Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #314: Jim Vahrenkamp-University of North Dakota

Transcript

#314: Jim Vahrenkamp-University of North Dakota · 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 juvenile
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  tuned 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 back on the Gil athletics connections podcast so
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  pumped that you would you press play again, you know, 300 and
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  something episodes going into six years of this and now adding
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  a daily Gil 1918 project. It's amazing the coaches, the
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  men and women who continue to plug in here to learn about
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  coaches around the country and to receive value in our coaches,
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  speaking to them through the Guild 1918 project as well.
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  So pumped for today. We're going to go, you know, I
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  don't go to the state very often because I'm a weenie, meaning I
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  don't like cold and I just assume it's cold 24/7 up here.
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  We're going to find out more about that.
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  Help me welcome the head coach of the University of North
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  Dakota, Mr. Jim Vehrenkamp. Jim, how are you, Sir?
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  Doing great, thanks for having me.
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  I've done this 300 times. I must be in a I'm too stressed
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  or too doing too many things that I just realized that is the
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  first time I have not introduced a guest correctly.
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  Jim, you are the wise and wonderful Jim Verincam.
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  I started that on episode 1 and I've carried that through.
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  And I really literally just saw caught myself doing that.
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  So forgive me. Forgive me.
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  Our longtime listeners will will recognize that immediately.
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  I can't believe I did that. University of North Dakota.
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  All right. I like to my my kind of geekdom
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  nerddom is I like to know everybody's mascots and I I
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  think I do know. I I can see that.
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  Well, I know it's on your shirt, but I can see that it's a bird.
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  You're not the you're not. Yeah, you're not eagles.
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  Are you like a the fighting hawk or something like that?
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  That is it, right? That's it.
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  Yeah. I love that.
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  I love that. And is it true that it's cold
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  24/7 365 in North Dakota? Was 86 yesterday.
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  Holy crap, is that right? Yeah, I I would say no.
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  Yeah, I was in. That's interesting.
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  I was in Dallas, TX yesterday and it was Uber raining, just
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  raining all day and like 4550°. So that's amazing.
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  It was 86. 86 dry you know it was it was toasty for the 5th of
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  May. Yeah, hey.
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  And I've been to your campus when it's.
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  Yeah, I've never been there when it's not nice, like when it's
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  snowing and stuff. But when I've been there, it's
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  it's been nice. It's a beautiful campus.
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  Like I, I can kind of see the sunshine and it's a, it's a
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  really nice place there. Tons of construction over the
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  last couple of years, almost a billion dollars worth of
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  construction so. Wow, holy, is that right?
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  Yeah, they continue to do stuff. I mean, the build, the current
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  office that I'm in now, less than a year old, the building
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  across the street where we were from the 1950s, that's going to
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  go away. They're going to put it in a
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  whole mining, engineering, science, technology building.
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  That'll be, you know, about $200 million project.
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  It's going to be incredible so. Dude, I, I did, I was going to
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  remark, your office does look different than what I remember
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  going to. So you're, so I, I know where
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  you were, I kind of kind of picturing it.
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  So you're across the street now, Yes, Yeah, there was anything
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  there if I remember correctly. No, there was nothing there.
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  It used to be the old football stadium, Memorial Stadium that
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  was built following World War One.
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  And that building was, you know, here from from then until
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  probably four years ago. And they took that down.
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  The outdoor track is over my over my right shoulder indoor
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  track is across the outdoor track.
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  So now it's all pretty, pretty tied together in a, in a, you
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  know, they called an athletics complex.
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  Yeah. You know, we believe healthy
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  things grow, right? Like, you know, humans, when
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  they're healthy, we grow gardens, etcetera.
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  What is behind this? I mean, this is growth.
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  I mean, a billion dollars worth of construction that doesn't
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  happen because things are going bad.
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  No. So we had a president, President
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  Kennedy, who just kind of looked at it.
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  What we're doing in a lot of places do this higher Ed
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  definitely defers maintenance because you don't always have
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  the ability to replace the roof when the roof needs to be
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  replaced. And he looked at some of the
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  buildings that we had on campus and said, you know, the deferred
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  maintenance bill, building costs are more than what it would cost
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  us to tear the thing down, build a brand new one and finance that
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  cost out over the same period of time.
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  And so they've gone and they've torn down our student union.
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  We have a brand new, one of those brand new Business School,
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  a brand new dorm complex. You know, they just, this is a
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  brand new athletic building here.
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  Across the street from me is another like $200 million
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  complex that's going up that has, you know, it's a public
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  private partnership with just put in a three or $4 million
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  softball field this last year. The track is getting resurfaced
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  this summer. It'll be done in July.
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  The outdoor track or indoor track is 10 years old.
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  I mean, it's just a lot of a lot of things are really changing a
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  lot. They're going to tear down that
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  building and put in new labs and stuff that have updated hoods.
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  All of the, you know, the, the newest of the new type to me,
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  you know, President Kennedy hasn't had and he's moved on
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  since this point. His background was not always in
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  academia. It was in in business.
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  So I think he had a different, you know, view of kind of how
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  things get done. Yeah.
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  And did a great job, had a great vision for what our macro was
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  going to be over the next 50 to 100 years in our, our undergrad
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  and grad enrollment is just over 15,000, which is I think the
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  highest or the second highest it's ever been in school
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  history. So we continue to kind of
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  attract and grow in a period of time when there's some headwinds
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  in in our world. Yeah, right, right.
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  Well, I think that's a great example you have there,
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  President Kennedy, leadership matters.
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  You know, he, he could have gone and just did the status quo and
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  everybody would have been happy as far as like, you know, the
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  budget wise, yeah, let's do the the roof when it's it's time to
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  do it and all this kind of stuff.
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  But he had the foresight to say, hold on, guys, wait, what are we
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  doing here? Let's look past next year.
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  What's 20 years, 40 years, 60 years look like?
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  I think it's just a great example of what leadership is
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  really, really important in our society, not just athletics and
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  academia, but just in our society.
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  And that's a great example of that's really cool.
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  That's awesome. And the new president is
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  continuing on with that vision and that and his or her own.
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  President Armacost and his background is, if you know
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  anything about industrial engineering, it's it's thinking
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  about process and thinking about manufacturing, all of that
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  stuff. He was at the Air Force for 20
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  years as his PhD sort of in that background in academia.
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  And so operationally has done an incredible job of just
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  continuing to work on things in regards to culture and and right
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  fit the people into the right positions that we have on campus
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  and just incredible partner for athletics right now.
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  That's cool. I love that.
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  All right, well, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
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  I try to do this chronologically and of course I just, I'm a
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  tangent guy, so I just like to learn and ask questions.
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  So let's get in our wayback machine here.
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  Jen, let's learn more about you. Speaking of leaders, let's learn
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  more about you. Where does track and field start
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  for you? You know, I've always assumed
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  you're people are athletes, but we've learned plenty of times
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  that lots of our coaches, we're not athletes.
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  We're just maybe track and fielder sports start for you.
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  If you go all the way back until sort of in 1980, probably 1987,
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  I was born in 1983, sort of about four or five years old, I
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  started getting drug along to cross country meets and track
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  meets and basketball games and that's just really what I
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  thought was normality. Everybody did that.
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  You know, everybody, every weekend you're going to
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  something. Your dad, everybody's dad
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  coached and did that thing. So OK, my dad was go ahead.
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  Yeah, no, I'm sorry. I think you're about to answer
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  exactly what I was cutting out to say.
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  Why were you drugged to those? Did you have siblings that were
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  in it or your dad? You're getting mentioned your
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  dad. I think you're.
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  I'm the oldest and, you know, dad coached cross country,
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  basketball and track and field. So to me, you know, I think
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  there's two things when I think of people and their context,
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  it's what is their nature and then what is the nurture part of
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  that, you know, and then and the nurture part of that is your
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  experience. So my experience was, of course,
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  what's normal for everybody, right?
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  Your dad coaches everything all the time, and you always have
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  practice after school. And so I grew up, you know,
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  going to practices. We literally lived across the
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  street from the high school. And so if they were out
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  practicing high jump, you know, I saw that all the time.
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  If they were out hurdling, I tried hurdling, which oddly
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  enough is the same experience that our kids are having right
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  now. We've got a three-year old and a
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  six year old and they just, you know, they're like, Hey, we're
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  going to a track meet. And so they just think that that
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  is perfectly normal to track meet all day to, to try to
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  hurdle to throw things. Our throws coach has got a, a
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  kid that's two. I mean, he, he's got his own
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  little weight that he carries around.
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  He's already doing turns and trying to throw that.
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  So that I mean, that's to me where where that starts becoming
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  normal, you know, think about those kind of things.
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  And then of course, you compete in those things as you go
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  through junior high, high school and those different things.
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  That I had some success. Track wasn't my first love.
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  It was just something that you did.
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  I love basketball. Is that right?
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  Yeah, I love. Basketball I played played
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  football, basketball and ran track.
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  That's what everybody did. I grew up in a small town in
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  Wyoming, 224 people on just the Cheyenne, WY, so very small.
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  So you, you know, if you don't want to be doing chores on the
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  ranch, you do sports so you can. So everybody does sports.
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  And then I and we, my parents moved, my dad went and taught at
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  a private school in Rapid City, SD.
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  And so that was a little bit different because we didn't have
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  the, the ranching farming background there.
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  Most kids were from, you know, the metro area, which is 100 to
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  125,000 depending what you include.
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  And so I played football, did basketball on track in that
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  environment and was pretty good at football, wasn't that good at
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  basketball, was pretty good at track, but I love basketball.
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  And at six three, you either got to be able to shoot it real well
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  to be able to survive, which was not my Forte.
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  I just was pretty athletic and get out running out, jump all
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  the different people and and ended up going to college and
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  and pursuing track and field because that's just kind of
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  where I fell in. You know, so so before we get to
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  college, did dad coach you in basketball and track?
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  Dad coached me in middle school in football.
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  OK. Once, and I think that was 7th
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  and 8th grade and that was, you know, for him it was like, I get
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  paid my, my, you know, whatever it is $1000 to go to all my
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  son's game. So that's that's not a hard.
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  That's pretty cool. That's not a hard sell.
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  You know, if you could get paid to go to your kids games and
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  part of your responsibilities that that worked out really
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  well. No shade to dad, Dad, Dad wasn't
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  a great athlete. I don't know, the dad knew a lot
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  about football, but he was there and I appreciated that.
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  And I and I, you know, I processed that at the time that
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  he sat with the coaches up in the front.
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  I sat with my friends in the back and and we went to the same
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  game he watched. He really pushed me.
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  Or tell me, you know, what to do or anything like that.
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  Worked in a different area, but man, I appreciated that he went
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  to those things. Yeah.
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  You you you mentioned he was a basketball and track coach
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  though. So but but he didn't coach you
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  in high school. Nope, in high school when we got
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  to that point he accepted a job as a math science teacher, then
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  also has the athletic director and so he didn't really coach a
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  whole lot. Coaching hat came off at that
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  point. Pro is you no longer have to be
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  traveling with one team. You can be at all the sporting
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  events so your kids do stuff. I think he left being the
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  athletic director after I think two or three years when we were
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  there and just stayed in in that capacity until he retired.
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  That's interesting. I love coaches kids because you
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  know, when we grow up and you're not dealing with this now have
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  an eighth grader and a fifth grader, you know, because when
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  they start reaching their independence, a lot of, I
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  shouldn't say a lot of times, sometimes that creates the kids
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  to push away from the parents like, oh, you're, you're a
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  coach. Well, then I never want to be a
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  coach, you know, but you seem like this was just your DNA like
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  from three years old. You're at a practice and at a
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  meet and as an 18 year old, here I am, I'm at practice and that
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  basketball game and doesn't matter if dad is coaching, rock
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  coaching, he set the the base for you, if you will.
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  Yeah. And I actually, you know, in my
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  senior year of high school, my friend kept leaving our, our,
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  you know, we had a study hall, you know, last period of the day
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  and he kept disappearing. I was like, hey, man, where you,
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  where you going? He's like, I'm helping out
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  coaching the 7th grade basketball team.
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  And I thought, man, that's kind of cool.
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  And so I started following him to that because I had nothing
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  going on in my senior year. We're just in school because
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  we're waiting for practice to happen.
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  So I started following him in there and there was one of the
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  parents was coaching all this stuff and great guy, Mr.
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  Prufnik. He was passionate about seeing
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  his son have a good experience. Didn't have a ton of background
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  in coaching or anything like that.
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  So I kind of started sitting on the bench for the 7th grade
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  games and then I started looking at it and be like, man, our
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  practices are so unorganized. We're just like, what are we
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  doing? So Josh, my friend and I would
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  sit down and start scripting practices minute by minute by
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  minute. And so, you know, we just, I'm
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  just copying what we did at the high school level.
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  And my coach played at the University of Wyoming, had a,
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  had a pretty good background, I felt like in basketball.
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  So we started scripting practices and, and Miss Proofnik
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  just kind of kept backing off and backing off.
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  And by the end of the year, Josh was more the relationship type
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  of person and I was kind of slid into the XS and OS.
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  And so I was running the whole practice and you know, like
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  coaching every single game. We traveled every 7th and 8th
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  grade game, started coaching all of those.
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  As a senior, this is an 18 year old kid.
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  Yeah, wow. Yeah, and that's it, right into
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  like I knew a little bit about something in track, so I would
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  help anybody that I could because we had one track coach.
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  We're a school with like 100 kids in it.
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  We ran in the parking lot, you know, high jumped onto 1 high
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  jump. Section.
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  You kind of shift that so you could land on.
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  It I, I cringe at how often that is happening today in 2025.
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  I go to tracks and I'm like, where's the rest of it?
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  Please tell me you're not jumping on that.
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  I can't see that. So, so where as a as an 18 year
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  old, and we'll keep moving here in a second, but stay as an 18
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  year old, where is the idea of becoming a coach at in your mind
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  at all? Or is this just like, oh man,
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  you know, I saw my dad do that. Yeah, just fun.
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  Not not like, oh, this is what I'm going to become at this
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  point. Man, and I will say this too, so
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  I got a lot of encouragement from my high school basketball
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  coach. You know, he Mike Purcell, he
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  just, he encouraged me and I was like, hey, why do we take time
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  outs? Here's a he's a, and he was an
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  educator too. And this is one thing that I
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  think people who don't come from an educational background I
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  think miss because we as coaches or we're just teachers, OK, our
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  subject matters a little bit different.
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  But man, I teach every day of the week.
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  And my job is to not create perfection, like you said, but
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  to help people to become critical thinkers and think
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  about what they did. So you might just said, here's a
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  couple different reasons that we take time out.
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  You know, you know, people are physically exhausted.
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  We need to break momentum of the other team.
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  You want to install something defensively, offensively, you
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  know, you've got so much time left.
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  We're going to you know, if you can script a play and come into
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  the play, the other team is always going to be reacting to
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  it. So you know, I don't know why is
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  this high high school seniors like perfect.
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  That's what I'm doing. And it was fun for me.
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  I dressed up on the sideline, you know, run everything and I
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  loved helping kids get better and we and I coached the next
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  year too. My first year in college, man,
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  we flat felt people. We we'd start the beginning of
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  the year where we're winning by two to three points and the back
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  end of the year, I still have all the stats on the on the
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  Internet here. I mean, we're winning by 30 to
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  40 points. We go through our conference
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  tournament, just crush everybody, press every play in
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  the entire game. And it was a it was a blast.
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  My brother was also on that team that is an eighth grader and he
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  was a a six 485 LB eighth grader.
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  We had another kid that was 65. Both kids could shoot the ball.
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  It was the first team that went to state, you know, started and
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  they and they, they kind of Mike Purcell, the guy that was there
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  was building a program where, you know, when I started as a
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  freshman and we ran zone exclusively, we ran a 2-3 zone.
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  We ran the flex and the teams that we ran into that were more
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  talented, that could shoot the ball.
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  We, we just couldn't beat it. We lost five games in my
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  freshman year. We lost three of them to the
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  team that ran up that was a runner up at national or sorry,
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  not nationals, at the South Dakota High School state
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  tournament. And we lost a Rapid City Central
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  and we lost a Hill City, and those teams were a class above
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  us, you know? Jim, how long ago was this?
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  Well, I would have been 1997. I mean, do you remember like
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  this was you, you were involved. I mean, you remember the, the
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  losses and who they were. That's amazing.
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  It was your I mean, you know, spoiler alert, this is a track
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  podcast and you become a track coach.
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  I love, you know, I'm not a big basketball guy, but what I am is
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  I love passion, right? So like you talking about right
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  there, like you could see, like you obviously are a basketball
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  guy, like you love basketball. I mean, you're you know, you're
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  talking about the zone and all these kind of things.
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  How was were you like that with track at this age as well?
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  Like like I love, it's fascinating to me when a coach
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  comes on the podcast and they talk about, you know, I asked my
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  coach, Hey, so why did not in a challenging way, like an
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  inquisitive way of like a curious way of like, hey, so why
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  did we run repeats like this? And then the next day we ran
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  this race and you were like, hey, so why did we take like
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  that's such a coach question, like a future coach question of
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  like, hey, so why did we take a time out there?
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  Like what was your thinking? So I can understand it and
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  process it. I just love those because it's,
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  it's like, man, you're you're look, you're a future coach.
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  I mean, right there, whether you become a teacher or whatever you
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  do, but you're a coach in that sense.
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  So. You're asking how's this time to
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  track? Well, what I'm wondering is
• 18:27
  where you like that with track? Are you with, I don't know what
• 18:31
  events you did, but with your events and you said you had one
• 18:33
  coach. So are you talking to coach
• 18:34
  about like, hey, so why did we do this?
• 18:37
  Why did you follow up with this? Are you asking the same kind of
• 18:39
  questions for track at that? Point Well, let's let's walk it
• 18:41
  even further back because going back to that that freshman year
• 18:44
  where we went, you know, whatever it was 15 O 5 in
• 18:46
  basketball or seventeen O 5. The guy that coached basketball,
• 18:51
  Mr. Mulder was the was the track coach.
• 18:54
  And so I went out for track and there were three of us.
• 18:56
  There's Tim Marinelli, Jeff Woodstruck and myself.
• 18:59
  And there was one girl on the team and I've always left. 33%
• 19:03
  of us made it to state that year.
• 19:05
  Tim was he ran 50.5 in the 400 meter dash.
• 19:10
  He did a great job. He was an Army or Air Force
• 19:13
  brat. Dad brought him in.
• 19:15
  You know, he was with me the whole time, but he'd been all
• 19:17
  over the place and I was like, this sucks.
• 19:20
  We can't have a relay, you know, and so, so.
• 19:23
  Literally 3 not. Oh yeah, literally not.
• 19:25
  You 3 homeboys were together and you have a team. 3/3.
• 19:30
  You did say the school was like 100 A. 100 and his, yeah, wife,
• 19:32
  Renita Marinelli, or well, was was also on the track.
• 19:37
  She was a triple jumper. And so I thought to myself,
• 19:40
  like, this is not a fun experience.
