became the head coach roughly.
• 1:24:37
  Yeah. And you still probably were
• 1:24:39
  there probably aspects were like, oh God, I wasn't ready for
• 1:24:41
  this or I didn't know I had to do this.
• 1:24:43
  So my my favorite questions I asked this of everybody at their
• 1:24:46
  first head coaching job. When we get to that part of
• 1:24:50
  their story, the first question is when you got the head
• 1:24:53
  coaching job. So when you sit down in the big
• 1:24:55
  boy seat, what was something that you thought was going to be
• 1:25:00
  hard? You're like, I might have to
• 1:25:02
  figure out how to do this or I might have to get help on this,
• 1:25:05
  but ended up being easy. And so and because you know, you
• 1:25:08
  can talk while you think about that here a little bit, because
• 1:25:10
  you can think about all the millions of difference of hats
• 1:25:12
  you wear as the head coach. Budgeting.
• 1:25:14
  We mentioned budgeting, equipment, recruiting,
• 1:25:17
  scheduling, alumni. Maybe you're involved in hiring
• 1:25:22
  committees now that you're a head coach for your athletic
• 1:25:24
  department. You're part of the hiring
• 1:25:25
  committee for the softball coach or whatnot.
• 1:25:29
  I mean, the ability, there's other thing grades, academics,
• 1:25:32
  anything about that. There's so many things that you
• 1:25:34
  have to do as the head coach. What was something that you're
• 1:25:36
  like, oh, I might struggle with this or I might have to find an
• 1:25:39
  assistant that can really do this?
• 1:25:41
  And it ended up being like, oh, wow, yeah, actually, this wasn't
• 1:25:43
  wasn't as hard as I thought. Yeah, I think coming into it for
• 1:25:49
  me was just learning how to manage such a large group of
• 1:25:54
  student athletes. I think at the time we we
• 1:25:58
  probably had about 70 men and women or so and managing a a
• 1:26:04
  full coaching staff and just the the whole thing.
• 1:26:09
  I think initially feeling overwhelmed 100% like wow, OK,
• 1:26:14
  here I am like, what, what are we going to do?
• 1:26:16
  And so, so I think the management side, not not only
• 1:26:21
  just my immediate staff, but an athletic trainer or a string
• 1:26:24
  industry or psychologist and then, you know, bringing in, you
• 1:26:29
  know, so many other people and trying to make sure the
• 1:26:31
  communication really is, is going to be as effective as it
• 1:26:36
  possibly can. So.
• 1:26:38
  Great point. When he brought up management of
• 1:26:41
  like your staff. You know, that's one of the
• 1:26:43
  things that I don't know if it perturbs me or just concerns me.
• 1:26:47
  You know, we go to track clinics and professional development and
• 1:26:51
  what we're getting better today in 2025, you know, go back 1015
• 1:26:55
  years, 90% of the topics would be, you know, how to coach a
• 1:26:59
  cross country runner better, how to coach a long jumper better
• 1:27:02
  and then there'd be some professional development.
• 1:27:03
  We're getting better to where it's more 80207525 where we're
• 1:27:06
  talking about, you know, resume development and things like
• 1:27:10
  that. But one of the things that I've
• 1:27:12
  yet to hear anywhere, and maybe this will be the first one is
• 1:27:16
  when someone becomes a head coach.
• 1:27:18
  Does anyone pull you to the side?
• 1:27:20
  And but I mean, anyway, I mean like someone in HR or you're in
• 1:27:23
  oversight AD and says, hey, so you're, you're now responsible
• 1:27:27
  for putting together a staff. Here are best practices on
• 1:27:31
  interviews, reading resumes, best practices on how to build
• 1:27:35
  your staff. And I don't mean like, you know,
• 1:27:36
  you're the track coach. You get to pick the throws and
• 1:27:38
  jumps and there's like, but you know what?
• 1:27:40
  You probably don't want to work with your buddies.
