One of the hardest things to get used to at Sierra was something I had very little experience with in Lovington and that is "transient" athletes. In Colorado Springs it wasn't simply dealing with losing athletes who had competed for us at Sierra. It was losing them to another school in town and then having to compete against them and watch them be successful for other teams. While I always supported and continued to want my former athletes to be successful it was hard to digest when that success came against our present athletes. It was hard dealing with the "what might have beens" and believe me over 20 years there were many many of them.
Clockwise from top left. #1 One of top sprinters losing to a girl who had run for us the year before and transferred to a school just a few miles from us and in our region. #2 Visiting with one of our former athletes who ran one year for us and then her family moved and she attended and ran for another school in our region. #3 Even though I started coaching the second year that Sierra was open I never met this young lady. She was a regional champion for Sierra her freshman year and then moved to a school further north in the city and competed against us for the next three years. #4 This young lady was an outstanding sprinter for us as a freshman and moved the next year to another local school . #5 Both of these ladies ran on our State Championship 4x800 relay team, a team that had 2 freshmen, a sophomore and a junior so we were excited looking ahead. Three of the team members also ran cross country. When school began the next year one of them had moved to Denver and two withdrew and went to a charter school that made them false promises. The one girl who did remain became senior class president. #6 This young lady came to us in 1990 and ran track her junior year. She set school records in the 1600 and 3200 that still stand today in 2016.
That is only a small sample of the athletes that we lost during the 20 years that I coached at Sierra.
Just as the 1988 season was a breakthrough year for the girl's cross country team, 1989 became that breakthrough year for our boy's program. This, in spite of the fact that one of our top five runners decided to play tennis as a senior and another varsity runner moved. Our boys team started breaking into the top tier at most local meets and they won both the varsity and open divisions at Falcon and at Fountain Fort Carson. The importance here is that we were fielding two complete teams consistently for the first time. My comment after the Falcon meet was, Great job!!!! Our J.V. is showing the potential to be an even better team than our varsity was only two years ago".
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| Coach Spell and me talking to the varsity girls and JV boys premeet |
"Before I give you your individual results I feel I need to address an issue for what better be the final time. HORSEPLAY: It's got to stop. I would have thought that after Steve was lost for the meet because of playing street football that I wouldn't have to say any more. I was wrong. While Coach Spell and I were waiting for Larry to get the results Friday (and a good job he's doing for us), I turned around just in time to see Steve kick Gary in the right knee because, 'he pulled my hair'. That kick could have put Gary out for the rest of the season or a lot worse. With a maximum of three weeks left in the season I would hope you can use some good judgement and even more important use good judgement when some of your teammates fail to. Don't throw away everything you've worked for".
There were certainly more positives than negatives throughout the season with the increased number of boys being one of the highlights. The numbers were still low for the girls but the girls that we had worked hard and showed promise. I summarized the boy's season after the regional meet this way, "We lose 3 fine seniors, Steve, Gerald and Eddie and unfortunately another very good runner, David who is moving after the season. On the positive side, we have some very good runners back with varsity experience and we have some of the finest junior varsity runners that we've ever had back. You can continue what we've built the past 3 years".
And to the girl's team I wrote: "I think your slogan should be, 'the best is yet to come'. With only one of our top 7 runners graduating and four of you running your senior year next year, the only thing that can stand between you and a great season next year is if you are unwilling to put in the time and work it takes to be the best you can be". At the time I wrote that I had no idea how prophetic it would turn out to be for many years to come. By the way, keeping with the theme of never knowing who you would have to work with from one season to the next on 3 of the 4 seniors decided to run their senior year, one chose to sit out and not do anything in the fall.
Another milestone that was accomplished this season was when Gerald Romero became the first four year letter winner in cross country. And Gerald is still one of the top Master's runners in Colorado over 25 years later.
The 1990 track season came close to being my final track season at Sierra. We had more personality problems, primadonnas, trouble makes, big egos and on and on than I had ever encountered as a head coach before. This despite the fact that we were a very good team competitively. We won 7 of the 10 varsity meets that season and were 2nd, 2nd and 3rd in the other three. There was so much interpersonal nonsense and turmoil though that the winning didn't make it all better. I'm going to quote quite a bit from newsletters here so you can get a sense of what I'm talking about.