• 19:41
  Yeah, sure. You know, I'm new enough about
• 19:43
  track. So I started recruiting in my
• 19:46
  senior year. We had 45 kids on the track team
• 19:51
  between men and women. And I just, you know, I went, I
• 19:53
  was like, guys, weather's amazing, OK, there's girls on
• 19:57
  the track team, we're working on that.
• 20:00
  And you get to skip school all the time.
• 20:01
  Like what's the negative here? And you get to choose what you
• 20:04
  do. You don't have to go and run
• 20:06
  that, you know, a couple miles. You can Sprint, you can jump 0
• 20:10
  facilities. But I was recruiting my friends
• 20:13
  and, and so by the time I was a senior, we're taking like a, a
• 20:17
  small bus and, and some other stuff to get people there.
• 20:20
  And and we got better and better my freshman year of college.
• 20:27
  Sunday school teacher is a track coach at the local college at
• 20:30
  South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
• 20:33
  I'm looking around at the landscape.
• 20:34
  I don't understand the recruiting process at all.
• 20:38
  Got private school coaches tell me what we're going to give you
• 20:40
  a 50% scholarship and just you got to come up with 10 grand out
• 20:44
  of pocket. And I knew if I went to School
• 20:46
  of Mines it was going to be like 2 grand out of pocket.
• 20:50
  I was like no brainer. I signed a letter of intent to
• 20:52
  play football at University of Sioux Falls in NAI school.
• 20:57
  At the time, Bob was still the coach then.
• 21:00
  They'd won a national championship in 1996.
• 21:03
  Caitlin De Boer, who's currently the head football coach at the
• 21:05
  University of Alabama, was the first coach at the time.
• 21:09
  No way is that right? Yeah, and there's a ton of guys
• 21:13
  on that, on that coaching staff that went somewhere else.
• 21:16
  And I was, I was recruited by a guy named Rich Greeno.
• 21:19
  Raleigh. Greeno was his brother.
• 21:21
  Worked at the University of Jamestown.
• 21:23
  I was also a football coach up there, just like people that
• 21:26
  were the guys back in the day. And I just, I loved Rich.
• 21:31
  He was a really kind and incredibly benevolent dude.
• 21:36
  And I just ended up going where I was comfortable because
• 21:39
  everybody was trying to get out of town, out of high school.
• 21:41
  And I was like, I just got here four years ago.
• 21:44
  I don't know anything about where I live.
• 21:46
  I'm having a great time. Got a girlfriend that lives in
• 21:48
  the same town, Talked to Jerry two weeks before school started.
• 21:53
  So Jerry, I'm going to go to School of Mines and he was like,
• 21:55
  I'll see if I can get you a track scholarship.
• 21:56
  He comes back to me a week later, gives me a $500 track
• 21:59
  scholarship, which lo and behold was one of the biggest
• 22:01
  scholarships on the team at the time.
• 22:03
  Had no idea. And I began that learning
• 22:07
  process. And so I, you know, because I
• 22:09
  was in town, I became like, they paid me to coach middle school
• 22:14
  basketball the next year. So he head coach, I recruited
• 22:18
  assistants, I ran everything. Nobody had any questions about
• 22:21
  that. I'd skip track practice to make
• 22:23
  sure that I could be there for my, you know, basketball games
• 22:26
  and stuff like that. I remember there was one, we had
• 22:28
  a track meet where my dad, I was like, Hey, I, I can't go to this
• 22:32
  basketball game, I need you to coach.
• 22:34
  And they went and they coached. We coached against Wall.
• 22:37
  We ran his own defense against Wall.
• 22:38
  They're way bigger than us. Could do a bunch of stuff we
• 22:40
  couldn't do. Lost by 6 points.
• 22:42
  That was the only team we couldn't beat.
• 22:44
  The next game I coached we we tried to press and try to be
• 22:47
  really aggressive. Just got ran out of the gym
• 22:49
  last, but move on to track season.
• 22:52
  And now I'm kind of I've learned a lot from Jerry.
• 22:55
  I'm starting to learn about throws.
• 22:56
  So I, I start working with this kid named Max.
• 22:59
  He's throwing 45 feet, 48 feet. We throw 49 feet.
• 23:03
  We go to state, he throws 52 feet.
• 23:05
  He's 2nd and shot put. An incredible athlete and I
• 23:09
  start having these incredible experiences.
• 23:12
  We got a girl named Alita Ugama that's on the team.
• 23:14
  We're letting her run the 800 every single week.
• 23:16
  And I'm like, you know, I mean, are you enjoying this?
• 23:19
  Just having one off conversations with her.
• 23:21
  And she's like, I'd like to try some longer races.
• 23:23
  She's an eighth grader at this time.
• 23:26
  And so I go and I talk to the coach and I'm like, hey man,
• 23:28
  let's put a lead in the mile this next week.
• 23:30
  And he's like, I don't know, she's so young.
• 23:32
  And I'm like, she runs 4 miles every day.
• 23:35
  It's going to be fun. Put her in the mile, qualifies
• 23:38
  for state, right? And so I'm like, hey, let's put
• 23:40
  her in the two mile, qualifies for state in the two mile goes
• 23:45
  the state, wins the state championship, is an eighth
• 23:46
  grader in the 2 miles. So like to me, like 1 of the
• 23:51
  things that I felt like people don't ever think about is first
• 23:55
  principles. Like why are we doing what we're
• 23:56
  doing? Not what is my opinion and what
• 23:59
  is the lens of my experience telling me, but like
• 24:01
  fundamentally, let's let kids try kids try things and have
• 24:05
  fun. I took backs when we went to the
• 24:07
  regional championship, I was like, man, you're pretty fast.
• 24:10
  I'm going to put you in the 100 qualifies for state in the 100.
• 24:13
  So he went to the state and he did the 104 by 1 discus shot put
• 24:17
  quadruple, but I was sixth in the 800, sorry, in the 100 meter
• 24:21
  dash. I mean just incredible, credible
• 24:24
  athlete and continue to coach him.
• 24:27
  I think his senior year through 5811, three discus 160 was a
• 24:32
  starting linebacker on their state championship football team
• 24:35
  went on and played football. But suffice to say, the whole
• 24:38
  point of this story is you're asking about how does this tie
• 24:41
  into track. It's about recruiting.
• 24:42
  It's about. Yeah, yeah.
• 24:45
  Putting them into roles and I was happy as a clamp doing that.
• 24:50
  And starting to create your own philosophy as you talked about,
• 24:52
  you know, what are we doing this for?
• 24:54
  You know what? Shouldn't the kids have some
• 24:56
  fun? So if they want to try the mile,
• 24:58
  let them try the mile. Let's see what may blow up and
• 25:00
  we learn and move back. Yeah.
• 25:02
  You're starting to, like, formulate all these things that
• 25:04
  are part of the skill set of being a track and field coach.
• 25:07
  Help me. I got a little brain fog.
• 25:09
  I didn't get home till till 1:00 last night from the airport.
• 25:13
  So you're in town. So you stayed in town to go to
• 25:15
  school at the school of mines and and Mines and Tech?
• 25:18
  Is that what it is? Yep.
• 25:20
  Yeah, I heard for a second you're playing football or no?
• 25:24
  No, I signed at the University of Sioux Falls.
• 25:26
  OK, there it is. And AI, nothing's binding, you
• 25:28
  know? Yeah, OK.
• 25:29
  And I was like, I, man, if I had a different football coach, I'd
• 25:33
  be a football player. I'm not a person.
• 25:34
  Yeah, I had three different football coaches when I was in
• 25:37
  high school and my friend's dad was our football coach for my
• 25:41
  senior year of high school and pastor maintenance guy at the
• 25:45
  McDonald's also football coach just there cuz his son's there
• 25:49
  and his son started ahead of me at running back.
• 25:52
  Josh was 5, four, 127 lbs and at this time I was 6, three, 185
• 25:56
  lbs, probably the fastest kid in the school.
• 25:59
  And I played tight end, you know, caught a touchdown pass
• 26:02
  our first game against Edgemont that year.
• 26:04
  And, you know, was averaging about 50-60 yards a game as a
• 26:09
  tight end. And Josh, we're playing Bison,
• 26:12
  tears his pectoral muscle away from the bone, gets carted off,
• 26:17
  Jim gets to go in and start playing at running back.
• 26:19
  And for the rest of your average 133 yards rushing a game, we
• 26:22
  played second ranked team in the state.
• 26:23
  I had 246 yards rushing down to block punts in a sack.
• 26:28
  You know, like, I'm having a great time, but we're terrible
• 26:30
  as a team. We're terrible as a team.
• 26:33
  And so nobody's telling me you need to go to football camps to
• 26:35
  get seen, right? You need to go to, you need to
• 26:39
  send out letters and say I'm interested in your program.
• 26:41
  You got to remember it back in 2000, you don't have your your
• 26:46
  huddle profile where a coach can film.
• 26:49
  So I was clueless. And the only reason that
• 26:51
  University of Sioux Falls is Rich said, hey, I got this kid.
• 26:54
  Yeah, athleticy, high jump, 6, four runs of hurdles, pretty
• 26:57
  well then he'd be good in football.
• 26:59
  And so, you know, they all visited me just because they
• 27:01
  were both going on a trip together.
• 27:03
  But in a in a different world, if I have a different coach like
• 27:06
  we, I remember we played Crawford, Nebraska.
• 27:08
  And as we're going through the handshake line, the coach like
• 27:10
  stopped at me and goes, hey, where are you looking at going
• 27:13
  to college? And I was like, for what?
• 27:15
  I don't know. He's like, like, are you not
• 27:17
  being recruited for? Football.
• 27:19
  I didn't talk to anybody. I don't know.
• 27:21
  Were there scouts here today? I don't.
• 27:22
  Know. You know, we'd seen blue chips,
• 27:25
  the world works. That's and I'm dating myself.
• 27:29
  I'm 42 years old. But when you talk about like
• 27:32
  blue chips and those things, context, we thought that's how
• 27:35
  recruiting went. I just had no idea.
• 27:38
  Like one of the guys that we played against, he ended up
• 27:39
  coming up here, Josh Loosener, and playing free safety for the
• 27:43
  University of North Dakota when they won their national
• 27:44
  championship. So like, that was like my equal
• 27:47
  that came up here and played great D2 football.
• 27:49
  And yeah, I just missed the boat on that.
• 27:51
  When did track? It's a it's amazing.
• 27:53
  We've talked about this a couple times here recently about the
• 27:55
  difference of recruiting track and recruiting other sport,
• 27:58
  basketball, football, etcetera. And you know, the kid runs.
• 28:02
  Well, I was going to say the kid runs, you know, 1060 in 100,
• 28:04
  but, you know, we just had a kid run 992 for crying out loud in
• 28:07
  high school, which is just nuts OS But you know, a kid runs 992
• 28:10
  and 100. Well, that 100's the same 100
• 28:12
  that's on your track as it was down in the state meet.
• 28:14
  Like, you know, you know, kind of what you're getting in broad
• 28:17
  general terms with a football player.
• 28:19
  Yeah. You know, you run 200 yards a
• 28:21
  game. It's like, well, was he playing
• 28:22
  against a bunch of kindergarten? I mean, there's a lot of
• 28:24
  different talent levels out there.
• 28:25
  So it's a little a little more involved, I assume not ever
• 28:29
  having recruited basketball. Well, the prime example is this
• 28:32
  time. My brother's an eighth grader
• 28:33
  and he's averaging 200 yards a game.
• 28:35
  Well, he's 64. He's 185 lbs.
• 28:37
  Yeah, yeah, Playing against a. Bunch of they just itched in the
• 28:40
  ball and he was pushing kids down and touchdowns.
• 28:43
  All right, right. I love it.
• 28:45
  So, so you're doing track, you mentioned high jump.
• 28:48
  Are you doing other events or are you primarily a high jumper?
• 28:51
  No. And you know, in high school I
• 28:54
  just like to do other stuff. I had that grounded Dad just
• 28:57
  hurdles was something like I was fast.
• 29:00
  I was the fastest kid, but I tell you what, add hurdles in
• 29:03
  there, and I've got a skill set nobody else has.
• 29:05
  Yeah. And so I hurdled very cool.
• 29:09
  Short hurdles, long hurdles, high jump my senior year at 1,
• 29:13
  discus at 1. You know, one track meet that we
• 29:15
  went to was just a small track meet.
• 29:17
  So dabbled in a bunch of stuff. My freshman year of college, I'd
• 29:22
  start working with Jerry and he's like, you're going to do
• 29:26
  the pentathlon. Jerry's like.
• 29:28
  I was wondering if there's any multis here.
• 29:29
  Yeah. Yeah, 5657 guy that ran at Adams
• 29:32
  State back when they're NAI for Joe V Hill.
• 29:35
  Yeah, nice. Somehow Jerry has segwayed that
• 29:37
  into he's, he's a coach at a small school, so he coaches
• 29:41
  throws, he coaches jumps, he coaches hurdles.
• 29:44
  He's also the distance coach and, you know, great friends
• 29:47
  with Jerry. So I'd do whatever Jerry said
• 29:49
  and first meet and went out and qualified for nationals for
• 29:53
  NAIA. Had no clue what I was doing,
• 29:57
  but you know, Jerry got me to jump 6-7 my freshman year, six 6
• 30:01
  1/2. It's it's a centimeter off with
• 30:03
  the conversion. First time I long jumped, I
• 30:06
  jumped 20 foot 11. My PR in high school was 1511,
• 30:11
  you know, so I, I had, that was one time I jumped 151112 foot at
• 30:15
  the next meet and I was like, yeah, not doing this anymore.
• 30:19
  Because we, we self select into what we're good at and we get
• 30:22
  this positive feedback loop. So right.
• 30:25
  So what did you go into college thinking as far as like a major?
• 30:28
  And I'm going to become engineer, a doctor.
• 30:31
  What did you think going in? No, no thinking.
• 30:35
  Just on autopilot. On autopilot, going in my my.
• 30:41
  Autopilot like. Just go to college.
• 30:43
  Just go to college. You.
• 30:44
  Don't know what I'm doing. Now, your dad is an educator,
• 30:47
  you know he's a teacher. I know what mom did.
• 30:52
  But you seem to have like pretty good examples in front of you.
• 30:55
  And yet I'm here and kind of a little aimlessly, like I'm just.
• 30:59
  Go. I go to college.
• 31:00
  I wonder about that. You know, my parents are going
• 31:02
  to be up here in two weeks. I'll ask him about that.
• 31:04
  But like, I think they very much so allowed us to make our own
• 31:10
  path. Oh, very cool.
• 31:12
  Very unique, right? In a in a well, we live in a day
• 31:15
  and an age where I don't like this is totally different with
• 31:20
  my kids. Other parents don't let their
• 31:22
  kids get out of arm reach. Right.
• 31:23
  Yeah. I do.
• 31:26
  I do appreciate my neighbors. Jacobson's.
• 31:29
  I'll see him in the backyard and be like, have you seen my kids?
• 31:32
  Yeah. They're down the street with my
• 31:35
  kids. And he's like, all right, you
• 31:37
  know, But that's very unique. And so at that time, the life
• 31:40
  that I grew up with in rural Wyoming was I left the house at
• 31:44
  8:00 AM, came back for lunch. This is when I was 7 to 12, five
• 31:51
  years, left the house, then after lunch, came back when the
• 31:56
  sun started to go down. Nobody ever asked any questions
• 31:59
  in old building forts you know, doing stuff like that with my
• 32:03
  best friend and so like my parents all my dad grew up in in
• 32:08
  rural Nebraska the same way and so I don't I don't know.
• 32:11
  Certainly his lens of experience was you'll figure it out.
• 32:17
  And I did a lot of figuring out my freshman year of college was
• 32:23
  enrolling to school of minds at technology.
• 32:25
  And your options are industrial engineering, you know, civil
• 32:29
  engineering, electrical engineering and mining.
• 32:34
  You know, there were there were no degrees, there's no English,
• 32:37
  there's no math or history, there's no education.
• 32:40
  That's. What's that's what's
• 32:41
  interesting. You didn't go to a liberal arts
• 32:42
  where it's like, oh, OK, there's 100 majors I can eventually find
• 32:45
  myself into. You're going to a very specific
• 32:47
  high level academic school here. And I was so lost my first year
• 32:52
  and my parents allowing me to live my life, I went in.
• 32:54
  I promptly failed trigonometry and I went to my advisor.
• 32:59
  Dad taught math, didn't he? Is that what you said?
• 33:01
  Yeah, he let me make. My own way, as soon as I got out
• 33:04
  of as soon as I was, and he taught me in two different math
• 33:06
  classes in high school. As soon as I got out of high
• 33:10
  school, my parents were like, you do you.
• 33:12
  I'm not checking on you, so you know what that means.
• 33:15
  You don't do anything. I was like, that's amazing.
• 33:17
  I never have to do anything. Nobody cares if I turn into
• 33:20
  homework. Dad doesn't care.
• 33:21
  Nobody asks. I got a 24% on my final.
• 33:25
  I remember that and I just, I remember sitting in my parents
• 33:28
  living room, it's kind of snow's coming down.
• 33:31
  It's like 3:00 in the afternoon before I got to go to track
• 33:33
  practice. I've looked at my grades and
• 33:35
  just being emotional and crying and just being so embarrassed,
• 33:41
  you know, and just being like I knew I was responsible for it.
• 33:46
  But you know, everybody else on the team was like, we're going
• 33:49
  she's a terrible teacher, it's her fault, yadda yadda.
• 33:51
  So like perpetuated the lie that it was somebody else's fault.
• 33:55
  So I went to my advisor and they're like, cool, get you
• 33:58
  right back in trig. We're going to pass that.
• 34:00
  I finished that semester with A227.
• 34:02
  I took some other classes where it was OK.
• 34:06
  And she's like, will you take trig and they'll get you into
• 34:08
  Calc 1, Calc 2, Calc 3, We'll do differential equations in my
• 34:12
  head. I'm going what are you talking?
• 34:13
  About. Like I can't, I can't pass trig.
• 34:17
  Got into trig the next semester with a different with a
• 34:19
  different professor. Tried a little harder right
• 34:24
  before ad drop. He's like, you're failing my
• 34:26
  class. I was like, yeah, I know, I I'm
• 34:28
  aware. So I dropped that class.
• 34:31
  I made sure I had enough credits.
• 34:33
  One of them was history. One of them was reading science
• 34:38
  fiction, which was incredibly popular at school of mines.
• 34:41
  It was 38 dudes and one girl in this class that I would that I
• 34:44
  was. And man, I'm so I'm like, I had
• 34:47
  history, I had English this semester.
• 34:49
  I was like, I'm happy as a clam can be and I and I'm starting to
• 34:52
  get bees, you know, and, and we travel for track meets and
• 34:57
  school of mine has got an outdoor track and the you know,
• 35:01
  the Armory or the indoor gymnasium, which is a small
• 35:04
  basketball court where we high jumped and you didn't long jump,
• 35:08
  you know, and we hurdle diagonally across the big gym
• 35:10
  upstairs where you can do 3 hurdles.
