#314: Jim Vahrenkamp-University of North Dakota

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
You're listening to the Gil Athletics Connections podcast
with host Mike Cunningham. Track and field world juvenile
tuned in to our humble servant Mike Cunningham for another
extraordinary message for Gil Athletics Connections.
Here we go back on the Gil athletics connections podcast so

(00:25):
pumped that you would you press play again, you know, 300 and
something episodes going into six years of this and now adding
a daily Gil 1918 project. It's amazing the coaches, the
men and women who continue to plug in here to learn about
coaches around the country and to receive value in our coaches,
speaking to them through the Guild 1918 project as well.

(00:45):
So pumped for today. We're going to go, you know, I
don't go to the state very oftenbecause I'm a weenie, meaning I
don't like cold and I just assume it's cold 24/7 up here.
We're going to find out more about that.
Help me welcome the head coach of the University of North
Dakota, Mr. Jim Vehrenkamp. Jim, how are you, Sir?
Doing great, thanks for having me.
I've done this 300 times. I must be in a I'm too stressed

(01:07):
or too doing too many things that I just realized that is the
first time I have not introduceda guest correctly.
Jim, you are the wise and wonderful Jim Verincam.
I started that on episode 1 and I've carried that through.
And I really literally just saw caught myself doing that.
So forgive me. Forgive me.
Our longtime listeners will willrecognize that immediately.
I can't believe I did that. University of North Dakota.

(01:29):
All right. I like to my my kind of geekdom
nerddom is I like to know everybody's mascots and I I
think I do know. I I can see that.
Well, I know it's on your shirt,but I can see that it's a bird.
You're not the you're not. Yeah, you're not eagles.
Are you like a the fighting hawkor something like that?
That is it, right? That's it.

(01:50):
Yeah. I love that.
I love that. And is it true that it's cold
24/7 365 in North Dakota? Was 86 yesterday.
Holy crap, is that right? Yeah, I I would say no.
Yeah, I was in. That's interesting.
I was in Dallas, TX yesterday and it was Uber raining, just

(02:12):
raining all day and like 4550°. So that's amazing.
It was 86. 86 dry you know it was it was toasty for the 5th of
May. Yeah, hey.
And I've been to your campus when it's.
Yeah, I've never been there whenit's not nice, like when it's
snowing and stuff. But when I've been there, it's
it's been nice. It's a beautiful campus.
Like I, I can kind of see the sunshine and it's a, it's a
really nice place there. Tons of construction over the

(02:34):
last couple of years, almost a billion dollars worth of
construction so. Wow, holy, is that right?
Yeah, they continue to do stuff.I mean, the build, the current
office that I'm in now, less than a year old, the building
across the street where we were from the 1950s, that's going to
go away. They're going to put it in a
whole mining, engineering, science, technology building.

(02:56):
That'll be, you know, about $200million project.
It's going to be incredible so. Dude, I, I did, I was going to
remark, your office does look different than what I remember
going to. So you're, so I, I know where
you were, I kind of kind of picturing it.
So you're across the street now,Yes, Yeah, there was anything
there if I remember correctly. No, there was nothing there.
It used to be the old football stadium, Memorial Stadium that

(03:17):
was built following World War One.
And that building was, you know,here from from then until
probably four years ago. And they took that down.
The outdoor track is over my over my right shoulder indoor
track is across the outdoor track.
So now it's all pretty, pretty tied together in a, in a, you
know, they called an athletics complex.

(03:38):
Yeah. You know, we believe healthy
things grow, right? Like, you know, humans, when
they're healthy, we grow gardens, etcetera.
What is behind this? I mean, this is growth.
I mean, a billion dollars worth of construction that doesn't
happen because things are going bad.
No. So we had a president, President
Kennedy, who just kind of lookedat it.
What we're doing in a lot of places do this higher Ed
definitely defers maintenance because you don't always have

(04:01):
the ability to replace the roof when the roof needs to be
replaced. And he looked at some of the
buildings that we had on campus and said, you know, the deferred
maintenance bill, building costsare more than what it would cost
us to tear the thing down, builda brand new one and finance that
cost out over the same period oftime.

(04:21):
And so they've gone and they've torn down our student union.
We have a brand new, one of those brand new Business School,
a brand new dorm complex. You know, they just, this is a
brand new athletic building here.
Across the street from me is another like $200 million
complex that's going up that has, you know, it's a public
private partnership with just put in a three or $4 million

(04:42):
softball field this last year. The track is getting resurfaced
this summer. It'll be done in July.
The outdoor track or indoor track is 10 years old.
I mean, it's just a lot of a lotof things are really changing a
lot. They're going to tear down that
building and put in new labs andstuff that have updated hoods.
All of the, you know, the, the newest of the new type to me,

(05:06):
you know, President Kennedy hasn't had and he's moved on
since this point. His background was not always in
academia. It was in in business.
So I think he had a different, you know, view of kind of how
things get done. Yeah.
And did a great job, had a greatvision for what our macro was
going to be over the next 50 to 100 years in our, our undergrad

(05:31):
and grad enrollment is just over15,000, which is I think the
highest or the second highest it's ever been in school
history. So we continue to kind of
attract and grow in a period of time when there's some headwinds
in in our world. Yeah, right, right.
Well, I think that's a great example you have there,
President Kennedy, leadership matters.

(05:52):
You know, he, he could have goneand just did the status quo and
everybody would have been happy as far as like, you know, the
budget wise, yeah, let's do the the roof when it's it's time to
do it and all this kind of stuff.
But he had the foresight to say,hold on, guys, wait, what are we
doing here? Let's look past next year.
What's 20 years, 40 years, 60 years look like?
I think it's just a great example of what leadership is
really, really important in our society, not just athletics and

(06:14):
academia, but just in our society.
And that's a great example of that's really cool.
That's awesome. And the new president is
continuing on with that vision and that and his or her own.
President Armacost and his background is, if you know
anything about industrial engineering, it's it's thinking
about process and thinking aboutmanufacturing, all of that
stuff. He was at the Air Force for 20

(06:36):
years as his PhD sort of in thatbackground in academia.
And so operationally has done anincredible job of just
continuing to work on things in regards to culture and and right
fit the people into the right positions that we have on campus
and just incredible partner for athletics right now.
That's cool. I love that.
All right, well, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

(06:57):
I try to do this chronologicallyand of course I just, I'm a
tangent guy, so I just like to learn and ask questions.
So let's get in our wayback machine here.
Jen, let's learn more about you.Speaking of leaders, let's learn
more about you. Where does track and field start
for you? You know, I've always assumed
you're people are athletes, but we've learned plenty of times
that lots of our coaches, we're not athletes.
We're just maybe track and fielder sports start for you.

(07:18):
If you go all the way back untilsort of in 1980, probably 1987,
I was born in 1983, sort of about four or five years old, I
started getting drug along to cross country meets and track
meets and basketball games and that's just really what I

(07:39):
thought was normality. Everybody did that.
You know, everybody, every weekend you're going to
something. Your dad, everybody's dad
coached and did that thing. So OK, my dad was go ahead.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry. I think you're about to answer
exactly what I was cutting out to say.
Why were you drugged to those? Did you have siblings that were
in it or your dad? You're getting mentioned your
dad. I think you're.
I'm the oldest and, you know, dad coached cross country,

(08:01):
basketball and track and field. So to me, you know, I think
there's two things when I think of people and their context,
it's what is their nature and then what is the nurture part of
that, you know, and then and thenurture part of that is your
experience. So my experience was, of course,
what's normal for everybody, right?
Your dad coaches everything all the time, and you always have

(08:23):
practice after school. And so I grew up, you know,
going to practices. We literally lived across the
street from the high school. And so if they were out
practicing high jump, you know, I saw that all the time.
If they were out hurdling, I tried hurdling, which oddly
enough is the same experience that our kids are having right
now. We've got a three-year old and a
six year old and they just, you know, they're like, Hey, we're

(08:45):
going to a track meet. And so they just think that that
is perfectly normal to track meet all day to, to try to
hurdle to throw things. Our throws coach has got a, a
kid that's two. I mean, he, he's got his own
little weight that he carries around.
He's already doing turns and trying to throw that.
So that I mean, that's to me where where that starts becoming

(09:08):
normal, you know, think about those kind of things.
And then of course, you compete in those things as you go
through junior high, high schooland those different things.
That I had some success. Track wasn't my first love.
It was just something that you did.
I love basketball. Is that right?
Yeah, I love. Basketball I played played
football, basketball and ran track.

(09:30):
That's what everybody did. I grew up in a small town in
Wyoming, 224 people on just the Cheyenne, WY, so very small.
So you, you know, if you don't want to be doing chores on the
ranch, you do sports so you can.So everybody does sports.
And then I and we, my parents moved, my dad went and taught at
a private school in Rapid City, SD.

(09:52):
And so that was a little bit different because we didn't have
the, the ranching farming background there.
Most kids were from, you know, the metro area, which is 100 to
125,000 depending what you include.
And so I played football, did basketball on track in that
environment and was pretty good at football, wasn't that good at
basketball, was pretty good at track, but I love basketball.

(10:13):
And at six three, you either gotto be able to shoot it real well
to be able to survive, which wasnot my Forte.
I just was pretty athletic and get out running out, jump all
the different people and and ended up going to college and
and pursuing track and field because that's just kind of
where I fell in. You know, so so before we get to
college, did dad coach you in basketball and track?

(10:35):
Dad coached me in middle school in football.
OK. Once, and I think that was 7th
and 8th grade and that was, you know, for him it was like, I get
paid my, my, you know, whatever it is $1000 to go to all my
son's game. So that's that's not a hard.
That's pretty cool. That's not a hard sell.
You know, if you could get paid to go to your kids games and

(10:56):
part of your responsibilities that that worked out really
well. No shade to dad, Dad, Dad wasn't
a great athlete. I don't know, the dad knew a lot
about football, but he was thereand I appreciated that.
And I and I, you know, I processed that at the time that
he sat with the coaches up in the front.
I sat with my friends in the back and and we went to the same
game he watched. He really pushed me.

(11:17):
Or tell me, you know, what to door anything like that.
Worked in a different area, but man, I appreciated that he went
to those things. Yeah.
You you you mentioned he was a basketball and track coach
though. So but but he didn't coach you
in high school. Nope, in high school when we got
to that point he accepted a job as a math science teacher, then

(11:37):
also has the athletic director and so he didn't really coach a
whole lot. Coaching hat came off at that
point. Pro is you no longer have to be
traveling with one team. You can be at all the sporting
events so your kids do stuff. I think he left being the
athletic director after I think two or three years when we were
there and just stayed in in thatcapacity until he retired.

(12:00):
That's interesting. I love coaches kids because you
know, when we grow up and you'renot dealing with this now have
an eighth grader and a fifth grader, you know, because when
they start reaching their independence, a lot of, I
shouldn't say a lot of times, sometimes that creates the kids
to push away from the parents like, oh, you're, you're a
coach. Well, then I never want to be a
coach, you know, but you seem like this was just your DNA like

(12:23):
from three years old. You're at a practice and at a
meet and as an 18 year old, hereI am, I'm at practice and that
basketball game and doesn't matter if dad is coaching, rock
coaching, he set the the base for you, if you will.
Yeah. And I actually, you know, in my
senior year of high school, my friend kept leaving our, our,

(12:45):
you know, we had a study hall, you know, last period of the day
and he kept disappearing. I was like, hey, man, where you,
where you going? He's like, I'm helping out
coaching the 7th grade basketball team.
And I thought, man, that's kind of cool.
And so I started following him to that because I had nothing
going on in my senior year. We're just in school because
we're waiting for practice to happen.
So I started following him in there and there was one of the

(13:10):
parents was coaching all this stuff and great guy, Mr.
Prufnik. He was passionate about seeing
his son have a good experience. Didn't have a ton of background
in coaching or anything like that.
So I kind of started sitting on the bench for the 7th grade
games and then I started lookingat it and be like, man, our

(13:30):
practices are so unorganized. We're just like, what are we
doing? So Josh, my friend and I would
sit down and start scripting practices minute by minute by
minute. And so, you know, we just, I'm
just copying what we did at the high school level.
And my coach played at the University of Wyoming, had a,
had a pretty good background, I felt like in basketball.
So we started scripting practices and, and Miss Proofnik

(13:53):
just kind of kept backing off and backing off.
And by the end of the year, Joshwas more the relationship type
of person and I was kind of slidinto the XS and OS.
And so I was running the whole practice and you know, like
coaching every single game. We traveled every 7th and 8th
grade game, started coaching allof those.
As a senior, this is an 18 year old kid.

(14:14):
Yeah, wow. Yeah, and that's it, right into
like I knew a little bit about something in track, so I would
help anybody that I could because we had one track coach.
We're a school with like 100 kids in it.
We ran in the parking lot, you know, high jumped onto 1 high
jump. Section.
You kind of shift that so you could land on.

(14:36):
It I, I cringe at how often thatis happening today in 2025.
I go to tracks and I'm like, where's the rest of it?
Please tell me you're not jumping on that.
I can't see that. So, so where as a as an 18 year
old, and we'll keep moving here in a second, but stay as an 18
year old, where is the idea of becoming a coach at in your mind
at all? Or is this just like, oh man,

(14:57):
you know, I saw my dad do that. Yeah, just fun.
Not not like, oh, this is what I'm going to become at this
point. Man, and I will say this too, so
I got a lot of encouragement from my high school basketball
coach. You know, he Mike Purcell, he
just, he encouraged me and I waslike, hey, why do we take time
outs? Here's a he's a, and he was an
educator too. And this is one thing that I

(15:17):
think people who don't come froman educational background I
think miss because we as coachesor we're just teachers, OK, our
subject matters a little bit different.
But man, I teach every day of the week.
And my job is to not create perfection, like you said, but
to help people to become critical thinkers and think
about what they did. So you might just said, here's a

(15:39):
couple different reasons that wetake time out.
You know, you know, people are physically exhausted.
We need to break momentum of theother team.
You want to install something defensively, offensively, you
know, you've got so much time left.
We're going to you know, if you can script a play and come into
the play, the other team is always going to be reacting to
it. So you know, I don't know why is
this high high school seniors like perfect.

