There's a natural sort of rivalry that exists between high schools located in the same town. Not that tiny little Pacelli could hold a candle to Stevens Point Area Senior High, one of the largest public high schools in the state of Wisconsin. But surely this reviewer, a former Pacelli athlete playing the part of David, can be forgiven for his ambivalence towards the Goliath-like sports teams of SPASH.
Natural hometown rivalries aside, no one who grew up in Stevens Point can feel anything but respect and admiration for SPASH's longtime cross country and track coach, Donn Behnke. His Panther boys cross country team has appeared in more than three dozen state meets and has won the state title 10 times. Coach Behnke has coached both future NCAA Division I champions, including former American 10,000-meter record holder Chris Solinsky, and a veritable plethora of ordinary, gangly, unathletic kids who had no idea what they were capable of until they flourished under his careful hand.
Sports books are generally formulaic, feel-good chronicles of cookie-cutter triumphs in the face of adversity. Not that Coach Behnke's Animal Keepers has nothing to do with trials and triumph--I don't want to spoil too much of it for you--but suffice it to say that the story he tells is real and raw. There is nothing cookie-cutter about SPASH's 1985 cross country season.
The story centers on Scott Longley, a special needs student temporarily housed at a Plover group home who somehow found himself on the SPASH track team in the spring of 1985. Despite his learning disabilities and other oddities, Scott was enthusiastic about running and willing to work hard. Coach Behnke's initial annoyance at Scott's presence gradually gave way to appreciation when his distance crew coalesced around their peculiar new teammate. He became "The Animal" to the other runners, who may have begun by poking fun at him but soon adopted him as one of their own.
Although a regrettable incident that spring led to the Plover group home pulling Scott from the track team--a total bureaucratic overreaction that left SPASH's coach frustrated--Scott was allowed to rejoin his teammates for cross country in the fall. Coach Behnke saw the 1985 season as a rebuilding season, but Scott and his teammates had other ideas. They showed consistent improvement all season and overcame a great deal of adversity, not the least of which came at the end when Scott was abruptly scheduled to be transferred to a new group home in a different part of the state. It took a direct appeal to the Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Health and Human Services to delay Scott's move a week and a half so that he could run for SPASH at the state meet. With Scott joining his teammates, it came down to the upstart team from SPASH dueling it out at state with number one-ranked Manitowoc in the driving snow in weather conditions that are legend to this day.
Again, I won't spoil the story for you because it's worth reading for yourself. Coach Behnke's book is not high literature. He could have used a better copy editor--"compliment" and "complement" are not the same word, for example, and dangling modifiers are rampant throughout. He uses practically the same language five or six times to describe how lengthy tempo runs are SPASH's trademark workout. The ending is drawn out way too long. But as Coach Behnke himself says, he's never tried to write anything longer than a grocery list, and I'm fairly certain that if ever I tried to write anything longer than a blog post, my annoying grammatical quirks would be pretty easy to point out too.
So, let me just say that I am grateful that Coach Behnke took the effort to share the story of Scott Longley and the legendary 1985 Panther cross country team. What this coach and his team were able to accomplish that season says a lot about how camaraderie is at the heart of what high school athletics are about. As a former high school runner, I saw glimpses of what I remember of all the miles I put in with my own Pacelli teammates--all the easier because our team ran the same narrow country roads that SPASH's coach describes in this book. As a current high school coach at a small private school in North Carolina, I haven't yet seen the likes of Scott, but I'm sure that the stories will come with time.
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