The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Coaches fondly recall indoor meets at Euclid
One day at an invitational a few years back, Bill Dennison showed a video on his phone to fellow coaches and observers of his vaunted Mentor boys 4x800 quartet competing at the Penn Relays.
Due to the volume of teams in the race, the exchange zone resembled a mosh pit at a 1990s heavy metal festival.
The visual likely didn’t faze Dennison, though — or anyone else who remembers those days way back when on East 222nd Street.
A winter tradition recalled vividly in area high school track and field are the old indoor meets once regularly hosted at Euclid.
With the advent of SPIRE and Northeast Ohio universities with their own facilities for such use, those Euclid indoor meets are largely a thing of the past.
But they were not a figment of anyone’s imagination.
“My first indoor meet as a kid at Mentor was in Euclid’s basement,” Dennison said. “They have a 100-meter track in the basement, and (former Mentor middle distance stalwart and coach) Ken Simko made me run the two-mile.
“So you can imagine I had 32 laps in that basement. You could almost raise your hand above your head and touch the ceiling. I remember it like it was yesterday. The air was thick. There were big columns supporting the roof above.”
At times before that 100-meter track, the setup was even more archaic, including days running sprints in the hallways and more — concepts with which even Euclid graduate and longtime Panthers girls coach Larry Nosse was blown away.
“Yeah, we used to a run a metric meet with a 3,000 and the 1,500 and, yeah, there used to be some crazy things,” Nosse said. “We had a metric meet we would call it, and there was about 20-25 teams that would come over. And all of these teams would be upstairs in the hallways and the gyms and all that. We used to run the meet downstairs. We had all the events — the shot, the discus. We used to do pole vault in the gym. It was crazy.”
Nosse said the metric meets continued until the mid-2000s, and a full season of indoor meets was held at Euclid until 2010.
He still holds indoor meets during the winter for schools whose athletes don’t get ample opportunities to head to SPIRE due to their team’s size.
One of the Greater Cleveland powers that would regularly appear at Euclid for that indoor competition was St. Ignatius under the tutelage of legendary coach Chuck Kyle.
“Chuck was coming here every year, and he would bring 70-75 boys in February, and that’s how he got to know his kids,” Nosse said. “He loved it.”
Those good, old days invoke plenty of memories for Beachwood coach Willie Smith as well — including one in particular during a weight man’s relay, in which throwers compete in a 4x1.
“At the time, I was coaching at (Cleveland) Heights,” Smith said. “And we had a kid named Tim Jones, who weighed about 370 pounds running the anchor. He came up on the bend and just could not transfer his weight around the tight turn.
“He took a spill on the track, got up and his sweatpants had fallen off his rear. You talk about a break in the action. I think we laughed for about 30 minutes. He got up and anchored our 4x1 to victory pulling his pants up while he was running because, to him, it was so important to win the relay and finish the race.”
Smith will never forget, either, the sight of Robert Smith amid indoor track and field.
Some of Smith’s exploits in the sport during indoor and outdoor seasons have taken on urban-legend status of sorts. One story that made the rounds, and was eventually confirmed, was the time Smith ran an 800 on a dare for fun during an outdoor dual meet and ran a 1:54, a time that would be in state contention in the event.
That was true, and so were those winters indoors.
“It was intense,” Willie Smith said. “There were the days when Euclid had Robert Smith and some of those kids, and we had a pretty good group ourselves. And the battles that we would have, Coach (Bob) Ramlow and the Euclid staff, they got intense. And we had the old Riverside coaches with Russ Pernus and those kinds of teams. We battled. Running a 4x4 in that thing was absolutely amazing.
“Robert Smith would have been a tremendous decathlete. He was a tremendous athlete period. He’d high jump 6-5 and go out there and run in the hallway a 55 (400) dash.”
Today, even amid the construction signaling a new era at Euclid, the 100-meter track in the basement remains, a component Nosse has found valuable building his highly regarded program.
“They’re still keeping that track, so it’s still there,” Nosse said. “Eight years ago, they resurfaced it. So we still have a 100-meter track down there. It’s a Mondotrack actually, so you can use spikes on it. But we don’t, just because it will tear apart.
“But there’s a four-lane, 100-meter track that goes around still. And then there’s a 25-meter in the middle section where at one end, you can put blocks on the ground. So we work on our blocks and starts. We have six lanes in the middle, and we still have enough space for two hurdles. Our hurdlers still work on the hurdles.”
Sprints and distance events in the basement or hallways and field events in the gym probably seem like a foreign concept to today’s high school track and field athletes, who can venture down Interstate 90 to SPIRE to hone their craft.
They may not realize how good they have it.
“These kids are so spoiled with SPIRE,” Dennison said. “Think about it: We have a gravy train of 300-meter tracks, which is kind of considered the redheaded stepchild of track and field because 200 is still considered the norm.
“But you can go from Youngstown to Kent State to Akron to SPIRE and these beautiful tracks. I think some of them produce faster times than outdoor tracks if you get the perfect air-conditioned environment and perfect condition to run some fast races.”
As a coach, Dennison can envision what the reaction would be like if, like him, a distance runner was asked to do a 3,200 on a 100-meter track.
“I don’t know – most kids today, if I put them in that kind of situation, they’d be like, ‘I’m not doing this. Why am I doing track?’” Dennison said.
“I would give anything to have a 100-meter track somewhere in Mentor instead of pushing kids in the hallways, getting shin splints and everything else.”
Those ventures into the hallways in this day and age during the spring are because of bad weather that forces teams inside.
But as those who know well will attest, the hallways and basement action was prevalent — and serious — back in the day at Euclid.
“Euclid became a staple of where most of us would go,” Smith said. “That was all we had.”