Thank Heaven For....

One raw, wet afternoon last spring a high school mathematics teacher, Jim Strock, and myself met a straggly band of 50 boys and girls in a pasture adjacent to the Fairfield Area School. The school, which serves several rural townships, is itself adjacent to metropolitan Fairfield, Pa., a community of some 500 in the foothills of the central Appalachians. More or less in order of appearance, the pasture recently had been designated as the Fairfield track, the children were candidates for the institution's track team and Jim and I were track coaches. None of these phenomena had previously existed in Fairfield. Also, none of them bore much resemblance to the tracks, track teams and track coaches that are found elsewhere.

To begin with, the pasture had become a track in the same way that strips of colored paper became money in the Weimar Republic—by fiat. As pastures go, it was relatively level, but it had a distinct tilt toward the east. (Later we used this topographical eccentricity to advantage. When we wanted to build a kid's confidence we let him, or her, run a couple of 220s downhill. Cocky ones got the opposite treatment.) The day before our first practice session Jim and I—with a transit, tape, balls of string, stakes, two bags of lime and a lot of little boys—had attempted to mark off a 440-yard circular track in the pasture. After a few false arithmetical starts we got the calculations down pat, only to find out that the final curve hit a swamp that was created by the overflow from a small creek that flowed past the low easternmost corner of the pasture. After some indecision, we finally lined off only a 400-yard circle.

The candidates for the track team were in some ways as irregular as their track. They showed up in sneakers, sandals, galoshes and clodhoppers ( Fairfield being mostly an agricultural area). They wore overalls, school pants, hip huggers, skirts and a collection of sweat shirts that had things like "Batman" and "'Wildwood, N.J." emblazoned on the breast. It was determined by a show of hands that only three of our hopefuls had seen a track meet. One of the more experienced members of the squad, a transfer student, had actually participated in an intramural field day at his former school. His event had been the sack race. A portly girl allowed that she had come out to "play track" in hopes of losing 10 pounds before the junior prom. A prospective weight man said he could throw that "gadget" (he was speaking of an eight-pound shot) a lot farther if it were not so heavy.

Jim and I were not exactly unprepared for the greenness of our squad. To put it bluntly, there was no tradition or record of athletic excellence at Fairfield. For example, during the previous year the three varsity teams fielded by the school—soccer, basketball and baseball—had amassed what must be one of the worst interscholastic records in the nation. Among them they had won two contests while losing 38. At schedule-making time coaches from other schools fought to arrange meetings with the teams from Fairfield. Other Fairfield coaches viewed the track project with weary cynicism. "Everybody thinks that if you tell them loud enough to go out and win they will win," said the dispirited basketball coach. "You guys will find out soon enough."

Which brings us to the track coaches. Fifteen years and 30 pounds ago Jim Strock had been a good sprinter, while a few years before that I had had a brief and undistinguished career as a miler. Jim knew about starting blocks, that you pass a relay baton with your left hand and similar matters. I remembered something about not passing on a curve and a phenomenon called the oxygen debt. Both of us, after a few days of secret practice, were able to hit the right button on a stopwatch eight out of 10 times. But, despite certain technical deficiencies, we had a lot of enthusiasm, for ever since our own pale, fleeting days of competitive glory we had remained track buffs. There is no worse sort of sports addict.

It is perhaps illustrative of the nature of track enthusiasts to explain that, contrary to common sense, nobody made or even asked Jim and I to organize a track team in a swamp out of a group of boys and girls who didn't know a shot-put from a mushroom and who hadn't won an athletic contest within living memory. Quite the contrary, we had begged the school board for permission to do so, badgered the superintendent of the school for sawdust and equipment, stolen a sprinter and a half-miler from the baseball coach and shelled out some money and a lot of time to get things going. Despite all of this it has been many a spring since I (and I am sure the same holds true for Jim) have had so much fun or been so satisfied with how I spent my hours.

There were a variety of happenings that made it a good spring. There was a thin, raggedy little boy who comes from what is now stylishly called "an Appalachian poverty pocket." He could run fast but not very far—boiled potatoes and coffee not being the best training meal. When he heard his name read out as one of those going to the first boys' meet he said solemnly, "That's the first time I ever been on a good list." There was the discovery of a handsome 14-year-old who looks and talks like an all-American Eagle Scout but who turned out to be much better than that. He just may be another Jim Ryun in half a dozen years. There was a tough, Huck Finn sort of kid—giving away several years and a lot of size—coming to the tape in a 440 with a six-inch lead. Trying to make a last, ultimate effort, he fell in the cinders but crawled across the line on bloody knees to save third place. Ten minutes later, his face and legs patched with Band-Aids, he was running and winning in a relay.

But particularly there were a dozen or so little girls. Little girls when they get enthused, involved and turned on are, I now think, absolutely beautiful. The word is used in the hippie, not Lolita, way. For all of us down in this corner of Appalachia they were the true flowers of spring.

Early in April I paid a visit to a fellow named Don Sterner, the track coach at Biglerville. a community some 20 miles into the Blue Ridge from Fairfield. Don was a real track coach, with a real cinder track and a real track team—boys who ran 49-second quarter miles and threw the shot 53 feet. More important for my purposes, Don was, in our part of the world, the pioneer, virtually the only promoter of girls' track, and when he died last September of cancer, at age 37, we lost a good friend.

Don, when I saw him in April, was more than obliging, because he was an obliging man by nature and because, as I have learned, people involved in girls' track are like castaways on a desert island. Everybody is anxious to help everybody else. Though our land of the free effortlessly produces teeny boppers, girls who officially run for the sport of it are hard to come by. Anybody in this, so to speak, game always welcomes a newcomer who wants in for no other reason than that it will increase the competitive field.