• 35:13
  And so we started going to track meets where other people at
• 35:15
  indoor facilities and I'm looking around going, you guys
• 35:18
  get to practice indoor here every single day.
• 35:21
  And so that that along with the academic piece of it,
• 35:24
  precipitated me looking somewhere else.
• 35:27
  And my event coach, Royce Wurtzer, at the time, I think
• 35:31
  he's at, he may still be at Rapid City Central coaching kids
• 35:34
  there. He was like, hey, I went to the
• 35:36
  University of South Dakota. I was like, yeah, I know.
• 35:37
  I've seen their indoor facility at the time.
• 35:41
  No one had anything like it. You have 5000 permanent or
• 35:44
  sorry, 10,000 permanent seats. You've got a 200 meter, 8 lane
• 35:48
  indoor flat track with 120 meter straight away.
• 35:52
  And it was fun to be able to jump in there.
• 35:54
  And like every time we went there, I was like, man, they're
• 35:56
  so loud. There's this team element at
• 35:59
  school of mine, there were 14 guys and there were three girls.
• 36:02
  And I just thought to myself, I was like that I'm really missing
• 36:06
  something there. And so me and and two other
• 36:08
  teammates transferred there at the end of the year.
• 36:12
  You know, Jim, as you're telling your story, it's striking.
• 36:16
  You always have an extremely good memory.
• 36:18
  Again, again, you know, you're talking about, you know, past
• 36:20
  games and the offenses you ran and what game your dad coached
• 36:23
  and you didn't. So I mean, obviously you kind of
• 36:25
  almost like have a steel trap up here.
• 36:28
  I tend to think that lends itself to people who are good
• 36:32
  academically. I don't necessarily want to say
• 36:35
  that you look sounded like you struggled academically because
• 36:37
  it seemed it doesn't seem like it was an intelligence thing.
• 36:39
  It just seems and I don't want to call it lazy effort.
• 36:42
  Yeah, but not but not lazy. Like I'm not catching.
• 36:45
  You're still you're coaching middle school basketball and
• 36:47
  doing it well. So lazy people don't do that.
• 36:49
  You know what I'm saying? So it's not lazy.
• 36:50
  It's just like this. It's just weird.
• 36:52
  I I before hearing your story, I don't know that I would have
• 36:55
  been able to say that someone who doesn't show effort is not
• 36:57
  lazy. Like I said, Oh, that's an
• 36:58
  automatic together, and yet here you're kind of proving that's
• 37:02
  not true. It's just so interesting to me.
• 37:04
  To me, I think it's a little bit of aptitude and interest, you
• 37:08
  know, and that's like what, what we, what we love, we pour
• 37:11
  ourselves into. And so I always tell my kids and
• 37:14
  they're like, what should I do? And it's, you know, as far as
• 37:17
  what should I do with my life? What classes should I take?
• 37:19
  And it's, and, and to me, most of us in the academic world are
• 37:24
  so tied to, I want to do international trade loss, like
• 37:29
  got to get an international trade degree before I go and get
• 37:32
  my law degree. And my advice to those people is
• 37:35
  like, you need to find the people in your industry.
• 37:39
  You need to network, you need to clerk, you need to do
• 37:42
  internships and you need to find what you're passionate about.
• 37:46
  Don't chase money. Chase what you're passionate
• 37:50
  about and the money will follow. If you can pour yourself into
• 37:53
  something 60-70 hours a week and come home and not feel used up
• 38:01
  like to me you, you've found your calling in life.
• 38:05
  Bro, who are you? And what I mean by that is I, I
• 38:10
  resonate so much with that advice, but you hear the exact
• 38:14
  opposite what you just talked about.
• 38:15
  Oh, you want international law? OK, well, here's the path.
• 38:16
  It means you do this, this and this.
• 38:18
  And maybe it's because of, you know, that that's the similar to
• 38:22
  how I raise my kids today. But also maybe it's it's even
• 38:26
  more resonates with me because, you know, I've done 300 of these
• 38:28
  interview now and everybody's a, you know, very high successful
• 38:32
  coach who's on this podcast. And they all get to where they
• 38:34
  are in different ways. But no one has gone and said,
• 38:37
  OK, well, I knew I wanted to be a coach.
• 38:39
  So I need to I know I needed to go and study kinesiology.
• 38:41
  And then I know I need to do Aga at this school and then I know I
• 38:44
  needed to, you know, get this certification.
• 38:47
  Like it was like, oh, you know, I want, I, I liked English.
• 38:49
  So I went and studied English and then found out that I like a
• 38:51
  coach. And so I, you know, started
• 38:53
  volunteer. Everybody has such different
• 38:55
  paths that all begin with passion, that all begin with
• 38:59
  like, I, I really like the sport or I really like helping young
• 39:01
  people that those are the passions that help guide them to
• 39:04
  eventually become coaches. And I just, that's just striking
• 39:07
  to me that you would, that you have that advice to your kids
• 39:11
  today. You want to say your kids, your
• 39:12
  kids, and then also your athletes today, 'cause I think
• 39:15
  it's just spot on. I literally just had a
• 39:16
  conversation with one of the, I don't give it away too much.
• 39:20
  We're one of the top athletes in college right now for our sport
• 39:23
  and they're struggling their last year of college.
• 39:26
  And like, man, I just, I don't know if I should go do this grad
• 39:28
  thing or should I do this And track plays a part in what their
• 39:32
  decision is. And I was like, you know what,
• 39:34
  you're so young. First of all, it's like you're
• 39:36
  2021. They were 21, you're 21.
• 39:38
  I was like, I'm 48, so I'm 2 plus your lifetimes.
• 39:41
  I go life right now should be a buffet.
• 39:43
  Go taste you like this. Go try that.
• 39:45
  You like this, Go try that. And here's the thing, I think we
• 39:48
  do a disservice with our and I love how your parents did not do
• 39:51
  this is we seem to think to tell young people, you better have it
• 39:56
  all together by 22. Like you better know what you're
• 39:59
  going to be, where you're going to live, what job you're going
• 40:01
  to, your profession, your, your, your, your ladder up to wherever
• 40:05
  you eventually want to be. And it's like, dude, at 22,
• 40:09
  yeah, I don't know what you, but I don't know.
• 40:10
  I didn't know anything at 22. I think one of the things too, I
• 40:16
  think a lot about this in regards to what are my skill
• 40:19
  sets, right? Everybody thinks the skill sets
• 40:22
  you need are business. You need to know economics,
• 40:25
  accounting, management. There are a lot of like really
• 40:28
  soft skills like. People.
• 40:31
  Being able to struggle. Yeah.
• 40:33
  Like if you've never dealt with adversity, Yeah, man, my, my
• 40:39
  parents just threw me in the deep end and said, you know,
• 40:41
  figure it out. I don't know what you're going
• 40:43
  to study. Go figure it out.
• 40:44
  I'm not going to answer the questions for you.
• 40:45
  And, and go back to the story. I struggled a lot, you know, and
• 40:51
  I struggled and struggled and struggled, and I had that.
• 40:54
  My favorite part of the story, I had this incredibly kind
• 41:00
  girlfriend at the time who got into college, was an hour away.
• 41:07
  She was playing college basketball.
• 41:08
  I'm running track. And I was blaming everybody for
• 41:12
  my failures in math. I got into college algebra.
• 41:14
  Once I got to South Dakota, failed that, I dropped it or I
• 41:18
  failed, failed. I was smart enough not to get
• 41:20
  another F on my transcript and the next semester I think I just
• 41:24
  did it again. I, I hear this is a good
• 41:25
  professor and she just kind of was like, you know, the problem
• 41:28
  is you, right? And I, I just never wanted to
• 41:33
  take responsibility, but it was incredible to have at this time.
• 41:36
  I'm 20 years old, she's 18 years old.
• 41:40
  She's a freshman, I'm a, I'm a junior and she just straight up
• 41:43
  said you're the problem. And I, and I wanted to see her.
• 41:47
  So part of her, the requirement for us to see each other was I
• 41:52
  would come and she would go through my math homework and she
• 41:56
  she was in Calc 2 at this college and I'm taking college
• 42:00
  algebra and she would check my work and I'd had a dad as a math
• 42:04
  teacher. I knew I could just brute force
• 42:06
  that I could start with the answer and work kind of work
• 42:08
  backward. And man, she made me show all
• 42:11
  the work for it she made and she never kept took her foot off the
• 42:15
  gas. And and I've been diagnosed with
• 42:18
  Attention Deficit Hyperactivity disorder when I was in second
• 42:22
  grade. Super high energy which
• 42:27
  precipitated me drinking a cup of black coffee before I went to
• 42:30
  school every morning starting in second grade.
• 42:32
  No. Oh, it's incredible.
• 42:34
  It's a stimulant. Caffeine's a stimulant.
• 42:36
  So is Ritalin. Any of those drugs that they use
• 42:39
  are a low level stimulant and caffeine's a natural stimulant.
• 42:42
  Yeah, but I can't picture a second grader.
• 42:45
  No cream of sugar, just. Just sitting at the car, you
• 42:48
  know, and I'd sit at the table. Reading your Wall Street Journal
• 42:51
  and they. Just they were like, you are
• 42:53
  drinking this cup of coffee before you go to school and
• 42:57
  coffee tastes terrible. You know, kids got a sugar too.
• 42:59
  I'm sitting there drinking this bitter, bitter drink.
• 43:02
  Yeah, I'm tired of pretending that coffee tastes good.
• 43:04
  It does not. It it was Folger's instant
• 43:06
  coffee, too. It wasn't any gourmet stuff.
• 43:08
  It was stirring some of those dried crystals and oh, and so
• 43:14
  I've always blamed things on that.
• 43:18
  I was like, well, I'm not dumb. I just have ADD, it's a crutch,
• 43:22
  you know, she kicked that crutch out from underneath my arm and
• 43:25
  held my face to a mirror and just said, this is who you are.
• 43:29
  And it was incredible because no adult, I would never allow an
• 43:31
  adult to do that. Somebody that I cared about,
• 43:34
  whose opinion I cared about, who I cared about as a person, who I
• 43:37
  wanted to spend my time around, held my feet to the fire.
• 43:41
  And I got AC in college algebra. Dude, nice.
• 43:47
  Lo and behold, it's amazing. You do some homework and, and I
• 43:52
  we, we broke up in that, that over, over Christmas break and I
• 43:55
  got a geometry, I got an 89.4 in that class.
• 44:01
  Dude. Sitting at Iowa State where I'd
• 44:03
  attract me and I'm sitting in the stands, I'm like doing
• 44:06
  homework. I'm just thinking to myself, I'm
• 44:08
  just like all those nerds at school.
• 44:09
  My yeah, who? If this is the real who are you?
• 44:11
  They would do their homework up, you know, in the in the stands
• 44:14
  and be laughing. They'd be going through the
• 44:16
  through the media guy be like, look at this kid,
• 44:20
  interdisciplinary sciences. That's not even a major this kid
• 44:23
  that you know. So I, I'm starting to pass
• 44:26
  things right and take responsibility for who I am.
• 44:30
  I, I did the other thing. I I started studying business
• 44:33
  when I went to South Dakota and accounting weeded me out.
• 44:38
  I was like, OK seeing. That it's all processed for you
• 44:40
  and you got to do your. Homework going.
• 44:42
  On and I finally, I'm just kind of aimlessly, you know, looking
• 44:46
  through majors, I have been doing well in the history
• 44:49
  classes I've taken. So let's let's do history
• 44:52
  education classes. Those are pretty easy.
• 44:55
  I can write, you know, I'm good at that.
• 44:58
  Let's do a double major. And so I ended up doing that.
• 45:01
  I started taking some coaching classes, took coaching football
• 45:04
  coaching, basketball care and prevention of athletic injuries.
• 45:06
  You know, psychology of coaching, which was my favorite
• 45:09
  class man, that guy was he, he was the defensive coordinator on
• 45:14
  the football team. His name was Mike.
• 45:16
  An incredible guy. Just just an incredible mind,
• 45:22
  you know, in the in the way that he related to people.
• 45:23
  And I learned so much about psychology of coaching.
• 45:27
  There are some people that get the book, you get some notes
• 45:31
  that basically read the book to you.
• 45:32
  But this guy like put the book down and spoke to you every
• 45:37
  single class. And it was so easy to sit there,
• 45:40
  you know, with me and my other coaching friends that just, I
• 45:43
  just soaked up so much knowledge from that guy.
• 45:47
  I love that you had that girlfriend at that time of your
• 45:50
  life. You know, sometimes, you know,
• 45:53
  not sure, Jim, where you are necessarily in your walk with in
• 45:57
  faith, but you know, sometimes people are putting our lives
• 46:00
  that, you know, sometimes we look back like, man, why did I
• 46:02
  ever or how did that ever? And it's like, you know what,
• 46:03
  that you needed that person or or might have been the reverse,
• 46:06
  by the way, they could have needed you at that specific
• 46:09
  time. So I love that you had that
• 46:10
  person of like almost that, you know, proverbial slap in the
• 46:15
  face of like, hey, dude, it's you.
• 46:17
  You're the problem here. And you know, what's interesting
• 46:20
  is, you know, there's two sides of that coin.
• 46:21
  So she said that, and that was probably the right thing at that
• 46:24
  time, but you had to be able to accept that as well, like you
• 46:28
  could easily push. Probably would not have been
• 46:30
  ready for that until that point. Yeah, or from another person
• 46:33
  even. Like if mom would have said,
• 46:34
  hey, Jim, you're the problem. Like, yeah, Mom, you don't
• 46:37
  understand. Sorry, Mom, not this time.
• 46:39
  You don't understand this, this teacher, blah, blah, blah, all
• 46:41
  these other, you know, things. That was the right person, the
• 46:44
  right time, saying the right thing to you.
• 46:45
  And then you had to be open to like, oh, crap, man, maybe she's
• 46:51
  right. And then do something about it
• 46:52
  after that. So that's really cool here at
• 46:55
  South Dakota. I love how if you're not
• 46:58
  watching on YouTube, when he's talking about aimlessly, it
• 47:00
  almost looked like you were aiming though.
• 47:01
  Like like you're trying to 0 in and where am I?
• 47:04
  What I got to get a major. Like, you do know that's an end
• 47:06
  goal. Like, OK, I got to get a degree.
• 47:07
  So I got I got to eventually pick something and it's like,
• 47:09
  OK, well, yeah, no, math's no good.
• 47:11
  OK, right over here. History is pretty good.
• 47:12
  OK. Yeah, right.
• 47:14
  Well, you're kind of honing in on where that aim is going.
• 47:17
  So what did you end up getting a degree in then?
• 47:20
  I got a degree. I got a double degree in history
• 47:23
  in English class away from a minor in business, a class away
• 47:27
  from a minor in coaching. I graduated with 168 credits.
• 47:30
  He needed 128 credits. Oh geez, when you finally
• 47:35
  decided on that history in English, was it?
• 47:41
  Did you have the, I don't know, 4 sites the right word?
• 47:45
  Did you have? Trying to find a major that
• 47:47
  would allow me to coach. OK, that's what I wanted.
• 47:49
  Like were you seeing like, OK, this because I can coach if I
• 47:51
  had this degree or was it just like it gives me a degree and I
• 47:54
  get out of college? I'm not hearing you really like
• 47:55
  trying to get out of college. You know, some people like I
• 47:58
  don't ever want to be here again.
• 47:59
  I just just give me a degree and I'll get out.
• 48:00
  You don't sound like that's necessarily.
• 48:02
  True. No.
• 48:03
  And I like from the moment I got into school, I looked at the
• 48:08
  people that had coached me. There was a guy who was ACPA,
• 48:11
  Casey Peterson in Rapid City, who was my football coach.
• 48:14
  He played football at South Dakota State.
• 48:17
  He and his father, Stanley Peterson, were our coaches the
• 48:21
  the second two years that I was in high school and he was ACPA.
• 48:25
  And I was like, maybe I can be a business owner and coach on the
• 48:30
  side because I can dictate my own schedule.
• 48:32
  And I was thinking of ways as like, I know how much mom and
• 48:35
  dad make, maybe I'd like to make a little bit more money than
• 48:38
  that and have the ability to come and go as I please and and
• 48:42
  coach. And so I was always looking for
• 48:44
  a way to get into coaching. You you say that, but maybe
• 48:49
  caveat you, you correct me here. In college, you work because
• 48:53
  when I asked you in high school, senior, I was like, hey, what
• 48:55
  what are you, you know, where's coaching?
• 48:56
  You're like, oh, yeah. Not it's not necessarily in my
• 48:58
  head, but in college it seems like almost like this like those
• 49:02
  slider buttons for a light. Like it doesn't seem like there
• 49:04
  was a light switch. Like you took that psychology of
• 49:06
  her coaching classes like, oh, yeah, this is it wasn't that
• 49:08
  feels like this is more like the the slow burn of like, oh, OK.
• 49:11
  Yeah, coaching coach. Oh, look, this guy's a business
• 49:13
  owner and OK, yeah, this is where I I'm going to end up up
• 49:17
  is I'm going to be doing something that allows me to
• 49:18
  coach. It seems like it kind of slow
• 49:20
  burned up to that I think. That experience coaching middle
• 49:24
  school basketball lit a. Fire.
• 49:26
  That seems huge. Yeah.
• 49:27
  That's certainly a core part of of you, yeah.
• 49:30
  Never even thought about it. And I'll tell you what you know,
• 49:37
  my background is so my parents work at worked.
• 49:40
  They just retired two years. Ago good for.
• 49:43
  Them we, we when we moved to South Dakota, they worked at a
• 49:47
  private Christian Protestant high school.
• 49:50
  And so everything kind of revolved around the church and
• 49:53
  like missionary work or working within a church being, you know,
• 49:57
  whether it's a youth counselor type of scenario.
• 50:00
  Those are the things that because I went to that school,
• 50:03
  everybody was hyper focused on going to small private liberal
• 50:09
  art evangelical colleges. And so everybody was getting
• 50:15
  into mission work or being a youth pastor or doing something
• 50:19
  in that field. It so there wasn't a big
• 50:24
  emphasis on get a business degree.
• 50:26
  There was a big emphasis get a history degree, you know, teach
• 50:29
  somewhere else. And it was I, I would chalk that
• 50:33
  up to not really knowing where I needed to be.
• 50:37
  But the coaching piece of it, you know, the people that came
• 50:40
  in and coached and weren't the high school teachers, because
• 50:43
  the base salary at Rapid City Christian back then was like
• 50:47
  18,500. There's nobody coming out of
• 50:50
  high school or out of college coaching high school at that
• 50:53
  level. It's mostly people within
• 50:58
  evangelical Christian circles who had done other things who
• 51:02
  could afford to kind of early retire, right, and get into it.
• 51:05
  And my dad took an early retirement buyout in Wyoming.
• 51:09
  Very disenfranchised with the experience.
• 51:11
  When I was in school, I remember Roger Pareto was in 7th grade,
• 51:16
  brought a 357 to school and was showing everybody is like oh
• 51:19
  man. Check out Wyoming.
