“Clyde Hart holds secrets to success”
http://www.baylor.edu/Lariat/news.php?action=story&story=42567
Oct. 20, 2006
By BRITTANY MCGUIRE
Sports writer
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Clyde Hart said. The “secret” has led the former Baylor head track and field coach to three Olympic gold medalists, a dual-world record holder, 29 NCAA champions and 475 All-Americans. If that’s not enough of a laundry list, Hart was named the 2004 USA Track and Field’s Nike Coach of the Year, inducted to the Baylor Wall of Honor and is the longest-tenured Baylor coach in school history, coaching the Bears for 42 seasons before retiring in June 2005.
Before divulging the secret, Hart, like any great storyteller, started at the beginning.
Hart ran the 100 and 200-meter dash and sprint relays for Baylor from 1952 to 1956, but then returned to his homestate of Arkansas to coach at Little Rock Central High School.
During his six years at the school, Hart found success pretty quickly, winning 50 straight track meets. His success is what drove him to his next career move.
“When you’re a high school coach, you have aspirations to go to the next level. Of course, everybody wants to go back home,” he said. “Even if you have a choice to go somewhere more prestigious, you still lean toward your alma mater.”
Hart took over the Baylor program from his college coach and mentor, Jack Patterson, in 1964.
“It was kind of a dream for me,” Hart said.
He said his first season was a bit of a struggle, but that his teams first found real success a year later.
The sprint medley relay set a national collegiate record at the Drake Relays, and then came back with the same four runners to win the 4x400-meter relay.
“We did OK. We had a little breakthrough,” Hart said. “But I wasn’t satisfied that we were where we should be.”
Although the relay team always finished in the top four at the NCAA championships, it didn’t win its first national title until 1985, nearly 20 years later. The men’s track team finished third overall, its highest finish ever.
Since 1985, the men’s 4X400 relay has gone on to win 15 more titles.
“It took us that long to win the first, but in the next 20 years we’ve pretty well dominated the NCAA in that event,” Hart said.
“By 1990, we had a good reputation going. Somehow Track and Field News dubbed us one day as ‘Quarter-Miler U’ and it’s just stuck.”
“Quarter-Miler U” started attracting some quality 200/400-meter runners in the mid 1980s. Hart’s athletes reads like a who’s-who of track and field.
It includes Raymond Pierre, who became Baylor’s first-ever individual NCAA outdoor champion in 1989, Bayano Kamani, Baylor’s only two-time NCAA outdoor champion with two 400-meter hurdle titles, Jeremy Wariner and Darold Williamson, 2004 Olympic gold medalists at Athens, and of course five-time Olympic champion and dual-world record holder Michael Johnson.
“Out of the top 100 400-meter times ever run by anyone, 44 have come through our program,” Hart said.
“Thats pretty remarkable. The best times in history have come through our program.”
[b]So what is Hart’s secret? It’s two simple percentages that lead up to world-record performances.
Hart said he trains his sprinters like milers and half-milers. When track afficionados and know-it-alls believed that a 400-meter runner needed 90 percent anaerobic speed and only 10 percent aerobic strength, Hart was training his athletes at a 60/40 anaerobic to aerobic.
“Time has shown me that the aerobic benefits far outweigh the anaerobic benefits,” he said. “You put money in the bank when you train. To me, anaerobic is withdrawing money from the bank and aerobic is putting it back in.”
“If you go out and do a lot of anaerobic running, you might as well be racing.” [/b]
Hart used Johnson’s performances at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta as an example. After the Olympic Committee changed the schedule, Johnson said in print that he’d not only win both the 200 and 400 but that “he’d do something special.” After winning the 400 in a world-record time of 43.18 seconds (PJ : hum have a look to history books!) , Hart just wanted Johnson to go for the win for the 200-meter dash. Johnson, however, said he wanted to do something extraordinary. And he did.
After eight straight days of racing, Johnson won his second gold medal of the games in the 200, breaking the world-record in a time of 19.32, regarded by many as one of the most impressive track and field records, a record that still stands today.
“That was pretty special, because for the first time in my coaching career, nobody had to tell me ‘good job,’” Hart said. “I had a self-satisfaction that I’d never had before.”
Hart handed the coaching reins over to Todd Harbour, who took on the job along with the head cross country position.
The entire Baylor track and field coaching staff was coached under Hart, preserving the Baylor family. Harbour said he came to Baylor because of Coach Hart.
“He was very intense, but because of who Coach Hart was, I came to Baylor,” Harbour said after first meeting Hart. “He’s just one of those people driven to be the best and that’s what he pushes his athletes to do.”
Although he pushes his runners hard, assistant Coach Stacey Smith said he’s a “Papa Bear” to the athletes.
“He tries to come off as hard, but inside he’s just a big softy,” she said.
Whatever Hart is, a good coach is certainly one of them. He’s respected by many as one of the all-time greatest track and field coaches.
He now works as the director of track and field for Baylor, helping out with recruiting and fundraising. Although retired, Hart still plays a large part in coaching the quarter-milers.
“Virtually everything that can be done in the 400, we have done it at one time or another,” Hart said. “But you can’t just live on that. That’s the great thing about track and field: there’s another year that rolls around and, you get to re-prove yourself.”
; But the best female I ever worked with, who reached an O final, used to flog the 20min runs and go for course PBs every damn time she went out. On top of that, she ran in the morning (often before a sprint session later that morning) and she ran on concrete footpaths in her neighbourhood. Multiplicity of coaching sins there! :eek:
so basically you went from being an up and coming talent to flagging it due to the results there?