A Dude Named Rainbolt - part deux (reposted from 3/14/2007)

Last week I reposted a blog from 2006 (from Trackshark.com) when I had recently arrived to Wichita to take the job as the sprint coach about Coach Rainbolt.  This is the follow up I wrote in March of 2007.  Anyone who has worked with Bolt can probably relate to a lifetime of memories in whatever time you had working with him.  Here are just a few ...

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March 14, 2007 (Trackshark.com)

If I would have to describe Bolt’s management style, I would probably refer to it as “organized chaos”.  If you were to follow Bolt and our staff around for a day you would probably wonder how the Shockers maintain their level of success.  Bolt is a master of flying by the seat of his pants.

An example of this is our staff meetings.  I know Wendel McRaven, Brad Hunt, and Jenni Ashcroft are probably giggling right now thinking about some of those historic Rainbolt staff meetings.  Generally we all gather in his office, many times after practice in the early evening.  Bolt likes to keep the lights off except for one near his desk.  He feels this sets an unthreatening ambiance for a positive staff meeting.  Bolt likes good karma with his staff. :)

Most of the time we will meet for an hour or two and usually we get about 15 minutes of actual work done.  Here is an example of a conversation that might happen in one of our staff meetings:

Wise:  Ok, when are we leaving for Tulsa?

Burns:  Well, first event on Saturday morning is at 9:30 so we need to send some throwers down Friday night.

Hetzendorf:  Yeah, let’s take everyone competing before noon down Friday in a van and I’ll drive.

Yost: Ok how many hotel rooms do we need?

Rainbolt:  Hey, the last time we stayed in Tulsa, I went for a run around the town and you wouldn’t believe what I saw.  There was this homeless guy who was wearing a red robe with a Holiday Inn logo on it.  So I go back to the hotel manager and tell him about it and where they can go get their robe and they look at me like I’m out of my mind.  What the heck?

Wise, Burns, Hetzendorf, and Yost realize the meeting has been temporarily derailed from the tracks.

Over at practice, Bolt can appear to be what he would call “scatterbrained” at times, but usually all of the athletes get in the work they need to get done without too many trials and tribulations.  Bolt generally lightens the mood at practice with some kind of comment out of right field.  This is no joke, today we were setting up some hurdles and as some athletes are jogging by on their warmup and Coach Rainbolt asks them “Do any of you have a sandwich I could eat?”

While it may appear that Bolt’s style would be ineffective, nothing could be further from the truth.  Just sit in a meeting with him and a recruit and you will see one the smoothest and most skillful recruiting minds in the country.  I have seen kids almost jumping out of their chairs thinking about how fast they could run while getting coached by Rainbolt.  He makes people believe they can do things they never thought possible.  I know because I was one of them.

In many jobs, coming to the office in the morning is only the beginning of a non-eventful day with people who are sometimes not very interesting.  In my job, I go to work in the morning knowing full well I will be laughing and smiling most of the day because of the leadership style of Steve Rainbolt.  It’s why I drove out toWichita this past July without even visiting when he offered me a job and hopefully it’s why I’ll be working with “The Dude” for a long time to come.

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It's remarkable how the more things change, the more they stay the same!

A Dude Named Rainbolt - Part 1 (reposted from Trackshark.com 10/26/2006)

I don't have a lot of interesting stuff to update you all on so I thought I'd do something different today.  If you want updated on WSU T&F at the Olympic Trials or NCAA Meets just go to GoShockers.com and you can read some terrific recaps.  I don't feel the need to regurgitate them on this blog.

Through the magic of the Internet, you can go back and look at old websites through the Internet Archive website.  It's a fascinating look back (especially if you used to build websites).  My good friend and former teammate Tom Borish had one of the best websites ever - Trackshark.com - back in the day and I wrote a semi-regular blog around 10 years ago.

I had just moved to Wichita about 4 months prior to this blog entry but, obviously, I knew Bolt pretty well by then.

Here is one of the more popular blog entries from 2006 titled "A Dude Named Rainbolt - part 1" ...

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Oct 26, 2006 (Trackshark.com)

This has been a much anticipated and frequently requested topic from my legions of followers out there.  Well, at least 3 people have said so anyways.

If you don’t really know who Steve Rainbolt is, then your life isn’t quite complete.  “Bolt”, as we affectionately refer to him, is about as unique of a person as you will ever meet, and also one heck of a college track and field coach.

Bolt went to Kansas University and did high jump and decathlon, qualified for the 1980 Olympic Trials and then became an assistant coach at Nebraska.  From there he eventually got his first head gig at Kent State and now has been the commander in chief at Wichita State for the past seven years.  Quite simply, he’s the dude.