(15:59):
That's what I'm doing. And it was fun for me.
I dressed up on the sideline, you know, run everything and I
loved helping kids get better and we and I coached the next
year too. My first year in college, man,
we flat felt people. We we'd start the beginning of
the year where we're winning by two to three points and the back
end of the year, I still have all the stats on the on the
Internet here. I mean, we're winning by 30 to

(16:21):
40 points. We go through our conference
tournament, just crush everybody, press every play in
the entire game. And it was a it was a blast.
My brother was also on that teamthat is an eighth grader and he
was a a six 485 LB eighth grader.
We had another kid that was 65. Both kids could shoot the ball.
It was the first team that went to state, you know, started and

(16:43):
they and they, they kind of MikePurcell, the guy that was there
was building a program where, you know, when I started as a
freshman and we ran zone exclusively, we ran a 2-3 zone.
We ran the flex and the teams that we ran into that were more
talented, that could shoot the ball.
We, we just couldn't beat it. We lost five games in my
freshman year. We lost three of them to the
team that ran up that was a runner up at national or sorry,

(17:06):
not nationals, at the South Dakota High School state
tournament. And we lost a Rapid City Central
and we lost a Hill City, and those teams were a class above
us, you know? Jim, how long ago was this?
Well, I would have been 1997. I mean, do you remember like
this was you, you were involved.I mean, you remember the, the
losses and who they were. That's amazing.

(17:28):
It was your I mean, you know, spoiler alert, this is a track
podcast and you become a track coach.
I love, you know, I'm not a big basketball guy, but what I am is
I love passion, right? So like you talking about right
there, like you could see, like you obviously are a basketball
guy, like you love basketball. I mean, you're you know, you're
talking about the zone and all these kind of things.
How was were you like that with track at this age as well?

(17:51):
Like like I love, it's fascinating to me when a coach
comes on the podcast and they talk about, you know, I asked my
coach, Hey, so why did not in a challenging way, like an
inquisitive way of like a curious way of like, hey, so why
did we run repeats like this? And then the next day we ran
this race and you were like, hey, so why did we take like
that's such a coach question, like a future coach question of

(18:12):
like, hey, so why did we take a time out there?
Like what was your thinking? So I can understand it and
process it. I just love those because it's,
it's like, man, you're you're look, you're a future coach.
I mean, right there, whether youbecome a teacher or whatever you
do, but you're a coach in that sense.
So. You're asking how's this time to
track? Well, what I'm wondering is
where you like that with track? Are you with, I don't know what
events you did, but with your events and you said you had one

(18:33):
coach. So are you talking to coach
about like, hey, so why did we do this?
Why did you follow up with this?Are you asking the same kind of
questions for track at that? Point Well, let's let's walk it
even further back because going back to that that freshman year
where we went, you know, whatever it was 15 O 5 in
basketball or seventeen O 5. The guy that coached basketball,
Mr. Mulder was the was the trackcoach.

(18:54):
And so I went out for track and there were three of us.
There's Tim Marinelli, Jeff Woodstruck and myself.
And there was one girl on the team and I've always left. 33%
of us made it to state that year.
Tim was he ran 50.5 in the 400 meter dash.
He did a great job. He was an Army or Air Force
brat. Dad brought him in.

(19:15):
You know, he was with me the whole time, but he'd been all
over the place and I was like, this sucks.
We can't have a relay, you know,and so, so.
Literally 3 not. Oh yeah, literally not.
You 3 homeboys were together andyou have a team. 3/3.
You did say the school was like 100 A. 100 and his, yeah, wife,
Renita Marinelli, or well, was was also on the track.

(19:37):
She was a triple jumper. And so I thought to myself,
like, this is not a fun experience.
Yeah, sure. You know, I'm new enough about
track. So I started recruiting in my
senior year. We had 45 kids on the track team
between men and women. And I just, you know, I went, I
was like, guys, weather's amazing, OK, there's girls on

(19:57):
the track team, we're working onthat.
And you get to skip school all the time.
Like what's the negative here? And you get to choose what you
do. You don't have to go and run
that, you know, a couple miles. You can Sprint, you can jump 0
facilities. But I was recruiting my friends
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.
And and we got better and bettermy freshman year of college.
Sunday school teacher is a trackcoach at the local college at
South Dakota School of Mines andTechnology.
I'm looking around at the landscape.
I don't understand the recruiting process at all.

(20:38):
Got private school coaches tell me what we're going to give you
a 50% scholarship and just you got to come up with 10 grand out
of pocket. And I knew if I went to School
of Mines it was going to be like2 grand out of pocket.
I was like no brainer. I signed a letter of intent to
play football at University of Sioux Falls in NAI school.
At the time, Bob was still the coach then.

(21:00):
They'd won a national championship in 1996.
Caitlin De Boer, who's currentlythe head football coach at the
University of Alabama, was the first coach at the time.
No way is that right? Yeah, and there's a ton of guys
on that, on that coaching staff that went somewhere else.
And I was, I was recruited by a guy named Rich Greeno.
Raleigh. Greeno was his brother.

(21:21):
Worked at the University of Jamestown.
I was also a football coach up there, just like people that
were the guys back in the day. And I just, I loved Rich.
He was a really kind and incredibly benevolent dude.
And I just ended up going where I was comfortable because
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.
I don't know anything about where I live.
I'm having a great time. Got a girlfriend that lives in
the same town, Talked to Jerry two weeks before school started.
So Jerry, I'm going to go to School of Mines and he was like,
I'll see if I can get you a track scholarship.
He comes back to me a week later, gives me a $500 track
scholarship, which lo and beholdwas one of the biggest
scholarships on the team at the time.

(22:03):
Had no idea. And I began that learning
process. And so I, you know, because I
was in town, I became like, theypaid me to coach middle school
basketball the next year. So he head coach, I recruited
assistants, I ran everything. Nobody had any questions about
that. I'd skip track practice to make
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
a track meet where my dad, I waslike, Hey, I, I can't go to this
basketball game, I need you to coach.
And they went and they coached. We coached against Wall.
We ran his own defense against Wall.
They're way bigger than us. Could do a bunch of stuff we
couldn't do. Lost by 6 points.
That was the only team we couldn't beat.
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
last, but move on to track season.
And now I'm kind of I've learneda lot from Jerry.
I'm starting to learn about throws.
So I, I start working with this kid named Max.
He's throwing 45 feet, 48 feet. We throw 49 feet.
We go to state, he throws 52 feet.
He's 2nd and shot put. An incredible athlete and I

(23:09):
start having these incredible experiences.
We got a girl named Alita Ugama that's on the team.
We're letting her run the 800 every single week.
And I'm like, you know, I mean, are you enjoying this?
Just having one off conversations with her.
And she's like, I'd like to try some longer races.
She's an eighth grader at this time.
And so I go and I talk to the coach and I'm like, hey man,
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.
And I'm like, she runs 4 miles every day.
It's going to be fun. Put her in the mile, qualifies
for state, right? And so I'm like, hey, let's put
her in the two mile, qualifies for state in the two mile goes
the state, wins the state championship, is an eighth
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
principles. Like why are we doing what we're
doing? Not what is my opinion and what
is the lens of my experience telling me, but like
fundamentally, let's let kids try kids try things and have
fun. I took backs when we went to the
regional championship, I was like, man, you're pretty fast.
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
quadruple, but I was sixth in the 800, sorry, in the 100 meter
dash. I mean just incredible, credible
athlete and continue to coach him.
I think his senior year through 5811, three discus 160 was a
starting linebacker on their state championship football team

(24:35):
went on and played football. But suffice to say, the whole
point of this story is you're asking about how does this tie
into track. It's about recruiting.
It's about. Yeah, yeah.
Putting them into roles and I was happy as a clamp doing that.
And starting to create your own philosophy as you talked about,
you know, what are we doing thisfor?
You know what? Shouldn't the kids have some

(24:56):
fun? So if they want to try the mile,
let them try the mile. Let's see what may blow up and
we learn and move back. Yeah.
You're starting to, like, formulate all these things that
are part of the skill set of being a track and field coach.
Help me. I got a little brain fog.
I didn't get home till till 1:00last night from the airport.
So you're in town. So you stayed in town to go to
school at the school of mines and and Mines and Tech?

(25:18):
Is that what it is? Yep.
Yeah, I heard for a second you're playing football or no?
No, I signed at the University of Sioux Falls.
OK, there it is. And AI, nothing's binding, you
know? Yeah, OK.
And I was like, I, man, if I hada different football coach, I'd
be a football player. I'm not a person.
Yeah, I had three different football coaches when I was in
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
McDonald's also football coach just there cuz his son's there
and his son started ahead of me at running back.
Josh was 5, four, 127 lbs and atthis time I was 6, three, 185
lbs, probably the fastest kid inthe school.
And I played tight end, you know, caught a touchdown pass

(26:02):
our first game against Edgemont that year.
And, you know, was averaging about 50-60 yards a game as a
tight end. And Josh, we're playing Bison,
tears his pectoral muscle away from the bone, gets carted off,
Jim gets to go in and start playing at running back.
And for the rest of your average133 yards rushing a game, we

(26:22):
played second ranked team in thestate.
I had 246 yards rushing down to block punts in a sack.
You know, like, I'm having a great time, but we're terrible
as a team. We're terrible as a team.
And so nobody's telling me you need to go to football camps to
get seen, right? You need to go to, you need to
send out letters and say I'm interested in your program.
You got to remember it back in 2000, you don't have your your

(26:46):
huddle profile where a coach canfilm.
So I was clueless. And the only reason that
University of Sioux Falls is Rich said, hey, I got this kid.
Yeah, athleticy, high jump, 6, four runs of hurdles, pretty
well then he'd be good in football.
And so, you know, they all visited me just because they
were both going on a trip together.
But in a in a different world, if I have a different coach like

(27:06):
we, I remember we played Crawford, Nebraska.
And as we're going through the handshake line, the coach like
stopped at me and goes, hey, where are you looking at going
to college? And I was like, for what?
I don't know. He's like, like, are you not
being recruited for? Football.
I didn't talk to anybody. I don't know.
Were there scouts here today? I don't.
Know. You know, we'd seen blue chips,
the world works. That's and I'm dating myself.

(27:29):
I'm 42 years old. But when you talk about like
blue chips and those things, context, we thought that's how
recruiting went. I just had no idea.
Like one of the guys that we played against, he ended up
coming up here, Josh Loosener, and playing free safety for the
University of North Dakota when they won their national
championship. So like, that was like my equal
that came up here and played great D2 football.
And yeah, I just missed the boaton that.

(27:51):
When did track? It's a it's amazing.
We've talked about this a coupletimes here recently about the
difference of recruiting track and recruiting other sport,
basketball, football, etcetera. And you know, the kid runs.
Well, I was going to say the kidruns, you know, 1060 in 100,
but, you know, we just had a kidrun 992 for crying out loud in
high school, which is just nuts OS But you know, a kid runs 992
and 100. Well, that 100's the same 100

(28:12):
that's on your track as it was down in the state meet.
Like, you know, you know, kind of what you're getting in broad
general terms with a football player.
Yeah. You know, you run 200 yards a
game. It's like, well, was he playing
against a bunch of kindergarten?I mean, there's a lot of
different talent levels out there.
So it's a little a little more involved, I assume not ever
having recruited basketball. Well, the prime example is this
time. My brother's an eighth grader

(28:33):
and he's averaging 200 yards a game.
Well, he's 64. He's 185 lbs.
Yeah, yeah, Playing against a. Bunch of they just itched in the
ball and he was pushing kids down and touchdowns.
All right, right. I love it.
So, so you're doing track, you mentioned high jump.
Are you doing other events or are you primarily a high jumper?
No. And you know, in high school I

(28:54):
just like to do other stuff. I had that grounded Dad just
hurdles was something like I wasfast.
I was the fastest kid, but I tell you what, add hurdles in
there, and I've got a skill set nobody else has.
Yeah. And so I hurdled very cool.
Short hurdles, long hurdles, high jump my senior year at 1,
discus at 1. You know, one track meet that we

(29:15):
went to was just a small track meet.
So dabbled in a bunch of stuff. My freshman year of college, I'd
start working with Jerry and he's like, you're going to do
the pentathlon. Jerry's like.
I was wondering if there's any multis here.
Yeah. Yeah, 5657 guy that ran at Adams
State back when they're NAI for Joe V Hill.
Yeah, nice. Somehow Jerry has segwayed that

(29:37):
into he's, he's a coach at a small school, so he coaches
throws, he coaches jumps, he coaches hurdles.
He's also the distance coach and, you know, great friends
with Jerry. So I'd do whatever Jerry said
and first meet and went out and qualified for nationals for
NAIA. Had no clue what I was doing,
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
the conversion. First time I long jumped, I
jumped 20 foot 11. My PR in high school was 1511,
you know, so I, I had, that was one time I jumped 151112 foot at
the next meet and I was like, yeah, not doing this anymore.
Because we, we self select into what we're good at and we get

(30:22):
this positive feedback loop. So right.
So what did you go into college thinking as far as like a major?
And I'm going to become engineer, a doctor.
What did you think going in? No, no thinking.
Just on autopilot. On autopilot, going in my my.
Autopilot like. Just go to college.

(30:43):
Just go to college. You.
Don't know what I'm doing. Now, your dad is an educator,
you know he's a teacher. I know what mom did.
But you seem to have like prettygood examples in front of you.
And yet I'm here and kind of a little aimlessly, like I'm just.
Go. I go to college.
I wonder about that. You know, my parents are going
to be up here in two weeks. I'll ask him about that.

