I stayed around the bottom of the team most of the season and then at a meet with Baldwin Park we ran our slower runners against the varsity and junior varsity teams from Bishop Amat High School. I was on the junior varsity team of course but it was a high point of my season at that point. We won the JV race and I was one of the five scoring runners for our team. In the newsletter Coach wrote, "Showing indications of future promise were Ruben Chavez (3rd), Dave Oden (4th), Jack Phethean (5th), Dana Anstey (6th), Cliff Coffey (9th) and Bob Miko (10th). The fact that he was once again emphasizing improvement as well as potential for the guys on the lowest tier of the team made a big impact on me that always stuck with me and was reflected in the newsletters that I wrote for my teams throughout my career.
The other thing that I learned from Coach that year and carried throughout my career was the importance of the total team. After the Mt. San Antonio College Invitational this is what Coach wrote; "Los Altos runners led by Bruce Geddes (9:02) posted outstanding times and personal bests right down the line. Los Altos HS was one of the top teams of the meet as team victories were recorded in varsity and novice competition. Freshmen runners did well and placed 4th in a team of fourteen teams in their race." About the freshman team he continued, "All six LA runners can be proud of their improvement". My takeaway here is once again his focus on improvement as well as team performance.
My philosophy of everyone regardless of talent having an opportunity to letter was also learned from Coach. My freshmen year I didn't earn a frosh soph letter in cross country or a C team letter in track and I was one of very few team members who could make that claim. Ironically what I did win was Most Inspirational Runner on the Frosh Soph cross country team and that was an award voted on by my teammates. (I would win it my sophomore year as well). They recognized the fact that despite the fact that I had very little natural ability I worked hard and always did my best.
Now I don't know if I had anything to do with Coach changing his letter policy but I like to think that I was because of my work ethic and the respect I had from my teammates for that work ethic. The point is that after my freshman year I never again saw Coach not letter someone who did their best all season no matter their talent level. That is the philosophy that I carried throughout my entire coaching career. My athletes could earn points for practice, performance, academics and equally important they could lose points for poor classroom performance. The focus was on effort over talent and academics.
By the time I graduated I had the 5th fastest time on the cross country team when the season ended and lettered varsity in both cross country and track. It took me four years to earn those varsity letters but our program offered Frosh-Soph, Junior Varsity and Varsity in cross country and C, B and Varsity in track so I always lettered after my freshman year. My final dual track meet my senior year I won my event and as a team we won varsity and cee divisions and tied for first in the bee division. Coach wrote the following summary; "We had one of our finest team performances of the year. It has been a hard year, injuries, facility problems, etc., but the key factor was that the team as a whole didn't give up when it looked like it was all over two weeks ago. To the entire team, it was a job well done". He made sure that we knew we had a lot to be proud of.
I graduated in 1966 and Coach left Los Altos to move to northern California after just one more year to become the cross country coach at Stanford University. during his 5 decade career he also coached at Seaside High School for a year, San Jose State University until the disbanded the program in 1988, the University of Montana from 1978 - 1980 and the last 10 years of his career at Saratoga High School. It was the Saratoga girl's cross country team he was training with when on September 30, 2002 he collapsed and died instantly. The following was written in a biography provided by his son Richard: "Despite his credentials, Coach Clark as he was widely known by his athletes will perhaps best be remembered for his selfless & indiscriminate dedication to the men and women, boys and girls he coached over five decades, and from his colleagues for his unwavering passion and loyalty to the sport(s).
Former Stanford Head Track and 1968 U.S. Olympic Coach said of Clark, He tried to build men and not just champions. As a result everyone was better for having him as a mentor...He made a difference in everyone's lives who knew him."
Coach and I kept in touch through letters and sharing each other's result sheets up until the time that he died. His death hit me hard and I will be forever grateful for his mentorship and influence on my life.
I was pleasantly surprised when doing research for this post to come across a book written by one of his former Stanford athletes, Jock: A Memoir of the Counterculture, who dedicated the book to Coach. His dedication read; "FOR COACH MARSHALL CLARK '...who gave us the bit, then handed us the reins...' In the first few pages he talked about Coach's first meeting with the team.