• 1:27:41
  And here's why. Oh, and by the way, when you do
• 1:27:44
  hire these guys and gals now, here's how you evaluate them on
• 1:27:48
  year after year. And here's if you have to
• 1:27:50
  release someone, here's the proper ways to do it.
• 1:27:52
  I've never heard a head coach ever getting taught advised on
• 1:27:59
  that. It's always like, yeah, hey, go
• 1:28:00
  hire coaches. And it's like, what do you mean
• 1:28:02
  that there's a lot involved with that?
• 1:28:04
  You know, we hire here, I'm involved in that process.
• 1:28:06
  There's a lot involved in that. So when you said management of
• 1:28:09
  team and and staff, it's like, Oh yeah, dude, I, I could easily
• 1:28:13
  see you going, Oh my gosh, what? OK, I've, I've been hired.
• 1:28:16
  How do I hire and how do I evaluate?
• 1:28:19
  But the question was, what was something you thought was hard
• 1:28:21
  that ended up actually being easier.
• 1:28:23
  So you've learned you, you, you kind of figured out that groove
• 1:28:25
  over. Time right like it didn't happen
• 1:28:28
  overnight and I think the previous experiences that I had
• 1:28:31
  at all those other positions we've been talking about and
• 1:28:36
  seeing how Coach Ford did things, you know you know here
• 1:28:41
  at Illinois State and what worked well at Illinois State
• 1:28:45
  helped tremendously. I, you know, I wouldn't have
• 1:28:46
  been ready to, to jump in as a head coach had I not been here
• 1:28:51
  already and seeing how things can get done.
• 1:28:52
  But yeah, you're right. There is no playbook on how to
• 1:28:56
  do all of those things. And so no matter how much
• 1:28:59
  experience you have coming into it, as much or little, you're
• 1:29:03
  still figuring it out. You know, when you make mistakes
• 1:29:07
  along the way, you know, and you try to make as few as you as you
• 1:29:10
  possibly can. But we're all going to make
• 1:29:13
  them. And so it's trying to learn from
• 1:29:15
  them and, and to make better, better decisions each each year
• 1:29:19
  that you have that opportunity. So I told you, I ask every first
• 1:29:23
  time head coach 2 questions. That's one.
• 1:29:25
  What was that you thought would be hard would be easy?
• 1:29:27
  Well, the other question, the second question is the exact
• 1:29:29
  reverse that. What's something that you
• 1:29:31
  thought would be easier? Like, oh man, I'm going to nail
• 1:29:34
  this part. And it actually was like, oh,
• 1:29:36
  actually it's a little bit more complex than I thought you had
• 1:29:38
  to get help from oversight 80 or something.
• 1:29:40
  Again, you know, budgeting, a lot of assistants have nothing
• 1:29:43
  to do with budgets. And then you sit down on day
• 1:29:45
  one. It's like, all right, figure out
• 1:29:47
  how to run a, a whole 6 teams by the way, with this budget here.
• 1:29:51
  And maybe you think like, oh man, schedule.
• 1:29:54
  I know exactly where I this in scheduling and budgeting go very
• 1:29:56
  hand in hand. I know exactly where we, I can't
• 1:29:58
  believe we go to these meets. We're going to go to these
• 1:30:00
  meets. And then you realize, Oh, well,
• 1:30:01
  I can't even get in that meet because it's already full and I
• 1:30:04
  can't even afford these plane tickets.
• 1:30:06
  What was something that you thought you were going to just
• 1:30:08
  come in and just crush it And you're like, oh, it's a little
• 1:30:10
  bit harder than I thought. I need some help here.
• 1:30:13
  I, I think it all goes hand in hand, the recruiting part, the
• 1:30:15
  scheduling part, the budgeting part, because you have a
• 1:30:19
  scholarship budget, you have a travel budget and you have a, an
• 1:30:23
  equipment budget and you have all these things.