First, some background on why I had such high expectations for the way that our athletes conducted themselves everywhere they were; school, community, bus, meets, and so on. We were located in the south end of the Springs in a high minority, high transience, low socio-economic area and I didn't want our athletes to act in a way that gave the bigots ammunition to roll their eyes and say, "what do you expect from them". What we wanted was that when people thought about Sierra athletes was that win or lose they were first and foremost a classy group of young ladies and young men.
And the nonsense started early. After our first competition this is what I wrote after congratulating them on their second place finish to a very fine Rampart team. "I hope I never have to come on a team bus after a good performance like that again, and only talk about the negatives. If that's all there is to it you might as well stop competing and I'll stop coaching. I don't want to have to bring those negatives up again. All the trophies and medals in the world are meaningless if you're not a nice person and some of you, many of you, need to take a long hard look at the way you've been acting. This is the first time in 14 years that I've started talking seriously about getting out of coaching".
It would have been nice if the team meeting and newsletter comments would have put an end to the negativity that was like a cancer on the team. The newsletter comments from just three weeks later make it clear that wasn't the case.
"If I had written this right after the Cheyenne Mountain meet I'd have had nothing but positive things to say. Unfortunately for all of us, it's 3 days, 2 meets and a practice later and you've managed to offset all the positives with negatives, a subject you'll already have heard plenty about before you read this.
First let me comment on the C.M. meet. You did a wonderful job, with few exceptions participating in your events and doing them well under very adverse weather conditions. You realized then that regardless of the weather you still had to do your best. Some of you got beat by some people you probably shouldn't get beat by and instead of making excuses or complaining you talked about getting them next time at District. Those are the things that make championship teams.
Unfortunately as you have so often done the past few track seasons, you then came back the next day, and in spite of the fact that you won, you had a lousy meet overall. We told you specifically to take two laps and stretch as a team on the infield and you didn't do it. We told you the restrooms were outside and yet some of you prima donnas had to go into the building and show yourselves off. You don't go into other schools unless you're invited and you weren't. You'd better remember that Saturday at Harrison. The building is off limits.
Then yesterday at practice the same group of people who apparently think they're stars and don't have to do what the rest of the team does decided that they'd do their warmup 7th hour without a coach around. You didn't even think you had to get permission to do so. WRONG! Most of you have proven that you can't be trusted to warm up or cool down properly without us standing there watching you and you expect us to let you do things on your own. You haven't done anything to earn that trust.
Then at yesterday's meet we have a relay team run the sorriest race in school history and they want to start some stuff with somebody because they commented on how slow they were running. The reality is ladies, if you'd been doing more than jogging you wouldn't have heard them.
I could go on and on but I don't intend to. As I said, you'll hear most of this in a team meeting today. (And more). I meant everything I said in today's meeting. It's sad that we can't enjoy the winning we've been doing because the negatives so far outweigh the positives so far this season.
If anyone disagrees with anything I've said here, see me, I'll be glad to discuss it with you. Now I'll give you the results from the past 3 meets."
The meeting I made reference to was very intense. Basically I said everything I have just shared and much more. I didn't want to go into some of the negatives in the newsletter because we shared those with many people outside the program and a lot of it needed to be dealt with within the team only, including my decision to quit coaching at the end of the season because I just didn't feel that I was making an impression in their lives the way that I needed to. It was emotional and the next day I got called into the APs office because he wanted to know why so many of the girls were walking down the hall to practice yesterday crying and acting like someone had died. I shared what I felt he had to know and left it there. He didn't need to know specifics about individual athletes.
After the next meet I wrote, "There's not one of you that can say this wasn't the most enjoyable meet we've had in at least two years. The reason? There are several. You showed that you were a team and cared about one another. You showed that you truly did enjoy track and accepted every challenge that was thrown at you. And most important, you had fun!!! That's what it's all about."
We finished the season winning 3 meets and finishing 2nd in one and 3rd in another, then we won our 3rd Regional Championship in a row.
Did the meeting have an impact? I think it did for the remainder of that season for sure. In a future post I'm going to share something written from a girl who was just a freshman on that team. She doesn't appear in either of the celebration pictures above because at District all she did was high jump and she didn't even clear opening height. She didn't want to be included in the celebration even though the others tried to include her.
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