What he’s Done:
Coached cross country at York High School in Illinois for 50 years
Won 26 Illinois state cross country titles, and 20 cross county national championships, including the initial NTN in 2004
Coached track and field at York and won the team state championship there too
On life after college and the service: I got a job in Waterman, Illinois, which is a tiny town up by DeKalb, which is about 60 miles from Chicago. I was there for two years. It was one of those schools with 125 students, K-12. I was the head basketball (coach). I was the head track. I was the head cross country. I was the head baseball. I was the intramural director. I was the athletic director. I taught Algebra, Geometry, PE—everything. I read in the paper—this would be like June of ’56—the longtime athletic director and track and field coach at York High School in Elmhurst was retiring. I applied for that job and I was fortunate that the guy (in charge of hiring) was from Northwestern. There were about 75 guys who applied for the job and I was a Northwestern guy and so I got that job at York. And when I had gotten the job at Waterman, the principal was a Northwestern guy, so both of the jobs I’ve gotten in life I’ve gotten because I went to Northwestern.
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Longtime York, Illinois coach Joe Newton
Photo by Donna Dye
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It’s hard to believe that I’ve been coaching 50 years. This will be my 50th year in cross at York—my 54th year at York, but my 50th year as the cross country guy.
I was a devotee of Arthur Lydiard and over the years I had him to my home in the three or four times he came to America. I picked his brain. I was a devotee of Bowerman and I learned all of his stuff. Then Igloi, the guy from Hungary and I picked his brain. Then I put it all together and became close friends with Peter Coe and Sebastian Coe and I got all of my sprint training for distance running from them. Then the last guy was Dr. Joe Vigil who was the coach at Adams State for 30 years. He had Pat Porter who won eight straight AAU cross country championships. We became close friends, like brothers, and he taught me all of his VO2 Max training. He was the (Olympic) distance coach in ’88 in Seoul and I was the assistant manager and we roomed together and I picked his brain. From those people I combined all that stuff and got my own system and put it together and, dang, it works. Our program is pretty solid because it came from some pretty famous people.
I can remember when I first started. Nobody thought about marathon training, which Arthur Lydiard brought here with Peter Snell. We were just light years ahead of everybody else. They all thought that I was killing my guys and that they were overtraining and doing too much work. It was tough making it, but we survived and everyone looks at our program as not too bad.
On what Lydiard taught him: He taught me that you can do far more than you ever thought you could do. At that time, he was like 45 years old and he was training himself, experiment on himself, and running between 200-250 miles a week. Then he got Peter Snell on 100 miles a week. But he told me this, and I’ll never forget this, he told me that—he was sitting across the dinner table from me, I had him at my house for about a week—and he told me, “Joe, everybody thinks we’re running 100 miles a week, but I don’t tell them that in that 100 miles a week I don’t count the morning run, I don’t count the warm up and I don’t count the cool down. So everybody thinks that they can run 100 miles a week and beat us. Hell, Peter’s running 200 miles a week.” |
