 | Galloway, who has coached 16 team state champions, will soon retire. Diana Eliazov/SI |
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By Melissa Segura
Milton Hershey School
Hershey, Pa.
Aaron Dabney felt the stares. The girls on his school's state champion hurdling team?girls!?were standing around, watching, waiting for the sophomore to attempt the first hurdle of his life. "Go over it," coach Leroy Galloway told Dabney. "I know you're going to fall." The audience, recruited to witness Dabney's impending embarrassment, laughed when Dabney fell awkwardly over the hurdle. Then Galloway extended his hand to help Dabney up and said, "Once you fall?and everybody falls?you can learn. Now, let's learn to hurdle."
For 25 years Galloway has coached scores of track athletes over literal and figurative hurdles at the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pa. The boarding school, funded by the chocolatier's estate, provides free education, room and clothing to some 1,500 children who are orphaned, low-income or facing unstable home lives. (Dabney, for example, now a junior and a district title contender in the 300-meter hurdles, came to Hershey after his grandmother struggled to raise him in a drug-plagued Chicago neighborhood.)
The most constant male authority figure for many of his athletes, Galloway, 54, will end one of the most successful high school coaching tenures in Pennsylvania when he retires after the May 25 state meet. He already has 14 girls' and two boys' state team track championships, and his girls' team could contend at the state meet again this year.
A former hurdler who graduated from Shippensburg (Pa.) University, Galloway is praised by athletes for coaching without pressuring. At meets he remains relatively quiet, trusting that his athletes have absorbed his instruction. "I try to teach them to think on their own," he says. Galloway is stepping down, he says, because he doesn't "want to get stale." He will continue teaching English at Hershey, and he aspires to write a book on coaching. What might that book say? Senior Anna-Christine Scull, who will be a favorite in the 800 meters at states, sums up Galloway's lessons: "He's taught me that you get exactly what you work for."