• 1:30:25
  But how do you bring in enough student athletes to have team
• 1:30:29
  success, but not stretch yourself so thin that you can't
• 1:30:34
  take care of the student athletes that you have in a way
• 1:30:36
  that they're, they're very happy and scheduling falls into all
• 1:30:40
  that too, right? So having a schedule that fits
• 1:30:44
  your budget, but one that's going to challenge your best
• 1:30:48
  athletes and also help your developmental athletes have
• 1:30:51
  their opportunities to grow and to get better and to have
• 1:30:54
  opportunities. And that's why you bring them
• 1:30:56
  here. And so having a balance there of
• 1:31:00
  taking care of everybody that you bring into the fold is
• 1:31:03
  really important to me. And it's always trying to do it
• 1:31:07
  in a creative way that is fun and makes it interesting.
• 1:31:11
  And so you're not always going to have the exact same schedule
• 1:31:14
  every single year. You might have some specific
• 1:31:18
  meets, the dual with Indiana State or the Missouri Valley
• 1:31:21
  Conference in the NCAA, etcetera.
• 1:31:23
  Those are all going to be focal points.
• 1:31:26
  But then trying to be creative and creating different
• 1:31:29
  opportunities of which sometimes requires that you reach out to a
• 1:31:34
  different coach at a different institution to say, hey, we want
• 1:31:38
  to come to your meet this year. Anything you can do to help us
• 1:31:40
  out or to create a home meet where you say, hey, we're going
• 1:31:45
  to score this meet. We're going to bring in these
• 1:31:47
  three teams and everybody's going to be able to compete,
• 1:31:50
  everybody that they want. And but yet we're going to do it
• 1:31:54
  on this weekend where there's three other home events going on
• 1:31:58
  with baseball and with softball. And now we're going to be create
• 1:32:02
  this cool environment on campus. We're all working together.
• 1:32:05
  And so, you know, it's just trying to be creative and think
• 1:32:08
  outside the box. And I'll be honest, like I, I
• 1:32:11
  need all my coaches and in the different in, in the student
• 1:32:16
  athletes, you know, get feedback from them and the coaches to
• 1:32:19
  say, Hey, what, what can we do a little bit differently here to,
• 1:32:21
  to, to keep this fun and interesting and, and help us,
• 1:32:27
  you know, when the Missouri Valley and to help us get more
• 1:32:30
  athletes to the NCA championships.
• 1:32:32
  Like what are, you know, give us some of that feedback and and
• 1:32:35
  help us make this thing better. Kind of just a question I had.
• 1:32:40
  When you're talking about scheduling, it's a little bit of
• 1:32:43
  A2 parter like I want, I want to ask you, I want you to answer
• 1:32:46
  for yourself and then I, I want you to answer for the the body
• 1:32:50
  of coaches do most programs. So therefore, most coaches stay
• 1:32:56
  with the same schedule year after year.
• 1:32:58
  And obviously sometimes there's minor tweaks in regards to like
• 1:33:01
  sometimes a, you know, you always go to this one meet and
• 1:33:03
  they decide they're not hosting this year.
• 1:33:04
  So you're, you're forced to make a change.
• 1:33:06
  So do do most coaches have the same?
• 1:33:09
  And, and we know that you, you talked about focal meet.
• 1:33:11
  There's some meets that just, you know, they're always going
• 1:33:12
  to be the schedule conference. Obviously NCAA's obviously maybe
• 1:33:14
  Drake relays always, always maybe certain dual meets, things
• 1:33:18
  like that. But with the other ones that you
• 1:33:20
  could change, if you want to do most, do you and do most coaches
• 1:33:24
  stay the same or which would, which would be the easy button
• 1:33:27
  because there's so much complexity in your job, so it
• 1:33:29
  would be easier just to know. Oh yeah.
• 1:33:30
  On the third week of February, we always go to that.
• 1:33:33
  I know what I know what hotel we're going to.