(31:04):
But like, I think they very muchso allowed us to make our own
path. Oh, very cool.
Very unique, right? In a in a well, we live in a day
and an age where I don't like this is totally different with
my kids. Other parents don't let their
kids get out of arm reach. Right.
Yeah. I do.

(31:26):
I do appreciate my neighbors. Jacobson's.
I'll see him in the backyard andbe like, have you seen my kids?
Yeah. They're down the street with my
kids. And he's like, all right, you
know, But that's very unique. And so at that time, the life
that I grew up with in rural Wyoming was I left the house at
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
sun started to go down. Nobody ever asked any questions
in old building forts you know, doing stuff like that with my
best friend and so like my parents all my dad grew up in in
rural Nebraska the same way and so I don't I don't know.
Certainly his lens of experiencewas you'll figure it out.

(32:17):
And I did a lot of figuring out my freshman year of college was
enrolling to school of minds at technology.
And your options are industrial engineering, you know, civil
engineering, electrical engineering and mining.
You know, there were there were no degrees, there's no English,
there's no math or history, there's no education.

(32:40):
That's. What's that's what's
interesting. You didn't go to a liberal arts
where it's like, oh, OK, there's100 majors I can eventually find
myself into. You're going to a very specific
high level academic school here.And I was so lost my first year
and my parents allowing me to live my life, I went in.
I promptly failed trigonometry and I went to my advisor.
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
of as soon as I was, and he taught me in two different math
classes in high school. As soon as I got out of high
school, my parents were like, you do you.
I'm not checking on you, so you know what that means.
You don't do anything. I was like, that's amazing.
I never have to do anything. Nobody cares if I turn into
homework. Dad doesn't care.
Nobody asks. I got a 24% on my final.

(33:25):
I remember that and I just, I remember sitting in my parents
living room, it's kind of snow'scoming down.
It's like 3:00 in the afternoon before I got to go to track
practice. I've looked at my grades and
just being emotional and crying and just being so embarrassed,
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
she's a terrible teacher, it's her fault, yadda yadda.
So like perpetuated the lie thatit was somebody else's fault.
So I went to my advisor and they're like, cool, get you
right back in trig. We're going to pass that.
I finished that semester with A227.
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
Calc 1, Calc 2, Calc 3, We'll dodifferential equations in my
head. I'm going what are you talking?
About. Like I can't, I can't pass trig.
Got into trig the next semester with a different with a
different professor. Tried a little harder right
before ad drop. He's like, you're failing my
class. I was like, yeah, I know, I I'm

(34:28):
aware. So I dropped that class.
I made sure I had enough credits.
One of them was history. One of them was reading science
fiction, which was incredibly popular at school of mines.
It was 38 dudes and one girl in this class that I would that I
was. And man, I'm so I'm like, I had
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
get bees, you know, and, and we travel for track meets and
school of mine has got an outdoor track and the you know,
the Armory or the indoor gymnasium, which is a small
basketball court where we high jumped and you didn't long jump,
you know, and we hurdle diagonally across the big gym

(35:10):
upstairs where you can do 3 hurdles.
And so we started going to trackmeets where other people at
indoor facilities and I'm looking around going, you guys
get to practice indoor here every single day.
And so that that along with the academic piece of it,
precipitated me looking somewhere else.
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
there. He was like, hey, I went to the
University of South Dakota. I was like, yeah, I know.
I've seen their indoor facility at the time.
No one had anything like it. You have 5000 permanent or
sorry, 10,000 permanent seats. You've got a 200 meter, 8 lane
indoor flat track with 120 meterstraight away.

(35:52):
And it was fun to be able to jump in there.
And like every time we went there, I was like, man, they're
so loud. There's this team element at
school of mine, there were 14 guys and there were three girls.
And I just thought to myself, I was like that I'm really missing
something there. And so me and and two other
teammates transferred there at the end of the year.

(36:12):
You know, Jim, as you're tellingyour story, it's striking.
You always have an extremely good memory.
Again, again, you know, you're talking about, you know, past
games and the offenses you ran and what game your dad coached
and you didn't. So I mean, obviously you kind of
almost like have a steel trap uphere.
I tend to think that lends itself to people who are good
academically. I don't necessarily want to say

(36:35):
that you look sounded like you struggled academically because
it seemed it doesn't seem like it was an intelligence thing.
It just seems and I don't want to call it lazy effort.
Yeah, but not but not lazy. Like I'm not catching.
You're still you're coaching middle school basketball and
doing it well. So lazy people don't do that.
You know what I'm saying? So it's not lazy.
It's just like this. It's just weird.
I I before hearing your story, Idon't know that I would have
been able to say that someone who doesn't show effort is not

(36:57):
lazy. Like I said, Oh, that's an
automatic together, and yet hereyou're kind of proving that's
not true. It's just so interesting to me.
To me, I think it's a little bitof aptitude and interest, you
know, and that's like what, whatwe, what we love, we pour
ourselves into. And so I always tell my kids and
they're like, what should I do? And it's, you know, as far as
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
so tied to, I want to do international trade loss, like
got to get an international trade degree before I go and get
my law degree. And my advice to those people is
like, you need to find the people in your industry.
You need to network, you need toclerk, you need to do

(37:42):
internships and you need to findwhat you're passionate about.
Don't chase money. Chase what you're passionate
about and the money will follow.If you can pour yourself into
something 60-70 hours a week andcome home and not feel used up
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
resonate so much with that advice, but you hear the exact
opposite what you just talked about.
Oh, you want international law? OK, well, here's the path.
It means you do this, this and this.
And maybe it's because of, you know, that that's the similar to
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
interview now and everybody's a,you know, very high successful
coach who's on this podcast. And they all get to where they
are in different ways. But no one has gone and said,
OK, well, I knew I wanted to be a coach.
So I need to I know I needed to go and study kinesiology.
And then I know I need to do Agaat this school and then I know I
needed to, you know, get this certification.

(38:47):
Like it was like, oh, you know, I want, I, I liked English.
So I went and studied English and then found out that I like a
coach. And so I, you know, started
volunteer. Everybody has such different
paths that all begin with passion, that all begin with
like, I, I really like the sportor I really like helping young
people that those are the passions that help guide them to
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
today. You want to say your kids, your
kids, and then also your athletes today, 'cause I think
it's just spot on. I literally just had a
conversation with one of the, I don't give it away too much.
We're one of the top athletes incollege right now for our sport
and they're struggling their last year of college.
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
decision is. And I was like, you know what,
you're so young. First of all, it's like you're
2021. They were 21, you're 21.
I was like, I'm 48, so I'm 2 plus your lifetimes.
I go life right now should be a buffet.
Go taste you like this. Go try that.
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
this is we seem to think to tellyoung people, you better have it
all together by 22. Like you better know what you're
going to be, where you're going to live, what job you're going
to, your profession, your, your,your, your ladder up to wherever
you eventually want to be. And it's like, dude, at 22,

(40:09):
yeah, I don't know what you, butI don't know.
I didn't know anything at 22. I think one of the things too, I
think a lot about this in regards to what are my skill
sets, right? Everybody thinks the skill sets
you need are business. You need to know economics,
accounting, management. There are a lot of like really
soft skills like. People.

(40:31):
Being able to struggle. Yeah.
Like if you've never dealt with adversity, Yeah, man, my, my
parents just threw me in the deep end and said, you know,
figure it out. I don't know what you're going
to study. Go figure it out.
I'm not going to answer the questions for you.
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.
My favorite part of the story, Ihad this incredibly kind
girlfriend at the time who got into college, was an hour away.
She was playing college basketball.
I'm running track. And I was blaming everybody for

(41:12):
my failures in math. I got into college algebra.
Once I got to South Dakota, failed that, I dropped it or I
failed, failed. I was smart enough not to get
another F on my transcript and the next semester I think I just
did it again. I, I hear this is a good
professor and she just kind of was like, you know, the problem
is you, right? And I, I just never wanted to

(41:33):
take responsibility, but it was incredible to have at this time.
I'm 20 years old, she's 18 yearsold.
She's a freshman, I'm a, I'm a junior and she just straight up
said you're the problem. And I, and I wanted to see her.
So part of her, the requirement for us to see each other was I
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
algebra and she would check my work and I'd had a dad as a math
teacher. I knew I could just brute force
that I could start with the answer and work kind of work
backward. And man, she made me show all
the work for it she made and shenever kept took her foot off the
gas. And and I've been diagnosed with

(42:18):
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity disorder when I was in second
grade. Super high energy which
precipitated me drinking a cup of black coffee before I went to
school every morning starting insecond grade.
No. Oh, it's incredible.
It's a stimulant. Caffeine's a stimulant.
So is Ritalin. Any of those drugs that they use

(42:39):
are a low level stimulant and caffeine's a natural stimulant.
Yeah, but I can't picture a second grader.
No cream of sugar, just. Just sitting at the car, you
know, and I'd sit at the table. Reading your Wall Street Journal
and they. Just they were like, you are
drinking this cup of coffee before you go to school and
coffee tastes terrible. You know, kids got a sugar too.

(42:59):
I'm sitting there drinking this bitter, bitter drink.
Yeah, I'm tired of pretending that coffee tastes good.
It does not. It it was Folger's instant
coffee, too. It wasn't any gourmet stuff.
It was stirring some of those dried crystals and oh, and so
I've always blamed things on that.
I was like, well, I'm not dumb. I just have ADD, it's a crutch,

(43:22):
you know, she kicked that crutchout from underneath my arm and
held my face to a mirror and just said, this is who you are.
And it was incredible because noadult, I would never allow an
adult to do that. Somebody that I cared about,
whose opinion I cared about, whoI cared about as a person, who I
wanted to spend my time around, held my feet to the fire.
And I got AC in college algebra.Dude, nice.

(43:47):
Lo and behold, it's amazing. You do some homework and, and I
we, we broke up in that, that over, over Christmas break and I
got a geometry, I got an 89.4 inthat class.
Dude. Sitting at Iowa State where I'd
attract me and I'm sitting in the stands, I'm like doing
homework. I'm just thinking to myself, I'm

(44:08):
just like all those nerds at school.
My yeah, who? If this is the real who are you?
They would do their homework up,you know, in the in the stands
and be laughing. They'd be going through the
through the media guy be like, look at this kid,
interdisciplinary sciences. That's not even a major this kid
that you know. So I, I'm starting to pass
things right and take responsibility for who I am.

(44:30):
I, I did the other thing. I I started studying business
when I went to South Dakota and accounting weeded me out.
I was like, OK seeing. That it's all processed for you
and you got to do your. Homework going.
On and I finally, I'm just kind of aimlessly, you know, looking
through majors, I have been doing well in the history
classes I've taken. So let's let's do history

(44:52):
education classes. Those are pretty easy.
I can write, you know, I'm good at that.
Let's do a double major. And so I ended up doing that.
I started taking some coaching classes, took coaching football
coaching, basketball care and prevention of athletic injuries.
You know, psychology of coaching, which was my favorite
class man, that guy was he, he was the defensive coordinator on

(45:14):
the football team. His name was Mike.
An incredible guy. Just just an incredible mind,
you know, in the in the way thathe related to people.
And I learned so much about psychology of coaching.
There are some people that get the book, you get some notes
that basically read the book to you.
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,
you know, with me and my other coaching friends that just, I
just soaked up so much knowledgefrom that guy.
I love that you had that girlfriend at that time of your
life. You know, sometimes, you know,
not sure, Jim, where you are necessarily in your walk with in

(45:57):
faith, but you know, sometimes people are putting our lives
that, you know, sometimes we look back like, man, why did I
ever or how did that ever? And it's like, you know what,
that you needed that person or or might have been the reverse,
by the way, they could have needed you at that specific
time. So I love that you had that
person of like almost that, you know, proverbial slap in the
face of like, hey, dude, it's you.

(46:17):
You're the problem here. And you know, what's interesting
is, you know, there's two sides of that coin.
So she said that, and that was probably the right thing at that
time, but you had to be able to accept that as well, like you
could easily push. Probably would not have been
ready for that until that point.Yeah, or from another person
even. Like if mom would have said,
hey, Jim, you're the problem. Like, yeah, Mom, you don't

(46:37):
understand. Sorry, Mom, not this time.
You don't understand this, this teacher, blah, blah, blah, all
these other, you know, things. That was the right person, the
right time, saying the right thing to you.
And then you had to be open to like, oh, crap, man, maybe she's
right. And then do something about it
after that. So that's really cool here at
South Dakota. I love how if you're not

(46:58):
watching on YouTube, when he's talking about aimlessly, it
almost looked like you were aiming though.
Like like you're trying to 0 in and where am I?
What I got to get a major. Like, you do know that's an end
goal. Like, OK, I got to get a degree.
So I got I got to eventually pick something and it's like,
OK, well, yeah, no, math's no good.
OK, right over here. History is pretty good.
OK. Yeah, right.
Well, you're kind of honing in on where that aim is going.
So what did you end up getting adegree in then?

(47:20):
I got a degree. I got a double degree in history
in English class away from a minor in business, a class away
from a minor in coaching. I graduated with 168 credits.
He needed 128 credits. Oh geez, when you finally
decided on that history in English, was it?

(47:41):
Did you have the, I don't know, 4 sites the right word?
Did you have? Trying to find a major that
would allow me to coach. OK, that's what I wanted.
Like were you seeing like, OK, this because I can coach if I
had this degree or was it just like it gives me a degree and I
get out of college? I'm not hearing you really like
trying to get out of college. You know, some people like I
don't ever want to be here again.
I just just give me a degree andI'll get out.
You don't sound like that's necessarily.

