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 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.”
On Igloi: Igloi was a firm believer in 110’s. He used to train guys to run one hundred 110’s to get ready for the marathon. Way back when I started we were doing 40, 50, 60 110’s. We are down now to where we run 20. We’ve learned a little bit that we don’t have to do all of that.
On the 'secrets' to coaching: Here’s what I really learned and this is the whole secret. Most of the people I know who are coaches, they know a lot about running, but they don’t know how to coach. Arthur Lydiard told me the secret to coaching is you got to have your guys ready on the day. I tell my guys we are coaching you to run your best when it counts. We may not win early, and I also learned from Arthur Lydiard—when I first started coaching, before I hooked up with him, I used to plan my workouts from the first day to the last day—and he taught me that you start from the day you want to win the title and work backwards so you get all of your stuff in right before the meet that you want to do. After that, in 1963, we started making our program from the state meet and worked back to the first day of the season.
Here’s the next thing. This is the second big secret about coaching. Kids don’t care if you are an Olympic runner, the world’s greatest man, the strongest man in the world, or if you’ve got four PhD’s in exercise physiology. They don’t want to hear it until they find out that you care about them. Once they find out that you care about them, they will do anything for you. That is the secret. There has to be a relationship between you and your athletes. If they think you are just using them to promote your record, they won’t do squat for you. We have 200-225 guys on our cross country team. Only seven can run at the state meet. What the heck are all of those other guys doing? They are out there because at York we have created a culture that is based on excellence and toughness. We have an espirit de corp second to none. The Marine Corps never leave a guy in combat and we’re kind of like that. When a guy runs in a race, I tell them, ‘You’re not just running for yourself and York High School. You’re running for every guy who has come through this program and won those 26 state titles.’
The next secret to coaching. My wife and I got married in 1952. For the first 15 years that we were married, the only free time that I had was at Christmas time because I was always coaching. We would go to Miami Beach. And the guy who ran the pool at the hotel—we would come out to the pool deck and if you wanted to have a mat on your chair, he’d get you a mat and you’d tip him. Then you’d go away for a year. You come back the next year, the pool guy has not seen you for a year, and we’d come on to the pool deck and the guy would say, “Mr. and Mrs. Newton, how are you doing?” I’d tip him $20 because he called my name out and everybody around the pool is looking at me. I said, “How can you remember my name?” He said, “That’s my business. Does it make you feel good when I call your name out?” I said, “Yeah, I just gave you $20.” He said, “You got it.” From the pool guy, I learned that people wanted to hear their name.
When I first started coaching we had 20, 25 guys and now, 50 years later, 200, 225, but I tried every single day, one time during practice, to call a guy’s name out. Now we’re up to about 1963 and I had a freshman guy on my team who solidified what this guy at the pool taught me. Here’s this Malinkoff guy and out of about 20 freshmen, he was 20. He was terrible, six-three, slew-foot, slow, but every day he’d come out to practice and sometime during that practice, I would say, “Malinkoff, you’re looking great.” Well, I was just kind of flipping that out, kind of joking. After his freshman year of cross country, his folks moved to Miami in December. One year later, about December of the next year, I get a letter from Malinkoff down in Florida. He said, ‘Coach Newton, I’m down here in Florida and I’m not running anymore. It’s not the same here as it was at York. I knew that I was the worst freshman on the team, but I could hardly wait to get to practice every day because I knew that sometime during that practice you’d say, “Malinkoff, you’re looking great.” That just drove me to do anything you wanted me to do. Now, I came down to Miami and nobody called my name, so I quit.’
On checking in: Every day they have to check in with me. I have the roll book, so they’ve got to come up to me and I have a nickname for everybody. That’s another tip. Everybody has a personal nickname that I call them. So they’ll check in and they won’t say “Smith”, they’ll say, “Bonehead here, or Meatball here,” because that’s personal. I look them in the eye and check them in. That’s my first contact. Then I call their name out during practice. Then I make every guy, at the end of practice, walk up to me and say, “Checking out Coach Newton.” I say, “Checking out, Smith” and I shake his hand. If they’ve got a cold or I’ve got a cold, we touch elbows.
I have a saying that makes them laugh. I say, “When you are running fast, run faster.”
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