• 1:33:35
  I know where to feed the kids. When you go to a new meet,
• 1:33:37
  there's all those things to figure out what hotel, how we're
• 1:33:40
  going to feed the kids, transportation, etcetera.
• 1:33:42
  Do most coaches and you stay the same or do you switch it up
• 1:33:46
  every year? What's what's kind of the
• 1:33:47
  thought there? Yeah, I mean, I if I was to ask
• 1:33:54
  10 of my student athletes, we probably get a few different
• 1:33:56
  responses. I think some would say, wow,
• 1:33:58
  seems like we go to a lot of the same meets and then some others
• 1:34:01
  would be like, oh, you know what, like this year we went to
• 1:34:04
  that meet and the, you know, two years ago where, you know.
• 1:34:07
  So I think the the answer is somewhere in the middle where we
• 1:34:11
  probably have a lot of similarities from year to year,
• 1:34:15
  but then we also have some differences.
• 1:34:17
  And certainly that's what we're looking for, right, to try to
• 1:34:21
  find something that is regional, especially when it comes to
• 1:34:26
  cross country and indoor. There's so many indoor bank
• 1:34:29
  tracks here in the Midwest. There's so many good cross
• 1:34:32
  country meets nearby. We don't have to go very far.
• 1:34:36
  But when we get to the outdoor season in particular, that's
• 1:34:39
  when we really need to invest in travel more.
• 1:34:43
  And, and so that's when we we tend to get a little bit more
• 1:34:45
  creative on where we go during the outdoor season.
• 1:34:48
  That's a good point, yeah. Yeah, that and that speaks to
• 1:34:51
  the, you know, what works for Georgia State doesn't work for
• 1:34:55
  Illinois State and or might not, I should say, might not work for
• 1:34:58
  Illinois State and might not work for Texas State, etcetera,
• 1:35:00
  because of location and weather is what you're talking about
• 1:35:03
  there in in that regards. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
• 1:35:07
  That's just interesting. You know, I, I was the type of
• 1:35:09
  kid that every few months I would change my room around.
• 1:35:13
  I just, I like change. I'm one of those weird people
• 1:35:16
  that, you know, a lot of people shirk away from change.
• 1:35:18
  I like change. And so I think if I were at an
• 1:35:21
  institution for, you know, 20 years, I think I'd be that weird
• 1:35:24
  guy. That would be like trying to
• 1:35:25
  change it all the time. And then I would run up against
• 1:35:27
  so many roadblocks, though, like I'd, I'd cancel one meet, you
• 1:35:30
  know, tell Joe, I'm not going to your meeting.
• 1:35:32
  I'd call Sally and she's like, well, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm at cap.
• 1:35:35
  I can't, I can't have you. I'm meeting.
• 1:35:37
  And now I'm stuck with no meet that week where I got to go to
• 1:35:39
  somewhere I don't want to go. And and then I'd be so
• 1:35:41
  frustrated because I'd have to find new hotels and food and
• 1:35:43
  stuff, but I'd I'd still, I'd love it.
• 1:35:46
  That's what I would go to different places all the time, I
• 1:35:49
  swear. OK, New head, new head coach.
• 1:35:52
  Who is the first person you called?
• 1:35:55
  All right, person, I'm a new head coach.
• 1:35:59
  Lay it on me. What do I need to expect?
• 1:36:01
  Mentor me. Who's the first person you
• 1:36:03
  called or might have reached out to you?
• 1:36:07
  Tom Akers. You kind of looked at me like I
• 1:36:12
  should have known that. Like, come on, man.
• 1:36:14
  Did you reach out to him or did he reach out to you?
• 1:36:18
  I think it was a little bit both.
• 1:36:19
  I mean, he knew that I was looking at the opportunity and
• 1:36:22
  so it was a daily conversation for, for a while there.
• 1:36:26
  And so, you know, he, he'd reach out to me and just check in at
• 1:36:30
  times. And you know, there were some
• 1:36:31
  others as well, but Tom was definitely a big part of that
• 1:36:35
  and still is to this day. That's a pretty good one.