(48:02):
True. No.
And I like from the moment I gotinto school, I looked at the
people that had coached me. There was a guy who was ACPA,
Casey Peterson in Rapid City, who was my football coach.
He played football at South Dakota State.
He and his father, Stanley Peterson, were our coaches the
the second two years that I was in high school and he was ACPA.

(48:25):
And I was like, maybe I can be abusiness owner and coach on the
side because I can dictate my own schedule.
And I was thinking of ways as like, I know how much mom and
dad make, maybe I'd like to makea little bit more money than
that and have the ability to come and go as I please and and
coach. And so I was always looking for
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
when I asked you in high school,senior, I was like, hey, what
what are you, you know, where's coaching?
You're like, oh, yeah. Not it's not necessarily in my
head, but in college it seems like almost like this like those
slider buttons for a light. Like it doesn't seem like there
was a light switch. Like you took that psychology of
her coaching classes like, oh, yeah, this is it wasn't that
feels like this is more like thethe slow burn of like, oh, OK.

(49:11):
Yeah, coaching coach. Oh, look, this guy's a business
owner and OK, yeah, this is where I I'm going to end up up
is I'm going to be doing something that allows me to
coach. It seems like it kind of slow
burned up to that I think. That experience coaching middle
school basketball lit a. Fire.
That seems huge. Yeah.
That's certainly a core part of of you, yeah.
Never even thought about it. And I'll tell you what you know,

(49:37):
my background is so my parents work at worked.
They just retired two years. Ago good for.
Them we, we when we moved to South Dakota, they worked at a
private Christian Protestant high school.
And so everything kind of revolved around the church and
like missionary work or working within a church being, you know,

(49:57):
whether it's a youth counselor type of scenario.
Those are the things that because I went to that school,
everybody was hyper focused on going to small private liberal
art evangelical colleges. And so everybody was getting
into mission work or being a youth pastor or doing something

(50:19):
in that field. It so there wasn't a big
emphasis on get a business degree.
There was a big emphasis get a history degree, you know, teach
somewhere else. And it was I, I would chalk that
up to not really knowing where Ineeded to be.
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
the base salary at Rapid City Christian back then was like
18,500. There's nobody coming out of
high school or out of college coaching high school at that
level. It's mostly people within
evangelical Christian circles who had done other things who

(51:02):
could afford to kind of early retire, right, and get into it.
And my dad took an early retirement buyout in Wyoming.
Very disenfranchised with the experience.
When I was in school, I rememberRoger Pareto was in 7th grade,
brought a 357 to school and was showing everybody is like oh
man. Check out Wyoming.
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
to school, was a pellet gun. But still like in the same year
you got two different kids bringing handguns to school.
One of the other kids at the high school jumped.
I remember the the PE teacher ashe was leaving school, big
physical altercation and I thinkmy parents got.
Jumped him. Jumped him.

(51:44):
Jumped him like, yeah, try to take him out.
And I think there was a period of time in the in the 90s where
there certainly was a lot of sentiment that society was going
to hell in a handbasket. And the concern was, which it
seems crazy now having lived in,in Atlanta and having lived in
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
gang problems, problems with, you know, and drugs existed.
But it, there weren't like that those type of things that were
really much of A concern. And we lived on a, on a ranch 5
miles South of town. My nearest neighbor was a mile
away. You couldn't see a house in any
direction other than town north,which I, I appreciate that

(52:33):
experience, but that was, you know, I think that was a
reaction to that. And so we got, you know, the,
the retreat was into the church and more into some of what was
the opposite of what they, they viewed in society at that time.
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.
You know, the options of things that my parents really care
about or value are are very religious in nature.
And I didn't have a compass outside of the church or like
here are the other things that you can do to be able to coach.
Go ahead, I was. Going to.

(53:14):
Say it. It just feels like you're the
most lost person who still has aguiding star, though, You know
what I'm saying? Like like you're just kind of,
you know, you're here trying this, trying that, but there's
still, you may not be able to see it or see it very well, but
there was still this guiding star out there of like, OK, it's
going towards coaching and helping people, but but there's
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
passion for sport. Mom's there.
She's she's very supportive, just a part of it.
But my mom didn't play sports. My dad wasn't good at sports
ever. You know, he said I was like
dad, because we were talking about like my high school
basketball experience when I waslike a sophomore.

(53:56):
It's like, so did you play a lotwhen you were a senior?
He's like, Nah, I played a lot less because they wouldn't let
seniors play JV. So I just all the time as a
senior, you know, back in the day, back in the 60s and 70s, I
mean, that wasn't a thing. And he would tell me the stories
about how if you if you bought black Chuck Taylors, the coach
would not play you. You have two options, white

(54:19):
Chuck Taylors and black Chuck Taylors.
It's like you want to play, you'll buy the white Chuck
Taylors. Otherwise you can sit on the
bench or. Why?
I don't know. I don't think I understand.
It might just. OK.
Just just the will. Yeah.
Wow. Yeah.
OK, So you. That's funny.
You know, that probably still goes on today in some form or
fashion. Oh, you don't want to?
Buy these 100. Percent.

(54:39):
Then you ain't run it. Yeah, you know.
It's 100%. All right, so you get these this
dual degree, you almost get a A minor in like 100 different
things, you know, you want to coach.
So what's our first? Did you graduate?
What's our first foray into coaching?
I I student taught in the fall of 2006 absolutely cured me out

(55:00):
of the desire to teach the high school.
It wasn't the kids. It was just like, I'm not
coaching. Like I like coach.
I'm only coach like an hour a day and I got to teach.
I got to do you know I have 5 different preps.
But you, you had to have some understanding of that.
That was going to be the life. Right.
And your dad's a teacher. Yeah.
But I guess it is different between yeah, I see dad doing it
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
school at 3:30, I'd come home, make my, you know, go for my
workout because I'm lost emotionally.
I'll tell you what one of the most devastating times in my
life is when I'm done with track.
No sports. And there's no sports and no one
cares if you do sports and no one else is doing sports.
And I'm like, what do I do at 3:00 every day?

(55:42):
Right, right, right. That's interesting.
Girlfriend at the time was doingsports.
She was on the swimming and diving team and she was busy.
She had stuff to do so I couldn't hang out with her.
So I literally would just outgrinded and running miles,
running 678 miles a day. Coming home soon as I'm done,
shower, clean up, eat dinner, start working on my press for
the next day, grading all these pap papers, reading everything

(56:04):
all the way till 10:00, going tobed, waking up at 6:00 AM, going
to school. I mean, that's I just was like,
yeah. And I've student taught for my
throws coach in college. She was incredibly kind to give
me that opportunity and I loved working with her, so my
experience with that was not bad, but I just.

(56:26):
Not for you, not. To the end of that semester, my
girlfriend at the time was like,so you going to get a job?
And I just kind of looked around.
I was like, the way it works, you get into high school
teaching is you just throw your hat in a ring in very disparate
geographic locations and towns and you get hired where you get
hired. And I just at the time I kind of
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
it's going to end. And so I was like, probably go
to grad school. Didn't know why I was going to
grad school. Still hadn't figured that out
yet. I wasn't Aga anywhere.
So I go to my track coach and I was like, hey, can I volunteer?
He's like, I've been waiting foryou to volunteer.

(57:11):
I know you're going to be a coach all this time.
So yeah, so I I did that this. Cracks me up.
I did that actually, if we go back, well, that was the summer
after the summer after that, youknow, I, I was working
construction and the job finished and we, we're

(57:32):
remodeling the dorms at South Dakota.
And so I work construction everysingle year to pay my bills.
Job finishes. I go to my forum and I'm like,
hey, I want to keep working. It was great.
There's a job in Fargo, we're remodeling a Sam's Club.
I'll get you on the the crew up there.
Great. Wake up at 3:30 AM, drive myself

(57:53):
to Sioux Falls, pick up the truck there with another guy,
drive a three ton truck all the way to Fargo.
Start work at 8:30 in the morning, work till 3:30.
Again, living in a hotel, no idea what's going on.
So I'm grinding out 30-40 mile an hour or miles per week just
running. What else do you do with

(58:15):
yourself? By the end of the week, they
were like, OK, we're going to start doing overnights, We're
going to start working when the store closes until 6:00 AM and
you can sleep. On there.
Hell no. I'm going back to Vermilion.
So I went back to Vermilion, called up my coach, and I was
like, hey, I got work study, canI work for you?
And he's like, I've been waitingfor you to ask.

(58:37):
And so I started. Working there, it's interesting
that just the describer you had there about, you know, when
you're done with athletics, whatdo you I do because because such
part of your identity. I've had this experience with
two, one family member, one bossmentor here at Gil of kind of
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.
Monday you wake up and it's likeI don't I don't go to the
office, I don't I don't call coaches.
I don't you know, my father-in-law was a purchaser
for Miller Lite. I don't go and check inventory,
like just the things you've donefor decades.
What do I do? I never thought about that.

(59:18):
I thought about that for like elite athletes, meaning athletes
who compete till they're 3035 and it's like, man, that's all
you've been doing and now Mondaywakes up and you're like, well,
then you're not getting ready for a meet or whatever, you
know, sport you played. You're just you're just a
regular person. I never thought about it down to
more. I'm calling more normalcy of the
college athlete. The college athlete has probably
been competing since, you know, middle school or high school,

(59:39):
been doing sports. You go through college, you do
it, you graduate. And on Monday it's like 2:00.
It's like, well, I'm supposed togo to practice.
What, what do I do? Even if you already got a job,
like I remember, you know, I coached for 10 years before I
came to Gill. I remember for the first year,
2:00-ish being in my desk and like, well, I'm supposed to go
outside. Like, I was just like itching,
like I'm supposed to go to the sand pit right now.
Let's what are we doing? You know, and it's a it's a

(01:00:02):
different world because your identity, your your routine,
everything is wrapped up into practice or staying fit or
shooting baskets of your. Basketball player it's all
wrapped around that and it's just it's gone and you you made
a great point different take away our elites now you know
guys and gals we've been doing it you know until they're 30
years old for our college kids when you graduate college when

(01:00:23):
you go you move into an apartment or you get a job, no
one care no one says hey, So what are you doing at Jake?
Are you on the softball team? Are you are you running the
local 5K or you know no one no one cares It's like oh you do
that that's cool that's awesome man great for you.
No, no one. Like there's no identity to it
at that point. The slice of the population that
ever reaches a national meet, the level and track and field is

(01:00:48):
infinitesimally small. Yes.
And what I one of the things that I still struggle with, I
can't have a conversation with any of my neighbors, any of the
guys at church, any of the guys anywhere else that I run into.
They have no idea. Well, my experience has been the

(01:01:09):
only other people are other coaches, right?
And that's a thin slice. You go to the coaches
convention, what, 2000 people there?
There are 2000 people. That's a great point in the
world who understand what I do. And so like this small network
of people, you know, I think a lot of coaches are in Group
chats right now where we kind ofthis little echo chamber where
we talk to each other about whatwe do.

(01:01:30):
And we all have our friends and in the industry, and I know
every industry is like that, butthere are a lot more people
working in business than there are at sport.
Yeah, I think it's something I've been thinking about a lot.
What you just said there about the number of people that make
it to a national meet. It is nobody one I I started

(01:01:53):
several years ago at the NCAA championships when we hope, when
we hand out like the gifts and stuff, you know, for, for you
guys and guys that qualify and and I'll usually say, oh, so you
know, Jim, you know who, who all'd you get here?
And some coaches will say a lot.And I think I know they're not
meaning it this way, but they'llbut what they're saying, I, I
always correct them. Now they'll say, oh, I just got
one or I just got 2 or I only got 1 and I go, whoa, first of

(01:02:17):
all, don't diminish what your athlete did.
They got here. It's like, you know, how many
coaches don't have anybody here?That's a lot.
So they'll take that away. And by the way, you got someone
here that no one gets people. The nationals, there's only a
couple hundred that get to go every single year.
And I, and I wonder in track if,if we because of nationals and
because of winning, you know, track meets have, you know, 20

(01:02:40):
guy winners every track meet, 20gal winners every track meet.
I wonder if we sometimes forget winning is hard.
Qualifying for nationals is hard.
When we have somebody on the, onthe podcast who, you know, went
to Olympics, it's like, bro, you're in a fraternity that
doesn't exist. No one.
And then when they're, you know,some of them had, you know, 234
Olympics and I'm like, you're, you're whatever a Unicorn of a
Unicorn is. And it's just amazing to me.

(01:03:01):
You, you hit the nail on the head.
No one goes to nationals. I we think everybody does
because we go, we go to conference and there's 2000 of
us. And so, you know, some form of
fashion, all of us get a kid there.
But in the reality, no one is having that experience.
No one. It's really, really special.
But one of the things that I tryto do with all of our kids is to

(01:03:22):
reframe success from going to nationals to learning about life
through sport. My job is to teach you how to be
a successful human being. And those soft like those skills
that we talked about, whether the people skills, whether those

(01:03:43):
or the skill of just struggling and struggling and struggling
without any, you know, tangible reward, right?
Because right now society says, you know, if you didn't get a a
reward, you're a loser. It's like man, like everybody's
a loser, like every track meet and.
Then like, that's right. You go up the line, there's only
one Olympic champion, and guess what?

(01:04:04):
They're probably only going to be an Olympic champion
statistically one time. That's right.
And that that number means that everybody else below them is a
loser. That that didn't make any.
Sense ridiculous, right? Right.
And so I, I think that goes backto figuring out how to value
life experiences and understand how to frame what happens to you

(01:04:27):
in a way that allows you to continue to move through life.
Because a lot of people get stuck in this loop.
I'm a failure, I feel bad about myself, I don't know what to do.
I'm a failure. I feel bad about myself.
I don't know what to do. And and most of my freshman kids
struggle with that because they were the big fish in the small
pond. Right.
They show up and they're no longer of fish on land, right?

