Wildcat Track - Boys 1981

1981 LOVINGTON WILDCAT TRACK

In 1981 the varsity boys track assistant job became available when Tom Stroh left the boy's team to become the head girls coach. Already working with the varsity as a volunteer and having coached most of the boys in junior high was an advantage as was volunteering with the cross country teams until I officially became head girl's coach. While I had worked with Coach Watkins in my past roles I was given a great learning opportunity working with him as his assistant. While I was a decent track coach before this and knew a decent amount, coaching with Coach Watkins is where I learned a lot and it gave me the confidence to believe that I could eventually be a head high school track coach.

Organization! That might be the most important thing I learned that year. Coach used to have a large board in his office and on it he had each event listed down the left side and then blank places for the number of people who could participate in the event. Most meets were 3 entries in an individual event and one relay team per relay event. In New Mexico there were 15 individual events and three relays requiring 4 runners and usually 2 alternates. So in an event with 3 individual entries that meant you had to place people in 45 individual places, 12 relay places and have 6 alternates ready to take someones place on a relay if necessary. That's just going into a meet. Coach had multiple tags with each athletes name on them that he would hang from the board when preparing for a meet. It is amazing how many changes took place throughout the week depending on health, fitness, eligibility, injury, and so many other factors. Additionally there were quite often changes during the meet for any number of reasons.

To me that became a big part of the magic of being a successful track coach, always thinking multiple steps ahead and having the athletes ready for any changes that might be necessary on the fly. There have been times in my track coaching career where meet victories were secured because we were able to place someone in an event rather than have to scratch the event and have no chance to score or keep another team from scoring.

While I had always used newsletters for my teams, particularly track and cross country this was the year that they became much more detailed. I would include results from that week's time trial efforts, previews of our next competition, results from the upcoming meet for the previous season, information about our former athletes who were competing in college or road races, training information, motivational information and so on. Additionally these newsletters were used to provide schedule information and reminders about academics and other things important for student-athletes. This was also where things discussed in team meetings were put in writing so no one could plead ignorance. The newsletters were provided to everyone including managers and even former athletes enjoyed receiving them. It is because of these newsletters that I am able to go back over 30 years later and write about my coaching career.

Some examples of what was written in the 1981 newsletters: In the first one I explained the purpose of newsletters and the importance of them providing an opportunity to "keep track of your progress throughout the season". It also became a very easy way for coaches and athletes to keep track of progress from season to season from both an individual and team standpoint. The second newsletter was written "four weeks to our first meet" and the emphasis was on "thinking about setting goals for the season if you haven't already done so".

Newsletter #5 is when we finally had meet results to see how we were going to stack up as a fan. The meet was held in Andrews, Texas and there were both varsity and junior varsity divisions so we had the opportunity to get a lot of athletes involved. There are times when not winning is the best thing that could happen for coaching. We always looked for meets with the most competition because we wanted to prepare our athletes for whatever they might encounter when we started District and State competition. That usually meant that we started our season in Texas. After the Andrews meet where we finished 4th of 8 and 40 points behind 3rd the point of emphasis in the newsletter was as follows: "Despite the conditions, it was still pretty obvious who has been working and who hasn't. If you're in the second category, you need to think seriously about how bad you want to compete. We go to Seminole Saturday and there won't be a J.V. division so there won't be as many places to run people"  and finished with this statement, "Once again, good job most of you, keep working hard and you'll reach the goals you've set for yourselves and we'll accomplish our goals as a team". 

The next week we returned to Texas and again finished 4th despite there only being 6 teams competing. The improvement though was shown in two main ways, first we were only 12 points out of 3rd and 35 from 1st and second the fact that as I told the team, "Good team effort, we placed at least one in every event". Team effort based on individual effort and placing in as many events as possible were both points of emphasis throughout my entire track coaching career.

We returned to New Mexico for our next meets, winning a dual meet with Carlsbad High School a AAAA school 75-70 and dominating the Portales Invitational scoring 129 1/2 points with the runner up scoring only 72 1/2. Most of the teams there were from our District so we were able to start realistically setting championship season (District & State) goals.

We went back to Texas and performed well despite the team scores. Once again we were 4th. There were 10 teams this time; we were 15 points from 3rd but 70 from first. Despite the fact that the coaches were pleased with the team effort we were certainly humbled before our return to New Mexico for the rest of the season. Our next three meets were the New Mexico Military Institute, Artesia and Lovington Invitationals. We tied for the win at NMMI giving the coaches an opportunity to reemphasize the importance of every point. We had a runner qualify 2nd in the 220 and another qualify 4th in the 440 neither of who ran the finals, guaranteed points. My comment after this meet was, "I hope you all learned the value of each and every point in a meet. We're not always going to blow people away in New Mexico and it's even less likely when we don't get top efforts from every member of the team. There are many places we could have and should have been able to pick up 1 point to be the outright winners". They must have taken it to heart because the next two meets we won and scored more points than the next two teams combined. 

The next week we won the District Championship with 110 1/2 points. NMMI the team we tied three weeks before was second with 71 1/2. Then we went to Albuquerque and won the AAA State Championship we scored 64 points followed by Albuquerque Academy 39 and a member of our District, Portales 37 1/2.

1981 NEW MEXICO STATE TRACK & FIELD CHAMPIONS

I learned a lot that year and one thing that came back to me time and time again was that early season results shouldn't get you to high or to low. Even though the high school season is short there is a lot both good and bad that can happen in that three months. Lesson learned and I was always to have prior newsletters to remind me!