• 1:36:37
  I like that. What was the first thing you
• 1:36:40
  did? I I I I put us on the schedule
• 1:36:46
  for a different meet. Mike or I analyzed all of our
• 1:36:49
  scholarship. What was the kind of the first
• 1:36:51
  like? OK, I'm, I'm head coach Bobby.
• 1:36:52
  Now I have a lot more authority at that point.
• 1:36:57
  What what do you remember? Like, what's the first thing
• 1:36:59
  like? All right, I know I need to.
• 1:37:01
  I want to put my fingerprint on this part of the program first.
• 1:37:06
  Well, we really want to emphasize our success at the
• 1:37:08
  conference level and establish a well balanced team in and we had
• 1:37:13
  some incredible athletes for sure for quite a while while I
• 1:37:18
  was an assistant coach and Coach Ford as a head coach.
• 1:37:20
  We some of them working for you right now.
• 1:37:23
  Mr. Tim Glover was one of them for sure, and he.
• 1:37:26
  Was pretty good. Yeah, yeah, Brittany Smith and
• 1:37:29
  IE Pratt and and many others. But yeah, I think for for us, it
• 1:37:34
  was about building a little bit more depth in in all the
• 1:37:38
  different event areas to really give us an opportunity to try to
• 1:37:40
  compete for a Missouri Valley Conference championship and yet
• 1:37:44
  still have that same success at the national level.
• 1:37:48
  So those were our initial goals. So when?
• 1:37:51
  When I took over as a head coach.
• 1:37:55
  Jeff, you know, you've been there 20 years and you've had
• 1:38:00
  kind of two parts of success. And what I mean by that as
• 1:38:02
  you've had kids that are part of your program.
• 1:38:05
  You mentioned Tim, so you didn't well, as far as I know, you
• 1:38:08
  didn't coach Javelin, so you didn't coach him.
• 1:38:10
  But you know, you're it's part of the program.
• 1:38:11
  I truly believe that it takes the whole village, not just
• 1:38:15
  that, just not not just that event coaching that athlete.
• 1:38:17
  It takes everybody. And you have had people directly
• 1:38:21
  under your you know, they were your event group that have gone
• 1:38:24
  on big time success. You had national champions, you
• 1:38:27
  had Olympians, you've had conference.
• 1:38:29
  I mean, just very, very successful program that you've
• 1:38:32
  been involved in and have led now for close to 10 years.
• 1:38:35
  What keeps you there? You're you're not afraid to, I
• 1:38:39
  almost said hop around, which would have been completely
• 1:38:41
  unfair because you've been at a place for 20 years, but you're
• 1:38:44
  not afraid to move at least maybe you know, earlier stage in
• 1:38:47
  your life and career, your age and stage there.
• 1:38:50
  You've been very successful. I have to imagine other places
• 1:38:54
  have talked to you, but you remain steadfast as a red bird
• 1:38:58
  and you remain from from the outside looking in here
• 1:39:02
  steadfast at I want to have a winning program.
• 1:39:05
  You're you have you have certainly not pushed cruise
• 1:39:08
  control, my friend. You continue to push that
• 1:39:11
  accelerator to get good athletes, good, good assistance.
• 1:39:13
  I'm thinking about Deshawn now, who you know is tearing it up
• 1:39:16
  coaching and and sprints and things like that.
• 1:39:18
  He's doing an amazing job. Your whole staff.
• 1:39:20
  I'm just singling him out. So you certainly have not hit
• 1:39:23
  cruise control. You can still accelerating
• 1:39:25
  forward and having a great program.
• 1:39:27
  What's kept you there at Bloomington, at Illinois State?
• 1:39:31
  Well, I love the university and the and the people I work with
• 1:39:35
  here and the community as a whole.
• 1:39:36
  Bloomington Normal is a great place.
• 1:39:38
  And, you know, I have three sons and, you know, they're here.