(01:04:49):
They're not. Getting anything?
Done Yeah, yeah. The the way I think about that
is it's why I've never unless they I knew they were like I had
Larry Wade on the podcast and I knew he was a super stud hurdler
and things like that, but I'd never ask a coach like when you
said you high jumped and you, you you volunteered the
information, but I would never would have asked you.
He was like, oh, what was your PR like?

(01:05:09):
Because I don't care. I don't care if you were a 77
high jumper or 47 high jumper, you still matter.
It doesn't matter what you what you actually did, you know,
competition with because there'sso many variables, right,
genetics, coaching, you know, injury, etcetera.
It's like, oh, I don't care whatyou actually did.
I care that you're a coach now and what you're doing for young
people. Yeah, it's really amazing.

(01:05:29):
That's a great, great, great topic there.
I love that. OK, you, you tried construction,
boy, soon as you said that, I'm just not tough enough to do
that. So anytime someone says they did
construction, I'm like, oh, God bless you.
I can't do that. You go back to South Dakota and
you're like, all right, look, can I volunteer?
I need to do grad school and let's.
Let's do that. So what did what did you go in
to do grad work? Maybe a little bit more targeted

(01:05:51):
this time, Right. OK.
Good history. Yeah.
Yeah. You didn't like, walk around
aimlessly in grad school, I hope.
Yeah. I.
Kind of was aimless, you know, like I talked to I talked to the
history department and I was like, I think I'm going to do my
masters. Are there any opportunities for
he's like my, my advisor is like, I'll, I'll give you Aga
spot. Cool, Sounds good.

(01:06:13):
Pays for 2/3 of my tuition, $6000 stipend.
Like just allowed me to, you know, keep doing what I was
doing, keep keep being financially solvent.
So I mean, that was that was awesome and I and I learned we
talked about being a critical thinker.
I grew so much academically and as a person in grad school.

(01:06:42):
I mean, just that year and a half.
Like I learned way more. How so?
What do you? I just like because they just
throw you in the water and they're like, hey, pick a
master's thesis topic, which I do whatever you want to do.
And it was kind of like my parents in the college thing
being like, you know, we're not going to tell you what to do.

(01:07:03):
You figure it out and man, I struggled with that because I
was like, just tell me what to do and I will jump through the
hoops. And they were like, Nope, figure
it out. Same with a lot of those
classes, right? And I had at this time a
different mean girlfriend who liked to study and if I wanted
to hang out with her and then I studied, I got like a four O my

(01:07:24):
last semester O undergrad got like a like GPA and grad schools
like 3-7 because they they don't, they don't just grade
your stuff. They look at it and they're
like, this is garbage. Go back and fix it until.
Right, right. And so, like, for the first
time, I couldn't just my way through, I, I was forced to
create something. And I lived, man, in the

(01:07:46):
summers, I just lived in the, the GA office.
I was there every day, you know,four to six hours, just me and
the secretary. I was just in there researching
and and what I was researching, not that this is relevant in any
way shape or form, but I was researching a political campaign

(01:08:07):
in 1972 where a Democrat won thegovernor position in the state
of South Dakota for the only second time in state history.
Hasn't happened since then either.
His name was Richard Knight. We had all of his papers in the
in the archives. I literally read every book
published ever on High Plains politics, South Dakota.

(01:08:30):
And I just, it was kind of interesting.
I was like, oh man, if you read everything, you know, you know
everything on the topic, you know what I mean?
And for the first time, it was alittle bit like I was finding
the people that publish the bookinterviewing them and be like,
tell me, where did you get this information?
And they would be like, they would refer me to that.
And it was rabbit holes. Yeah.

(01:08:51):
Yeah, really. I'd learned to research.
I didn't learn that in undergradbecause they would be like, find
2 peer reviewed journal articles, like 2.
How about find everything on thesubject matter ever in
existence, Find a bit geography,find obscure people that were,
you know, part of the project. And like, I was talking to Lucky

(01:09:11):
Huber, who's the head coach at the University of South Dakota,
about Ted Munster. Ted Munster was the guy who ran
the campaign for Richard Knight back in 1972.
We ended up running the foundation at the University of
South Dakota, who the student union is named after.
So it's kind of funny how all ofthese people are together.
And yeah, it was really interesting.

(01:09:32):
I just, I just learned and learned and learned and learned
and learned. And it was, it was fun, you know
what I mean? To actually learn for once in my
life. Two things.
One, you said you got a four O your last semester of undergrad.
Bravo, because I believe you said your first one was 2.2 or
something like that. So bravo.
I appreciate. I like growth, so that's really

(01:09:53):
cool too. Did you do your thesis statement
on this guy or or or? Yeah.
Yeah. I wondered.
Yeah, yeah. Written on this yeah, yeah.
Political campaign of of RichardKnight, you know, in 1972.
And and then they went from a two year program to a four year
program for the governor. So he was actually governor 3
terms. Oh wow, yeah.
What does this this almost fanaticism like you, you know,

(01:10:17):
you went in, I like I said, you know, one, one topic and I just
went All in all the rabbit holes.
I learned everything about this political campaign, this
politician, how it happened, what happened, all the factors
that led up to it all this kind of is this starting to turn any
of that starting to happen in the track and field world?
Like, are you studying high jumpand what?
Whatever. Oh.

(01:10:37):
Yeah. Oh, sorry.
At this time, Lucky had two GAS wound up getting married.
Sam Privel, who was a pole vaulter.
We came out and vaulted at the gill plant during the summers.
He and I would travel around, dostuff.
I set my pole vault PR boy down in Nebraska.
I forget which town it was in. I jumped 15 one the week.

(01:10:58):
Week before that my PR was like 13-6.
And then so did you become a multi?
Is that what you ended up being?Yeah, yeah.
OK, yeah, yeah. So I'm just traveling around.
I'm the only other hobo who doesn't have like a full time
job doing stuff. So Sam's like I'm going to all
these track meets trying to jump18 plus to make USAS.
Derek was a big influence at that time.

(01:11:19):
But you know, for example, here's a great book.
This is the Throes by Anatoly Bondage.
Oh yeah, so lucky would give this to Sam and be like, we need
to we're going to read it and talk about it as you're learning
and educating, right. So at that time I just said,

(01:11:39):
hey, what books are you guys reading?
And they would be like, oh, we're reading the Theory of
Training and Methodology by tutor Bampa.
And I'd be like, OK, cool. I go online, find an old
edition, buy it for a dollar. I'd be sitting on the bus
grinding through this book, a 300 page book.
It's a really thick book. That's a heavy one.
And then I'd get done with it and I'd be like, all right,

(01:11:59):
lucky, let's talk about it. What do you mean you got done
with it? It's only been a week in grad
school. I was.
Reading Oh yeah, it was a week, so it was way.
Different my Monday. My Monday schedule was wake up
at 7:30, go to McDonald's, have breakfast, read from 8:00 until
3:00. I'd eat lunch there, too.

(01:12:22):
Just sit in the lobby at McDonald's, anything else and
just read. Because every week you had, you
know, in our historiography class, you picked someone.
And I picked facilities at that time.
And I got a book that was like that thick.
And I needed to grind through it.
And so I learned to stop, you know, because a lot of kids just

(01:12:44):
want to watch TV. Well, I'm just you write it and
every week you read another 1500pages.
This is incredible how much stuff you can absorb.
So he gave me and I forget who wrote the book, but it's a
Canadian guy like hurdling, right?
And it was talking about. Brent McFarland.
Yes. Yes, I know exactly what book it
is. I I, I worked with Brent the
next. Morning and I was like.

(01:13:05):
Read the book that's that's the Bible.
I wish that was back in publication because the best
Brent Hurdle book ever. And there's a lot of ton of good
books out there, but Brent Mcfarland's book transformation
transformed my coaching career. I got to work with Brent.
It's spiral bound. You're talking about that one,
right? Yeah.
Yeah. Amazing book.
Love it. Love it.
Well, lucky, He'd start giving me books.
Yeah. And he'd give the books to these
other two and they'd just never do anything with it.

(01:13:28):
And he'd give me the book and I'd bring it back the next day
and be like, I'm done, give me another book.
Yeah. And I couldn't find enough
stuff. And yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric Evely at this time was doing his Canadian a series of
podcasts where he would interview people.
Stumbled onto that and started to listen to Tom Tulez.

(01:13:48):
Started to listen. To.
Taft started to listen to Bruce Scheck, Snyder started to listen
to like one of my favorite ones.Derek did some great interviews
with the kid from Penn State that's throws guy now that
through with Dylan when they were together in Kamloops.
But just like talking, you starttalking about doctor B and like
how they were doing stuff and I just mind blowing because I have

(01:14:11):
no context right. The coaches that I have lucky
and God's busy doing their jobs,not not busy educating me.
They just gave me the multis arelike just go away and coach the
multis here are 12 kids go away and I would I would bring lucky.
I'd be like this is what I'm doing.
He'd be like, that looks good. And so I got to experiment with

(01:14:32):
a bunch of kids. I had some success.
I had a lot of fun. And by the time I got done with
that process, well, during the process, I kept going to Gods,
Hey gods, I'm thinking about getting a job this next year.
What do I need to do? And you'd be like you need to
network and the conversation would end like.

(01:14:53):
How do I do that? Networking.
Needs, right? It is like, we're going to
nationals this week and make sure you network.
And I'm like, OK, so we go to nationals and I'd try to like,
I'd see, you know, Mike Cunningham there.
And I'd sit down and be like, hey, Mike, I mean, nobody knows
me. And he'd be like, hey, I'm
really, you know, I'm trying to start a conversation with these

(01:15:15):
people. Nobody.
I mean, the hard thing about networking, if you don't have an
introduction or if it's not a social scenario, people are not
trying to have a conversation. With you, yeah.
There's roadblocks there, yeah. So I, I, you know, I'll get done
and I'm like. So I think I networked.
Yeah, I networked. They're like, well, here here's
here's the jobs list. Go apply for a job I applied
for, you know, 37 different jobsand I still have all of my cover

(01:15:39):
letters, all of my stuff. I got an Apple, I got an
interview at Black Hills State to be the assistant and I, they
ended up hiring Travis Covey instead of me and eventually I
got a kind of had a conversationwith Dickinson State with the
guy that's now the AD there and they were killing it.
OK, So that's when they had their three-year run of national

(01:16:02):
championships. Derek Atkins, Trevor Berry,
Aaron Clear, like all those guys.
Derek's down at Utah Tech now, Trevor Berry's down at Morehead
State, guys that went and did stuff at the world Championship,
Diamond League levels, incredible guys.
Dickinson That didn't pan out, and I got an interview at Emory
University. I'd never heard of it.

(01:16:24):
It's a prestigious. I was going to ask, did you
because you mentioned all these schools are kind of in that
area, so you didn't just limit yourself to?
Oh no, Anything that. Popped up, I applied for.
You could go on here. I applied for every job.
I think Petros moved from you and O that you're in Boise
State. We both applied for Boise State.
Yeah, Yeah. They would never have talked to
me because I was just Aga, but I, you know, at the time I

(01:16:47):
didn't know. Yeah.
What I'm? Right, right, right.
Absolutely the. Process works.
And sometimes that's better, by the way, because then you don't
put yourself in some box, to be real, frankly, Yeah.
Yeah, I never would have appliedfor the job in Emory, you know.
Yeah, right. You know, that's why I got that
job. And John Curtin, the guy who was
the the head coach at that time,said I'm going to be in Omaha
for juniors. Can you drive down a meat drove

(01:17:11):
down. We ate at Ted's, you know, grill
and had a delicious Buffalo hamburger, whatever.
And we talked and I don't remember exactly how the offer
came, whether it was on the phone later or whether it was
there, but I drove myself a couple hours back to Vermilion.
And later on, he calls me up, I guess, and says, how would you

(01:17:35):
like that? You'd coach here next year?
And I'm like, do that. I could do that.
And he's like 18, five. I was starved to death.
Yeah. And so he said, I'll see what I
can do, call me back. Two days later, he goes How does
22,000 sound? Better than better than 18 Five.
August, it's like last week in July, this week in August, then

(01:17:56):
I'm like I got no other offers. I'm moving to Atlanta.
And one of the things that I said to myself is I am never,
I'm going to be willing to move wherever I need to move.
Personal life doesn't matter anymore.
I'm not going to not take a job because it's somewhere scary.
Yeah, yeah. But Emory and Emory's a great

(01:18:17):
school, great campus. It's really cool.
But Atlanta, that's different than Vermilion.
I mean like radically different.How did you adjust?
I was lucky enough every 3rd year we'd had family reunions on
the bearing camp and on the Moors side.
And so you get connected with your first, second, third

(01:18:38):
cousins. And it just turned out that my
mom had some cousins that lived there and their kids, you know,
I had gotten to know them growing up.
And I said, don't David and Melina live down there?
And so my parents got me their phone number.
I called them up. I said I'm coming down, I'm
going to get a job. Kind of crash on your couch for
two weeks while I look for a jobor I look for a place to live.

(01:19:00):
Super helpful. That'd be great.
That'd be great. The wonderful thing about Melita
and is Melita is an immigrant from Peru.
She got married to David and they have helped family come
over. It's a very normal thing for
them to do. Her brother is a doctor at Duke
now. He does throat stuff.
And so they brought her parents over, her brother over, you

(01:19:23):
know, uncles and aunts and stufflike that.
So to live in their house, they're like, Oh yeah, meets
expectations, right? Not a big deal.
So I moved in with them. It was kind of a crazy scenario
was David Melita, my mother's cousins.
I don't even know how that works.
Their daughter, her husband and their daughter, right.
So there were 3456 of us living in a house.

