Ex-music teacher finds new route
Many people spend retirement relaxing from a life of hard work.
Not Vickie Liddell.
“I have 10 children, and all of them ran track, some of them quite successfully,” Liddell said. “I was just a mother on the sideline cheering them on. The year that I retired from high school, it was like it was placed in my spirit, like a desire for it. I thought, ‘OK. In my retirement, I’m going to do track and field.’”
Liddell, 67, is a senior athlete living in Pine Bluff. She started running track in 2019 after retiring from Dollarway High School.
Earlier this month, she won a gold medal in the long jump at the National Senior Games in Pittsburgh with a leap of 11 feet, 9.25 inches. She also won silver medals in the 400-meter dash and the 4x100-meter relay with a bronze in the 200-meter dash. She competed in the 65-69 age group.
To qualify for nationals, an athlete must finish among the top four in a state qualifying meet or meet a minimum qualifying standard for an event. Liddell has now been to nationals twice.
“I wish they would televise it, because it is wonderful,” Liddell said. “I’ve made friends. It’s competitive, but it’s a friendly competition where you encourage one another, but you don’t want to encourage them too much that they want to beat you, but it’s warm. It’s inviting, and it’s exciting to see other people who do what I do.”
Liddell spent 22 years teaching music and directing band at Dollarway. She gives piano lessons and plays her saxophone occasionally, but track has become a new passion.
After retiring from Dollarway, she turned to her kids’ track coach, Louis Moss.
When Liddell approached him, Moss said he knew it would be a challenge, but it didn’t take Liddell long to take to the sport.
“She had that competitiveness in her already,” Moss said. “So it was just more or less me mapping out … a program that’s going to fit her. So I guess that was a challenge right there, but she had that competitiveness in her and she believed in herself. She’s a God-fearing woman, so with God, she thinks all things are possible. So that’s what we had to lay our hats on, right there.”
Moss ran track for the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in the 1970s and started coaching track in 1999. He coached all of Liddell’s children but had never coached a retiree.
Moss said he expects kids to get better with practice and age, but not someone Liddell’s age, yet she set a personal best in the 200 at nationals.
“I wish I had about 40 kids like her,” Moss said. “I guess I’m about eight miles to the track, and she’s about 12, and I can’t beat her to the track field. She’s gonna beat me there basically every time. She has what you look for in an athlete. She’s got that competitiveness in her. She’s gonna be on time. She’s got confidence.”
Since 2019, Liddell has won 59 medals, including 54 gold medals.
There aren’t many track meets for senior athletes, so
she often travels out of state to compete in places such as Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida. She usually must pay all her own travel expenses.
She speaks fondly of all the people she has met through athletics and the opportunities it has provided her. She met twotime Olympian Trayvon Bromell of Team USA in Florida and got to run alongside Nigerian Olympic runner Knowledge Omovoh in Louisiana.
“In that heat, there was nobody else my age, so I ran with her,” Liddell said. “She said, ‘You’re encouraging me, because when I get to be your age, it’s telling me that I can still do this.’”
Athletes are always susceptible to injuries, and Liddell is no exception. She competed injured in her first trip to nationals in 2022. After getting home, she discovered she had torn her meniscus. She had knee surgery to repair it, but just as it was finishing healing, she found out she needed gallbladder surgery.
At her age, Liddell could have decided these surgeries meant it was time to stop competing, but she said the thought never crossed her mind.
“What encouraged me some on that was in 2022 at the nationals watching the other women in their 70s, 80s and 90s and listening to their stories of hip replacements and knee replacements, and yet they’re out there,” Liddell said. “I thought, ‘Oh yeah. Nothing’s stopping me now.’”
Liddell is primarily a sprinter. She competes in the 50-meter, 60-meter, 100-meter, 200-meter and 400-meter dashes, though the first two aren’t offered at every meet. While recovering from surgery, she decided to add the long jump. After not winning a gold medal in her first trip to nationals, she won gold in the long jump this month despite having not tried it until this year. She said it has become one of her favorite events along with the 400.
She has no plans of quitting any time soon. Liddell said there was a 94-yearold athlete at nationals, and she wants to follow that example and continue competing as long as she lives.
Liddell said she is the only senior athlete in Pine Bluff. She has tried to recruit others to no avail, but she continues to encourage everyone to be active.
“This is the best I have felt probably in 40 years,” Liddell said. “I have more energy. I’m healthier. I’m enjoying life. I’m getting to travel, but if they’ll just get up off the couch and just start moving where they are, whatever it is. If it’s something that they feel like, ‘Oh, I’m too old for this.’ If they have a desire for it, just start where you are.”
Liddell’s next meet is the Arkansas Senior Olympics at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway on Sept. 30, which will include athletes 50 and older.