• 1:39:42
  That's a big poll for me. And, and I think, you know, to
• 1:39:46
  me, having coached at these different levels, I just, I just
• 1:39:51
  love coaching the sport of track and field.
• 1:39:52
  And so, you know, I'm not chasing, I don't know, something
• 1:39:57
  that I think might be better somewhere else.
• 1:39:59
  And, you know, I, I've had, you know, some, you know,
• 1:40:04
  opportunities, maybe look at some other possibilities.
• 1:40:07
  But at the end of the day, like, I'm really happy here and I want
• 1:40:10
  to continue to see what we can do to take this to the next
• 1:40:14
  level. And, and, you know, I I have a
• 1:40:17
  great staff. You mentioned Deshawn Jordan.
• 1:40:20
  Mike Turk, Jake Jacoby, Jake Gillman, Steve Luke, you know,
• 1:40:25
  we've got a great group and we really love working together
• 1:40:28
  and, and you know, they constantly pushing the the
• 1:40:31
  buttons. I'm trying to take us to the
• 1:40:33
  next level and find, you know, what recruits going to help us
• 1:40:37
  get there. What, you know, what do we need
• 1:40:39
  to do to, you know, develop this athlete and how do we support
• 1:40:43
  them in ways that they can get a great education here?
• 1:40:46
  And so the, the things that the university and the department
• 1:40:49
  value, it's a big part of our team values.
• 1:40:52
  And, and so that's what that's what keeps me here honestly, is
• 1:40:55
  just all those things put together.
• 1:40:58
  I get to do what I love to do. And Illinois State's giving me
• 1:41:01
  the the opportunity to do that. You know, I told you I'm a
• 1:41:04
  visual guy. You keep, I keep hearing the
• 1:41:07
  theme of, you know, leveling up, leveling up.
• 1:41:08
  So I think of like this mountain.
• 1:41:10
  I don't know that you have a mountain that has a peak.
• 1:41:13
  Like you just continues like, oh, man, that was a really good
• 1:41:15
  year. That's awesome.
• 1:41:15
  All right. How do we get better?
• 1:41:16
  Move up, move up a step. Oh man, this is really good.
• 1:41:20
  Wow. We had more all Americans or
• 1:41:21
  more qualifiers than ever. That's really cool.
• 1:41:23
  All right, How do we step up and do more?
• 1:41:24
  Like you're always kind of stepping up that proverbial
• 1:41:27
  mountain that doesn't have a mountaintop.
• 1:41:29
  You you just continue to climb forward and you know, to do
• 1:41:32
  that, to keep using that, you know, mountain climbing analogy
• 1:41:36
  as if I had any experience doing that.
• 1:41:37
  By the way, it does take a complete staff.
• 1:41:39
  It it does not not a staff, a complete team.
• 1:41:42
  And obviously athletes there, but I'm talking about, you
• 1:41:45
  mentioned Jacoby and Turk and those guys, Luke, that that's
• 1:41:49
  part of it. Your athletic trainers, your
• 1:41:50
  administration, those are all part of that team that has to
• 1:41:55
  move forward to make that step by step there.
• 1:41:57
  There cannot be any weak leaks there.
• 1:41:59
  They all have to be pulling on the same chain.
• 1:42:01
  And that seems to be your your, your motto, your mission, your
• 1:42:04
  passion to continue to to level up.
• 1:42:07
  Yeah, you know, and we're all humans, right?
• 1:42:10
  We all have, you know, a day where maybe we're a little a
• 1:42:15
  little bit less motivated than the day before.
• 1:42:17
  And but then you get that that other coach and your staff, it's
• 1:42:20
  like, hey, you need to get your shit together.
• 1:42:23
  Let's go. You know, like we hold each
• 1:42:26
  other accountable and and you know that, but again, like that
• 1:42:30
  doesn't happen that often, but yet you need to have that like,
• 1:42:34
  you know, we didn't win this year.
• 1:42:36
  So what do we got to do differently to win?
