Know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this great sport is really much more than that for many of us. Practically a religion. A labor of love and a love of labor begets excellence. Can I have a “Hallelujah?” And the best pass it on. Coaches like Joe Volk. Amen.
A Collection of Reflections, Memories, Moments, and Life Lessons from Many Years of Coaching by Joe Volk.
Acknowledgements
I have always believed that if you surround yourself with good people, good things will happen. As I look back over these past forty+ years of coaching, I see how true that adage is.
My becoming a coach is singularly attributable to the fact that I was blessed with having several great coaches and mentors when I was a young athlete. A special debt of gratitude goes to Steve Levesque and Tony Veney, who in addition to being great coaches, were amazing human beings that contributed to the person I am today. I am also incredibly indebted to all my high school, club, and college teammates over the years.
I would also like to thank the over one-thousand athletes that I have had the opportunity to coach; the dozens of assistant coaches that I have coached alongside; the parents that have entrusted their children to my tutelage; the administrators and teaching colleagues who have supported my programs; and the hundreds of coaches who I compete against and share this passion with.
Preface
As I look back over my coaching career, I can distill many important moments that shaped me as a coach and as a person. As I’ve become older, one of the things I often ponder is how long will I continue to coach. While there are several things I have enjoyed about this passion, I still look forward to seeing other things that I hope to accomplish.
Writing this book has become one of those things. During my coaching and teaching career, I have always enjoyed the process of reflecting back at the season’s or year’s conclusion. Up until the creation of social media, most of these reflections were recorded in school newsletters, personal journals, or letters to my athletes. After my team’s first state title in the fall of 2007, I wrote my reflections from that experience and shared it as an email to friends and colleagues. Little did I know that this practice would become a habit that I would engage in after each season for the next fifteen years.
Those writings have sat on Facebook, on my computer, on a 5” floppy disc, a 3” diskette, or in a cloud (?) until this winter when I decided that I would compile those writings for a class I was teaching called “Writing For Publication,” in which I needed a sample piece of writing to demonstrate to my students how to navigate using Amazon’s KDP self-publishing platform. Back in 2018-2021, I had written and published my first book, Stable Boy; David Mack– A Story of Struggle, Success, Shadow, and Redemption, and I truly enjoyed the process of planning, researching, interviewing, writing, formatting, publishing, and promoting that book.
As a coach, I am big on “process.” I have learned that typically the process dictates the outcome. I have also come to enjoy watching the process unfold almost as much as I do watching the end result. Looking back and reflecting over the entirety of my coaching career, it becomes readily apparent that the limited “success” that we garnered at the state level in the first few years, laid the groundwork and established the process by which later teams would excel.
I have always enjoyed this aspect of sport. I am sure that it is the student and teacher in me, but I love the lessons that sport provides. I know that during my time as a high school, collegiate, club, and recreational runner, running has taught me so many life lessons: “Life is Hard, So Don’t Be Deterred When Things Become Difficult”; “Perseverance Is Often the Solution”; “Patience is a Virtue”; “Learn to Believe in the Process”; “Achieving One’s Goals Is Amazing”; “Dealing With Disappointments Is Vital”; “Remember to Have Fun” are just a few of the lessons I’ve learned and have hoped to instill in my athletes.
As coach and teacher, it has also become obvious that to succeed I must be a student too. In addition to reading everything I could along the way, I have also learned that just as I have enjoyed the lessons I learned from my coaches during my time as an athlete, I have also thoroughly enjoyed learning from several master coaches throughout my four decades. People like the venerable instructors at the USATF Level 1 and Level 2 programs such as Jay Johnson, Peter Thompson, Matt Lydum, Joel Pearson, Kathy Butler, Mike Smith, or my own high school coach, Tony Veney; and especially the sage Bruce Brown of Proactive Coaching have taught me so much, but more importantly they have lived an example of coaching as a community. The title of this book actually comes from something that I first heard from Bruce at a conference almost two decades ago. He spoke to the notion of the different types of teams we will coach; that along the way we will have “good teams,” or we might be fortunate to coach “great teams”, and in rare instances, we might even be able to coach “legacy teams.” This struck me on so many levels, and it serves as a point of reflection for me each season.
Building community within my teams, my assistant coaches, within my league or district, or throughout the state has been a result of the relationships formed by these groups. I feel blessed to have been able to do what I’ve done these past four decades. Circling back to an earlier comment, in pondering how long do I think I’ll be doing this, I think about what I would miss most were I to retire. For me, it is the relationships that sparks my passion in coaching, and I look at the example of Oregon veteran coaches like Glide High School’s Maynard Mai (RIP) or Lakeview’s Bobbi Stenninger, and see how their coaching legacy was such a powerful example of this sport we love. I sincerely hope that my example as a coach will be that when I’m done, I will be able to hand over my team, my role, and this sport in a better status.
Joe Volk recently commenced his 42nd year – his 37th at St. Mary’s – of coaching track and cross country.
During those 36 years at St. Mary’s, the Track & Field program has had:
- 284 Boys & Girls Individual League/District Champions
- 528 State Qualifiers
- 364 State Medalists
- 63 State Champions
- 6 Girls State Team Titles (‘09, ‘10, ‘11, ‘12, ‘16, ‘19)
- 1 Boys State Team title (‘19)
- 3 Girls State Team Runner-up (‘15, ‘21, ‘22)
- 2 Boys State Team Runner-up (‘16 & ‘21)
- 19 Girls and Boys State Team trophies (top 4)
Titles on the field of competition, titles on the book shelf.
Congratulations to Coach Volk and the St. Mary’s Crusaders.
