Speaker says coaches have difficult job

Dr. Don Holst said he was a high school football coach at age 25 more than 50 years ago. He told of the interest in art and music possessed by a number of great athletes he interviewed and the trials and tribulations he has encounted while trying to keep alive the heritage of oak trees given to gold medalists at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. In addition, Holst displayed some of his art work and read several poems he has written.

During the introduction, Milton Wolf, director of the CSC library, called Holst “a renaissance jock” and “an unusually gifted person.”

Sprinkling his talk with humor, Holst said a coach has one of the most difficult jobs in society. “The president or CEO of General Electric probably doesn’t encounter all the problems a coach can have,” said Holst, who was the track and field coach at Chadron State 1965-73 and now lives a few miles south of Chadron.

Holst noted that a coach has to “get along” with the school administration, the state and national coaches associations, the athletic director, fellow coaches, the support staff, fans, alumni, news media, the athletes and their parents.

Because of this, Holst said coaching careers are often short-lived. Using information he obtained during a survey for his doctorate in physical education in the 1970s, he related that 76 percent of the coaches at Class C schools in Nebraska at that time were between the ages of 21 and 30 and only six percent were between 41 and 50.

Somewhat suprisingly, he said his study showed that the values posssessed by the older coaches were more in line with the values possessed by the senior athletes he also surveyed.

“The statement you sometimes hear, ‘Let’s get a young coach who understands these kids is probably not the best idea,” Holst said. “Coaches with some experience often work best with the kids.”

The speaker also pointed out coaches must frequently make quick decisions that impact the outcome of contests.

“There usually isn’t time to dilly-dally around. A coach has to make quick decisions. Whether he was right or wrong is often displayed immediately. It’s usually not a place to be soft-spoken. High emotions are common.”

Holst added that numerous coaches become principals and superintendents, positions that also require working with numerous individuals and groups and making many important, prompt decisions.

Holst told about several of the world class athletes he interviewed to learn why they excelled and what they had done after they finished competing. Profiles about nearly 20 Olympic athletes that Holst interviewed are included in the book “American Men of Olympic Track and Field” that he co-authored with Marcia Propp in 2005.

 

Holst noted Al Oerter, the four-time Olympic discus champion, took up abstract painting in his later years and Steve Owens, the Oklahoma running back who was a Heisman Trophy winner, collected art and encouraged his children to play a musical instrument.

Holst also said Olympic decathlon champion Al Toomey was a high school English teacher and Bob Richards, a two-time Olympics pole vault champion, told him a basic need of the American educational system is to develop well-rounded individuals.

In addition, Holst said following the death of Alan “The Horse” Ameche, the Heisman Trophy winner and athletic director from Wisconsin, he sent Ameche’s widow a tape recording of the interview he had with her husband. In return, she sent Holst a tape of Beethoven music that Ameche enjoyed listening to. He added that Ameche was on the board of directors of the Philadelphia Philhamonic Orchestra.

One of Holst’s numerous endeavors has been to keep what he calls “Olympic oak trees” alive. He became interested in the trees while attending a reunion of the United States’ 1936 Olympic team in Columbus, Ohio, in 1986. There, Holst learned that the 24 Americans who won gold medals at the Olympics, which were in Berlin, also were given a small oak tree that was native to northern Germany.

Holst’s immediate question was, “Where are these trees today?”

He found that five of them in the United States were still alive, but that only one of them produced acorns. That tree belonged to John Woodruff, the 800-meter champion, and was planted at Woodruff’s high school in Connellsville, Pa.

A while later, Holst traveled from Lebanon, Ill., the location of McKendree College where he was teaching, to Carlisle and collected about 15 acorns from the tree. But he planted them just a few inches below the surface and squirrels dug up most of them.

The next year, Holst contacted the secretary at the school and asked her to send him as many of the acorns as she could. He received about 50 and grew about 35 seedlings, most of which he gave away. Because of his efforts, Holst received the International Arbor Day Award from Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City in 1987.

One of the seedlings was planted on the Chadron State campus, but it apparently was the victim of an herbicide that was being used to control weeds in the adjacent lawn and did not survive.

Later, Holst learned the oak tree given to Jack Lovelock, the 1,500-meter champion from New Zealand, produces from 1,000 to 1,500 acorns annually. He contacted personnel at the Timaru Boys School where it was planted and had them send him some of the acorns. The first batch of about 600 was made sterile by the bromide that was sprayed on them by inspectors at the California port where they arrived. However, he received a second shipment of about a dozen. Out of them, he has a tree that is now about six feet tall growing in his yard south of Chadron.

Holst, who said at age 5 he began playing the drum in a band directed by his grandfather in Marysville, Kan., closed his presentations by reading several of his poems and showing some of his artwork, including a couple of paintings of author John Neihardt.

While attending the University of Missouri in the mid-1950s, Holst worked part-time at Neihardt’s Sky Rim Stable, a small farm the author, professor and Nebraska poet laureate owned about six miles north of Columbia.

Also among the items Holst displayed was a print of the 3x6-foot oil painting he did of 38 cowboys from six states who gathered in Deadwood, S.D., in 1905 to attend Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration. The original hangs in the Wild West Casino in Deadwood.