• 1:42:38
  Like what, what are we missing it?
• 1:42:39
  What are we, you know, let's, let's think outside the box here
• 1:42:42
  and let's get in the room and that's have an honest
• 1:42:44
  conversation about the state of the union, right?
• 1:42:47
  And like, how do we, how do we get better?
• 1:42:50
  And so you got to be asking yourself that all the time.
• 1:42:52
  And, and, and that's what's great about the staff that
• 1:42:55
  they're, they're, they keep me on my toes that way.
• 1:42:58
  And, and hopefully I I do a little bit of that for them too.
• 1:43:01
  Teammates are invaluable. They really are.
• 1:43:03
  We, I think of this, I can't remember where it was from, but
• 1:43:06
  the saying it's if you want to go fast, go by yourself.
• 1:43:08
  If you want to go far, go with others.
• 1:43:11
  And you know, when you think about going far means winning
• 1:43:14
  championships, going fast is maybe winning one time, one
• 1:43:16
  thing going far, you pick the people around you tremendously.
• 1:43:20
  All right, Mr. Bovie, last question here and I'll let you
• 1:43:23
  go. Appreciate your time here today
• 1:43:25
  as you look forward to the future and you get to define if
• 1:43:28
  that's the 26th season, the 36th season, I don't know the next
• 1:43:31
  5-10 years. What's got you excited about
• 1:43:33
  Illinois State track and field? Well, you know, obviously we're
• 1:43:38
  in this new world with roster caps and you know, we're we're
• 1:43:43
  able to keep them at the full complement of 45 and up to 17 on
• 1:43:48
  the cross countryside. And so, you know, we're going
• 1:43:50
  to, you know, actually, it's going to be a little bit smaller
• 1:43:54
  of a roster than what we've had, but we're really embracing that
• 1:43:57
  and looking forward to, you know, just taking this program
• 1:44:02
  to the next level. And, and for us, that's continue
• 1:44:05
  to recruit a high level student athlete.
• 1:44:08
  And and so for us, we're going to continue to try to recruit
• 1:44:11
  the, you know, the the home, you know, state start with the state
• 1:44:15
  of Illinois, But we also have gotten a bigger presence on the
• 1:44:18
  international recruiting scene. We have quite a few
• 1:44:20
  internationals on our team. You know, at this moment in
• 1:44:24
  time, we'll continue to do that. Obviously look at the transfer
• 1:44:26
  portal as well. So it's going to be a nice
• 1:44:29
  balance and we're going to be learning how to navigate all of
• 1:44:33
  the changes and and what not. But the other big part of what
• 1:44:36
  we need to be doing here and really any mid major is we can't
• 1:44:40
  just be recruiting the people to come into our program.
• 1:44:44
  We have to be doing the things that keep our athletes here.
• 1:44:47
  And so that is the part that we're working on the most is
• 1:44:51
  working with NIL and working with all the different resources
• 1:44:56
  we have on campus, you know, to take care of our student
• 1:44:59
  athletes in a way that they they want to stay here because they
• 1:45:01
  love being a red bird. And so that's the key to our
• 1:45:04
  success is not only bringing in wonderful people that are good
• 1:45:09
  students and good athletes, but are going to keep them happy and
• 1:45:13
  and they're going to want to thrive here and to finish out
• 1:45:15
  their eligibility here at Illinois State.
• 1:45:17
  Yeah, great point there. And you know, when I hear those
• 1:45:20
  things and those are all, you know, we should be doing those
• 1:45:22
  before an IL time frame and all this kind we were.
• 1:45:25
  But you know, I hear those things.
• 1:45:26
  I'm like, you know, I'm OK that I got out because now I get to
• 1:45:30
  do those kind of very same issues, but with you with
• 1:45:31
  coaches. And you know, part of that is
• 1:45:33
  being here on the podcast and uplifting an honor.
• 1:45:35
  What you doing, Jeff, First of all, thank you.