(01:19:45):
It was like a 5000 square foot house, four bedrooms up, 6 total
full basement. And they they didn't they, they
this was 2008. They were Realtors.
Everything had just crashed. Oh, right, yeah, 08 yes, the.
Year before that they had paid off their house, they had paid

(01:20:05):
off business place they they'd done, I think they had done
500,000 that year in net net revenue.
That's how much they've made andthey and they put it all into
just being, you know, sufficientand where they're.
So smart. I'm looking at places.
I'm, you know, my $22,000 a month doesn't go anywhere for a

(01:20:26):
year. And after two weeks, Melita
comes to me and she goes, hey, we don't want you to move out.
We want you to live with us in exchange for rent.
We want you to cook on Tuesdays and Thursdays, dinner, just want
to have it on the stove. We want it there when we come
home, don't care what it is. And we want you to mow the lawn

(01:20:47):
and do stuff around the house. Dude.
And I was like, done. Yeah, I said.
Yes, ma'am. Wow.
And I was commuting from Dunwoody where they lived down,
which is on the North End of town up by Sandy Springs, OK S
all the way down 400 every single day in Atlanta.
So I get to learn what that was all about.
That was experience. Paid a dollar in tolls every

(01:21:09):
day, $0.50 in 50. Cents, OH.
Man only toll road lucky me in all of Georgia is 400.
That's the. Only but but man, the kindness
of facilitate what I was trying to do and I and I learned, you
know, they were like you, the pole vault coach, and I was like

(01:21:31):
I pole vaulted. That doesn't mean I know what I
was doing. Wait, you pole vaulted and with
Lucky and Derek was there, so ofcourse you know what you're
doing of. Course I know what I'm doing.
I was a multi. I jumped 13/5 and 3/4 at the
conference meet one time. So I, you know, I had an
incredible group of people and Iwas again, just trying to learn

(01:21:52):
and learn and learn and learn and learn and learn and learn in
making 22 grand a year. They, they didn't have a huge
demand on our time other than just be in the office at 10, be
here until 6. You know, it seems pretty normal
now. Was the track the same place
where it is now? Yeah, but they're attached to
the swimming pool and rec area. Kind of.

(01:22:14):
Track, You know that track was one of the practice tracks for
the 96 Olympics. That's right.
Yeah, that's right. Exactly.
Yeah, record tan track. It's an incredible facility,
awesome place to be able to go and practice.
Yeah, every day. It's a cool.
Did not know how good I had it. Yeah, I'll say that is a Emory's
a little bit of a hidden gem. I don't know that a lot of
people know Emory, but oh man, they've got a lot going on from

(01:22:37):
facilities to just the the school and the support athletics
get. It's it's actually quite amazing
there and it's beautiful. I call it little campus, you
know, just all kind of built right there.
It's a it's a cool little campus.
So this is your first full time coaching job.
How I want to say how did you like it?
Because you know, spoiled alert,you're still coaching, but it's

(01:22:59):
different when it's full time versus Aga versus volunteer
versus, you know, coaching the middle school basketball team
because now there's some of us will put higher expectations on
ourselves. We see our athletes every week.
We know we're going to paycheck for this.
So there, you know, again, some expectations come from there.
We have a boss that we have to report to as far as what
recruits were getting or not getting.

(01:23:20):
Why didn't you pull, pull vault this kid this weekend?
You made him do the hurdles instead or whatever.
How? How are you adjusting to like,
OK, I'm a coach. I'm a full time college track
and field coach at what, 2322? You're young.
Well, 2008, are you good at math?
I'm not. Yeah, no.
And I'm, I went to school in Alabama, so no, I'm not at all.

(01:23:41):
I. Think it was 25.
All right, sounds good. But I, you know, no, I don't
think anything really changed, OK, from my perception, like,
you know, when I was on the team, I'd stay up late at night,
chart everything and try to figure out, and this was when I
was in school, figure out what event should everybody be in,
score the meet. I was trying to pull race.

(01:24:01):
Berry Jam was still doing all ofthat.
Yeah, that's old school. Yeah, for, for the North Central
Conference and I was trying to pull things in and calculate
who's done what and what if theydo these other events and
putting things in. Like my senior year, I did the
decathlon, I did the 110 meter hurdles.
I did high jump, long jump, triple jump, javelin.

(01:24:26):
I don't remember if I did anything else.
I didn't run the 4x4. So if you think I did 10 events,
+5. So I did 15 events at the
conference meet and that's all. That was the first time I ever
triple jumped. I got fourth.
You know, like I, I say long jump, a long jump in there as
well. But like I wanted to do a lot of
stuff. I wanted to impact what was
going on when I was at when I was at South Dakota and I was

(01:24:47):
coaching, there was a kid named Jeff Segren at the time who
ended up coincidentally working for me as a coach later on.
Put him in triple jump. That kid scored the second or
third most points at the conference meet on the team.
I just a walk on kid and I've recruited him.
He was best friends with the kids that live next door to me
in the dorm. You know, got talking to him and
he's like, Oh yeah, these are myathletic endeavors.

(01:25:07):
Like you need to transfer here. You need to come here.
And this is when we're both on the team.
Always have been recruiting. People.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we're always, so nothing
really changed. I always was thinking about like
building teams, putting people in great positions to be
successful and two great decathletes there that year that

(01:25:28):
you know, had like 4 or 500 point PRS.
We went to the Last Chance NorthCentral meet, did incredible
until we got to Javelin. It would have been a 7 or 800
point PR. We just did not throw Javelin.
But I got to coach a bunch of stuff and no one cared.
They put me completely in charge.
They never monkeyed with anything that I was doing and

(01:25:48):
kids did well. You've you've shown a great
proclivity to what I call unofficial coaching education.
Coaching education to me is official and unofficial.
Not one is more important than the other.
Unofficial as you know, peers, books, doing your own studies,
things like that. Official B in the certificates,

(01:26:08):
right? USATF level 1, USTFCA, Altos,
etcetera. Are you doing any of the
certification route at this point?
Yeah, so I went to and you're involved in this story here.
So I went to a level 1 school at, boy, it's a purple school in
Missouri. What am I trying to say?
Truman State, Yeah. Truman State So I go to Truman

(01:26:30):
State in this summer in between getting this job, I stayed at
campground with my, I just convinced my best friend to come
along and was like, Hey, man, I'm going to this, this coaching
clinic. And he's like, sounds good to
me. I'll just sit at the library
each day. And then we went out and ate and
did different things and, and true.
And, you know, and you were one of the presenters.
I was going to say I taught that.

(01:26:51):
Yeah, and so I taught. Your level 10 Jim, I just you
know you have overcome a lot my friend, if I was your.
Level 1. Holy cow, that's amazing.
That's. Really.
That was the first one I did. That's special.
That's that's really cool. I, I ended up doing 30 of those
before, you know, just work got too busy and really enjoy them.
And I do. Thanks for for bringing that up

(01:27:13):
and remembering that because I, it's special to me when I see
coaches that I taught, you know,it's a curriculum.
There's not a lot of leeway in there, but that's really that I
really enjoyed my time as a coach, a level 1 teacher.
I wish I could do it some more. That's really cool, man.
Yeah. Truman State, man, that was that
wasn't out in the middle of nowhere.
The Bulldogs. That was fun.

(01:27:33):
That's really cool. I love that.
Thank you for bringing that memory up for me.
OK. So you're doing Level 1, any
level 2 or and I guess we didn'thave USTFCCCA then or maybe it
was just starting it? Might have been just starting
about that time. Yeah, yeah, it's probably.
Because I got done. I got done in Amory and took a
job. How many years it?

(01:27:55):
How many? Years.
One year. One year and you go back to
South Dakota. Why?
You know, I was working construction during the summer.
We were doing fixture setting atJC Penney's, building the
backroom and then putting thingsout there.
Wait, so you moved to Atlanta toEmory in August roughly, and
then when season was up, May or June, you then go back to do
construction? We did.

(01:28:16):
But I, I work construction on Lake Altoona and we did a, a JC
Penney's just have one of my teammates, his parents on a
construction business they built.
They do all the shelving for anyShields whenever those get
installed and all the fixture setting for that kind of stuff.
And he was like, hey, man, we'regoing to actually be in Georgia.
You want to work for our crew? Oh, OK.
OK, OK, OK, I got. It So Tyler and I got on that

(01:28:36):
crew. They had a house rented.
It's crazy that people do this stuff in construction.
We'd work all day, come back andwe just watch HBO shows and and
then sleep. I slept on the couch in the
living room every night. Then we moved over to
Birmingham. Once we got that job done, I
lived in a hotel there for a month.
And then as soon as we got done with that, my friend Tyler and

(01:28:57):
I've been talking, I was going to go back and and do some more
research and he's like, hey man,I've always wanted to.
Were you definitely not coming back to Emory?
Like when When? I was planning on coming back.
Oh, OK, OK. Yeah, it's.
A10 month contract. So I'm yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah. And he wanted to kayak down to
Missouri, so we kayaked from Vermilion all the way down to
Kansas City. And that was, you know, I'm

(01:29:17):
applying for jobs during this period of time too, and.
But you're coming back to Emory as far as you're.
Concerned back to Emory. Yep, Yep, Yep.
Lucky calls me. This is always a funny thing
because I the the way that this happened, Lucky calls me goes,
hey, Chris Bradford got the job at Western Colorado.
Here's Tracy Hellman's phone number.

(01:29:38):
You need to call him and tell him you're going to be in town
tomorrow and you're going to interview for the job.
But I got nothing to lose. I called him up and he's like,
yeah, hello, who's this? And Jim Berenkamp, I've been
working at Emory. Oh, yeah, I know.
Who are you, Jim, who you are orwhatever?
I said I'm going to be in town tomorrow and I'm going to
interview for your open job. Did you really say that like

(01:30:00):
that? Oh yeah.
What did he say? He goes, oh, well, let me get
some things together. Is it OK if I get you, you know,
an itinerary? Yep.
So I drove up to Sioux Falls andI interviewed for the job.
It wasn't even open. Yeah, you know, but that, OK,

(01:30:23):
that's your first cue. That's what networking is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A little bit of gall though, is
to say, hey, I'm I. Had nothing to lose.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and in my opinion too,
August Cano was terrible, my senior.
Yeah, yeah. There's I, Yeah.
You're not doing. You're not calling.
My friend Tyler scored more points than their team.
Yeah, at conference. Yeah Tyler.

(01:30:44):
Tyler scored in the steeplechase5 of the 10 and their entire
team scored 15 points. Right, right.
Yeah, there's. I didn't have a lot of it wasn't
like this. Is yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There there is a little bit of situational, not awareness, but
situational, right, Cuz like, like right now, how would you
feel if someone called you if you had a position open and they
said, hey, Jim, I'm Mike Cunningham.

(01:31:04):
Oh, yeah, I know, I know you, Mike.
Yeah. Hey, So I'm in town tomorrow and
I'm I'm gonna interview for yourassistant job.
I feel like you'd be like cool with who?
Because not with me, buddy. What are you talking about?
You know, and I think that's theother thing too, it depends on
what your networks like. If you don't have anybody
that'll interview for your job and, and, and this is the one
thing, if I could give anybody advice, you need to have a

(01:31:25):
shortlist. If you don't know what a
shortlist a shortlist is established relationships with
people that you believe you can offer a better position to, not
people you wish would take your job.
Yeah. Explain that.
Explain that. But for example, if if I'm Jim
Berenkamp, I've got a short listof throws coaches, I have a

(01:31:46):
short list of distance coaches. For your job, for for your
future opening if it comes available, correct?
Yes, it's when it's open. It's closed before it's open.
Good head coaches have that and good assistant coaches who
aspire to be head coaches have that.
Like, hey, here's a staff that Iwould my dream staff.
And then to your point, two or three, because, you know, some

(01:32:07):
don't want to move to where you are or they're happy where they
are or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.
Absolutely. Don't be don't don't get the job
as a head coach and then be like, I got to fill a staff.
What the Frick man? Who do I hire best?
Just let me go look at the applications.
Yeah, yeah. Good ones are prepared.
That's exactly. Right.
And I would say everywhere that I've been, we've already had

(01:32:28):
staff filled for, for example, I'm thinking about, you know,
when I was at Queens, you know, I, I knew my assistant was going
to leave. I spent six months talking to
people and just betting, feelingpeople out.
So they're going through that, you know, and especially at a
private institution where there are no rules, you hire who you

(01:32:49):
want. Doesn't have to be, you know,
doesn't have to be public for a certain amount of time.
You don't have to be a certain number of people.
Anytime I went to my boss and I said, Sahaya's going to leave, I
want to hire this person. And she would even say she's
like, man, I appreciate you haveyour staff built.
Absolutely. Because there's always turnover
at small schools at that. Yeah, yeah.

