How laid back is Yared Nuguse? Before his 1500 final at the 2019 NCAA outdoor champs, his coaches found him asleep in the backseat of the rental car an hour before the race. He went out and won the title.
Had a chance to profile Yared for @ndmagazine☘️
https://t.co/bMZ4WrGFUH
‘Hug the people you love, get the pet you want, go on that holiday you dream about. Seize all your days.’
Ciara Mageean was the very best of us, and the world is a lesser place now.
Thinking of those closest to her 🤍
"I keep seeing beautiful things and I can't help but wonder, will I have an opportunity to see them again?"
Ciara Mageean speaking to RTÉ earlier this year.
Such strength & bravery. #RIP
Frank Gagliano was a college quarterback.
After his career, he was hired to start a football team at a high school. While waiting, he coached track. They never started the football team.
Gags went on to become one of the greatest American distance coaches in history: 15 Olympians, 140 All-Americans, 43 sub-4 milers.
He passed away this week.
We often think that you've got to have done it or experienced it to coach it. Gags was never a runner. He just wanted to coach, the true essence of the word, helping people out.
“I don’t have golf clubs. I have a stopwatch." And like the best 'old school' coaches, he'd help whoever showed up.
I was a former high school phenom, struggling in college. Then I got a call from an unknown number.
"Steve. We've never met. It's Gags with the Farm Team. I just wanted you to know that you're great. Talent doesn't go away. Stick with it. You've got people who believe in you. If I can ever help, let me know."
He called a struggling 19-year-old out of nowhere, while running the best professional team in the country.
In an era where training got really complicated, Gags kept it simple. His philosophy was strength + speed, consistently for a long freaking time.
“Everyone has to be patient in development. Everyone has to enjoy the sport, have a lot of fun, and work really hard.”
More than the workouts, his real secret was the one every great coach shares. Relationships. His son Ralph put it best:
“As a track coach, you have very large teams, many participants, and he carried over the years very special relationships — not only with the great ones, but even with the ordinary athlete.”
He was still coaching into his late 80s.
“As long as my mind is in the sport for workouts, so I don’t deprive the men and women that I’m coaching, I’ll keep coaching.”
And this summer, at 89, when they named a national championship race after him, “I’m not a cocky man. I’m the guy that just coaches, and the athletes mean everything to me, everything.”
He was a coach’s coach. Someone who lost his first meet 112 to 15, and then went on to become an all-time great...despite never having run.
Because the point was to help people....even those he didn't coach.
RIP Gags.
Frank “Gags” Gagliano, the Hall of Fame coach who guided more than a dozen Olympians across six decades, has died. He was 89.
Gagliano coached at nearly every level of the sport. As an assistant at Manhattan College, he helped the Jaspers win the 1973 NCAA indoor team title. He spent 18 years leading Georgetown, where his teams won 23 Big East championships and produced 140 All-Americans, and he was twice named national coach of the year.
At an age when most coaches retire, he became one of the country’s top professional coaches. He led the Reebok Enclave, the Nike Farm Team, Oregon Track Club Elite and, from 2010, the New Jersey-New York Track Club. His Olympians included John Trautmann, Steve Holman, Nicole Teter, Jonathon Riley, Nick Symmonds, Christian Smith, Julie Culley and Donn Cabral. At the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials, Symmonds and Smith were part of the famous “Oregon Sweep” of the men’s 800m at Hayward Field.
A Bronx native, Gagliano was a quarterback at the University of Richmond, not a runner. He began coaching track in 1960 at Roselle Catholic High School in New Jersey, which had hired him with the promise of starting a football team that never came. In 1965, Roselle Catholic became the first high school to win both the DMR and 2-mile relay at the Penn Relays.
“I didn’t know anything about track,” he said in a 2014 interview. “But I accepted the offer because I really wanted to coach.”
Gags became one of the most influential coaches in American distance running. His philosophy was simple: strength plus speed. And when you hear “Hit it!” on the final turn, change gears.
Gagliano was inducted into the USTFCCCA Hall of Fame in 2003. This July, USA Track and Field named the men’s 800m at its national championships in his honor.
Went to the Rose City Champs XC meet on Friday. Saw some great racing, but the coolest thing I saw was three guys from a local public HS standing alongside the course with a violin, clarinet and snare drum playing "The Final Countdown" as the pack ran past.
HS kids are awesome.
Went to the Rose City Champs XC meet on Friday. Saw some great racing, but the coolest thing I saw was three guys from a local public HS standing alongside the course with a violin, clarinet and snare drum playing "The Final Countdown" as the pack ran past.
HS kids are awesome.
“I think I can win a medal and the quickest way to get me there is come here and put it all on the line in Oregon.”
Spoke to @nickgriggs4321 about his move to the University of Oregon, where he'll have three years of NCAA eligibility.
https://t.co/QxpbHLFJ0x