• 1:45:38
  You know, I asked for a lot of time.
• 1:45:40
  This is not an easy podcast to be on guys and gals.
• 1:45:43
  You know, I don't ask you for 30 minutes.
• 1:45:44
  I ask you for two hours. And we're we're getting close to
• 1:45:46
  that mark. And so I'm just so grateful for
• 1:45:48
  you, Jeff. I'm glad I'm glad we were able
• 1:45:50
  to do this post track season that for you a little bit here.
• 1:45:53
  So there's a little bit more time for you, but you know, the
• 1:45:55
  most valuable thing that you can give me is your time.
• 1:45:57
  And I'm, I'm really grateful that you, you joined us today
• 1:45:59
  here. Well, likewise Mike, I, it's
• 1:46:03
  been fun and you know, something that I haven't been able to do
• 1:46:06
  and truly enjoyed it and appreciate your time as well.
• 1:46:10
  Absolutely, man. Jeff, thank you so much for your
• 1:46:12
  journey. Thank you guys and gals for
• 1:46:13
  being here listening to him. And I'm so cool.
• 1:46:16
  You know, Jeff is one of those guys I talk about.
• 1:46:18
  You know, sometimes I have guests on here that I've known
• 1:46:19
  forever. You know, they're like brothers
• 1:46:21
  to me or sisters to me, other kind of the other side of that
• 1:46:24
  spectrum. I've never met them before.
• 1:46:26
  This is the first time ever. Jeff is kind of in the middle.
• 1:46:28
  But boy, I learned so much about this story and I love and I want
• 1:46:33
  to explore this more with coaches.
• 1:46:34
  I love the variety of coaching, right?
• 1:46:36
  High school, junior college, Division Three, Division One, GA
• 1:46:39
  and assistant head coach. I mean, there's a a lot of
• 1:46:41
  different roles there. And that was what I think is
• 1:46:43
  super important for people who listen to the podcast to to hear
• 1:46:47
  and see, because we have a lot of people who listen.
• 1:46:49
  This is their first year coaching ever.
• 1:46:51
  And you, you, you think you're on the path that you're always
• 1:46:54
  gonna be at the school or you're always gonna be Division One or
• 1:46:56
  always gonna be high school. And there's a lot of paths out
• 1:46:58
  there and a lot of avenues to get there.
• 1:47:00
  And I think hearing experiences like Jeff are extremely
• 1:47:03
  important. So thank you again so much for
• 1:47:04
  being here and listening. Join us next week.
• 1:47:06
  We'll do it all over again. Thanks guys.
• 1:47:10
  The goals to appreciate the coach, the ones that point
• 1:47:12
  people most every season needs a voice of reason speaking the
• 1:47:16
  growth you got to prep before you carry the load ice coffee to
• 1:47:19
  the soul. For those of us stay on the go
• 1:47:21
  proper handoff to stay in the zone which you packing for the
• 1:47:24
  road. There's more than one way to go
• 1:47:26
  taking those SAT paying your toe.
• 1:47:28
  It ain't practice if you purchase St.
• 1:47:29
  Clair. It can't happen until you listen
• 1:47:31
  with both is you can't mentor without a mentor of experience.
• 1:47:36
  You can reinvent those years. Every plan's got to stand and
• 1:47:38
  deliver to the price sacrifice. Can you give up you.
• 1:47:42
  It's a choice and a fight, not a win or lose.
• 1:47:44
  It's not a ploy boy device. Y'all can make more moves.
• 1:47:47
  It's not about how to, it's all about why you don't know till
• 1:47:50
  you know who you are inside 6,000,000.
• 1:47:53
  Waste of time, choose none. So y'all cross finish line, The
• 1:47:56
  work ain't done so we learn from the experts.
• 1:47:58
  But y'all got to put in the network.
• 1:48:00
  Kill athletics, use the network. It's all about connections put
• 1:48:03
  together for the profession to where every track coach could be
• 1:48:06
  blessing.