(01:33:10):
Don't be delusional and think that, yeah, your staff's gonna
be the one that stays together for 20 years, Right?
Right. It happens.
But that's, again, that Unicorn out there.
For the sake of time, let's moveforward a little bit.
So you get, you take that. Do you get that job?
The job that you say, hey, I'm going to interview tomorrow.
Yeah, I took that job in Augustana.
I started and I just. So what was that like to tell

(01:33:31):
the head coach back at Emory? Because that's something we
sometimes don't think about. You know, I'm Yeah, I coached
for 10 years and has a 5 different institutions.
So I'm certainly not gonna wag, wag my finger.
People who leave and go on. I think you should go on to
whatever you think is bigger andbetter for yourself for your
career. I have that same philosophy with
athletes too, which sometimes conflicts with our coaches, but
that's OK. But we forget that you talk

(01:33:52):
about networking. Well, don't burn bridges either.
How did you handle? Yeah, I.
Don't I don't burn bridges. OK, I thought you were telling
me you burned a bridge. No, I called John and I just
said, hey, you know, it's 8000 more a year.
My rent is going to be like $250a month.
But the pro, the thing that I, Idon't know if I even said I got

(01:34:13):
to know the Southeast when I wasdown there.
The number one thing I would recommend to people as they look
at jobs, go away from where you've been, go out, experience
something different, different town, different cities, the way
the track meets are run in a different place.
Because I will say this, I feel like when I interviewed for the
job at Queens, my familiarity with the region helped me out so

(01:34:37):
much. I knew people, I knew where the
meats were. I knew how it worked.
It was, it was an easy way to, you know, circle back around and
come back into there and I knew people that I could reference
and under and I could show that I understood the area.
That's what I was, yeah. I mean, I, you know, I don't
think, I think I failed to tell you this before we during our
pre interview. I, I don't do any research
beforehand. So what I know of you is what I

(01:34:58):
know of you. And then we explore that right.
Allows me to stay curious. So I knew you went to Queens,
but one of my concern was that'swhy I asked when you, when you
were applying for all those jobs.
I was like, did you just I was, I was concerned because I agree
with that too. Go away from where you grew up,
go away from where you're familiar, Go put yourself in
unfamiliar places and learn and fail and and get better.
So I was concerned about that. But then I knew Queens was in
there at some form or fashion. So, OK, so you did call coach

(01:35:20):
back at Emory and was like, Hey,appreciate everything.
You know, I'm not, but I, you know, I took this job and here's
why and that's good. I, I, I hope, I don't know if
it's, if that's the case, I, I don't know, I'm not saying it's
not the case, but I hope that's the case of the professionalism
of our profession of, hey, if you accept another position,
give the coach the respect immediately so that they can

(01:35:41):
prepare. They they don't have a hole in
their staff that they've got to fix and hopefully they have a
list of three to four people they can immediately call.
But but don't, don't treat them how you would want to be
treated. If if you're a head coach one
day and someone leaves you, you would certainly hope someone's
letting you know immediately. So I appreciate that.
All right, so you go, you're back home ish.
You're back in this, you know, up here in this upper Midwest.

(01:36:04):
How many, how many years there, and what's next?
So three years there, OK, Tracy and Chris Bradford had really
changed the philosophy and really doubled down on getting
some good kids. And so I walked into what
externally didn't look very good, but man that we had a lot
of really great stuff coming andI thinking about networking and

(01:36:30):
this is a year on. We have some success with some
kids. And the next year I was at the
conference multi that that year and Chris Parno was there and he
was, I was like, what are you doing, man?
He's like, I don't know. I just got back from student
teaching in Bolivia and I got this semester, I was like, why
don't you come be Aga for me next year?
I need Aga. No way.
Oh yeah. So Chris lived in my basement,

(01:36:53):
kept his drums in his room. He let me play that when I was
when he was at class and stuff like that.
And so he was Aga with me at Augustana for two years and he
knew the job was going to come open at Mankato.
So he worked really hard at thatand we won conference
championships. We've never won anything.
So we won women's indoor, women's outdoor, we won women's

(01:37:13):
NCAA national championship across country.
So success, success, success. Looks like I know what I'm
doing. I don't.
We're just really motivated. We're recruiting really hard and
there was a guy named Scott Simmons who had a lot of success
at Minot State to Virginia Intermont after that, and when
Virginia Intermont closed, he went to Queens.

(01:37:34):
Queens, That's right. Followed him because when he was
at Minot State, I was at South Dakota school of mine.
So we're in the DAK 10 at that time.
So I knew who Brad Thai and and the Thai brothers and all of
them were. So I and I see that he leaves
the job. I see the job gets posted on my
birthday, January 27th. Boom, immediately send in my

(01:37:57):
resume. I called the secretary every
single week until I got an interview and I was in the
second round of the interview. Why?
Why that school? Why just?
It was just a job. Yeah.
No, no, no particular interest. I just was out there and I
wanted an interview, so I calledthis Robbie every single week.

(01:38:19):
Miss Robbie, What's going on with the job?
Oh, what's up, Jim? And.
And they did. They did a first round of
interviews. Didn't like anybody there.
Did a second round of interviews.
My eventual assistant, Sahai de Nacho was she interviewed the
day after I did last one and they offered me the job while I

(01:38:41):
was out at the national championships in Pueblo with
with Tracy and the and the rest of the kids and I took the job
experience at Augustana. They have the freedom for the
speed power group and to just grow it and try different
things, which I would argue are foolish things, but sometimes
you got to learn by doing and and you're going back to formal

(01:39:01):
education. When I went to Queens, I was the
time when I took my first coaches association sprints and
jumps or sprints that foundationclass and it was like wow, they
have not been doing this. Yeah, I think I like when you
say, you know, trying things, doing things and looking back
now some foolish things. Because I feel like if you know,

(01:39:24):
after you coach for some amount of time, not necessarily a lot,
5 years, 10 years, if you don't look back, some of the first
things you did and cringe a little bit.
It's like, well, I'm not sure you're growing then if you're
still doing the same things or because I doubt anybody's coming
right out the gate, no matter who was your college coach or
whatnot, all that stuff. I'm not sure about the gate.
Anybody is coaching good. When they first start.

(01:39:44):
You're, you're, you're trying tofigure out your own identity and
that means a lot of accidents. And so if you, you don't look
back and be like, oh man, what in the world was I doing?
I I'm just not sure you're growing.
So I appreciate you saying that.I love the Chris.
That's so that's so interesting.I I'm toying around with the
idea of having some kind of button during these interviews
to hit. That signifies Gill podcast
alums cuz Parno. Chris was like, I don't know,

(01:40:07):
maybe 11 #12 he's an OG. He's one of the first ones.
And as you know him, you know, today you can see he would have
absolutely jumped at it when I first started this back in 2020.
So I appreciate Chris a lot and lived in your basement.
That's pretty cool. I bet if I go back and listen, I
guarantee that's part of his story that he told.
Yeah, that's really, that's really cool.
So I mentioned Emory and how beautiful that campus is.

(01:40:28):
You go to Queens, another reallybeautiful camp.
And now you're N you have an attraction for really attractive
campuses. So you go to Queens beautiful,
you know, right in Charlotte, you know, you kind of drive down
that residential area and then it opens up a lot of greeneries.
What I remember there How how was it at Queens?
And this is your first head coaching job?
Yeah. Yeah, how was that, Queens?

(01:40:49):
Queens was a great opportunity to develop my SO as a head
coach. It's wildly different than being
an assistant coach. I spend way more time now and
even when I was at Queens on themacro, I hired my friend Jeff.
He coached sprints, couldn't find a throws coach.
So I coached throws and we had Sahai who was a distance coach

(01:41:12):
and we didn't really see each other.
Throws coach like throws, facilities over here, sprints,
jumps is over here, distance, who knows?
And we had no facilities, right?And that was an opportunity for
me to go out and to identify facilities, build relationships,
get us a place to do things and really establish what you

(01:41:37):
believe. You know what I mean?
It start establishing staff, network building, building
through all of those different things.
So we never ended up with any facilities.
You know, COVID was a real struggle.
We had an asphalt track. What's crazy, we went to
nationals, I had a girl that wasa national champion in the short
hurdles, girl that was runner upin the multi, you know, and we

(01:41:57):
did it all on an asphalt track. And that's what a lot of people
think. Well, we got to have the nicest
and my kids even thought this, we got to have a nice facility.
And I'm like, here's the deal. Your body doesn't know from a
neurological standpoint, if you're wearing spikes and you're
on rubber, if you're wearing flats or you're on an asphalt
track. Running fast is about limb
movement and neural recruitment.And I would argue having a girl

(01:42:19):
that came in as a 14-1 hurdler that ran 13 two right body must
not have known at any point. And so like we and now being
able to do it without facilitieswhen I had the opportunity to
come here and they're like, we only have an 8 lane 300m indoor

(01:42:41):
track and you can only, you can only use it from 1:00 to 5:00
every day. You're like, wow, I'll suffer
through. I was like, if it gets -100 that
sounds. Fantastic.
I'll figure it out. Yeah.
All right, go back to Queens real quick.
I have three questions that I'd love to ask first time head
coaches. One is because now you have

(01:43:03):
perspective, you know, you know,years behind you.
Were you ready to be a head coach?
Well, I might have to ask you, what does that mean?
Because I, I, I, I, I don't knowif there's a ready, you know
what I mean? I was, I was ready.
I was prepared to, you know, make all of the decisions to be

(01:43:24):
responsible for that stuff. I made mistakes along the way,
but from an aptitude standpoint,I was unhesitantly ready to do
that. And I was real.
Like, I don't want anybody else telling me what I could or
couldn't do. And not that I not that I
couldn't do that, but I think ifyou really, I have a lot of

(01:43:51):
personal belief in my abilities and skills and that was an
opportunity to try that stuff. So at some point, you know, you,
you work for somebody and you learn some stuff.
And we always know everything, right when we're the assistant
and then you get to be the head coach and that's when you learn
what you what you don't know. And that's a great, I mean,

(01:44:12):
that's a growth opportunity. Growth is by definition
uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, you're
not growing. That's right.
And so for me, I was ready to beuncomfortable and I was very
uncomfortable actually. Like going back.
Remember I said I was never going to put personal life and I
didn't want that to hold me back, right?

(01:44:34):
And I wanted to move as much as I could.
I wanted to do what I could. So 29 years old, I get the
opportunity to be. So young.
All right, So my second questionfor new head coaches, because I
don't think I know from being the podcast host talking to
coaches 24/7, we overall, some coaches, some head coaches do a

(01:44:58):
very good job of this, But overall, we don't do a very good
job of helping our assistant coaches become future head
coaches, meaning we're very controlling sometimes.
Again, this is just a big general swap.
So we don't want to give up equipment or scheduling or
budgeting or academics or all the other billion hats that you
wear as a head coach. We don't want to give that up to

(01:45:18):
our assistants. And so when they become head
coaches, it's the first time they realize, oh crap, I didn't
even think I have to meet with my the academic counselor about
the school, about the team, you know, things like that.
So these questions are very similar.
I'll start with the first one. When you got to Queens, you,
you, you nailed it. You said, hey, being the head
coach is different than being the assistant coach.
That that is different. You're, you're more macro,

(01:45:39):
right? Not just siloed on your event
group. You're also siloed on your event
group by the way, while also doing the macro.
It's kind of you're doing 2 jobs, if you will.
What did you think was going to be hard?
What was something you thought, oh, I might struggle with this
as the head coach but end up being easy?
So I'll go back and I want to, Iwant to answer your first

(01:46:01):
question because I struggled finding a job and I got told the
network and I had no, nobody explained it to me, just
intrinsically. I have always wanted to help
people move on and I have alwayswanted to offer people exposure

(01:46:23):
too, so that they know about South.
Any assistant that I ever had when I was at Queens, the goal
is you're going to learn everything about everything.
So when you go to the next place, you understand all this.
So one of one of my coaching tree, Aaron Combs, just took
over at Indiana, Purdue, Fort Wayne as a head coach.

(01:46:45):
He called me the other day and he's not just trying to be nice.
He goes, I just want to say thank you.
He goes every step of the way. You have prepared me for
everything before I've ever gotten to it.
I understand budgeting, I understand fundraising.
I understand dealing with administration.
I understand home meats, meat administration, how we do all
this stuff. And my AD said to me, this is

(01:47:05):
him speaking. She goes, you have been so far
ahead of the curve. It's just really been us getting
to a place where we can hire you.
And, and I've always tried to dothat and I've pushed kids out to
like different jobs in my, and for a while there, I tried to
position myself where everybody knew me who was looking for a
distance coach. And we always had volunteers

(01:47:27):
come in every year. We always pushed out those
volunteers. So I've got a, I've got a
coaching tree group chat that we're in now.
I love that we all stay connected and we all talk about
what we're doing and and. For our profession, we need more
of that. We, we have too many assistant
coaches who become head coaches who are just clueless.

(01:47:47):
Not their fault. They, they were never exposed
to, they were told go coach sprints, go coach throws, don't
talk. I'll do the rest of that right?
Because, because on one hand, the head coach in that sense
feels like they're, they're supporting their assistant
coach. It's like, look, man, don't
worry about that stuff. You just coach.
And then they that, that guy goes and Gal goes, becomes a
head coach. And now they're three years
behind the curve, learning meat management, scheduling,

(01:48:09):
budgeting. How do you work with your
oversight AD They're just so farbehind.
They'll they'll get there. They're all smart individuals.
People become head coaches are very smart individuals, but
they're so far behind when it's like, man, you could have, you
could have, you know, use a baseball term here.
You could have put that kid on first base to become a head
coach. Instead, they're they're the
they're on the on bat circle here.
You know, I mean, come on. So I love 1.
Of my, one of my favorite expressions is Lucky said this

(01:48:32):
to my my wife the other day who was our jumps coach, he said.
You know those people that are born on third base who feel like
they had a triple, that really, that really frustrates me.
Because you. Know understand what they were
just given, but like one of the so one of the stories to just
eat into this last year I had a graduate assistant named Olivia
Lane and she came to us from Oregon.

(01:48:57):
She was I forget which Oregon small NAI school it was.
And then she was at Ashland for a year when Judd Logan passed
away. And that was a tough year.
And and she came here because coincidentally, my distance
coaches from Ash Ashland, my throws coaches from Ashland, not
by design coincidence. And she worked here for a little
bit and then she was like after a year she's like, I don't want

(01:49:19):
to do this. She tried to leave.
She went and got a job with the forestry service.
I kept talking to her. I was like, you need to get back
here. You need to finish your degree
coaching job. You only were here for eight
months. You can't tell me you don't like
it because it takes used to develop friendships and really
feel like you're in a place. So she comes back, you know,
and, and I'm working with her onright now, we're going to go get
a job. And Tom, our distance coach,

(01:49:42):
comes into my office and she andI are sitting there and she's
crying and you know, and Tom just turns around and walks back
out of the office. I was grilling her with
interview questions and just trying to prep her for the
interview kind of breakdown. Some of the emotional barriers
that she has is ready. She's got her dream job.
She's at Montana State right now.