• 51:21
  Yeah, check out my piece. You know, and I was like, I
• 51:24
  don't know, Arthur Lira brought a, you know, brought a handgun
• 51:28
  to school, was a pellet gun. But still like in the same year
• 51:30
  you got two different kids bringing handguns to school.
• 51:34
  One of the other kids at the high school jumped.
• 51:36
  I remember the the PE teacher as he was leaving school, big
• 51:40
  physical altercation and I think my parents got.
• 51:43
  Jumped him. Jumped him.
• 51:44
  Jumped him like, yeah, try to take him out.
• 51:47
  And I think there was a period of time in the in the 90s where
• 51:51
  there certainly was a lot of sentiment that society was going
• 51:56
  to hell in a handbasket. And the concern was, which it
• 52:01
  seems crazy now having lived in, in Atlanta and having lived in
• 52:04
  Charlotte, big metro areas and, and looking back to a town of
• 52:08
  3000 people in Wyoming and thinking like, we didn't have
• 52:11
  gang problems, problems with, you know, and drugs existed.
• 52:16
  But it, there weren't like that those type of things that were
• 52:20
  really much of A concern. And we lived on a, on a ranch 5
• 52:23
  miles South of town. My nearest neighbor was a mile
• 52:25
  away. You couldn't see a house in any
• 52:27
  direction other than town north, which I, I appreciate that
• 52:33
  experience, but that was, you know, I think that was a
• 52:36
  reaction to that. And so we got, you know, the,
• 52:39
  the retreat was into the church and more into some of what was
• 52:46
  the opposite of what they, they viewed in society at that time.
• 52:50
  And so that I think, you know, that really that was the lens of
• 52:53
  my experience that framed how I looked at the world.
• 52:58
  You know, the options of things that my parents really care
• 53:00
  about or value are are very religious in nature.
• 53:04
  And I didn't have a compass outside of the church or like
• 53:09
  here are the other things that you can do to be able to coach.
• 53:11
  Go ahead, I was. Going to.
• 53:14
  Say it. It just feels like you're the
• 53:15
  most lost person who still has a guiding star, though, You know
• 53:19
  what I'm saying? Like like you're just kind of,
• 53:20
  you know, you're here trying this, trying that, but there's
• 53:22
  still, you may not be able to see it or see it very well, but
• 53:25
  there was still this guiding star out there of like, OK, it's
• 53:27
  going towards coaching and helping people, but but there's
• 53:30
  a lot, I mean, very varied in. This well, and I was going to
• 53:35
  say the one thing that was uniform throughout is my dad's
• 53:39
  passion for sport. Mom's there.
• 53:43
  She's she's very supportive, just a part of it.
• 53:45
  But my mom didn't play sports. My dad wasn't good at sports
• 53:49
  ever. You know, he said I was like
• 53:52
  dad, because we were talking about like my high school
• 53:54
  basketball experience when I was like a sophomore.
• 53:56
  It's like, so did you play a lot when you were a senior?
• 53:58
  He's like, Nah, I played a lot less because they wouldn't let
• 54:01
  seniors play JV. So I just all the time as a
• 54:04
  senior, you know, back in the day, back in the 60s and 70s, I
• 54:08
  mean, that wasn't a thing. And he would tell me the stories
• 54:11
  about how if you if you bought black Chuck Taylors, the coach
• 54:16
  would not play you. You have two options, white
• 54:19
  Chuck Taylors and black Chuck Taylors.
• 54:21
  It's like you want to play, you'll buy the white Chuck
• 54:23
  Taylors. Otherwise you can sit on the
• 54:24
  bench or. Why?
• 54:27
  I don't know. I don't think I understand.
• 54:29
  It might just. OK.
• 54:30
  Just just the will. Yeah.
• 54:32
  Wow. Yeah.
• 54:33
  OK, So you. That's funny.
• 54:36
  You know, that probably still goes on today in some form or
• 54:38
  fashion. Oh, you don't want to?
• 54:39
  Buy these 100. Percent.
• 54:39
  Then you ain't run it. Yeah, you know.
• 54:40
  It's 100%. All right, so you get these this
• 54:43
  dual degree, you almost get a A minor in like 100 different
• 54:45
  things, you know, you want to coach.
• 54:48
  So what's our first? Did you graduate?
• 54:51
  What's our first foray into coaching?
• 54:54
  I I student taught in the fall of 2006 absolutely cured me out
• 55:00
  of the desire to teach the high school.
• 55:03
  It wasn't the kids. It was just like, I'm not
• 55:05
  coaching. Like I like coach.
• 55:06
  I'm only coach like an hour a day and I got to teach.
• 55:09
  I got to do you know I have 5 different preps.
• 55:11
  But you, you had to have some understanding of that.
• 55:14
  That was going to be the life. Right.
• 55:15
  And your dad's a teacher. Yeah.
• 55:17
  But I guess it is different between yeah, I see dad doing it
• 55:19
  and then you actually in the muck doing.
• 55:21
  It and I just every night I'd come home, I'd get done with
• 55:25
  school at 3:30, I'd come home, make my, you know, go for my
• 55:28
  workout because I'm lost emotionally.
• 55:30
  I'll tell you what one of the most devastating times in my
• 55:33
  life is when I'm done with track.
• 55:35
  No sports. And there's no sports and no one
• 55:37
  cares if you do sports and no one else is doing sports.
• 55:41
  And I'm like, what do I do at 3:00 every day?
• 55:42
  Right, right, right. That's interesting.
• 55:45
  Girlfriend at the time was doing sports.
• 55:47
  She was on the swimming and diving team and she was busy.
• 55:50
  She had stuff to do so I couldn't hang out with her.
• 55:53
  So I literally would just outgrinded and running miles,
• 55:56
  running 678 miles a day. Coming home soon as I'm done,
• 55:58
  shower, clean up, eat dinner, start working on my press for
• 56:01
  the next day, grading all these pap papers, reading everything
• 56:04
  all the way till 10:00, going to bed, waking up at 6:00 AM, going
• 56:08
  to school. I mean, that's I just was like,
• 56:11
  yeah. And I've student taught for my
• 56:13
  throws coach in college. She was incredibly kind to give
• 56:17
  me that opportunity and I loved working with her, so my
• 56:20
  experience with that was not bad, but I just.
• 56:26
  Not for you, not. To the end of that semester, my
• 56:28
  girlfriend at the time was like, so you going to get a job?
• 56:31
  And I just kind of looked around.
• 56:33
  I was like, the way it works, you get into high school
• 56:36
  teaching is you just throw your hat in a ring in very disparate
• 56:40
  geographic locations and towns and you get hired where you get
• 56:44
  hired. And I just at the time I kind of
• 56:46
  told her I was like, I kind of like dating you.
• 56:49
  And I feel like if I leave town and move 8 hours away, that's
• 56:54
  it's going to end. And so I was like, probably go
• 56:58
  to grad school. Didn't know why I was going to
• 57:00
  grad school. Still hadn't figured that out
• 57:02
  yet. I wasn't Aga anywhere.
• 57:04
  So I go to my track coach and I was like, hey, can I volunteer?
• 57:07
  He's like, I've been waiting for you to volunteer.
• 57:11
  I know you're going to be a coach all this time.
• 57:13
  So yeah, so I I did that this. Cracks me up.
• 57:17
  I did that actually, if we go back, well, that was the summer
• 57:21
  after the summer after that, you know, I, I was working
• 57:27
  construction and the job finished and we, we're
• 57:32
  remodeling the dorms at South Dakota.
• 57:34
  And so I work construction every single year to pay my bills.
• 57:37
  Job finishes. I go to my forum and I'm like,
• 57:41
  hey, I want to keep working. It was great.
• 57:44
  There's a job in Fargo, we're remodeling a Sam's Club.
• 57:48
  I'll get you on the the crew up there.
• 57:50
  Great. Wake up at 3:30 AM, drive myself
• 57:53
  to Sioux Falls, pick up the truck there with another guy,
• 57:56
  drive a three ton truck all the way to Fargo.
• 57:58
  Start work at 8:30 in the morning, work till 3:30.
• 58:05
  Again, living in a hotel, no idea what's going on.
• 58:09
  So I'm grinding out 30-40 mile an hour or miles per week just
• 58:13
  running. What else do you do with
• 58:15
  yourself? By the end of the week, they
• 58:17
  were like, OK, we're going to start doing overnights, We're
• 58:19
  going to start working when the store closes until 6:00 AM and
• 58:22
  you can sleep. On there.
• 58:24
  Hell no. I'm going back to Vermilion.
• 58:26
  So I went back to Vermilion, called up my coach, and I was
• 58:29
  like, hey, I got work study, can I work for you?
• 58:34
  And he's like, I've been waiting for you to ask.
• 58:37
  And so I started. Working there, it's interesting
• 58:40
  that just the describer you had there about, you know, when
• 58:43
  you're done with athletics, what do you I do because because such
• 58:46
  part of your identity. I've had this experience with
• 58:50
  two, one family member, one boss mentor here at Gil of kind of
• 58:54
  the same thing of retirement. You know, you do this job for
• 58:57
  30-40 fifty years and on Friday, you know, it's your last day.
• 59:01
  Monday you wake up and it's like I don't I don't go to the
• 59:03
  office, I don't I don't call coaches.
• 59:05
  I don't you know, my father-in-law was a purchaser
• 59:08
  for Miller Lite. I don't go and check inventory,
• 59:10
  like just the things you've done for decades.
• 59:13
  What do I do? I never thought about that.
• 59:18
  I thought about that for like elite athletes, meaning athletes
• 59:20
  who compete till they're 3035 and it's like, man, that's all
• 59:23
  you've been doing and now Monday wakes up and you're like, well,
• 59:25
  then you're not getting ready for a meet or whatever, you
• 59:27
  know, sport you played. You're just you're just a
• 59:29
  regular person. I never thought about it down to
• 59:33
  more. I'm calling more normalcy of the
• 59:35
  college athlete. The college athlete has probably
• 59:36
  been competing since, you know, middle school or high school,
• 59:39
  been doing sports. You go through college, you do
• 59:41
  it, you graduate. And on Monday it's like 2:00.
• 59:43
  It's like, well, I'm supposed to go to practice.
• 59:44
  What, what do I do? Even if you already got a job,
• 59:48
  like I remember, you know, I coached for 10 years before I
• 59:50
  came to Gill. I remember for the first year,
• 59:52
  2:00-ish being in my desk and like, well, I'm supposed to go
• 59:55
  outside. Like, I was just like itching,
• 59:57
  like I'm supposed to go to the sand pit right now.
• 59:59
  Let's what are we doing? You know, and it's a it's a
• 1:00:02
  different world because your identity, your your routine,
• 1:00:05
  everything is wrapped up into practice or staying fit or
• 1:00:08
  shooting baskets of your. Basketball player it's all
• 1:00:10
  wrapped around that and it's just it's gone and you you made
• 1:00:13
  a great point different take away our elites now you know
• 1:00:17
  guys and gals we've been doing it you know until they're 30
• 1:00:19
  years old for our college kids when you graduate college when
• 1:00:23
  you go you move into an apartment or you get a job, no
• 1:00:25
  one care no one says hey, So what are you doing at Jake?
• 1:00:28
  Are you on the softball team? Are you are you running the
• 1:00:30
  local 5K or you know no one no one cares It's like oh you do
• 1:00:33
  that that's cool that's awesome man great for you.
• 1:00:34
  No, no one. Like there's no identity to it
• 1:00:38
  at that point. The slice of the population that
• 1:00:43
  ever reaches a national meet, the level and track and field is
• 1:00:48
  infinitesimally small. Yes.
• 1:00:50
  And what I one of the things that I still struggle with, I
• 1:00:54
  can't have a conversation with any of my neighbors, any of the
• 1:00:59
  guys at church, any of the guys anywhere else that I run into.
• 1:01:03
  They have no idea. Well, my experience has been the
• 1:01:09
  only other people are other coaches, right?
• 1:01:12
  And that's a thin slice. You go to the coaches
• 1:01:13
  convention, what, 2000 people there?
• 1:01:17
  There are 2000 people. That's a great point in the
• 1:01:20
  world who understand what I do. And so like this small network
• 1:01:23
  of people, you know, I think a lot of coaches are in Group
• 1:01:26
  chats right now where we kind of this little echo chamber where
• 1:01:29
  we talk to each other about what we do.
• 1:01:30
  And we all have our friends and in the industry, and I know
• 1:01:34
  every industry is like that, but there are a lot more people
• 1:01:37
  working in business than there are at sport.
• 1:01:39
  Yeah, I think it's something I've been thinking about a lot.
• 1:01:45
  What you just said there about the number of people that make
• 1:01:47
  it to a national meet. It is nobody one I I started
• 1:01:53
  several years ago at the NCAA championships when we hope, when
• 1:01:56
  we hand out like the gifts and stuff, you know, for, for you
• 1:01:58
  guys and guys that qualify and and I'll usually say, oh, so you
• 1:02:01
  know, Jim, you know who, who all'd you get here?
• 1:02:03
  And some coaches will say a lot. And I think I know they're not
• 1:02:06
  meaning it this way, but they'll but what they're saying, I, I
• 1:02:10
  always correct them. Now they'll say, oh, I just got
• 1:02:13
  one or I just got 2 or I only got 1 and I go, whoa, first of
• 1:02:17
  all, don't diminish what your athlete did.
• 1:02:20
  They got here. It's like, you know, how many
• 1:02:21
  coaches don't have anybody here? That's a lot.
• 1:02:24
  So they'll take that away. And by the way, you got someone
• 1:02:27
  here that no one gets people. The nationals, there's only a
• 1:02:29
  couple hundred that get to go every single year.
• 1:02:31
  And I, and I wonder in track if, if we because of nationals and
• 1:02:36
  because of winning, you know, track meets have, you know, 20
• 1:02:40
  guy winners every track meet, 20 gal winners every track meet.
• 1:02:43
  I wonder if we sometimes forget winning is hard.
• 1:02:46
  Qualifying for nationals is hard.
• 1:02:47
  When we have somebody on the, on the podcast who, you know, went
• 1:02:49
  to Olympics, it's like, bro, you're in a fraternity that
• 1:02:52
  doesn't exist. No one.
• 1:02:52
  And then when they're, you know, some of them had, you know, 234
• 1:02:55
  Olympics and I'm like, you're, you're whatever a Unicorn of a
• 1:02:59
  Unicorn is. And it's just amazing to me.
• 1:03:01
  You, you hit the nail on the head.
• 1:03:03
  No one goes to nationals. I we think everybody does
• 1:03:06
  because we go, we go to conference and there's 2000 of
• 1:03:08
  us. And so, you know, some form of
• 1:03:10
  fashion, all of us get a kid there.
• 1:03:11
  But in the reality, no one is having that experience.
• 1:03:15
  No one. It's really, really special.
• 1:03:19
  But one of the things that I try to do with all of our kids is to
• 1:03:22
  reframe success from going to nationals to learning about life
• 1:03:30
  through sport. My job is to teach you how to be
• 1:03:36
  a successful human being. And those soft like those skills
• 1:03:40
  that we talked about, whether the people skills, whether those
• 1:03:43
  or the skill of just struggling and struggling and struggling
• 1:03:47
  without any, you know, tangible reward, right?
• 1:03:51
  Because right now society says, you know, if you didn't get a a
• 1:03:55
  reward, you're a loser. It's like man, like everybody's
• 1:03:58
  a loser, like every track meet and.
• 1:03:59
  Then like, that's right. You go up the line, there's only
• 1:04:02
  one Olympic champion, and guess what?
• 1:04:04
  They're probably only going to be an Olympic champion
• 1:04:06
  statistically one time. That's right.
• 1:04:08
  And that that number means that everybody else below them is a
• 1:04:11
  loser. That that didn't make any.
• 1:04:12
  Sense ridiculous, right? Right.
• 1:04:14
  And so I, I think that goes back to figuring out how to value
• 1:04:20
  life experiences and understand how to frame what happens to you
• 1:04:27
  in a way that allows you to continue to move through life.
• 1:04:32
  Because a lot of people get stuck in this loop.
• 1:04:34
  I'm a failure, I feel bad about myself, I don't know what to do.
• 1:04:37
  I'm a failure. I feel bad about myself.
• 1:04:39
  I don't know what to do. And and most of my freshman kids
• 1:04:41
  struggle with that because they were the big fish in the small
• 1:04:44
  pond. Right.
• 1:04:45
  They show up and they're no longer of fish on land, right?
• 1:04:49
  They're not. Getting anything?
• 1:04:51
  Done Yeah, yeah. The the way I think about that
• 1:04:54
  is it's why I've never unless they I knew they were like I had
• 1:04:58
  Larry Wade on the podcast and I knew he was a super stud hurdler
• 1:05:00
  and things like that, but I'd never ask a coach like when you
• 1:05:04
  said you high jumped and you, you you volunteered the
• 1:05:06
  information, but I would never would have asked you.
• 1:05:07
  He was like, oh, what was your PR like?
• 1:05:09
  Because I don't care. I don't care if you were a 77
• 1:05:11
  high jumper or 47 high jumper, you still matter.
• 1:05:15
  It doesn't matter what you what you actually did, you know,
• 1:05:17
  competition with because there's so many variables, right,
• 1:05:19
  genetics, coaching, you know, injury, etcetera.
• 1:05:23
  It's like, oh, I don't care what you actually did.
• 1:05:25
  I care that you're a coach now and what you're doing for young
• 1:05:28
  people. Yeah, it's really amazing.
• 1:05:29
  That's a great, great, great topic there.
• 1:05:31
  I love that. OK, you, you tried construction,
• 1:05:36
  boy, soon as you said that, I'm just not tough enough to do
• 1:05:38
  that. So anytime someone says they did
• 1:05:39
  construction, I'm like, oh, God bless you.
• 1:05:41
  I can't do that. You go back to South Dakota and
• 1:05:44
  you're like, all right, look, can I volunteer?
• 1:05:46
  I need to do grad school and let's.
• 1:05:48
  Let's do that. So what did what did you go in
• 1:05:49
  to do grad work? Maybe a little bit more targeted
• 1:05:51
  this time, Right. OK.
• 1:05:52
  Good history. Yeah.
• 1:05:53
  Yeah. You didn't like, walk around
• 1:05:54
  aimlessly in grad school, I hope.
• 1:05:55
  Yeah. I.
• 1:05:56
  Kind of was aimless, you know, like I talked to I talked to the
• 1:05:59
  history department and I was like, I think I'm going to do my
• 1:06:03
  masters. Are there any opportunities for
• 1:06:06
  he's like my, my advisor is like, I'll, I'll give you Aga
• 1:06:11
  spot. Cool, Sounds good.
• 1:06:13
  Pays for 2/3 of my tuition, $6000 stipend.
• 1:06:16
  Like just allowed me to, you know, keep doing what I was
• 1:06:20
  doing, keep keep being financially solvent.
• 1:06:25
  So I mean, that was that was awesome and I and I learned we
• 1:06:30
  talked about being a critical thinker.
• 1:06:33
  I grew so much academically and as a person in grad school.
