Fond Memory #2 – Blackboard

It’s not much, but it meant a lot to me at the time. I guess the very fact that I still remember it indicates it still does mean something to me.


The high school sports teams had a locker room dedicated for their use in the deepest bowels of the gymnasium. As each season ended one team would vacate their lockers and the next team would take their places. Many of the guys were year-round jocks and kept the same locker throughout the year.

As you entered the athletes locker room at the bottom of the stairs there was a small office for coaches on one side of the hallway, and a blackboard on the other side of the hallway. Every athlete had to pass that blackboard four times each afternoon. Once on the way in to change clothes into practice gear, a second time on the way to practice, a third time coming back to the locker room to change back into street clothes, and a fourth time on their way home for the evening.

Coach Wilkinson was the head track coach, but spent all of his time working with the sprinters. Coach Rosenberg worked with the field events guys, and Coach Drury held the stopwatch for the distance runners. Wilkinson wrote the workouts for the distance guys to do each afternoon, and Coach Drury timed us during our repeats and read out split times. The specification of the workouts was the only real coaching going on with the distance runners.

Coach Wilkinson wrote the distance workouts on the blackboard each afternoon during track season. We’d come down the stairs to the locker room and there would be our workout for the day on the blackboard. We’d look it over on our way into locker room, ponder it and mentally steel ourselves for the effort while changing clothes, then look at it again on the way out to the track to be sure we had it right.

Wilkinson didn’t put the sprinters workout on the chalkboard. He was working directly with them and I expect he tailored the workout to how they were doing that afternoon. The same thing was true with Rosenberg’s field events. He worked directly with the guys. Nothing was predetermined. He simply critiqued each throw and jump and offered suggestions for improvement.

There came a time when the other distance guys just could not do the same workouts that I could. I’d been running all year, except for my final season of wrestling, and the rest of the distance guys had not kept in shape during the off-season. It made no sense for me to do their workouts, as they were too slow and did not have enough distance in them, and it made no sense for them to attempt my workouts because the workouts were too fast and too long for my colleagues.

When I came down the stairs each afternoon I would find my name at the top of the chalkboard and my workout listed underneath. Underneath that Wilkinson listed “Distance” and their workout separately. Everyone could see the differences between my workout and the rest of the distance guys. I am embarrassed to admit it, but I enjoyed the fact that I had qualified for my own harder and longer workout, and every athlete in a spring sport was walking by that blackboard four times a day to see it. It was a form of recognition that I don’t recall anyone ever speaking of, but I sure got a kick out of it. A shameless glory hound – that’s me.

A blackboard in the basement of the gymnasium with my name on it –

It was a small thing, but it meant a lot to me.

February 27, 2011