"With these formalities out of the way, Coach cut to the chase: 'Most of you have done good work this summer in preparation for the season, and I want us to continue that. I also want all of us to think about Arthur Lydiard's maxim, 'Train, don't Strain'. This doesn't mean we won't train hard, because we will, but we're also going to stay relaxed and run within ourselves,' he went on, in an unhurried manner that seemed native to him. 'We'll put in enough miles, at quick enough tempos, for this approach to pay off in time. We'll have harder days and we'll have easier days, but the key to everything will be patience and consistency. If each of you follows through and does the workouts, I think we could find ourselves - you could find yourself - running faster than you ever thought possible.'
I was very fortunate to have known Coach Marshall Clark!
1987 was my final year coaching the UCCS cross country teams and it was also my first year as the head cross country coach at Sierra High School. the 1988 track season was also the year that I was hired as the head girl's track coach at Sierra. It was a tough year simply because it was my first year running both Sierra programs, as I said I was still doing the UCCS program and I was still teaching at Carmel Middle School. I was taking over a cross country program that had struggled to even have enough athletes to field a scoring team, particularly on the girls side. There had been one girl who qualified to attend the state meet but she was no longer running. And here I was, not even in the building to recruit for the program. To call it a challenge would be an understatement. My goals that first season were very conservative but still challenging based on the the school's short three year cross country history. The first goal was to field a scoring team and we did that at every meet that year in both divisions.
The fact that it takes 5 athletes finishing to have a scoring team shows how challenging this goal was for us. We were a small team particularly the girls. Of the 19 kids on the team only one had run cross country before and that was sophomore Gerald Romero a young man I had taught at Carmel in the 8th grade. Since we had enough to know we could score going into the first meet we made our goal a little more challenging for the team, we said we wanted to, "Team at least beat somebody and as an individual, do your best even it was just finishing your first meet". We accomplished the team goals by finishing 10th of 11 in girls and 15th of 17 in boys and the individual goal by having everyone finish. Not exactly world beaters but it was a good first step.
We ended the season with the girl's team beating more and more teams as the season went on and finishing 7th of 12 at the Metro League meet and and all of the girls improving and becoming more competitive. The boy's team didn't fare as well finishing 12th of 12 at League but individually showing improvement throughout the season. For example Gerald, our only returner, who had run 22:12 at the Pikes Peak Invitational the previous year as a freshman was only our 4th runner that day and ran 20:30. Improvement was happening.
That was in 1987 and now in 2015 I am still in touch with Gerald weekly and I go back to Colorado to run a race with him at least once a year. I stay in frequent contact with Rashaan Davis one of the best stories to come from our program, who is himself a teacher and coach today. From those humble beginnings they and a female teammate, Fatima Curley are all members of the Sierra High School Athletic Hall of Fame.
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| Rashaan Davis - Team Captain 1987 XC
One of the biggest challenges for me as the head track coach was the same as it was for cross country and that was teaching at a different school than I coached at. An advantage I had was that one of my assistant coaches was a well liked PE teacher, Shirley Diggs who was also the head Volleyball coach. It also helped that the returning athletes knew me from my two prior years as an assistant and they were instrumental in encouraging other girls to come out for the team.
It was an easier transition than cross country had been because of my working in the program for two previous years and the fact that I wasn't simultaneously coaching at the college. Another advantage was that we had a successful history to build from. Our first three years we had finished 2nd - 1st - 2nd in the League Championship meet.
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I also started getting our team entered in small school meets that provided varsity competitive opportunities for our freshmen and sophomores that they wouldn't get otherwise and that really paid of with quality depth in our program. That first year we entered two small school meets at Colorado D & B and won them both. We really found some talent because of those opportunities.
Additionally we won the 20 team Canon City Invitational and we won the 12 team Region with 112 points, Rampart was 2nd with 109. Remember the girl who I said was a sprinter as a freshman who we convinced to become a thrower after preseason testing? She won the District championship in the discus as a junior this year.
This was also the year when I made it clear numerous times that while they could always challenge for spots in individual events if they felt that they could beat someone on the team, all relay decisions were and always would be mine. This idea will be revisited in future posts.
It was a good start to my years as head coach at Sierra High School.
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