• 1:06:42
  I mean, just that year and a half.
• 1:06:44
  Like I learned way more. How so?
• 1:06:47
  What do you? I just like because they just
• 1:06:50
  throw you in the water and they're like, hey, pick a
• 1:06:53
  master's thesis topic, which I do whatever you want to do.
• 1:06:58
  And it was kind of like my parents in the college thing
• 1:07:01
  being like, you know, we're not going to tell you what to do.
• 1:07:03
  You figure it out and man, I struggled with that because I
• 1:07:08
  was like, just tell me what to do and I will jump through the
• 1:07:11
  hoops. And they were like, Nope, figure
• 1:07:12
  it out. Same with a lot of those
• 1:07:15
  classes, right? And I had at this time a
• 1:07:17
  different mean girlfriend who liked to study and if I wanted
• 1:07:20
  to hang out with her and then I studied, I got like a four O my
• 1:07:24
  last semester O undergrad got like a like GPA and grad schools
• 1:07:28
  like 3-7 because they they don't, they don't just grade
• 1:07:31
  your stuff. They look at it and they're
• 1:07:32
  like, this is garbage. Go back and fix it until.
• 1:07:34
  Right, right. And so, like, for the first
• 1:07:36
  time, I couldn't just my way through, I, I was forced to
• 1:07:43
  create something. And I lived, man, in the
• 1:07:46
  summers, I just lived in the, the GA office.
• 1:07:51
  I was there every day, you know, four to six hours, just me and
• 1:07:55
  the secretary. I was just in there researching
• 1:07:58
  and and what I was researching, not that this is relevant in any
• 1:08:02
  way shape or form, but I was researching a political campaign
• 1:08:07
  in 1972 where a Democrat won the governor position in the state
• 1:08:12
  of South Dakota for the only second time in state history.
• 1:08:15
  Hasn't happened since then either.
• 1:08:17
  His name was Richard Knight. We had all of his papers in the
• 1:08:20
  in the archives. I literally read every book
• 1:08:24
  published ever on High Plains politics, South Dakota.
• 1:08:30
  And I just, it was kind of interesting.
• 1:08:32
  I was like, oh man, if you read everything, you know, you know
• 1:08:35
  everything on the topic, you know what I mean?
• 1:08:37
  And for the first time, it was a little bit like I was finding
• 1:08:41
  the people that publish the book interviewing them and be like,
• 1:08:45
  tell me, where did you get this information?
• 1:08:47
  And they would be like, they would refer me to that.
• 1:08:48
  And it was rabbit holes. Yeah.
• 1:08:51
  Yeah, really. I'd learned to research.
• 1:08:53
  I didn't learn that in undergrad because they would be like, find
• 1:08:56
  2 peer reviewed journal articles, like 2.
• 1:09:00
  How about find everything on the subject matter ever in
• 1:09:03
  existence, Find a bit geography, find obscure people that were,
• 1:09:07
  you know, part of the project. And like, I was talking to Lucky
• 1:09:11
  Huber, who's the head coach at the University of South Dakota,
• 1:09:13
  about Ted Munster. Ted Munster was the guy who ran
• 1:09:17
  the campaign for Richard Knight back in 1972.
• 1:09:20
  We ended up running the foundation at the University of
• 1:09:22
  South Dakota, who the student union is named after.
• 1:09:25
  So it's kind of funny how all of these people are together.
• 1:09:29
  And yeah, it was really interesting.
• 1:09:32
  I just, I just learned and learned and learned and learned
• 1:09:34
  and learned. And it was, it was fun, you know
• 1:09:37
  what I mean? To actually learn for once in my
• 1:09:41
  life. Two things.
• 1:09:42
  One, you said you got a four O your last semester of undergrad.
• 1:09:46
  Bravo, because I believe you said your first one was 2.2 or
• 1:09:48
  something like that. So bravo.
• 1:09:49
  I appreciate. I like growth, so that's really
• 1:09:53
  cool too. Did you do your thesis statement
• 1:09:55
  on this guy or or or? Yeah.
• 1:09:57
  Yeah. I wondered.
• 1:09:58
  Yeah, yeah. Written on this yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:00
  Political campaign of of Richard Knight, you know, in 1972.
• 1:10:02
  And and then they went from a two year program to a four year
• 1:10:05
  program for the governor. So he was actually governor 3
• 1:10:07
  terms. Oh wow, yeah.
• 1:10:10
  What does this this almost fanaticism like you, you know,
• 1:10:17
  you went in, I like I said, you know, one, one topic and I just
• 1:10:20
  went All in all the rabbit holes.
• 1:10:22
  I learned everything about this political campaign, this
• 1:10:25
  politician, how it happened, what happened, all the factors
• 1:10:27
  that led up to it all this kind of is this starting to turn any
• 1:10:32
  of that starting to happen in the track and field world?
• 1:10:34
  Like, are you studying high jump and what?
• 1:10:36
  Whatever. Oh.
• 1:10:37
  Yeah. Oh, sorry.
• 1:10:39
  At this time, Lucky had two GAS wound up getting married.
• 1:10:45
  Sam Privel, who was a pole vaulter.
• 1:10:47
  We came out and vaulted at the gill plant during the summers.
• 1:10:49
  He and I would travel around, do stuff.
• 1:10:52
  I set my pole vault PR boy down in Nebraska.
• 1:10:55
  I forget which town it was in. I jumped 15 one the week.
• 1:10:58
  Week before that my PR was like 13-6.
• 1:11:00
  And then so did you become a multi?
• 1:11:01
  Is that what you ended up being? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:03
  OK, yeah, yeah. So I'm just traveling around.
• 1:11:06
  I'm the only other hobo who doesn't have like a full time
• 1:11:09
  job doing stuff. So Sam's like I'm going to all
• 1:11:11
  these track meets trying to jump 18 plus to make USAS.
• 1:11:17
  Derek was a big influence at that time.
• 1:11:19
  But you know, for example, here's a great book.
• 1:11:25
  This is the Throes by Anatoly Bondage.
• 1:11:27
  Oh yeah, so lucky would give this to Sam and be like, we need
• 1:11:32
  to we're going to read it and talk about it as you're learning
• 1:11:35
  and educating, right. So at that time I just said,
• 1:11:39
  hey, what books are you guys reading?
• 1:11:41
  And they would be like, oh, we're reading the Theory of
• 1:11:43
  Training and Methodology by tutor Bampa.
• 1:11:46
  And I'd be like, OK, cool. I go online, find an old
• 1:11:49
  edition, buy it for a dollar. I'd be sitting on the bus
• 1:11:52
  grinding through this book, a 300 page book.
• 1:11:55
  It's a really thick book. That's a heavy one.
• 1:11:58
  And then I'd get done with it and I'd be like, all right,
• 1:11:59
  lucky, let's talk about it. What do you mean you got done
• 1:12:03
  with it? It's only been a week in grad
• 1:12:04
  school. I was.
• 1:12:05
  Reading Oh yeah, it was a week, so it was way.
• 1:12:09
  Different my Monday. My Monday schedule was wake up
• 1:12:14
  at 7:30, go to McDonald's, have breakfast, read from 8:00 until
• 1:12:19
  3:00. I'd eat lunch there, too.
• 1:12:22
  Just sit in the lobby at McDonald's, anything else and
• 1:12:25
  just read. Because every week you had, you
• 1:12:28
  know, in our historiography class, you picked someone.
• 1:12:34
  And I picked facilities at that time.
• 1:12:35
  And I got a book that was like that thick.
• 1:12:37
  And I needed to grind through it.
• 1:12:39
  And so I learned to stop, you know, because a lot of kids just
• 1:12:44
  want to watch TV. Well, I'm just you write it and
• 1:12:47
  every week you read another 1500 pages.
• 1:12:49
  This is incredible how much stuff you can absorb.
• 1:12:52
  So he gave me and I forget who wrote the book, but it's a
• 1:12:55
  Canadian guy like hurdling, right?
• 1:12:57
  And it was talking about. Brent McFarland.
• 1:12:59
  Yes. Yes, I know exactly what book it
• 1:13:00
  is. I I, I worked with Brent the
• 1:13:03
  next. Morning and I was like.
• 1:13:05
  Read the book that's that's the Bible.
• 1:13:07
  I wish that was back in publication because the best
• 1:13:09
  Brent Hurdle book ever. And there's a lot of ton of good
• 1:13:11
  books out there, but Brent Mcfarland's book transformation
• 1:13:14
  transformed my coaching career. I got to work with Brent.
• 1:13:17
  It's spiral bound. You're talking about that one,
• 1:13:18
  right? Yeah.
• 1:13:19
  Yeah. Amazing book.
• 1:13:20
  Love it. Love it.
• 1:13:21
  Well, lucky, He'd start giving me books.
• 1:13:22
  Yeah. And he'd give the books to these
• 1:13:24
  other two and they'd just never do anything with it.
• 1:13:28
  And he'd give me the book and I'd bring it back the next day
• 1:13:30
  and be like, I'm done, give me another book.
• 1:13:31
  Yeah. And I couldn't find enough
• 1:13:34
  stuff. And yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:35
  Eric Evely at this time was doing his Canadian a series of
• 1:13:40
  podcasts where he would interview people.
• 1:13:43
  Stumbled onto that and started to listen to Tom Tulez.
• 1:13:48
  Started to listen. To.
• 1:13:50
  Taft started to listen to Bruce Scheck, Snyder started to listen
• 1:13:54
  to like one of my favorite ones. Derek did some great interviews
• 1:13:57
  with the kid from Penn State that's throws guy now that
• 1:14:01
  through with Dylan when they were together in Kamloops.
• 1:14:05
  But just like talking, you start talking about doctor B and like
• 1:14:08
  how they were doing stuff and I just mind blowing because I have
• 1:14:11
  no context right. The coaches that I have lucky
• 1:14:15
  and God's busy doing their jobs, not not busy educating me.
• 1:14:20
  They just gave me the multis are like just go away and coach the
• 1:14:24
  multis here are 12 kids go away and I would I would bring lucky.
• 1:14:27
  I'd be like this is what I'm doing.
• 1:14:28
  He'd be like, that looks good. And so I got to experiment with
• 1:14:32
  a bunch of kids. I had some success.
• 1:14:34
  I had a lot of fun. And by the time I got done with
• 1:14:38
  that process, well, during the process, I kept going to Gods,
• 1:14:42
  Hey gods, I'm thinking about getting a job this next year.
• 1:14:45
  What do I need to do? And you'd be like you need to
• 1:14:47
  network and the conversation would end like.
• 1:14:53
  How do I do that? Networking.
• 1:14:56
  Needs, right? It is like, we're going to
• 1:14:58
  nationals this week and make sure you network.
• 1:15:00
  And I'm like, OK, so we go to nationals and I'd try to like,
• 1:15:06
  I'd see, you know, Mike Cunningham there.
• 1:15:07
  And I'd sit down and be like, hey, Mike, I mean, nobody knows
• 1:15:11
  me. And he'd be like, hey, I'm
• 1:15:13
  really, you know, I'm trying to start a conversation with these
• 1:15:15
  people. Nobody.
• 1:15:16
  I mean, the hard thing about networking, if you don't have an
• 1:15:19
  introduction or if it's not a social scenario, people are not
• 1:15:22
  trying to have a conversation. With you, yeah.
• 1:15:23
  There's roadblocks there, yeah. So I, I, you know, I'll get done
• 1:15:27
  and I'm like. So I think I networked.
• 1:15:30
  Yeah, I networked. They're like, well, here here's
• 1:15:32
  here's the jobs list. Go apply for a job I applied
• 1:15:35
  for, you know, 37 different jobs and I still have all of my cover
• 1:15:39
  letters, all of my stuff. I got an Apple, I got an
• 1:15:43
  interview at Black Hills State to be the assistant and I, they
• 1:15:46
  ended up hiring Travis Covey instead of me and eventually I
• 1:15:52
  got a kind of had a conversation with Dickinson State with the
• 1:15:56
  guy that's now the AD there and they were killing it.
• 1:15:59
  OK, So that's when they had their three-year run of national
• 1:16:02
  championships. Derek Atkins, Trevor Berry,
• 1:16:06
  Aaron Clear, like all those guys.
• 1:16:07
  Derek's down at Utah Tech now, Trevor Berry's down at Morehead
• 1:16:11
  State, guys that went and did stuff at the world Championship,
• 1:16:15
  Diamond League levels, incredible guys.
• 1:16:17
  Dickinson That didn't pan out, and I got an interview at Emory
• 1:16:22
  University. I'd never heard of it.
• 1:16:24
  It's a prestigious. I was going to ask, did you
• 1:16:27
  because you mentioned all these schools are kind of in that
• 1:16:29
  area, so you didn't just limit yourself to?
• 1:16:32
  Oh no, Anything that. Popped up, I applied for.
• 1:16:35
  You could go on here. I applied for every job.
• 1:16:37
  I think Petros moved from you and O that you're in Boise
• 1:16:41
  State. We both applied for Boise State.
• 1:16:43
  Yeah, Yeah. They would never have talked to
• 1:16:44
  me because I was just Aga, but I, you know, at the time I
• 1:16:47
  didn't know. Yeah.
• 1:16:48
  What I'm? Right, right, right.
• 1:16:50
  Absolutely the. Process works.
• 1:16:51
  And sometimes that's better, by the way, because then you don't
• 1:16:53
  put yourself in some box, to be real, frankly, Yeah.
• 1:16:56
  Yeah, I never would have applied for the job in Emory, you know.
• 1:16:59
  Yeah, right. You know, that's why I got that
• 1:17:01
  job. And John Curtin, the guy who was
• 1:17:03
  the the head coach at that time, said I'm going to be in Omaha
• 1:17:06
  for juniors. Can you drive down a meat drove
• 1:17:11
  down. We ate at Ted's, you know, grill
• 1:17:16
  and had a delicious Buffalo hamburger, whatever.
• 1:17:20
  And we talked and I don't remember exactly how the offer
• 1:17:25
  came, whether it was on the phone later or whether it was
• 1:17:27
  there, but I drove myself a couple hours back to Vermilion.
• 1:17:31
  And later on, he calls me up, I guess, and says, how would you
• 1:17:35
  like that? You'd coach here next year?
• 1:17:37
  And I'm like, do that. I could do that.
• 1:17:38
  And he's like 18, five. I was starved to death.
• 1:17:41
  Yeah. And so he said, I'll see what I
• 1:17:44
  can do, call me back. Two days later, he goes How does
• 1:17:47
  22,000 sound? Better than better than 18 Five.
• 1:17:51
  August, it's like last week in July, this week in August, then
• 1:17:56
  I'm like I got no other offers. I'm moving to Atlanta.
• 1:17:59
  And one of the things that I said to myself is I am never,
• 1:18:03
  I'm going to be willing to move wherever I need to move.
• 1:18:07
  Personal life doesn't matter anymore.
• 1:18:11
  I'm not going to not take a job because it's somewhere scary.
• 1:18:14
  Yeah, yeah. But Emory and Emory's a great
• 1:18:17
  school, great campus. It's really cool.
• 1:18:20
  But Atlanta, that's different than Vermilion.
• 1:18:23
  I mean like radically different. How did you adjust?
• 1:18:27
  I was lucky enough every 3rd year we'd had family reunions on
• 1:18:33
  the bearing camp and on the Moors side.
• 1:18:35
  And so you get connected with your first, second, third
• 1:18:38
  cousins. And it just turned out that my
• 1:18:40
  mom had some cousins that lived there and their kids, you know,
• 1:18:45
  I had gotten to know them growing up.
• 1:18:47
  And I said, don't David and Melina live down there?
• 1:18:51
  And so my parents got me their phone number.
• 1:18:53
  I called them up. I said I'm coming down, I'm
• 1:18:54
  going to get a job. Kind of crash on your couch for
• 1:18:55
  two weeks while I look for a job or I look for a place to live.
• 1:19:00
  Super helpful. That'd be great.
• 1:19:01
  That'd be great. The wonderful thing about Melita
• 1:19:04
  and is Melita is an immigrant from Peru.
• 1:19:06
  She got married to David and they have helped family come
• 1:19:10
  over. It's a very normal thing for
• 1:19:12
  them to do. Her brother is a doctor at Duke
• 1:19:15
  now. He does throat stuff.
• 1:19:19
  And so they brought her parents over, her brother over, you
• 1:19:23
  know, uncles and aunts and stuff like that.
• 1:19:24
  So to live in their house, they're like, Oh yeah, meets
• 1:19:27
  expectations, right? Not a big deal.
• 1:19:29
  So I moved in with them. It was kind of a crazy scenario
• 1:19:32
  was David Melita, my mother's cousins.
• 1:19:35
  I don't even know how that works.
• 1:19:37
  Their daughter, her husband and their daughter, right.
• 1:19:42
  So there were 3456 of us living in a house.
• 1:19:45
  It was like a 5000 square foot house, four bedrooms up, 6 total
• 1:19:50
  full basement. And they they didn't they, they
• 1:19:54
  this was 2008. They were Realtors.
• 1:19:58
  Everything had just crashed. Oh, right, yeah, 08 yes, the.
• 1:20:01
  Year before that they had paid off their house, they had paid
• 1:20:05
  off business place they they'd done, I think they had done
• 1:20:09
  500,000 that year in net net revenue.
• 1:20:12
  That's how much they've made and they and they put it all into
• 1:20:15
  just being, you know, sufficient and where they're.
• 1:20:20
  So smart. I'm looking at places.
• 1:20:23
  I'm, you know, my $22,000 a month doesn't go anywhere for a
• 1:20:26
  year. And after two weeks, Melita
• 1:20:29
  comes to me and she goes, hey, we don't want you to move out.
• 1:20:33
  We want you to live with us in exchange for rent.
• 1:20:38
  We want you to cook on Tuesdays and Thursdays, dinner, just want
• 1:20:42
  to have it on the stove. We want it there when we come
• 1:20:44
  home, don't care what it is. And we want you to mow the lawn
• 1:20:47
  and do stuff around the house. Dude.
• 1:20:50
  And I was like, done. Yeah, I said.
• 1:20:51
  Yes, ma'am. Wow.
• 1:20:55
  And I was commuting from Dunwoody where they lived down,
• 1:20:58
  which is on the North End of town up by Sandy Springs, OK S
• 1:21:02
  all the way down 400 every single day in Atlanta.
• 1:21:04
  So I get to learn what that was all about.
• 1:21:06
  That was experience. Paid a dollar in tolls every
• 1:21:09
  day, $0.50 in 50. Cents, OH.
• 1:21:11
  Man only toll road lucky me in all of Georgia is 400.
• 1:21:16
  That's the. Only but but man, the kindness
• 1:21:23
  of facilitate what I was trying to do and I and I learned, you
• 1:21:28
  know, they were like you, the pole vault coach, and I was like
• 1:21:31
  I pole vaulted. That doesn't mean I know what I
• 1:21:34
  was doing. Wait, you pole vaulted and with
• 1:21:36
  Lucky and Derek was there, so of course you know what you're
• 1:21:39
  doing of. Course I know what I'm doing.
