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Bellarmine Magazine_Fall2012

Remembering Coach spalding By Sam Floyd ’77 I RAn CRoss CounTRy AT bellARmIne ColleGe in the mid-Sixties. Bellarmine didn’t have a track team back then, just a low key (i.e., inexpensive to operate) cross country program usually consisting of six to eight runners. Jim Spalding was our coach. He was the basketball coach too, and Bellarmine had some really terrific basketball teams in those days. Coach Spalding, who was always very slim, got even skinnier during basketball season. i think he enjoyed the more relaxed atmosphere of the cross country program. All the same, he used basketball calisthenics on us (think Gene Hack- man putting the Hickory Huskers through their paces in the movie Hoosiers) and our uniform sweats were old basketball warm-ups that had been washed so many times they’d shrunk to the point where they almost fit scrawny distance runners. Still, when basketball season rolled around, we were on our own. This was no problem, as most of the guys on the team Coach Spalding and a couple of his runners, captured had run cross country in high school and understood well Nevitt, Gene Weis, Coach Spalding). The photo was takenat a cross country meet at Bellarmine (left to right, Bill the grueling regime and discipline required for effective after Coach had finally gotten us our own warmup suits. practice sessions. Which is why, after Coach Spalding left to coach basketball, our cross country practices typi- cally consisted of stretching and talking on one of the golf course greens, maybe running a few miles, and then passing a football around. After that we’d watch basket- ball practice, and when it was over play pick-up games until Coach told us it was time to hit the showers because he had to lock the place up. even after basketball season started, however, Coach Spalding would still take us to away meets on weekends. He’d show up at the gym on Saturday morning with a box of donuts and encourage us to drink a can of “Nutra- ment,” which was—at that point in time—a state-of- 40 bellarmine magazine


Bellarmine Magazine_Fall2012
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