(01:50:02):
Her athlete was 49 last week, and she's helped that girl jump,
you know, 20 centimeters further.
She's doing an incredible job. That was the job she said she
wanted when she came here. She's like, I want to work
there. And so like just being able to
get her back out of the ForestryService, get her back over here,
and then push her back out into the world where she can do a

(01:50:23):
great job has always been my goal.
So, Jim, so where? So we're not born with a lot of
things. We're born with some things.
You started, you know, today's conversation, I was talking
about nature and nurture. So we are born with some things,
but a lot of things are learned,especially in our adult life.
And two things that you have just expressed are not common.
I wish they were. You know, no one talks to more

(01:50:44):
track coaches in depth than thisguy right here, right?
So this is I can put my hand on the Bible.
This is not common and I believeit should be 1.
Is that preparing your assistantcoaches for future head coaching
jobs? And two, putting what's best for
you as the head coach to the side and doing what's best for
them. So it's not best for you to have

(01:51:07):
an assistant coach leave you, right?
I mean, that puts you, I don't care if you have a list of three
and you already know who the next person up and all that kind
of stuff is. That's still a learning curve
for that new assistant. It puts you behind but.
You. Look at that, that young lady as
an example and say, hey, you know what?
It's not better for you to go become forestry.
Let me help you and let's work on this and come back here and

(01:51:29):
get you to like, where is that modeled from?
You had to have seen that somewhere.
Whether it's whether it's teachers, parents, clergy, best
friends, parents, I don't know, ATV show that somewhere.
I don't know if I ever directly saw it and modeled anywhere, but
I will tell you this. Who I am, who my personality is,

(01:51:51):
is I like to provide. I like to.
It's two different things. I love puzzles and not like flat
sheet puzzles. My job is a puzzle.
Anywhere you work is a puzzle. The people that you work with
are a puzzle. The athletes that you work with
are a puzzle. The facilities are a puzzle.
So I, I like tearing that apart,figuring out how it all fits

(01:52:15):
together. And #2 I love providing for
people, whether that is people outside of our program where we
provide an incredible meet and incredible opportunity that
maybe something that I didn't have.
And it is very driven by maybe what I missed out on or I wish
that I had, which is kind of, I don't know if that's weird to

(01:52:38):
think about that I'm trying to make up for what other people
didn't do, but what's my experience?
But what's cool about that though is you're not doing it so
that now, Jim, as a 42 year old,it's so that others don't have
that same experience that you had.
That's what's interesting there.And I don't really care about
awards. I'm not driven by that.
I am intrinsically driven by helping people and, and that

(01:53:02):
goes to helping you get your next job if you come work for
me. If you're an athlete, helping
you achieve your goals and also being hard on people and, and,
and having the belief that the way that the world works is not
the way that you're being told that the world works.
So right now everybody says, oh,nothing should be hard.
You should never be sad. Hell no.

(01:53:25):
Being sad is part of the cycle, OK.
And so I want you to be able to navigate that, learn what it
looks like and be able to move beyond it.
There are many people who are wounded emotionally who never
move beyond that wound. And what an incredibly, to me,
that's a that's a tragic story. And then there's a lot in
literature that's about that, right?

(01:53:46):
And some, some type of emotionalwound that nobody ever moves
beyond. But I want to be able to give
people tools to be successful inlife, whether that's assistance,
whether that's athletes, you know, whether that's other
people that I work with. And there are a lot of people in
this world that I bump into who don't necessarily like our
interaction because I do not subscribe to the status quo as

(01:54:11):
truth. And I would say that the success
rate of the people that I deal with indicates that what we're
doing is different. And I also think that it's right
there's there's a beautiful book, if you, if you haven't
read this, the Anxious Generation, written by a

(01:54:33):
professor at Columbia University, talks about the why
of where we are right now with our with dealing with young
people. And it's is, it's probably a
huge buzzword, but it's tied to phones and it's tied to going
through puberty with phones and not being able allowed to fail
and struggle and learn social cues and all that stuff.
And so like, my goal is whateverit is, it's going to be phones,

(01:54:55):
It's going to be MTV, it's goingto be Rock'n'roll, It's whatever
it is, it's threatens every generation.
But the goal is there have got to be people out there helping
people anchor themselves in truth where they can't move on
and be successful as adults and as humans.
And that's what we're trying to do.
Not even track field. We're just trying to do that
through our sport. Are you doing or have desire to

(01:55:18):
do that kind of helping others? You're you're doing it on your
we'll call it micro level meeting right there where you
are at University of North Dakota with your athletes, with
your coaching staff. I'm sure you're doing that with
your athletic department teammates as well.
The guy like you doesn't just pigeonhole and say screw

(01:55:39):
softball, screw hockey. We're only gonna you know, I'm
only focused on track here at UND.
Are you, have you, have you started doing anything outside
of the University of North Dakota ecosystem for our sport,
meaning speaking at clinics, helping out with the local or
and if you haven't, do you have desires or thoughts of doing

(01:56:00):
that? Yeah.
And I've and I've spoke at the convention before.
I've done coaches association entry level classes, talk there
and expressed interest in those.We do our state, state stuff.
I've been to Kansas, I've been to North Dakota, I've done
those. I've spoken to Nebraska state
one. Any chance that I get?
Do you speak mainly on the XS and OS or the other side of

(01:56:22):
Trek? You know, most people want you
to speak on the X and OS. Yeah, cuz they're like, hey,
talk to me about hydro and I'm like, let's talk about dealing
with high jumpers. Yeah, I.
Mean in communicating to them once XS and OS there's truth,
right? Yeah.
Physics, yeah. It's not your opinion.
Yeah, that's a good question is how do you manage those people?

(01:56:43):
That's what I was going to encourage you, you know, as I've
gone to track clinics, you know,my whole life, you know, so
20-30 years of it now and it's, and it's better today, you know,
back in the day when I was coaching.
So, you know, 2000, 2005, you'd go to a clinic in 95% of the
topics were, you know, how to teach high jumpers, how to, you

(01:57:04):
know, release in the shop at whatever else kind of stuff.
And 5% of it would be about culture or team management or
professional development, thingslike that.
Now it's about maybe 7525, we'redoing much better.
You know, USTFCA, the convention, we have many more
now topics on those kind of things.
When we go to like Texas track and field or Ohio Track clinic,
there's, there's more of it. But you know, we as we've been

(01:57:25):
exploring this over maybe the past 6:00-ish months here on the
podcast and through Twitter, youknow, for social media and
stuff, it's almost, and it's hard to say this as a guy who
was a big coaching education guy, right?
Like level ones, like 3-3 or four level twos, you know, all
that kind of stuff. Maybe the XS and OS are the easy
part. And again, that's so hard to say
as a guy who was so enthralled on how do you coach high jumpers

(01:57:47):
better and sprinters better and hurdlers better and the other
stuff, Culture, team management,professional development
network. To your point, go network.
You're like, well, what the fuckdoes that mean?
Like maybe someone needs to talkabout how you properly network.
I just want to challenge you like the next time someone calls
you up and says, hey, I want youto speak at the such and such
clinic on high jump, maybe you push back a little bit like,

(01:58:09):
hey, you know what I'd like to explore?
I'd like explore how you coach high jumpers, not the high jump,
the high jumpers, because I think that's when you look at
successful coaches, you're yourself included in this here.
Now, when you look longer term, successful coaches, not just
necessarily coach you as one good athlete, which again, I'm
not taking away, that's amazing.But coaches who continually win

(01:58:29):
their conference or Top 2 and send, you know, kids to the
nationals every year, they talk more about how they connect with
the athletes and their coaching staff and less about, Oh yeah,
I'm a real guru in this event. I will tell you when I
interviewed for this job, I, I, the guy that hired me, has him

(01:58:51):
since moved on, which he was more than willing to kind of
share what that experience was like.
And I spoke about the need to win hearts and minds.
They're like, what are you goingto do when you get here?
And he said that the AD was on the call build shaves.

(01:59:12):
And I just said, you know, the most important thing is, is
getting people to work together.And then, then the XS and OS,
we'll, we'll take care of that. But like winning hearts and
minds. And they had had a very
fractured experience. And he said within like 3
minutes, you starting to talk? Bill texted him on the side.
And be like, we need to hire this guy.

(01:59:33):
In a. Previous call, A previous call
he'd been on for the same position.
Coach is going on about anaerobic training and VO2 Max
and stuff like that. And Bill is texting him on the
side being like, shut this guy up.
We got to get going. Like, what is this guy talking
about, You know? And I think we all miss that,
right? Because when you come in, you're

(01:59:54):
working with humans. You've got to remember you're
working with humans and you got to connect with people.
If you can't connect with people, the X's and O's don't
matter. Right, Jim, that's a good place
to stop right there, man. That's our time.
But I do, I have one more kind of you're going to provide the

(02:00:15):
outro maybe here for this. You are obviously a long term
thinker. You're not just thinking about
what the rest of 2025 is bringing in or even with 2026.
You're already thinking 2027283035, etcetera.
As you sit in your seats right now, today is the head coach,
director of track and field there at University of North
Dakota. What's got you excited about the
future here for the Fighting Hawks?

(02:00:38):
The people, I mean, that's a, that's a silly way to the
opportunity that I have here to work with.
And the, the limitations here don't exist like they have
before. So we can attract more people
from a facility standpoint, we can impact their lives from a

(02:00:59):
travel and a gear standpoint. And like this place, the sky is
the limit. We had a young lady when I
started here, was like A1735K girl ran the 20th fastest 10K
this year in NCAA Division one history.
Dude. No change man.
We've just been pouring into herlife in letting her achieve her

(02:01:22):
dreams. She broke EU 23 Canadian record,
you know, and it's just recruiting, that kind of stuff.
Come in, meet the people. I'm not selling you the
facility. Meet the people.
They're going to tell you why you need to be and if you go
somewhere else that's fine, but the people that we have here and
the buy in the team culture could not be happier.

(02:01:47):
That's awesome. I love that for you.
That's really cool. Jim, my friend, the most
valuable thing you can give me is your time.
You're in the middle of track season, you got conference
coming up, nationals, and you'rein the thick of it all the way
there with that. So I'm just so grateful for your
time, man. It's amazing.
You know, we do this 52 * a yearevery Monday and during track

(02:02:09):
season when people say yes, it'salways, I'm just so humbled
because I'm like, dude, I know you're busy.
I know in the summer would be better or fall would be better.
And so just so grateful for that.
And just, you know, your experience is valuable.
You know, this is again, why we did this podcast was to learn
the different steps. I again, I just go back to this
like aimless. And I don't mean aimless

(02:02:30):
necessarily, but you know, just like all these different things.
But there was a North Star and I'm beginning to think that dad
put that North star there. I really do.
I, I just kind of think about his experience with you from day
one, if you will, and the support and, and I, I consider
the laissez faire the hands off of you going to college as
support. I don't, I don't consider

(02:02:52):
coddling supports. I I consider that support.
I just it's an amazing story about family and belief and and
not not giving up. Dude, you have plenty of
opportunities to give up that second trig class easily.
Like, look, man, this maybe college ain't for me.
I mean, I go do it more construction maybe.
That's a noble profession. So no, you know, no, no
judgement there. And you just kept at it.

(02:03:13):
You had the right people in yourtime at the right time and right
place that said the right thingsto you.
And I think that's just a great lesson for all of us to learn.
So I'm really thankful for you just being your, you know, most
open and authentic self with us today and really, really
grateful for you. Yeah, thank you for having me
on. Absolutely, guys, thank you
again for being here. Join us.
You know, every Monday we do thelong form here with amazing

(02:03:35):
coaches from around the country that are just doing amazing
things. And I really, I want you to take
heart. You know, it's it's one thing
about the journey of like the ifyou want XS and OS Jim's journey
of like, OK, you know, went to school here, went to grad work
here, went to Emory, went back there.
Then it goes to Queen. Like there's one thing.
But the real lesson, I think is the people.

(02:03:55):
I'm, it's, again, it's hard for me to say this, but I'm, I'm
getting more and more like this being a motto of like the XS and
OS are the easy part. What do you do outside of that?
And I think if you look at go back, you know, in our library
here, 300 plus coaches, I think if you look at the ones who are
the most successful, however youwant to define that, they're the
ones who they're working with people.
They're not coaching sprints or coaching throws.

(02:04:17):
They're, they're working with people and young people.
And that's extremely, extremely valuable.
So thanks again for being here today.
Join us next Monday. We'll have another great coach
here and join us every day on Tuesday through Sunday for 10 to
30 minute XS and OS type Ted talks of track and field, if you
will, by coaches for coaches, The Guild 1918 project that we
just started that you guys are making very successful.
I appreciate you guys listening to that and sharing with your

(02:04:38):
your network and helping others receive the value of what these
coaches are bringing to the table.
So thanks again. We'll see you next week.
See you guys. If it goes to appreciate the
coach the ones that pour people most every season needs a voice
of reason speaking the growth you got to prep before you carry
the load ice coffee to the soul.For those of us who stay on the

(02:05:01):
go proper handoff to stay in thezone which you packing for the
road. There's more than one way to the
go. Taking those SPN you're told it
ain't practice If your purpose Saint Clair it can't happen
until you listen with both is you can't mentor without a
mentor of years of experience. You can reinvent those years
Every plan's got to stand and deliver to and the price
sacrifice can you give up you. It's a choice and the fight not

(02:05:24):
a win or lose. It's not a ploy boy device.
Y'all can make more moves. It's not about how to it's all
about why you don't know till you know who you are inside
6,000,000 waste of time, she's none.
So we y'all cross finish line. The work ain't done so we learn
from the experts but y'all got to put in the network.
Guilt Athletics is the network. It's all about connections put
together for the profession to where every track coach could be

(02:05:46):
blessing.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#314: Jim Vahrenkamp-University of North Dakota

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Dateline NBC

All Episodes

#314: Jim Vahrenkamp-University of North Dakota

Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club