• 1:21:40
  I was a multi. I jumped 13/5 and 3/4 at the
• 1:21:44
  conference meet one time. So I, you know, I had an
• 1:21:49
  incredible group of people and I was again, just trying to learn
• 1:21:52
  and learn and learn and learn and learn and learn and learn in
• 1:21:54
  making 22 grand a year. They, they didn't have a huge
• 1:21:59
  demand on our time other than just be in the office at 10, be
• 1:22:02
  here until 6. You know, it seems pretty normal
• 1:22:07
  now. Was the track the same place
• 1:22:09
  where it is now? Yeah, but they're attached to
• 1:22:11
  the swimming pool and rec area. Kind of.
• 1:22:14
  Track, You know that track was one of the practice tracks for
• 1:22:17
  the 96 Olympics. That's right.
• 1:22:18
  Yeah, that's right. Exactly.
• 1:22:19
  Yeah, record tan track. It's an incredible facility,
• 1:22:23
  awesome place to be able to go and practice.
• 1:22:25
  Yeah, every day. It's a cool.
• 1:22:27
  Did not know how good I had it. Yeah, I'll say that is a Emory's
• 1:22:30
  a little bit of a hidden gem. I don't know that a lot of
• 1:22:33
  people know Emory, but oh man, they've got a lot going on from
• 1:22:37
  facilities to just the the school and the support athletics
• 1:22:40
  get. It's it's actually quite amazing
• 1:22:42
  there and it's beautiful. I call it little campus, you
• 1:22:45
  know, just all kind of built right there.
• 1:22:46
  It's a it's a cool little campus.
• 1:22:48
  So this is your first full time coaching job.
• 1:22:54
  How I want to say how did you like it?
• 1:22:57
  Because you know, spoiled alert, you're still coaching, but it's
• 1:22:59
  different when it's full time versus Aga versus volunteer
• 1:23:03
  versus, you know, coaching the middle school basketball team
• 1:23:05
  because now there's some of us will put higher expectations on
• 1:23:10
  ourselves. We see our athletes every week.
• 1:23:12
  We know we're going to paycheck for this.
• 1:23:13
  So there, you know, again, some expectations come from there.
• 1:23:15
  We have a boss that we have to report to as far as what
• 1:23:18
  recruits were getting or not getting.
• 1:23:20
  Why didn't you pull, pull vault this kid this weekend?
• 1:23:23
  You made him do the hurdles instead or whatever.
• 1:23:25
  How? How are you adjusting to like,
• 1:23:26
  OK, I'm a coach. I'm a full time college track
• 1:23:30
  and field coach at what, 2322? You're young.
• 1:23:35
  Well, 2008, are you good at math?
• 1:23:37
  I'm not. Yeah, no.
• 1:23:38
  And I'm, I went to school in Alabama, so no, I'm not at all.
• 1:23:41
  I. Think it was 25.
• 1:23:43
  All right, sounds good. But I, you know, no, I don't
• 1:23:46
  think anything really changed, OK, from my perception, like,
• 1:23:51
  you know, when I was on the team, I'd stay up late at night,
• 1:23:53
  chart everything and try to figure out, and this was when I
• 1:23:55
  was in school, figure out what event should everybody be in,
• 1:23:59
  score the meet. I was trying to pull race.
• 1:24:01
  Berry Jam was still doing all of that.
• 1:24:03
  Yeah, that's old school. Yeah, for, for the North Central
• 1:24:07
  Conference and I was trying to pull things in and calculate
• 1:24:10
  who's done what and what if they do these other events and
• 1:24:13
  putting things in. Like my senior year, I did the
• 1:24:17
  decathlon, I did the 110 meter hurdles.
• 1:24:21
  I did high jump, long jump, triple jump, javelin.
• 1:24:26
  I don't remember if I did anything else.
• 1:24:28
  I didn't run the 4x4. So if you think I did 10 events,
• 1:24:31
  +5. So I did 15 events at the
• 1:24:32
  conference meet and that's all. That was the first time I ever
• 1:24:35
  triple jumped. I got fourth.
• 1:24:37
  You know, like I, I say long jump, a long jump in there as
• 1:24:40
  well. But like I wanted to do a lot of
• 1:24:42
  stuff. I wanted to impact what was
• 1:24:43
  going on when I was at when I was at South Dakota and I was
• 1:24:47
  coaching, there was a kid named Jeff Segren at the time who
• 1:24:50
  ended up coincidentally working for me as a coach later on.
• 1:24:54
  Put him in triple jump. That kid scored the second or
• 1:24:56
  third most points at the conference meet on the team.
• 1:24:59
  I just a walk on kid and I've recruited him.
• 1:25:01
  He was best friends with the kids that live next door to me
• 1:25:03
  in the dorm. You know, got talking to him and
• 1:25:05
  he's like, Oh yeah, these are my athletic endeavors.
• 1:25:07
  Like you need to transfer here. You need to come here.
• 1:25:10
  And this is when we're both on the team.
• 1:25:12
  Always have been recruiting. People.
• 1:25:13
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we're always, so nothing
• 1:25:17
  really changed. I always was thinking about like
• 1:25:19
  building teams, putting people in great positions to be
• 1:25:23
  successful and two great decathletes there that year that
• 1:25:28
  you know, had like 4 or 500 point PRS.
• 1:25:30
  We went to the Last Chance North Central meet, did incredible
• 1:25:34
  until we got to Javelin. It would have been a 7 or 800
• 1:25:36
  point PR. We just did not throw Javelin.
• 1:25:40
  But I got to coach a bunch of stuff and no one cared.
• 1:25:43
  They put me completely in charge.
• 1:25:45
  They never monkeyed with anything that I was doing and
• 1:25:48
  kids did well. You've you've shown a great
• 1:25:53
  proclivity to what I call unofficial coaching education.
• 1:25:58
  Coaching education to me is official and unofficial.
• 1:26:01
  Not one is more important than the other.
• 1:26:03
  Unofficial as you know, peers, books, doing your own studies,
• 1:26:07
  things like that. Official B in the certificates,
• 1:26:08
  right? USATF level 1, USTFCA, Altos,
• 1:26:11
  etcetera. Are you doing any of the
• 1:26:13
  certification route at this point?
• 1:26:15
  Yeah, so I went to and you're involved in this story here.
• 1:26:19
  So I went to a level 1 school at, boy, it's a purple school in
• 1:26:25
  Missouri. What am I trying to say?
• 1:26:27
  Truman State, Yeah. Truman State So I go to Truman
• 1:26:30
  State in this summer in between getting this job, I stayed at
• 1:26:33
  campground with my, I just convinced my best friend to come
• 1:26:36
  along and was like, Hey, man, I'm going to this, this coaching
• 1:26:38
  clinic. And he's like, sounds good to
• 1:26:42
  me. I'll just sit at the library
• 1:26:43
  each day. And then we went out and ate and
• 1:26:44
  did different things and, and true.
• 1:26:46
  And, you know, and you were one of the presenters.
• 1:26:49
  I was going to say I taught that.
• 1:26:51
  Yeah, and so I taught. Your level 10 Jim, I just you
• 1:26:55
  know you have overcome a lot my friend, if I was your.
• 1:26:58
  Level 1. Holy cow, that's amazing.
• 1:27:02
  That's. Really.
• 1:27:02
  That was the first one I did. That's special.
• 1:27:05
  That's that's really cool. I, I ended up doing 30 of those
• 1:27:07
  before, you know, just work got too busy and really enjoy them.
• 1:27:11
  And I do. Thanks for for bringing that up
• 1:27:13
  and remembering that because I, it's special to me when I see
• 1:27:16
  coaches that I taught, you know, it's a curriculum.
• 1:27:19
  There's not a lot of leeway in there, but that's really that I
• 1:27:23
  really enjoyed my time as a coach, a level 1 teacher.
• 1:27:26
  I wish I could do it some more. That's really cool, man.
• 1:27:28
  Yeah. Truman State, man, that was that
• 1:27:30
  wasn't out in the middle of nowhere.
• 1:27:32
  The Bulldogs. That was fun.
• 1:27:33
  That's really cool. I love that.
• 1:27:34
  Thank you for bringing that memory up for me.
• 1:27:36
  OK. So you're doing Level 1, any
• 1:27:38
  level 2 or and I guess we didn't have USTFCCCA then or maybe it
• 1:27:43
  was just starting it? Might have been just starting
• 1:27:46
  about that time. Yeah, yeah, it's probably.
• 1:27:48
  Because I got done. I got done in Amory and took a
• 1:27:52
  job. How many years it?
• 1:27:55
  How many? Years.
• 1:27:55
  One year. One year and you go back to
• 1:27:58
  South Dakota. Why?
• 1:28:00
  You know, I was working construction during the summer.
• 1:28:02
  We were doing fixture setting at JC Penney's, building the
• 1:28:05
  backroom and then putting things out there.
• 1:28:07
  Wait, so you moved to Atlanta to Emory in August roughly, and
• 1:28:11
  then when season was up, May or June, you then go back to do
• 1:28:14
  construction? We did.
• 1:28:16
  But I, I work construction on Lake Altoona and we did a, a JC
• 1:28:20
  Penney's just have one of my teammates, his parents on a
• 1:28:22
  construction business they built.
• 1:28:24
  They do all the shelving for any Shields whenever those get
• 1:28:26
  installed and all the fixture setting for that kind of stuff.
• 1:28:29
  And he was like, hey, man, we're going to actually be in Georgia.
• 1:28:32
  You want to work for our crew? Oh, OK.
• 1:28:33
  OK, OK, OK, I got. It So Tyler and I got on that
• 1:28:36
  crew. They had a house rented.
• 1:28:38
  It's crazy that people do this stuff in construction.
• 1:28:40
  We'd work all day, come back and we just watch HBO shows and and
• 1:28:45
  then sleep. I slept on the couch in the
• 1:28:47
  living room every night. Then we moved over to
• 1:28:50
  Birmingham. Once we got that job done, I
• 1:28:52
  lived in a hotel there for a month.
• 1:28:54
  And then as soon as we got done with that, my friend Tyler and
• 1:28:57
  I've been talking, I was going to go back and and do some more
• 1:28:59
  research and he's like, hey man, I've always wanted to.
• 1:29:01
  Were you definitely not coming back to Emory?
• 1:29:04
  Like when When? I was planning on coming back.
• 1:29:06
  Oh, OK, OK. Yeah, it's.
• 1:29:06
  A10 month contract. So I'm yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 1:29:09
  yeah. And he wanted to kayak down to
• 1:29:11
  Missouri, so we kayaked from Vermilion all the way down to
• 1:29:13
  Kansas City. And that was, you know, I'm
• 1:29:17
  applying for jobs during this period of time too, and.
• 1:29:20
  But you're coming back to Emory as far as you're.
• 1:29:21
  Concerned back to Emory. Yep, Yep, Yep.
• 1:29:23
  Lucky calls me. This is always a funny thing
• 1:29:27
  because I the the way that this happened, Lucky calls me goes,
• 1:29:29
  hey, Chris Bradford got the job at Western Colorado.
• 1:29:35
  Here's Tracy Hellman's phone number.
• 1:29:38
  You need to call him and tell him you're going to be in town
• 1:29:40
  tomorrow and you're going to interview for the job.
• 1:29:42
  But I got nothing to lose. I called him up and he's like,
• 1:29:46
  yeah, hello, who's this? And Jim Berenkamp, I've been
• 1:29:50
  working at Emory. Oh, yeah, I know.
• 1:29:52
  Who are you, Jim, who you are or whatever?
• 1:29:54
  I said I'm going to be in town tomorrow and I'm going to
• 1:29:57
  interview for your open job. Did you really say that like
• 1:30:00
  that? Oh yeah.
• 1:30:02
  What did he say? He goes, oh, well, let me get
• 1:30:07
  some things together. Is it OK if I get you, you know,
• 1:30:12
  an itinerary? Yep.
• 1:30:15
  So I drove up to Sioux Falls and I interviewed for the job.
• 1:30:19
  It wasn't even open. Yeah, you know, but that, OK,
• 1:30:23
  that's your first cue. That's what networking is.
• 1:30:25
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A little bit of gall though, is
• 1:30:29
  to say, hey, I'm I. Had nothing to lose.
• 1:30:31
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and in my opinion too,
• 1:30:33
  August Cano was terrible, my senior.
• 1:30:35
  Yeah, yeah. There's I, Yeah.
• 1:30:37
  You're not doing. You're not calling.
• 1:30:38
  My friend Tyler scored more points than their team.
• 1:30:42
  Yeah, at conference. Yeah Tyler.
• 1:30:44
  Tyler scored in the steeplechase 5 of the 10 and their entire
• 1:30:47
  team scored 15 points. Right, right.
• 1:30:49
  Yeah, there's. I didn't have a lot of it wasn't
• 1:30:52
  like this. Is yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:30:53
  There there is a little bit of situational, not awareness, but
• 1:30:57
  situational, right, Cuz like, like right now, how would you
• 1:30:59
  feel if someone called you if you had a position open and they
• 1:31:02
  said, hey, Jim, I'm Mike Cunningham.
• 1:31:04
  Oh, yeah, I know, I know you, Mike.
• 1:31:06
  Yeah. Hey, So I'm in town tomorrow and
• 1:31:07
  I'm I'm gonna interview for your assistant job.
• 1:31:10
  I feel like you'd be like cool with who?
• 1:31:12
  Because not with me, buddy. What are you talking about?
• 1:31:14
  You know, and I think that's the other thing too, it depends on
• 1:31:18
  what your networks like. If you don't have anybody
• 1:31:20
  that'll interview for your job and, and, and this is the one
• 1:31:23
  thing, if I could give anybody advice, you need to have a
• 1:31:25
  shortlist. If you don't know what a
• 1:31:27
  shortlist a shortlist is established relationships with
• 1:31:32
  people that you believe you can offer a better position to, not
• 1:31:38
  people you wish would take your job.
• 1:31:40
  Yeah. Explain that.
• 1:31:40
  Explain that. But for example, if if I'm Jim
• 1:31:43
  Berenkamp, I've got a short list of throws coaches, I have a
• 1:31:46
  short list of distance coaches. For your job, for for your
• 1:31:51
  future opening if it comes available, correct?
• 1:31:53
  Yes, it's when it's open. It's closed before it's open.
• 1:31:56
  Good head coaches have that and good assistant coaches who
• 1:32:01
  aspire to be head coaches have that.
• 1:32:03
  Like, hey, here's a staff that I would my dream staff.
• 1:32:05
  And then to your point, two or three, because, you know, some
• 1:32:07
  don't want to move to where you are or they're happy where they
• 1:32:10
  are or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 1:32:11
  yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.
• 1:32:12
  Absolutely. Don't be don't don't get the job
• 1:32:15
  as a head coach and then be like, I got to fill a staff.
• 1:32:17
  What the Frick man? Who do I hire best?
• 1:32:20
  Just let me go look at the applications.
• 1:32:22
  Yeah, yeah. Good ones are prepared.
• 1:32:24
  That's exactly. Right.
• 1:32:25
  And I would say everywhere that I've been, we've already had
• 1:32:28
  staff filled for, for example, I'm thinking about, you know,
• 1:32:31
  when I was at Queens, you know, I, I knew my assistant was going
• 1:32:36
  to leave. I spent six months talking to
• 1:32:40
  people and just betting, feeling people out.
• 1:32:44
  So they're going through that, you know, and especially at a
• 1:32:46
  private institution where there are no rules, you hire who you
• 1:32:49
  want. Doesn't have to be, you know,
• 1:32:51
  doesn't have to be public for a certain amount of time.
• 1:32:53
  You don't have to be a certain number of people.
• 1:32:55
  Anytime I went to my boss and I said, Sahaya's going to leave, I
• 1:32:59
  want to hire this person. And she would even say she's
• 1:33:01
  like, man, I appreciate you have your staff built.
• 1:33:05
  Absolutely. Because there's always turnover
• 1:33:07
  at small schools at that. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:33:10
  Don't be delusional and think that, yeah, your staff's gonna
• 1:33:12
  be the one that stays together for 20 years, Right?
• 1:33:14
  Right. It happens.
• 1:33:15
  But that's, again, that Unicorn out there.
• 1:33:18
  For the sake of time, let's move forward a little bit.
• 1:33:20
  So you get, you take that. Do you get that job?
• 1:33:23
  The job that you say, hey, I'm going to interview tomorrow.
• 1:33:26
  Yeah, I took that job in Augustana.
• 1:33:28
  I started and I just. So what was that like to tell
• 1:33:31
  the head coach back at Emory? Because that's something we
• 1:33:33
  sometimes don't think about. You know, I'm Yeah, I coached
• 1:33:36
  for 10 years and has a 5 different institutions.
• 1:33:37
  So I'm certainly not gonna wag, wag my finger.
• 1:33:40
  People who leave and go on. I think you should go on to
• 1:33:42
  whatever you think is bigger and better for yourself for your
• 1:33:44
  career. I have that same philosophy with
• 1:33:46
  athletes too, which sometimes conflicts with our coaches, but
• 1:33:49
  that's OK. But we forget that you talk
• 1:33:52
  about networking. Well, don't burn bridges either.
• 1:33:55
  How did you handle? Yeah, I.
• 1:33:57
  Don't I don't burn bridges. OK, I thought you were telling
• 1:34:00
  me you burned a bridge. No, I called John and I just
• 1:34:03
  said, hey, you know, it's 8000 more a year.
• 1:34:06
  My rent is going to be like $250 a month.
• 1:34:10
  But the pro, the thing that I, I don't know if I even said I got
• 1:34:13
  to know the Southeast when I was down there.
• 1:34:15
  The number one thing I would recommend to people as they look
• 1:34:18
  at jobs, go away from where you've been, go out, experience
• 1:34:23
  something different, different town, different cities, the way
• 1:34:26
  the track meets are run in a different place.
• 1:34:29
  Because I will say this, I feel like when I interviewed for the
• 1:34:32
  job at Queens, my familiarity with the region helped me out so
• 1:34:37
  much. I knew people, I knew where the
• 1:34:38
  meats were. I knew how it worked.
• 1:34:41
  It was, it was an easy way to, you know, circle back around and
• 1:34:44
  come back into there and I knew people that I could reference
• 1:34:46
  and under and I could show that I understood the area.
• 1:34:49
  That's what I was, yeah. I mean, I, you know, I don't
• 1:34:51
  think, I think I failed to tell you this before we during our
• 1:34:53
  pre interview. I, I don't do any research
• 1:34:56
  beforehand. So what I know of you is what I
• 1:34:58
  know of you. And then we explore that right.
• 1:34:59
  Allows me to stay curious. So I knew you went to Queens,
• 1:35:01
  but one of my concern was that's why I asked when you, when you
• 1:35:03
  were applying for all those jobs.
• 1:35:05
  I was like, did you just I was, I was concerned because I agree
• 1:35:07
  with that too. Go away from where you grew up,
• 1:35:09
  go away from where you're familiar, Go put yourself in
• 1:35:11
  unfamiliar places and learn and fail and and get better.
