Mr. Crowley

On Saturday, Amherst Regional H.S. hosts the Amherst XC Invitational. At the meet, the "Crowley Cup" will be given to the school with the best combined finish for their girls and boys teams. The award recognizes the 30-plus-year career of Coach Randy Crowley, who guided the Hurricane track and cross-country teams to many Pioneer Valley league championships.

Randy Crowley was my track and XC coach at ARHS. He was also my gym teacher in the 7th and 8th grades. I never called him "Coach Crowley," it was always "Mr. Crowley." I remember very clearly our first meeting. It was the first day of winter gym class, and Mr. Crowley was my new gym teacher. He had us playing basketball. In those days, I was a big fan of "Pistol" Pete Maravich, and had the floppy hair and sagging socks to prove it. Handling the ball on my way down the court, I threw a behind-the-back pass. It was a good pass and it reached its target, but Mr. Crowley was not impressed. He took me out of the game and left me on the side of the court for the next ten minutes. "There is NOBODY in this class named Bob Cousy," he informed me.

Nothing significant changed in our relationship until the spring, when I went out for track and showed promise as a distance runner. None of the other young kids wanted to run the mile, but I loved it, and I even scored in meets against 9th graders. For Mr. Crowley and I, it was the beginning of a strange, but oddly close relationship. I say strange, because in six years. we never settled the question that had been raised by that first behind-the-back pass -- whether Mr. Crowley was going to find a way to reign in my relentless assault on authority and convention.

Mr. Crowley was not, and never had been, a runner. He had been a gymnast at Springfield College, and had become a gym teacher. He had a gruff demeanor, but he liked the challenge of molding a team, and I think he found track and field athletes to be generally hard-working and dedicated. He was also -- and I now appreciate how rare this was, especially in the 1970's -- a student of the sport of distance running. Never having competed in a 5K race himself, he studied distance running, and evolved a training philosophy that was remarkably healthy and sound. Mostly, we ran distance runs around the hilly environs of Amherst, building up to 10-11 mile runs as we progressed. We did strides after many runs. About once a week we would do long intervals on the grass fields of the school or over at UMass. We did tempo runs. We did hill workouts, even running up hills backwards sometimes. We stayed away from excessive short intervals on the track, although I do remember running 10x400 every once in a while. Mr. Crowley's training provided us with variety and interest. And we became pretty good runners, too.

I regret that I was always a thorn in his side. I was the one who thought up the infamous 24-hour relay as a fund-raising event for the track team (the captain of the team, a sprinter, had wanted to sell over-sized, over-priced candy bars -- typical!). I was the one who convinced him to let us paint our own lockers. And I was the one who became a vegetarian on his watch, and then convinced two other guys on the XC team to join me, leading him to spend several weeks researching non-meat sources of iron and protein. I was a lot of trouble, but I was also fiercely committed to our team, and I hope that my passion made up for all the aggravation.

I still remember some of the things Mr. Crowley said: little gems that my teammates and I would repeat endlessly in a variety of tones and cadences, depending on the occasion. Advising us on how to run a particularly steep part of the Turner's Falls course: "Don't be afraid to use your hands..." Or when warming up at Northampton, "Be cognizant of the contours of the course." Although not an especially learned man, Mr. Crowley was a bit of a poet, after all.

A couple of years after he retired, I visited Mr. Crowley at his home in South Amherst. He had kept a bunch of old trophies that our teams had won and that had been moved out of the high school during some re-modeling. He sent me away with a couple of them, and we reminisced about the characters on those teams that had achieved a modest sort of glory so long ago.

I really owe a lot to Mr. Crowley. In his way, he was extraordinarily generous to me -- generous with his time, and more important, generous in his ability to accept me more or less the way he found me. Six years he had to put up with me, and now I wish I hadn't been such a pain in the ass.

Mr. Crowley was my coach -- my only coach, as it turned out. I'm glad there is an award named after him because he set a high standard for himself, and a high standard for us. I was very fortunate to have been under his guidance.