BOOK EXCERPT

GOD ON THE STARTING LINE

The Triumph of a Catholic School Running Team and Its Jewish Coach

By Marc Bloom

My boys arrive at the track, tan and freckled and plump, piling out of parents' cars with new running shoes and tentative smiles for the first day of summer cross-country practice. "Hi, coach," they say, one after another. "Howyadoin', coach." I like the sound of that. I'm not big on formality or titles, but I'm tickled to hear teenage boys call me coach. I want them to feel they can rely on me. I want to come through for them. I want to come through for myself.

The late June winds, cooling off in the evening hour, tip infield cones I've placed at the start and finish line. As the boys assemble, all four of them, I hurry to set the cones right. I like everything neat and in place. Symmetry and order give me a sense of control. My brown accordian folder, thick with files for meet schedules, results, rosters, injuries, media and course maps, sits regally on a bare, gray grandstand bench. I carry a spiral notebook where I record the day's training and observations like how an athlete pushes the pace or capitulates to fatigue.

"What's the workout today, coach?" says Justin Gallagher, hoping to coast.

"Got something tough today, coach?" says Mike Solebello, wary but looking to be tested.

I wave off the parents who give up their sons to me for half a year, at an age when the boys are vulnerable and exposed. They want to be cool and accepted and can veer anywhere from obedient honor student to untamed rascal, from goal-setting athlete to bullied nerd who winds up--perish the thought--being a gun-toting headline on the evening news. As the father of two daughters, I have leaped into scary, uncharted male waters. Boys, to be honest, never held much appeal for me. Their scowls and macho acts and complex, hidden behaviors don't seem worth the effort.

But when I went looking for a coaching position four years ago, this is what I got: St. Rose High School in Belmar, New Jersey, a half-hour drive from home, three blocks from the beach on the Jersey Shore. I'd sent my resume, brimming with three decades of writing about running, to every high school in Monmouth County. The one call I got came from the athletic director at St. Rose, a 75-year-old coed Catholic school with 637 students. The Running Roses needed a boys' cross-country coach.

It was quite a letdown. The year before, I'd come this close to getting the girls' cross-country position at a nearby school that was bursting with excellent, eager runners. I knew the kids, met the parents at a coffee-klatch as though I were running for local office and had a sports connection in the district go to bat for me with the superintendent's office. Still, the bureaucracy prevailed. Even though my life's work revolved around young runners, a teacher in the school was chosen. I guess that made sense. I had never coached a team before.

After my daughters left for college, I wanted to coach girls. I wanted to be around girls' sweetness and smiles, their amiability. I wanted to embrace their needs and help them excel. I felt a gnawing, desperate void when my daughters, Allison and Jamie, departed. Leaving my younger daughter Jamie in Washington to get settled at school, I experienced a thundering, onrushing dread, like nothing I'd ever felt before. It caused me to burst out in a heaving, uncontrollable wail, a tidal wave of emotion that uncovered succeeding waves of emotion and made me look hard at how I dealt with intimacy and separation. It took a therapist to help me sort out my feelings and feel safe.

Now I'm okay but still lapse into vague fears having something to do with lost innocence and the need--still--to nurture young people and feel needed. I always feel better when I'm around my boys, who do need me and show me that they do, like when Ryan Lavender, a junior, tells me this evening at the track that he ran five miles this morning even though we're training hard tonight.

Ryan's ambition is commendable but it can get the best of him. His talent is of championship caliber but he squanders it. He must learn to pace himself. Distance running is a game of patience: a long, steady buildup, in which you absorb more and more stress, is the way to train. Ryan, who starred two years ago as a freshman but has sagged since, is my pet project. He shakes his head yes when I instruct him to start a race under control, but then he darts to the front--right in the lead, daringly, like he can run away from the field at will. But he can't, yet. I want to berate him after his recklessness leads to defeat, but instead I grab him around the shoulders, hug the daylights out of him and see if through my physical touch something of my lesson will rub off.