• 1:35:14
  So I was concerned about that. But then I knew Queens was in
• 1:35:17
  there at some form or fashion. So, OK, so you did call coach
• 1:35:20
  back at Emory and was like, Hey, appreciate everything.
• 1:35:24
  You know, I'm not, but I, you know, I took this job and here's
• 1:35:25
  why and that's good. I, I, I hope, I don't know if
• 1:35:29
  it's, if that's the case, I, I don't know, I'm not saying it's
• 1:35:32
  not the case, but I hope that's the case of the professionalism
• 1:35:35
  of our profession of, hey, if you accept another position,
• 1:35:38
  give the coach the respect immediately so that they can
• 1:35:41
  prepare. They they don't have a hole in
• 1:35:43
  their staff that they've got to fix and hopefully they have a
• 1:35:46
  list of three to four people they can immediately call.
• 1:35:48
  But but don't, don't treat them how you would want to be
• 1:35:51
  treated. If if you're a head coach one
• 1:35:53
  day and someone leaves you, you would certainly hope someone's
• 1:35:56
  letting you know immediately. So I appreciate that.
• 1:35:59
  All right, so you go, you're back home ish.
• 1:36:01
  You're back in this, you know, up here in this upper Midwest.
• 1:36:04
  How many, how many years there, and what's next?
• 1:36:06
  So three years there, OK, Tracy and Chris Bradford had really
• 1:36:14
  changed the philosophy and really doubled down on getting
• 1:36:18
  some good kids. And so I walked into what
• 1:36:21
  externally didn't look very good, but man that we had a lot
• 1:36:23
  of really great stuff coming and I thinking about networking and
• 1:36:30
  this is a year on. We have some success with some
• 1:36:32
  kids. And the next year I was at the
• 1:36:34
  conference multi that that year and Chris Parno was there and he
• 1:36:39
  was, I was like, what are you doing, man?
• 1:36:41
  He's like, I don't know. I just got back from student
• 1:36:43
  teaching in Bolivia and I got this semester, I was like, why
• 1:36:46
  don't you come be Aga for me next year?
• 1:36:48
  I need Aga. No way.
• 1:36:50
  Oh yeah. So Chris lived in my basement,
• 1:36:53
  kept his drums in his room. He let me play that when I was
• 1:36:56
  when he was at class and stuff like that.
• 1:36:58
  And so he was Aga with me at Augustana for two years and he
• 1:37:02
  knew the job was going to come open at Mankato.
• 1:37:04
  So he worked really hard at that and we won conference
• 1:37:08
  championships. We've never won anything.
• 1:37:10
  So we won women's indoor, women's outdoor, we won women's
• 1:37:13
  NCAA national championship across country.
• 1:37:16
  So success, success, success. Looks like I know what I'm
• 1:37:19
  doing. I don't.
• 1:37:20
  We're just really motivated. We're recruiting really hard and
• 1:37:24
  there was a guy named Scott Simmons who had a lot of success
• 1:37:27
  at Minot State to Virginia Intermont after that, and when
• 1:37:32
  Virginia Intermont closed, he went to Queens.
• 1:37:34
  Queens, That's right. Followed him because when he was
• 1:37:38
  at Minot State, I was at South Dakota school of mine.
• 1:37:41
  So we're in the DAK 10 at that time.
• 1:37:43
  So I knew who Brad Thai and and the Thai brothers and all of
• 1:37:46
  them were. So I and I see that he leaves
• 1:37:50
  the job. I see the job gets posted on my
• 1:37:52
  birthday, January 27th. Boom, immediately send in my
• 1:37:57
  resume. I called the secretary every
• 1:38:00
  single week until I got an interview and I was in the
• 1:38:04
  second round of the interview. Why?
• 1:38:06
  Why that school? Why just?
• 1:38:08
  It was just a job. Yeah.
• 1:38:10
  No, no, no particular interest. I just was out there and I
• 1:38:15
  wanted an interview, so I called this Robbie every single week.
• 1:38:19
  Miss Robbie, What's going on with the job?
• 1:38:21
  Oh, what's up, Jim? And.
• 1:38:25
  And they did. They did a first round of
• 1:38:27
  interviews. Didn't like anybody there.
• 1:38:29
  Did a second round of interviews.
• 1:38:31
  My eventual assistant, Sahai de Nacho was she interviewed the
• 1:38:38
  day after I did last one and they offered me the job while I
• 1:38:41
  was out at the national championships in Pueblo with
• 1:38:44
  with Tracy and the and the rest of the kids and I took the job
• 1:38:48
  experience at Augustana. They have the freedom for the
• 1:38:51
  speed power group and to just grow it and try different
• 1:38:54
  things, which I would argue are foolish things, but sometimes
• 1:38:57
  you got to learn by doing and and you're going back to formal
• 1:39:01
  education. When I went to Queens, I was the
• 1:39:04
  time when I took my first coaches association sprints and
• 1:39:09
  jumps or sprints that foundation class and it was like wow, they
• 1:39:14
  have not been doing this. Yeah, I think I like when you
• 1:39:18
  say, you know, trying things, doing things and looking back
• 1:39:20
  now some foolish things. Because I feel like if you know,
• 1:39:24
  after you coach for some amount of time, not necessarily a lot,
• 1:39:26
  5 years, 10 years, if you don't look back, some of the first
• 1:39:30
  things you did and cringe a little bit.
• 1:39:32
  It's like, well, I'm not sure you're growing then if you're
• 1:39:34
  still doing the same things or because I doubt anybody's coming
• 1:39:37
  right out the gate, no matter who was your college coach or
• 1:39:39
  whatnot, all that stuff. I'm not sure about the gate.
• 1:39:42
  Anybody is coaching good. When they first start.
• 1:39:44
  You're, you're, you're trying to figure out your own identity and
• 1:39:47
  that means a lot of accidents. And so if you, you don't look
• 1:39:49
  back and be like, oh man, what in the world was I doing?
• 1:39:51
  I I'm just not sure you're growing.
• 1:39:53
  So I appreciate you saying that. I love the Chris.
• 1:39:56
  That's so that's so interesting. I I'm toying around with the
• 1:39:59
  idea of having some kind of button during these interviews
• 1:40:01
  to hit. That signifies Gill podcast
• 1:40:04
  alums cuz Parno. Chris was like, I don't know,
• 1:40:07
  maybe 11 #12 he's an OG. He's one of the first ones.
• 1:40:10
  And as you know him, you know, today you can see he would have
• 1:40:13
  absolutely jumped at it when I first started this back in 2020.
• 1:40:16
  So I appreciate Chris a lot and lived in your basement.
• 1:40:19
  That's pretty cool. I bet if I go back and listen, I
• 1:40:21
  guarantee that's part of his story that he told.
• 1:40:23
  Yeah, that's really, that's really cool.
• 1:40:25
  So I mentioned Emory and how beautiful that campus is.
• 1:40:28
  You go to Queens, another really beautiful camp.
• 1:40:31
  And now you're N you have an attraction for really attractive
• 1:40:35
  campuses. So you go to Queens beautiful,
• 1:40:37
  you know, right in Charlotte, you know, you kind of drive down
• 1:40:40
  that residential area and then it opens up a lot of greeneries.
• 1:40:43
  What I remember there How how was it at Queens?
• 1:40:45
  And this is your first head coaching job?
• 1:40:47
  Yeah. Yeah, how was that, Queens?
• 1:40:49
  Queens was a great opportunity to develop my SO as a head
• 1:40:56
  coach. It's wildly different than being
• 1:40:58
  an assistant coach. I spend way more time now and
• 1:41:01
  even when I was at Queens on the macro, I hired my friend Jeff.
• 1:41:06
  He coached sprints, couldn't find a throws coach.
• 1:41:09
  So I coached throws and we had Sahai who was a distance coach
• 1:41:12
  and we didn't really see each other.
• 1:41:14
  Throws coach like throws, facilities over here, sprints,
• 1:41:18
  jumps is over here, distance, who knows?
• 1:41:21
  And we had no facilities, right? And that was an opportunity for
• 1:41:26
  me to go out and to identify facilities, build relationships,
• 1:41:31
  get us a place to do things and really establish what you
• 1:41:37
  believe. You know what I mean?
• 1:41:38
  It start establishing staff, network building, building
• 1:41:41
  through all of those different things.
• 1:41:44
  So we never ended up with any facilities.
• 1:41:46
  You know, COVID was a real struggle.
• 1:41:48
  We had an asphalt track. What's crazy, we went to
• 1:41:51
  nationals, I had a girl that was a national champion in the short
• 1:41:54
  hurdles, girl that was runner up in the multi, you know, and we
• 1:41:57
  did it all on an asphalt track. And that's what a lot of people
• 1:42:00
  think. Well, we got to have the nicest
• 1:42:01
  and my kids even thought this, we got to have a nice facility.
• 1:42:03
  And I'm like, here's the deal. Your body doesn't know from a
• 1:42:08
  neurological standpoint, if you're wearing spikes and you're
• 1:42:10
  on rubber, if you're wearing flats or you're on an asphalt
• 1:42:13
  track. Running fast is about limb
• 1:42:14
  movement and neural recruitment. And I would argue having a girl
• 1:42:19
  that came in as a 14-1 hurdler that ran 13 two right body must
• 1:42:26
  not have known at any point. And so like we and now being
• 1:42:32
  able to do it without facilities when I had the opportunity to
• 1:42:36
  come here and they're like, we only have an 8 lane 300m indoor
• 1:42:41
  track and you can only, you can only use it from 1:00 to 5:00
• 1:42:45
  every day. You're like, wow, I'll suffer
• 1:42:49
  through. I was like, if it gets -100 that
• 1:42:53
  sounds. Fantastic.
• 1:42:55
  I'll figure it out. Yeah.
• 1:42:57
  All right, go back to Queens real quick.
• 1:42:59
  I have three questions that I'd love to ask first time head
• 1:43:01
  coaches. One is because now you have
• 1:43:03
  perspective, you know, you know, years behind you.
• 1:43:06
  Were you ready to be a head coach?
• 1:43:10
  Well, I might have to ask you, what does that mean?
• 1:43:12
  Because I, I, I, I, I don't know if there's a ready, you know
• 1:43:15
  what I mean? I was, I was ready.
• 1:43:18
  I was prepared to, you know, make all of the decisions to be
• 1:43:24
  responsible for that stuff. I made mistakes along the way,
• 1:43:29
  but from an aptitude standpoint, I was unhesitantly ready to do
• 1:43:35
  that. And I was real.
• 1:43:37
  Like, I don't want anybody else telling me what I could or
• 1:43:40
  couldn't do. And not that I not that I
• 1:43:43
  couldn't do that, but I think if you really, I have a lot of
• 1:43:51
  personal belief in my abilities and skills and that was an
• 1:43:59
  opportunity to try that stuff. So at some point, you know, you,
• 1:44:02
  you work for somebody and you learn some stuff.
• 1:44:05
  And we always know everything, right when we're the assistant
• 1:44:07
  and then you get to be the head coach and that's when you learn
• 1:44:09
  what you what you don't know. And that's a great, I mean,
• 1:44:12
  that's a growth opportunity. Growth is by definition
• 1:44:17
  uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, you're
• 1:44:19
  not growing. That's right.
• 1:44:20
  And so for me, I was ready to be uncomfortable and I was very
• 1:44:25
  uncomfortable actually. Like going back.
• 1:44:27
  Remember I said I was never going to put personal life and I
• 1:44:32
  didn't want that to hold me back, right?
• 1:44:34
  And I wanted to move as much as I could.
• 1:44:36
  I wanted to do what I could. So 29 years old, I get the
• 1:44:41
  opportunity to be. So young.
• 1:44:43
  All right, So my second question for new head coaches, because I
• 1:44:48
  don't think I know from being the podcast host talking to
• 1:44:53
  coaches 24/7, we overall, some coaches, some head coaches do a
• 1:44:58
  very good job of this, But overall, we don't do a very good
• 1:45:01
  job of helping our assistant coaches become future head
• 1:45:04
  coaches, meaning we're very controlling sometimes.
• 1:45:08
  Again, this is just a big general swap.
• 1:45:09
  So we don't want to give up equipment or scheduling or
• 1:45:13
  budgeting or academics or all the other billion hats that you
• 1:45:16
  wear as a head coach. We don't want to give that up to
• 1:45:18
  our assistants. And so when they become head
• 1:45:20
  coaches, it's the first time they realize, oh crap, I didn't
• 1:45:23
  even think I have to meet with my the academic counselor about
• 1:45:25
  the school, about the team, you know, things like that.
• 1:45:28
  So these questions are very similar.
• 1:45:30
  I'll start with the first one. When you got to Queens, you,
• 1:45:33
  you, you nailed it. You said, hey, being the head
• 1:45:35
  coach is different than being the assistant coach.
• 1:45:37
  That that is different. You're, you're more macro,
• 1:45:39
  right? Not just siloed on your event
• 1:45:41
  group. You're also siloed on your event
• 1:45:43
  group by the way, while also doing the macro.
• 1:45:45
  It's kind of you're doing 2 jobs, if you will.
• 1:45:47
  What did you think was going to be hard?
• 1:45:49
  What was something you thought, oh, I might struggle with this
• 1:45:52
  as the head coach but end up being easy?
• 1:45:58
  So I'll go back and I want to, I want to answer your first
• 1:46:01
  question because I struggled finding a job and I got told the
• 1:46:08
  network and I had no, nobody explained it to me, just
• 1:46:13
  intrinsically. I have always wanted to help
• 1:46:16
  people move on and I have always wanted to offer people exposure
• 1:46:23
  too, so that they know about South.
• 1:46:26
  Any assistant that I ever had when I was at Queens, the goal
• 1:46:29
  is you're going to learn everything about everything.
• 1:46:33
  So when you go to the next place, you understand all this.
• 1:46:37
  So one of one of my coaching tree, Aaron Combs, just took
• 1:46:41
  over at Indiana, Purdue, Fort Wayne as a head coach.
• 1:46:45
  He called me the other day and he's not just trying to be nice.
• 1:46:47
  He goes, I just want to say thank you.
• 1:46:49
  He goes every step of the way. You have prepared me for
• 1:46:51
  everything before I've ever gotten to it.
• 1:46:53
  I understand budgeting, I understand fundraising.
• 1:46:55
  I understand dealing with administration.
• 1:46:57
  I understand home meats, meat administration, how we do all
• 1:47:01
  this stuff. And my AD said to me, this is
• 1:47:05
  him speaking. She goes, you have been so far
• 1:47:09
  ahead of the curve. It's just really been us getting
• 1:47:11
  to a place where we can hire you.
• 1:47:14
  And, and I've always tried to do that and I've pushed kids out to
• 1:47:17
  like different jobs in my, and for a while there, I tried to
• 1:47:21
  position myself where everybody knew me who was looking for a
• 1:47:25
  distance coach. And we always had volunteers
• 1:47:27
  come in every year. We always pushed out those
• 1:47:28
  volunteers. So I've got a, I've got a
• 1:47:32
  coaching tree group chat that we're in now.
• 1:47:34
  I love that we all stay connected and we all talk about
• 1:47:37
  what we're doing and and. For our profession, we need more
• 1:47:41
  of that. We, we have too many assistant
• 1:47:44
  coaches who become head coaches who are just clueless.
• 1:47:47
  Not their fault. They, they were never exposed
• 1:47:49
  to, they were told go coach sprints, go coach throws, don't
• 1:47:52
  talk. I'll do the rest of that right?
• 1:47:53
  Because, because on one hand, the head coach in that sense
• 1:47:55
  feels like they're, they're supporting their assistant
• 1:47:57
  coach. It's like, look, man, don't
• 1:47:58
  worry about that stuff. You just coach.
• 1:48:00
  And then they that, that guy goes and Gal goes, becomes a
• 1:48:03
  head coach. And now they're three years
• 1:48:05
  behind the curve, learning meat management, scheduling,
• 1:48:09
  budgeting. How do you work with your
• 1:48:11
  oversight AD They're just so far behind.
• 1:48:13
  They'll they'll get there. They're all smart individuals.
• 1:48:15
  People become head coaches are very smart individuals, but
• 1:48:17
  they're so far behind when it's like, man, you could have, you
• 1:48:19
  could have, you know, use a baseball term here.
• 1:48:21
  You could have put that kid on first base to become a head
• 1:48:23
  coach. Instead, they're they're the
• 1:48:25
  they're on the on bat circle here.
• 1:48:26
  You know, I mean, come on. So I love 1.
• 1:48:29
  Of my, one of my favorite expressions is Lucky said this
• 1:48:32
  to my my wife the other day who was our jumps coach, he said.
• 1:48:35
  You know those people that are born on third base who feel like
• 1:48:39
  they had a triple, that really, that really frustrates me.
• 1:48:42
  Because you. Know understand what they were
• 1:48:44
  just given, but like one of the so one of the stories to just
• 1:48:48
  eat into this last year I had a graduate assistant named Olivia
• 1:48:52
  Lane and she came to us from Oregon.
• 1:48:57
  She was I forget which Oregon small NAI school it was.
• 1:49:00
  And then she was at Ashland for a year when Judd Logan passed
• 1:49:04
  away. And that was a tough year.
• 1:49:05
  And and she came here because coincidentally, my distance
• 1:49:08
  coaches from Ash Ashland, my throws coaches from Ashland, not
• 1:49:12
  by design coincidence. And she worked here for a little
• 1:49:16
  bit and then she was like after a year she's like, I don't want
• 1:49:19
  to do this. She tried to leave.
• 1:49:21
  She went and got a job with the forestry service.
• 1:49:23
  I kept talking to her. I was like, you need to get back
• 1:49:24
  here. You need to finish your degree
• 1:49:26
  coaching job. You only were here for eight
• 1:49:29
  months. You can't tell me you don't like
• 1:49:30
  it because it takes used to develop friendships and really
• 1:49:34
  feel like you're in a place. So she comes back, you know,
• 1:49:36
  and, and I'm working with her on right now, we're going to go get
• 1:49:39
  a job. And Tom, our distance coach,
• 1:49:42
  comes into my office and she and I are sitting there and she's
• 1:49:45
  crying and you know, and Tom just turns around and walks back
• 1:49:49
  out of the office. I was grilling her with
• 1:49:51
  interview questions and just trying to prep her for the
• 1:49:55
  interview kind of breakdown. Some of the emotional barriers
• 1:49:58
  that she has is ready. She's got her dream job.
• 1:50:01
  She's at Montana State right now.
• 1:50:02
  Her athlete was 49 last week, and she's helped that girl jump,
• 1:50:06
  you know, 20 centimeters further.
• 1:50:08
  She's doing an incredible job. That was the job she said she
• 1:50:11
  wanted when she came here. She's like, I want to work
• 1:50:14
  there. And so like just being able to
• 1:50:17
  get her back out of the Forestry Service, get her back over here,
• 1:50:20
  and then push her back out into the world where she can do a
• 1:50:23
  great job has always been my goal.
• 1:50:25
  So, Jim, so where? So we're not born with a lot of
• 1:50:29
  things. We're born with some things.
