A Coach of Character

 

Okay, one more about my high school track days. But this one is really about my track coach. And it is about character.

The mile relay was a race I did not like (it was called the mile relay before the advent of the metric system. Now the almost equivalent race is called the 4X400 meter relay). The mile relay is the last event of the day. You have run your other races. You are tired, and now you have to run a grueling 400 meter sprint for your leg in the relay. Nobody on our team particularly liked it. But my coach said it was his favorite race. “It builds character,” he said. Much as I am loathe to admit it, he did have a point. Everyone is tired. Everyone is hurting in the race. It teaches you to work for something even when it is unpleasant. You do it for your team. As much as you may not want to inflict pain on yourself, there are three other teammates who are relying on you (not to mention the rest of the track team). You don’t want to let them down, so you give it your best. My coach was right. It builds character.

Character is something Coach Herbert knew something about. Here is a tiny example: I was a kid who liked science so I took a lot of science classes in high school. Herb was a science teacher, so I had a lot of classes with him. You know what grades he gave me? B’s and C’s. He was not the kind of coach who played favorites with his athletes. I know; that is just called doing his job, being a teacher. But there have been some coaches I have known in my life who did pad the grades for their athletes. It’s not right, but it happens. Coach Herbert was not in that group.

Okay, now for a bigger example. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, in my sophomore year in high school at the district track meet I was on a 4X100 meter relay team. I was on the second team or “B” team for my school. The “A” team dropped the baton and we on the “B” team won the event. That meant we qualified our team for the state track meet. Well . . .  it’s a little more complicated than that because if you qualify a relay team, your school can send anyone it wants to be the members of the relay team at State. Our coach would have been within his rights to say to us, “thanks ‘B’ team. Now we are going to send the ‘A’ team to State.” Or, he would have been within his rights to send the four fastest runners to be on the State relay team. Many coaches would have done this. I mean winning is important, right?

That is not what he did. Out of the eight runners who made up our two teams, he selected four for the team going to State. Three of the four were selected solely because they were not going to State in any other event, and two of them were seniors and this would be their last chance to compete at State (He did not even pick the fastest guy in the school because he was already going to state in the 100 and in the 200). This of course hurt our chances of scoring points at State, but it was a classy thing to do. At a time when high school sports had a ‘win at all costs’ mentality, our coach showed us that some things were more important than winning, people for one thing. Our relay team at State did not advance past our preliminary heat. Had our coach decided to pick the four fastest guys to be on the team, we probably would have had a shot at winning.

I was on that relay team, and I could have been bitter about the fact that the coach’s selections had hurt our chances, but I was not. The explanation sounded so reasonable that no one on the team argued with it. You see, the coach had taught us all a lesson more valuable than how to win a race. All these many years later, I hope I have lived a life that lives up to that lesson.