Today we chat with Lick-Wilmerding HS coach, Jeffrey Gardiner (Jeff is on the right in the picture to the left speaking with University HS coach Jim Tracy). Last season, the LW girls XC team made school history by earning their first podium place at the CA state cross country meet with a 3rd place finish. Jeff has his teams really rolling this season as they swept all four races (2 JV and 2 Varsity) this past Friday at the BCL West Championship meet at Golden Gate Park. The Varsity girls scored 22 points to win the league championship over 4-time defending state champions University HS. His boys won the league championship over an impressive Marin Academy team that includes defending individual state champion, Trevor Reinhart. As we head towards the NCS meet on Saturday, November 23rd, Jeff's girls are ranked 2nd in state and the boys 5th in state in the latest state rankings by www.dyestatcal.com.
1. Tell us a little about your own experiences playing sports. Highlights? Who were your most influential coaches and what did you learn from them?
Through 8th grade I played everything (basketball, baseball, football, a little hockey), and I considered myself a baseball player (Little League All Star for last 3 years before I stopped playing). Near the end of 8th grade while walking home from school, I stopped to watch a track meet at our high school. I watched a tremendous race between the two best runners in our school, who were also the best in our section. I was in awe of these guys. The race was so exciting, I decided that I wanted to become a runner.
Two years later I won the New York State Junior Olympics 880 (that will date me) at the Intermediate age group level. Two years after that I took 3rd at the senior level. I set a school record in the 880 and won our section, but at that time our section didn’t compete in the State Championship, so that capped my season. I ran for a year at the University of Connecticut, but my interests had changed and I didn’t give of myself fully to the training and finally quit competing.
My high school coaches in cross country and track were major influences on me. The cross country coach instilled in me a sense of patience about developing as a distance runner and just a basic love for going out for long runs. He also was a very considerate listener. He would listen to us and was open to suggestions about workouts. At the time, I was completely immersed in reading about running, so I would make suggestions based on something I had read and he often incorporated it into our workouts. At the time I felt great that he listened to me but probably didn’t realize just how extraordinary he was to be so open. A couple of years ago at a sports banquet that was honoring our teams from those years, he gave a speech that reminded me of just how kind a man he was (is) and how he extended that to his runners. All of them, regardless of ability level. I hope that I learned to do that as well with my runners.
My track coach was like a second father. He often gave lectures to the team on values. He had recently gone to a theology seminar but decided his calling was working with high school students. The motto he said to us many times was “let each become all that he is capable of becoming.” Years later he would talk to me about books that he recommended, and I realized then that he had derived much of his approach from the psychologist Carl Rogers and his book On Becoming a Person. His message of personal growth as a process applied clearly to developing as a distance runner. Those ideas stuck with me and inform my coaching. Annually I still go to my home town in northern New York and talk to him.
Those two coaches gave me my fundamental values as a coach.
2. What do you do besides coaching?
I am a manager at VMware in their training department, and one semester a year I teach an evening English class at City College of San Francisco. I still write an occasional critical essay on the poetry of Charles Olson and host the American Literature Association panels on his work when the conference is held in San Francisco. Just had a brief piece published in a book on Black Mountain College--where Olson taught in the 50s. Olson's breath-based poetics probably relates somehow to my running and coaching but you'll have to ask Urban's coach, Bill Cirocco, who studied with Olson, about that connection.
3. When did you start coaching at Lick-Wilmerding?
I started coaching and helped found the track team in 1997 at the urging of my daughter, Lillian; I started coaching the cross country team in 2004, but stopped coaching XC and track a couple of years later when a series of deaths in my family took a toll and I couldn't give enough of myself to my runners to justify holding onto the coaching position. My daughter got me back into coaching again in 2009. After she graduated from college (she ran for UC San Diego and was captain of their XC team her senior year), she held a position at Lick in the Development Office. My former assistant coach, Andy Hammann, who took over after me, brought her on board as an assistant coach. When he left to go to Stanford in a Ph.D. program, my daughter convinced me to come back to coaching. She's since moved on and left me to the school.
4. Did you coach at another school before Lick-Wilmerding?
I coached a youth track club part-time. I also coached the Team Diabetes marathon program for a couple of years.
5. Tell us a little about Lick-Wilmerding for those of us out here that are not familiar with the school. How old is the school?
Lick’s history is a bit complicated because the school is actually a combination of 3 schools, but its origins start in 1895 as a Mechanical Arts school. In the 1910s an equivalent all-girls school started and the faculties were shared. Eventually they would merge with an industrial arts school that was started in the 30s, which included a drafting and architecture program. There is more to it than that, but that is a rough overview. The current school is highly academic but still offers shops in metal, wood, and glass construction and continues with an architecture program that is superb. I see it as a descendant of the Bauhaus plus rigorous academic studies. The school is located on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco and the enrollment is roughly 450 students.