Ryan's a tough case alright. I still find out from his mother, Karen, that Ryan did some knucklehead guy-thing, like run a half-marathon just for the hell of it--despite my plea not to--and that's the reason his Achilles tendon hurts. Karen will whisper this fact to me in exasperation, like, you know stubborn Ryan, he does his own thing, there's nothing we can do about it. Karen and her husband, Dennis, have gone through a divorce, which illuminates the anger I detect in Ryan and makes me want to hug him even more. After practice, I will sit with him and talk. But he says little. He's a boy.

At least Ryan and the others follow the workouts I give them. In my first year of coaching, I was like a new teacher trying to holler the class into submission. St. Rose produces excellent teams but the cross-country coaching job had been a revolving door, with faculty members doing little more than babysitting the squad for years. In 1997, I inherited a mostly-senior group of wise guys who'd received no direction and spent most of practice imitating the professional wrestlers they'd seen on television. When I took over, they would quit and walk in the middle of runs and slack off at every opportunity. On even the hottest days, it was impossible to get anyone to bring a water bottle to practice. That would have signified compliance with authority. Who wants to be the first to crack and give in?

The one true runner I had thought he was too good for the team and practiced on his own. At a school meeting, his mother cornered me to complain that I was not training her son hard enough. I told her I be delighted to run the boy's legs off, if only he would show up.

The boy did appear at practice the day the seniors decided to fulfill an initiation rite. This was not a day to be missed. On the Jersey Shore boardwalk where we train after school, and out of my view, the older kids picked up a nerdy freshman, rushed down the beach and tossed the boy into the ocean. I was incensed--after all, the boy could have drowned--but let the incident pass without punishment. Reluctant to reveal my lack of authority, I didn't want to make an issue out of the episode with school administrators. The soaking wet freshman shrugged it off but later quit the team. So I sucked it up, plowing on with boys I felt I could coach and even like if I'd had them to mold when they entered the school. But now they were too world-weary to follow any rules from a neophyte like me.

One endearing boy that first season was Rory, who had a stride so clean I called him "The Ethiopian," after the great runners from that country. Rory wasn't fast but the nickname seemed to motivate him and he would show up for practice waiting for me to say it: Here comes the Ethiopian. I learned that little things like that, which seem inconsequential, can count for a lot in reaching teenage boys. Rory could tell that I cared about him in a personal way, and he knew that I meant the moniker as a compliment. Even that small taste of comaraderie whet my appetite for more.

With my miniscule team this season, I must be careful to treat everyone the same. Kids despise favoritism and let you know it. If I crown one boy with a nickname, everyone has to get one. Unless there's a clearly distinguishable character, someone who sets himself apart, who all the boys accept as a levitating personality. I now have such a candidate. His name is John Lennon. And I call him Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane but mostly Sgt. Pepper.

John loves the attention and eats it up. When one boy chirps up with an "Eleanor who?" John counters with, "The Beatles, you expletive ." I pull John aside, not for the first time, and tell him I'm not going to tolerate language like that so watch your mouth. I'm stunned and embarrassed by the boys' coarse words expressed out in the open. I'm careful to watch my words in their presence but I don't want to make an issue out of every curse that I hear. I don't want cross-country to seem like school.

At St. Rose, where rigidity rules--some might call it "compassionate conservatism"-- the boys get their marching orders daily. A crooked tie can result in after-school detention (and offers an excellent excuse to be late for practice). Lennon, a senior who is running reluctantly to get in shape for the baseball and basketball teams, leads the league in detention. He takes it in stride, as a badge of honor, anything to try and impress girls. Girls seem to like him, too; John's got a quick wit, and a forward, but non-threatening come-on.

I consider teaching, coaching, broadly, as in the rabbinical sense of imparting a spiritual grounding, a sure and simple path to unleash the power all kids have to succeed. I think I could have been a rabbi. I could have been one of those "running rabbis" who finds the moving, sweaty body a worthy partner with the pulpit. As I learn more about faith, pounding my chest in prayer with God's devotion, I search for ways to make the St. Rose squad see the purifying link between hard work and life's blessings.