Professionally, he is the kind of guy who has accomplished as much as is possible in the places he has been.  He has coached kids who ran on Olympic Teams, won NCAA titles, etc.  But he is most known for the affect he has on young people.

Besides having a passion for golf, he is an avid juggler, ping pong player, and outright entertainer.  He sings an unbelievable rendition of The Auctioneer Song that brings the house down on karaoke night.  There also isn’t a person in Kansas he doesn’t know or doesn’t know him.

The athletes that get to work with him on a daily basis end up becoming lifelong friends and everyone you meet has some sort of story about him at a meet, on a trip, or at a practice session that defies normal human behavior.

Steve Rainbolt and the word normal don’t usually collide in the same sentence.

Once when eating an obviously tasty meal, he turned to us and said, “that was excruciatingly pleasurable.”

Last week at a high jump session he told one of our jumpers to “just try and squirt over the bar.”

If he is frustrated you might possibly hear a “Dadgummit!” and if things are going good you will probably hear a “Dag yo!”

I can remember running at the Penn Relays in front of 50,000 people in the 4x100-meter relay finals and hearing his voice yell “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” from across the track.

Anyone who ran for him is probably smiling and knows what I am talking about.

Then there are the stories … oh my gosh there are some stories.  To go into detail here would be impossible but let’s just say I have been involved in one where he was driving a van back from a trip and got tired, told me to drive the rest of the way and instead of pulling over we changed drivers at 70 mph on the freeway.  As soon as I got seated and my heart rate adjusted to normal I look over and he is fast asleep in less than 30 seconds.

Working with him on a daily basis, now that is a whole other story …

To be continued …

Back for some blogging (I hope)

I used to do a pretty regular blog back in the Trackshark days but really haven’t been able to in a long time.  With there being a little break in our upcoming schedule I thought I’d try to get back into the groove. If Joe Eby has time to do it then so do I!  I also don’t get to see my family very often and hopefully this can keep them up to date.

I’m not going to give a long, wordy recap the previous 38 years of my life.

In a nutshell …  Years 1-18:  Brown County, Ohio, sports geek, grew up on a farm, was known as the fast white guy.

Years 19-28:  Kent, Ohio, Golden Flash athlete and coach, love my alma mater, best decision I could’ve made, lucky to make lifelong memories and friends.

Years 29-31:  Back to Southern Ohio, coached HS track and was self-employed, finally learned what I wanted to do in life (coach track and field), great experience, humbling.

Years 32-present:  Wichita, Kansas, Shockers, reunited with my former coach Steve Rainbolt, unbelievably lucky to fall into a great job, living the dream in the Great Plains.

Other than that I generally make every decision in life so that it will result in happiness.  Money isn’t a great motivator in my life and neither is the passion to procreate.

Want to know anything else?  Just ask.  This is beginning to feel like an online dating profile.

I’m hoping to be pretty open and honest about what I do and what is going on here in Wichita.  The only thing I am limited by is there are NCAA rules that us coaches have to abide by.  For example I could never mention where I’m going on a recruiting trip.  I also love my job and don’t want to get fired!

Ok so on to more current topics!  We just had our annual end of semester track meet yesterday at the Heskett Center.  This year we called it the Shocker Prelude instead of the Intersquad Meet (one of those NCAA things).  Overall it went very well, I think as a team we looked as good as we could in an early season meet like this.  We had a great atmosphere created by our team and it inspired some good things to happen.  As is always the case with track and field, there were also some below average performances but as long as our athletes use this as a motivator to get better they will be fine.

We’re not sure how good our team will be this year but for the past several years we have always been in the hunt for the MVC Championship on both the men’s and women’s side.  Our men have more returning points and the women are young and talented.  Yesterday gave us an indicator about a few things but we really won’t know how we stack up for at least 6-8 weeks.  The MVC is a very good conference and just looking through some early results it appears this will be another tough year to win a title.  A new team, Loyola, has been added the league and they will give us fits in a lot of places (for me it’s the sprints and relays).

After the meet we had our annual track banquet to honor last year’s seniors and teams.  This is always one of my favorite weekends and last night was no different.  Over 300 people were in attendance and a great time was had by all.  Afterwards we were able to have a fun night with our alumni.  The track season has officially begun!

This week will be low key as our athletes finish up their finals and head home for the holidays.  They have over a month of training on their own so this time will make or break our indoor season.  What other sport would take a month off right before the season begins?  Everyone is in the same boat so we just need to do our job and be ready for practice when we get back in January.

If I’m able to do this weekly then the next time I post I will be on my way to Orlando for the annual USTFCCCA convention.  Since it’s 25 degrees in Wichita today I will definitely be looking forward to that, as well as seeing a bunch of coaching friends from across the country.

Since this past week has been hectic and exhausting, the rest of the weekend will be spent watching football and Shocker basketball.  And sleeping.