Larry Coyle Inducted into Ridgewood High School Athletic Hall of Fame

Mr. Coyle was one of those soft spoken types of people who could say something quietly in a room full of rambunctious kids which would reverberate forever in their minds. I am grateful for having known Larry Coyle and for being one of those kids who can fondly recollect one of those gentle talks he used to give which were packed with powerful meaning.

The one I am thinking about was the last time he spoke to one of my teams. He was scheduled to take a half year off to study in England. He gathered us around one last time after we had just slogged through a horrific downpour at the Eastern States Cross Country Championship in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The moment we stepped off the bus we were soaked. So was Larry Coyle and he had to both coach us and carry 15 sets of drenched sweat shirts and pants for the next hour. As a team we finished 3rd that year, partly because we showed up and partly because the seniors knew this was our last race for Larry.

Later on when we had returned back to RHS he brought us to a classroom to say farewell. He thanked us for our efforts and we thanked him for being our coach. There was one final thought he wanted to leave us with and it has stayed with me all these years. It probably meant more to those were in attendance that day than it does to a casual reader these forty years later. In any event, he told us to Dare to be good. The emphasis was on the word "Dare" and not on the final result. He knew we all couldn't come in first, as an individual or as a team. Though we could always dare to try to be the best we might on any given day, and in any given situation. He was speaking to us for all times and about all the times we would be faced by challenges in the future.

All I have to do is mention these words to somebody who was in the room that day and their face with light up and a Larry Coyle story will soon begin. I feel that one definition of success in this world is to leave it a little better and maybe a bit happier. Larry Coyle was most definitely a success by this and any other standard for role models, teachers, coaches, and athletes.

From The Bergen Record:

He might have achieved coaching and teaching greatness at Brandeis High School in New York City, or at the American school in Alexandria, Egypt, or in Taiwan.
But a potential teachers strike and a coaching opening led Larry Coyle to Ridgewood High School in 1968, and when he left coaching 29 years later, both parties were very happy that their paths had crossed.
Coyle, who passed away last August, retired after the 1997 cross-country season, and even two decades later, his influence and success have been hard to approach.
In his 29 years as the Maroon boys cross-country coach, RHS won 15 league and divisional titles in the Northern New Jersey Interscholastic League (NNJIL), 12 Bergen County Group 4 titles, seven Bergen Meet of Champions titles and 10 North 1, Group 4 sectional titles.
Ridgewood won the 1991 and 1992 State Group 4 championships, the only time a Bergen County team has gone back-to-back in the 70-year history of the group meet. The team also finished in the top five of the State Meet of Champions five times.
The soft-spoken (most of the time) Coyle ran track at Mount St. Michael’s High School in the Bronx and at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. before coming to Ridgewood to teach English. The next year, the RHS principal remembered that Coyle had talked about track in his initial interview and quickly hired Coyle as the school’s cross-country, indoor and outdoor track coach.
He coached all three seasons for 11 years and started the indoor program. While the Maroons did not win any major team titles in indoor and outdoor track, Coyle coached 1972 Group 4 indoor two-mile champ Bruce Mason and 1975 Group 4 outdoor 330-yard intermediate hurdles titleholder Parke Muth. Dropping from the head coaching ranks in indoor and outdoor track and field, Larry stayed on as the boys cross-country coach with extraordinary success.
"In some ways, cross-country is the most enjoyable season, which is why I kept doing it after I gave up track,’’ Coyle said in a 1997 interview upon his retirement from coaching. "In some ways, it’s the simplest and the easiest because everyone’s running the same event, but it’s also the purest high school sport."
Consistency was the hallmark of Coyle teams. They qualified for 24 of the 25 Bergen Meet of Champions races and finished in the top four the last 19 times they qualified, winning in 1978, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1991, 1995 and 1996. The Maroons also qualified for 24 out of the last 25 State Group 4 championships during Coyle’s reign, with 10 runner-up finishes and three third-place finishes in addition to the 10 titles.
And his contributions went beyond simply coaching track and cross-country.
Along with fellow Ridgewood Hall of Fame inductee Jacob Brown and Mike Glynn, he started and co-directed the Ridgewood Winter Games — a pioneering indoor track meet at Rockland Community College that began in the 1970s — and the season-opening Ridgewood Relays, now known as the Steve Pawlowski Relays, in the spring. These two events, still going strong today, are important stops on the area’s indoor and outdoor track schedule.
Coyle is one of the great championship coaches in Ridgewood and Bergen County history, and even better than that, he was one of the finest gentlemen and teachers you’d ever hope to meet.
Email: tartaglia@northjersey.com