• 1:50:30
  You started, you know, today's conversation, I was talking
• 1:50:32
  about nature and nurture. So we are born with some things,
• 1:50:34
  but a lot of things are learned, especially in our adult life.
• 1:50:37
  And two things that you have just expressed are not common.
• 1:50:41
  I wish they were. You know, no one talks to more
• 1:50:44
  track coaches in depth than this guy right here, right?
• 1:50:47
  So this is I can put my hand on the Bible.
• 1:50:49
  This is not common and I believe it should be 1.
• 1:50:51
  Is that preparing your assistant coaches for future head coaching
• 1:50:55
  jobs? And two, putting what's best for
• 1:50:59
  you as the head coach to the side and doing what's best for
• 1:51:03
  them. So it's not best for you to have
• 1:51:07
  an assistant coach leave you, right?
• 1:51:09
  I mean, that puts you, I don't care if you have a list of three
• 1:51:11
  and you already know who the next person up and all that kind
• 1:51:13
  of stuff is. That's still a learning curve
• 1:51:15
  for that new assistant. It puts you behind but.
• 1:51:20
  You. Look at that, that young lady as
• 1:51:22
  an example and say, hey, you know what?
• 1:51:24
  It's not better for you to go become forestry.
• 1:51:26
  Let me help you and let's work on this and come back here and
• 1:51:29
  get you to like, where is that modeled from?
• 1:51:32
  You had to have seen that somewhere.
• 1:51:34
  Whether it's whether it's teachers, parents, clergy, best
• 1:51:39
  friends, parents, I don't know, ATV show that somewhere.
• 1:51:43
  I don't know if I ever directly saw it and modeled anywhere, but
• 1:51:46
  I will tell you this. Who I am, who my personality is,
• 1:51:51
  is I like to provide. I like to.
• 1:51:54
  It's two different things. I love puzzles and not like flat
• 1:51:58
  sheet puzzles. My job is a puzzle.
• 1:52:01
  Anywhere you work is a puzzle. The people that you work with
• 1:52:03
  are a puzzle. The athletes that you work with
• 1:52:07
  are a puzzle. The facilities are a puzzle.
• 1:52:10
  So I, I like tearing that apart, figuring out how it all fits
• 1:52:15
  together. And #2 I love providing for
• 1:52:19
  people, whether that is people outside of our program where we
• 1:52:22
  provide an incredible meet and incredible opportunity that
• 1:52:25
  maybe something that I didn't have.
• 1:52:27
  And it is very driven by maybe what I missed out on or I wish
• 1:52:33
  that I had, which is kind of, I don't know if that's weird to
• 1:52:38
  think about that I'm trying to make up for what other people
• 1:52:40
  didn't do, but what's my experience?
• 1:52:42
  But what's cool about that though is you're not doing it so
• 1:52:45
  that now, Jim, as a 42 year old, it's so that others don't have
• 1:52:48
  that same experience that you had.
• 1:52:50
  That's what's interesting there. And I don't really care about
• 1:52:53
  awards. I'm not driven by that.
• 1:52:56
  I am intrinsically driven by helping people and, and that
• 1:53:02
  goes to helping you get your next job if you come work for
• 1:53:05
  me. If you're an athlete, helping
• 1:53:06
  you achieve your goals and also being hard on people and, and,
• 1:53:12
  and having the belief that the way that the world works is not
• 1:53:16
  the way that you're being told that the world works.
• 1:53:19
  So right now everybody says, oh, nothing should be hard.
• 1:53:22
  You should never be sad. Hell no.
• 1:53:25
  Being sad is part of the cycle, OK.
• 1:53:27
  And so I want you to be able to navigate that, learn what it
• 1:53:30
  looks like and be able to move beyond it.
• 1:53:34
  There are many people who are wounded emotionally who never
• 1:53:37
  move beyond that wound. And what an incredibly, to me,
• 1:53:41
  that's a that's a tragic story. And then there's a lot in
• 1:53:44
  literature that's about that, right?
• 1:53:46
  And some, some type of emotional wound that nobody ever moves
• 1:53:49
  beyond. But I want to be able to give
• 1:53:51
  people tools to be successful in life, whether that's assistance,
• 1:53:56
  whether that's athletes, you know, whether that's other
• 1:53:59
  people that I work with. And there are a lot of people in
• 1:54:02
  this world that I bump into who don't necessarily like our
• 1:54:05
  interaction because I do not subscribe to the status quo as
• 1:54:11
  truth. And I would say that the success
• 1:54:15
  rate of the people that I deal with indicates that what we're
• 1:54:19
  doing is different. And I also think that it's right
• 1:54:25
  there's there's a beautiful book, if you, if you haven't
• 1:54:27
  read this, the Anxious Generation, written by a
• 1:54:33
  professor at Columbia University, talks about the why
• 1:54:38
  of where we are right now with our with dealing with young
• 1:54:41
  people. And it's is, it's probably a
• 1:54:44
  huge buzzword, but it's tied to phones and it's tied to going
• 1:54:46
  through puberty with phones and not being able allowed to fail
• 1:54:49
  and struggle and learn social cues and all that stuff.
• 1:54:52
  And so like, my goal is whatever it is, it's going to be phones,
• 1:54:55
  It's going to be MTV, it's going to be Rock'n'roll, It's whatever
• 1:54:58
  it is, it's threatens every generation.
• 1:55:00
  But the goal is there have got to be people out there helping
• 1:55:04
  people anchor themselves in truth where they can't move on
• 1:55:09
  and be successful as adults and as humans.
• 1:55:12
  And that's what we're trying to do.
• 1:55:13
  Not even track field. We're just trying to do that
• 1:55:14
  through our sport. Are you doing or have desire to
• 1:55:18
  do that kind of helping others? You're you're doing it on your
• 1:55:26
  we'll call it micro level meeting right there where you
• 1:55:28
  are at University of North Dakota with your athletes, with
• 1:55:30
  your coaching staff. I'm sure you're doing that with
• 1:55:33
  your athletic department teammates as well.
• 1:55:35
  The guy like you doesn't just pigeonhole and say screw
• 1:55:39
  softball, screw hockey. We're only gonna you know, I'm
• 1:55:42
  only focused on track here at UND.
• 1:55:44
  Are you, have you, have you started doing anything outside
• 1:55:48
  of the University of North Dakota ecosystem for our sport,
• 1:55:51
  meaning speaking at clinics, helping out with the local or
• 1:55:55
  and if you haven't, do you have desires or thoughts of doing
• 1:56:00
  that? Yeah.
• 1:56:01
  And I've and I've spoke at the convention before.
• 1:56:04
  I've done coaches association entry level classes, talk there
• 1:56:09
  and expressed interest in those. We do our state, state stuff.
• 1:56:12
  I've been to Kansas, I've been to North Dakota, I've done
• 1:56:15
  those. I've spoken to Nebraska state
• 1:56:16
  one. Any chance that I get?
• 1:56:18
  Do you speak mainly on the XS and OS or the other side of
• 1:56:22
  Trek? You know, most people want you
• 1:56:24
  to speak on the X and OS. Yeah, cuz they're like, hey,
• 1:56:27
  talk to me about hydro and I'm like, let's talk about dealing
• 1:56:31
  with high jumpers. Yeah, I.
• 1:56:33
  Mean in communicating to them once XS and OS there's truth,
• 1:56:36
  right? Yeah.
• 1:56:37
  Physics, yeah. It's not your opinion.
• 1:56:41
  Yeah, that's a good question is how do you manage those people?
• 1:56:43
  That's what I was going to encourage you, you know, as I've
• 1:56:46
  gone to track clinics, you know, my whole life, you know, so
• 1:56:49
  20-30 years of it now and it's, and it's better today, you know,
• 1:56:53
  back in the day when I was coaching.
• 1:56:55
  So, you know, 2000, 2005, you'd go to a clinic in 95% of the
• 1:56:59
  topics were, you know, how to teach high jumpers, how to, you
• 1:57:04
  know, release in the shop at whatever else kind of stuff.
• 1:57:06
  And 5% of it would be about culture or team management or
• 1:57:10
  professional development, things like that.
• 1:57:12
  Now it's about maybe 7525, we're doing much better.
• 1:57:15
  You know, USTFCA, the convention, we have many more
• 1:57:17
  now topics on those kind of things.
• 1:57:19
  When we go to like Texas track and field or Ohio Track clinic,
• 1:57:22
  there's, there's more of it. But you know, we as we've been
• 1:57:25
  exploring this over maybe the past 6:00-ish months here on the
• 1:57:28
  podcast and through Twitter, you know, for social media and
• 1:57:31
  stuff, it's almost, and it's hard to say this as a guy who
• 1:57:33
  was a big coaching education guy, right?
• 1:57:34
  Like level ones, like 3-3 or four level twos, you know, all
• 1:57:38
  that kind of stuff. Maybe the XS and OS are the easy
• 1:57:42
  part. And again, that's so hard to say
• 1:57:43
  as a guy who was so enthralled on how do you coach high jumpers
• 1:57:47
  better and sprinters better and hurdlers better and the other
• 1:57:50
  stuff, Culture, team management, professional development
• 1:57:54
  network. To your point, go network.
• 1:57:56
  You're like, well, what the fuck does that mean?
• 1:57:58
  Like maybe someone needs to talk about how you properly network.
• 1:58:02
  I just want to challenge you like the next time someone calls
• 1:58:04
  you up and says, hey, I want you to speak at the such and such
• 1:58:06
  clinic on high jump, maybe you push back a little bit like,
• 1:58:09
  hey, you know what I'd like to explore?
• 1:58:10
  I'd like explore how you coach high jumpers, not the high jump,
• 1:58:15
  the high jumpers, because I think that's when you look at
• 1:58:18
  successful coaches, you're yourself included in this here.
• 1:58:20
  Now, when you look longer term, successful coaches, not just
• 1:58:23
  necessarily coach you as one good athlete, which again, I'm
• 1:58:25
  not taking away, that's amazing. But coaches who continually win
• 1:58:29
  their conference or Top 2 and send, you know, kids to the
• 1:58:32
  nationals every year, they talk more about how they connect with
• 1:58:37
  the athletes and their coaching staff and less about, Oh yeah,
• 1:58:41
  I'm a real guru in this event. I will tell you when I
• 1:58:46
  interviewed for this job, I, I, the guy that hired me, has him
• 1:58:51
  since moved on, which he was more than willing to kind of
• 1:58:55
  share what that experience was like.
• 1:58:59
  And I spoke about the need to win hearts and minds.
• 1:59:04
  They're like, what are you going to do when you get here?
• 1:59:06
  And he said that the AD was on the call build shaves.
• 1:59:12
  And I just said, you know, the most important thing is, is
• 1:59:15
  getting people to work together. And then, then the XS and OS,
• 1:59:20
  we'll, we'll take care of that. But like winning hearts and
• 1:59:22
  minds. And they had had a very
• 1:59:24
  fractured experience. And he said within like 3
• 1:59:28
  minutes, you starting to talk? Bill texted him on the side.
• 1:59:30
  And be like, we need to hire this guy.
• 1:59:33
  In a. Previous call, A previous call
• 1:59:35
  he'd been on for the same position.
• 1:59:39
  Coach is going on about anaerobic training and VO2 Max
• 1:59:44
  and stuff like that. And Bill is texting him on the
• 1:59:46
  side being like, shut this guy up.
• 1:59:48
  We got to get going. Like, what is this guy talking
• 1:59:50
  about, You know? And I think we all miss that,
• 1:59:52
  right? Because when you come in, you're
• 1:59:54
  working with humans. You've got to remember you're
• 2:00:00
  working with humans and you got to connect with people.
• 2:00:03
  If you can't connect with people, the X's and O's don't
• 2:00:05
  matter. Right, Jim, that's a good place
• 2:00:10
  to stop right there, man. That's our time.
• 2:00:12
  But I do, I have one more kind of you're going to provide the
• 2:00:15
  outro maybe here for this. You are obviously a long term
• 2:00:19
  thinker. You're not just thinking about
• 2:00:20
  what the rest of 2025 is bringing in or even with 2026.
• 2:00:23
  You're already thinking 2027283035, etcetera.
• 2:00:27
  As you sit in your seats right now, today is the head coach,
• 2:00:29
  director of track and field there at University of North
• 2:00:31
  Dakota. What's got you excited about the
• 2:00:34
  future here for the Fighting Hawks?
• 2:00:38
  The people, I mean, that's a, that's a silly way to the
• 2:00:43
  opportunity that I have here to work with.
• 2:00:48
  And the, the limitations here don't exist like they have
• 2:00:52
  before. So we can attract more people
• 2:00:54
  from a facility standpoint, we can impact their lives from a
• 2:00:59
  travel and a gear standpoint. And like this place, the sky is
• 2:01:05
  the limit. We had a young lady when I
• 2:01:06
  started here, was like A1735K girl ran the 20th fastest 10K
• 2:01:12
  this year in NCAA Division one history.
• 2:01:16
  Dude. No change man.
• 2:01:17
  We've just been pouring into her life in letting her achieve her
• 2:01:22
  dreams. She broke EU 23 Canadian record,
• 2:01:27
  you know, and it's just recruiting, that kind of stuff.
• 2:01:30
  Come in, meet the people. I'm not selling you the
• 2:01:33
  facility. Meet the people.
• 2:01:34
  They're going to tell you why you need to be and if you go
• 2:01:37
  somewhere else that's fine, but the people that we have here and
• 2:01:40
  the buy in the team culture could not be happier.
• 2:01:47
  That's awesome. I love that for you.
• 2:01:49
  That's really cool. Jim, my friend, the most
• 2:01:53
  valuable thing you can give me is your time.
• 2:01:55
  You're in the middle of track season, you got conference
• 2:01:57
  coming up, nationals, and you're in the thick of it all the way
• 2:02:01
  there with that. So I'm just so grateful for your
• 2:02:03
  time, man. It's amazing.
• 2:02:05
  You know, we do this 52 * a year every Monday and during track
• 2:02:09
  season when people say yes, it's always, I'm just so humbled
• 2:02:11
  because I'm like, dude, I know you're busy.
• 2:02:14
  I know in the summer would be better or fall would be better.
• 2:02:18
  And so just so grateful for that.
• 2:02:19
  And just, you know, your experience is valuable.
• 2:02:22
  You know, this is again, why we did this podcast was to learn
• 2:02:25
  the different steps. I again, I just go back to this
• 2:02:27
  like aimless. And I don't mean aimless
• 2:02:30
  necessarily, but you know, just like all these different things.
• 2:02:32
  But there was a North Star and I'm beginning to think that dad
• 2:02:35
  put that North star there. I really do.
• 2:02:38
  I, I just kind of think about his experience with you from day
• 2:02:41
  one, if you will, and the support and, and I, I consider
• 2:02:45
  the laissez faire the hands off of you going to college as
• 2:02:49
  support. I don't, I don't consider
• 2:02:52
  coddling supports. I I consider that support.
• 2:02:54
  I just it's an amazing story about family and belief and and
• 2:02:58
  not not giving up. Dude, you have plenty of
• 2:03:01
  opportunities to give up that second trig class easily.
• 2:03:05
  Like, look, man, this maybe college ain't for me.
• 2:03:07
  I mean, I go do it more construction maybe.
• 2:03:08
  That's a noble profession. So no, you know, no, no
• 2:03:11
  judgement there. And you just kept at it.
• 2:03:13
  You had the right people in your time at the right time and right
• 2:03:16
  place that said the right things to you.
• 2:03:18
  And I think that's just a great lesson for all of us to learn.
• 2:03:20
  So I'm really thankful for you just being your, you know, most
• 2:03:24
  open and authentic self with us today and really, really
• 2:03:26
  grateful for you. Yeah, thank you for having me
• 2:03:29
  on. Absolutely, guys, thank you
• 2:03:30
  again for being here. Join us.
• 2:03:32
  You know, every Monday we do the long form here with amazing
• 2:03:35
  coaches from around the country that are just doing amazing
• 2:03:38
  things. And I really, I want you to take
• 2:03:40
  heart. You know, it's it's one thing
• 2:03:41
  about the journey of like the if you want XS and OS Jim's journey
• 2:03:46
  of like, OK, you know, went to school here, went to grad work
• 2:03:48
  here, went to Emory, went back there.
• 2:03:50
  Then it goes to Queen. Like there's one thing.
• 2:03:51
  But the real lesson, I think is the people.
• 2:03:55
  I'm, it's, again, it's hard for me to say this, but I'm, I'm
• 2:03:58
  getting more and more like this being a motto of like the XS and
• 2:04:01
  OS are the easy part. What do you do outside of that?
• 2:04:03
  And I think if you look at go back, you know, in our library
• 2:04:06
  here, 300 plus coaches, I think if you look at the ones who are
• 2:04:09
  the most successful, however you want to define that, they're the
• 2:04:12
  ones who they're working with people.
• 2:04:14
  They're not coaching sprints or coaching throws.
• 2:04:17
  They're, they're working with people and young people.
• 2:04:19
  And that's extremely, extremely valuable.
• 2:04:21
  So thanks again for being here today.
• 2:04:22
  Join us next Monday. We'll have another great coach
• 2:04:23
  here and join us every day on Tuesday through Sunday for 10 to
• 2:04:27
  30 minute XS and OS type Ted talks of track and field, if you
• 2:04:30
  will, by coaches for coaches, The Guild 1918 project that we
• 2:04:33
  just started that you guys are making very successful.
• 2:04:36
  I appreciate you guys listening to that and sharing with your
• 2:04:38
  your network and helping others receive the value of what these
• 2:04:41
  coaches are bringing to the table.
• 2:04:42
  So thanks again. We'll see you next week.
• 2:04:44
  See you guys. If it goes to appreciate the
• 2:04:51
  coach the ones that pour people most every season needs a voice
• 2:04:55
  of reason speaking the growth you got to prep before you carry
• 2:04:58
  the load ice coffee to the soul. For those of us who stay on the
• 2:05:01
  go proper handoff to stay in the zone which you packing for the
• 2:05:04
  road. There's more than one way to the
• 2:05:06
  go. Taking those SPN you're told it
• 2:05:08
  ain't practice If your purpose Saint Clair it can't happen
• 2:05:11
  until you listen with both is you can't mentor without a
• 2:05:14
  mentor of years of experience. You can reinvent those years
• 2:05:17
  Every plan's got to stand and deliver to and the price
• 2:05:20
  sacrifice can you give up you. It's a choice and the fight not
• 2:05:24
  a win or lose. It's not a ploy boy device.
• 2:05:26
  Y'all can make more moves. It's not about how to it's all
• 2:05:29
  about why you don't know till you know who you are inside
• 2:05:32
  6,000,000 waste of time, she's none.
• 2:05:34
  So we y'all cross finish line. The work ain't done so we learn
• 2:05:37
  from the experts but y'all got to put in the network.
• 2:05:40
  Guilt Athletics is the network. It's all about connections put
• 2:05:44
  together for the profession to where every track coach could be
• 2:05:46
  blessing.