Remembering track coach Sanderson
Sanderson remembered for humility, ability to inspire athletes to excellence
Diane Jones-Konihowski travelled the world with Lyle Sanderson. The iconic track star and the quiet, bespectacled coach worked in close quarters, and at lofty heights.
Jones-Konihowski was waiting to fly home from Toronto Thursday when she heard the news: A vacationing Sanderson died Thursday night in Mexico, at age 79, after a short hospital stay.
“There was no ego with Lyle,” Jones-Konihowski said Friday. “He was a kid who came out of Piapot, Saskatchewan — just a kid off the ranch, off the land of Saskatchewan. He was very humble. You could talk to Lyle about anything.”
Sanderson coached track and field at the 1972 and 1976 Olympics — Jones-Konihowski competed there, too — and both were slated to go to the 1980 Games before Canada boycotted the event.
Back home in Saskatoon, Sanderson — an inductee into the Canadian Track and Field Hall of Fame, among many others — won 10 national track championships in his 39 years as the University of Saskatchewan Huskies’ head coach, and 33 Canada West titles.
Sanderson coached current Huskies’ track coach Jason Reindl for two seasons, and served as his mentor after Reindl moved into the coaching ranks several years ago.
Reindl took the Huskies’ job last summer, and he says Sanderson continued to provide feedback.
“A few weeks ago, he said ‘Jason, you’re doing good,’ ” Reindl said Friday. “He gave me that reassurance that it was going to be a long road and a journey, but things were moving in the right direction. And a thumbs-up from Lyle means a lot.”
Sanderson grew up on a cattle ranch south of Piapot, and moved to Regina in Grade 12 to attend Luther College. He was a good enough middle-distance runner to compete at the 1960 Canadian Olympic trials, where he placed middle-of-the-pack.
Sanderson was hired as the Huskies’ track and field coach in 1965 and retired in 2004.
He coached on 54 Athletics Canada national teams along the way.
Sanderson coached Jones-Konihowski for 17 seasons, starting in 1969, when she joined the Huskies.
She was already on the national team at that point, looking ahead to the 1972 Olympics, and needing somebody she could trust with her vision after previous coach Bob Adams retired.
She was a pentathlete, which stretched Sanderson in many ways.
When they travelled the globe, she says he alternately served as a parent, coach, psychologist, even massage therapist when needed.
He would insist on exploring cities they visited — museums, churches, art galleries — because he wanted those journeys to be about more than sport.
Back in Saskatoon, their training facilities were humble.
“He created many national team members and Olympians out of a gymnasium where it was about 30 laps to the mile,” recalls JonesKonihowski.
“We did not have an indoor track facility, like the Field House, in the
You wanted to win for Lyle. There aren’t too many coaches like that.
’70s. We trained out of the old hangar building, in a small little gym with wooden boards in the corners. Those were really, really fun times. I could only run over three hurdles, then out the door, around a corner, down a hallway and up the stairs to decelerate. But Lyle had this incredible ability to pull a team together.”
And that knack, she says, extended to each individual athlete in his fold.
“If anybody was vertical and breathing, he would approach them on campus and say ‘come on out for track and field!’ He was a great recruiter,” she says.
“And when he recruited you, he had this special ability, even if you weren’t the most talented athlete ... Lyle made you feel like you were the most important athlete on that team. He made you feel like you could do anything.
“For years and years and years, the U of S Huskies may not have had the most talented team, but they loved and admired Lyle so much that you just went out on the track, and you gutted it out. You wanted to win for Lyle. There aren’t too many coaches like that.”
Jones-Konihowski says plans were underway to celebrate Sanderson’s 80th birthday next November.
It was going to be a celebration, and a bit of a track-and-field reunion.
Those plans have changed, obviously.
It will now be a memorial for a man who touched lives across the globe.
“It’ll be a track reunion, but of a different kind, celebrating his life,” Jones-Konihowski says.
And sprinkled across the country, at a track here and a track there, in big cities and small towns, are coaches who learned to love the sport because of their brushes with Sanderson.
“Lyle was such an inspiration to them,” Jones-Konihowski said.
“There’s a lot of little Lyles out there around the world who continued coaching because of him.”