"The Man in the Arena"

     When I attended high school my wallet contained an abridged version of this quote scrawled on a piece of paper. It provided inspiration when I suffered from teenage angst and bucked me up without fail. Glad I now have the whole quote. Then I simply knew it as something President Theodore Roosevelt once said. We had no Internet to provide context and elaboration. I simply had seen it in a book, felt strongly about it, and wrote it on the nearest notepad.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

      My cross country and track coach in high school, Larry Coyle, paraphrased it simply as "dare to be good." He left us with those words before he went on sabbatical. He never coached us seniors in person again but to this day we say those words to each when we chance to meet at a reunion or even on the street. We may not have anything else in common now except those words and the feelings they contain. They just leave our mouths with such joy that all other circumstances don't really matter. These fleeting conversations never seem trite and always make us feel better for having had them. Not too much in life can be said to have such power.

     The original piece of paper with Teddy Roosevelt's words on it has long been replaced with all sorts of bank cards and IDs. Though I'm glad that I still have the memory of how I once coped with the world. It's reassuring in the current moment where we are all grasping at straws and trying to figure out our the new reality produced by the pandemic.

     Now we all have to consider how we might: "Dare greatly. Know victory. Know defeat."Scary idea I realize but more important than ever. We've been given a chance to reconsider how we value ourselves and those around us. The old adages about ever greater productivity being the measure of a person's worth don't seem too important today. I'm ever hopeful that we will follow the better angels of our nature.

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

Larry Coyle

Larry Coyle, a low-key coach who built a boys’ cross-country juggernaut at Ridgewood High School, died Saturday at a Manhattan nursing home. He was 74.

Larry Coyle 

 

He had Alzheimer’s disease, his family said.

“Larry was this quiet guy who never raised his voice, never lost his temper, but had this way of commanding kids’ respect,” said Mike Glynn, his successor as cross-country coach.
“He would do anything for his kids, and they would go through a brick wall for him,” Glynn said.
Mr. Coyle taught English at Ridgewood and coached cross-country for all his 29 years there. His Maroons won state Group 4 championships in 1991 and 1992, a dozen Bergen Group 4 championships and a slew of Bergen Meet of Champions and other titles. He also coached track and field early in his Ridgewood tenure.

Suburban Bergen County may have been the last place James Lawrence Coyle imagined finding himself. The Bronx native went to Iona College on a track scholarship — Glynn was a teammate — and began his teaching career at a Catholic high school in Harlem. He was hired by Louis D. Brandeis High School on the Upper West Side, but a citywide teachers strike sidelined him and he wound up working at a Coca-Cola bottling plant.

A job placement agency found Mr. Coyle a teaching position in Ridgewood, a town he never heard of. “New Jersey was completely foreign to my parents,” daughter Audrey Siciliano said. “Their world was the Five Boroughs.”

Mr. Coyle started at Ridgewood High in 1968 and immediately commenced coaching. He commuted from New York City for a few years before settling his family in Midland Park.

In retirement, he and his wife, Sandra, known as Patsy, moved back to Manhattan.
Mr. Coyle is survived by his wife of 48 years; his daughter, of Winchester, Mass.; a son, Patrick, of Atlanta; and four grandchildren.

Arrangements were by Cremation Consultants in Brooklyn. The family is planning a New Jersey memorial service in September.

New Track at BF

For all of you who follow Track and Field or who once participated while in the Ridgewood School System, there is great news to share about the new track at BF Junior High School. According to Tom Thurston, who was our Track Captain in 1977 along with Andy Drapkin, this is "probably the nicest HS track and field facility in northern NJ."

To take a look click  here

You will be taken to Jacob Brown's web site. Yes, he is still a coach at RHS and is looking pretty good by all accounts and pictures. It must be the exercise and healthy living which he teaches.

When you see a track as fast as the one now at BF, it makes old time runners like me and Tom wonder how much faster we might have run if we hadn't been running on cinders and a 300 something yard track. It's pretty comical to consider what we had to compete on in the 1970s and earlier. This photo of Larry Coyle shows the kind of track we ran on, though I'm not sure if this was taken in Ridgewood.

Larry Coyle

     As some of you may know, Larry Coyle taught English at RHS and was Head Coach of both the Men's Cross Country and Spring Track teams.

     I often think about the last words he said to our team in 1976, before he took his family to England for a sabbatical:

     "Dare to be good."

     Not that it was some world-changing utterance, but it was and has remained to me a gentle reminder to try hard at all endeavors no matter how humble they might seem.

     I know he meant it in the immediate context of our next race, but I also always felt he had a eye on developing us as human beings, too. As a former athlete himself he knew how quickly the glory would fade and how important it would be for us to have something to fall back upon other than medals and ribbons achieved in athletic competition.

      He offered us these words to make us think, and hopefully to inspire us when there wasn't a big meet to hold our attention and make us excel to our fullest potential. I always meant to ask what he meant but our paths didn't cross too many times after that and this philosophical discussion never took place. I suspect if we had spoken about it he would have offered me a modest smile and his customary encouragement. It was never his way to draw attention to himself and I think he probably would have blushed to think that I would remember his words and that I repeat them to people from time to time.