Why They Coach: Brett Halter

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PM: When you were growing up, what sports were you involved in?

BH: "My old man was an FBI agent, so we moved around a lot. It was New York, Jersey, Philadelphia. So really in probably South Jersey, that was the heyday of Philadelphia, the Vince Papale movie, the Sixers, Moses Malone, (Julius) Erving, the Flyers glory and all that stuff. They were killing it. Every day was the same. Depending on the season, just come home, get some streetball in the streets with a basketball, football, hockey, soccer a little bit, stickball, half-ball; it's a Philadelphia thing--you cut a racquetball or a tennis ball in half, you throw it, so you can play in small spaces, you hit it with a broomstick. All the normal stuff. Sport was just embedded in who I was and everything I thought about.

PM: Once you got to high school, what did you kind of focus on?

BH: "To be honest, basketball was my love. I love basketball. I was a buck, 25 or something. I went back and saw the old football coach a number of years ago and he was like, 'Why didn't you look like this then?' I wasn't much on the football field. Track, it just came relatively easy for me. Just running around, but basketball was my love. Track I did because I could just beat people."

PM: A lot of people at that age seem to do track to stay in shape for other sports. When did it kind of go from that to something you really enjoyed?

BH: "Probably sophomore year, I was getting pretty good so I was running a lot. But I still loved basketball and it was what I wanted to do. Ended up, fortunate enough to be able to do D2 track. I was a slow distance runner. Able to do D2 track out by Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Getting here was really just kind of weird, frankly. I think it probably found me more than I found it. I came here with the intention, my dad had gotten transferred to Kansas City when I was in college. My mom's from Leavenworth, Kansas, my dad's a Park College grad. So he put in a transfer so my mom could be closer to her mom and encouraged me to look at Missouri. You probably don't know a lot of people from the Northeast, but it's like education and geographic snobbery. I was straight up caught up in it. West is Pittsburgh, south is Florida, California, you go Hollywood and for all I knew you're pulling wagons in Oklahoma and got cows in Texas. All I knew about Missouri and Iowa and Kansas was cornfields, I thought. I applied to grad school and got accepted and the week before school started--literally the week before school started, I decided I was coming to Missouri for grad school.

My intention was to get in the FBI, get my Master's degree. You need an advanced degree, then you've got to work for a couple years and then you can apply. So I was going to take that route, at least I thought. My whole life, every single day at 3 o'clock from as far back as I can remember, I got off the bus and did something sport. Now I'm in grad school taking classes, I was just twiddling my thumbs, just bored. And so I asked (Rick) Maguire if I could help out and he actually said no. It was my buddy in grad school class (Mizzou associate AD) Brian Brown that encouraged me to go back and ask again. Finally talked me into it, but he never told me his wife was (associate track head coach) Tash (Natasha Brown). Whatever Tash asked coach Maguire for she got, so this time he was like, 'Oh, come on in.' I think it's more kind of found me to be honest. I was always the guy that was organizing the games and the point guard on the basketball team, things like that."

PM: When your goal is to be an FBI agent, what do you major in and how do you prepare for that?

BH: "Back then, a lot of people, the FBI they're looking for skill sets. Today, I probably can't speak too intelligently about what they're looking for today, but I think it probably has something to do with Internet crimes, computer savvy. They're looking for various backgrounds at that level, they're looking for people that have business acumen and computer skills and speak multiple languages and things like that. It's a wide array, quite honestly. I inititally started as an English major and was going to go to law school and didn't like the lawyers getting people off DUI's and all that stuff. So I kind of punted on that and decided I don't like these seven-line sonnets and English class talking about them for two hours and they don't mean anything to me. Eventually that's how I got to where I came to Missouri."

PM: So when you start helping coach Maguire, is that just a volunteer thing?

BH: "Oh yeah. I was a volunteer for three or four years."

PM: How are you paying bills at that point?

BH: "I wasn't really. I was running credit cards and doing what people shouldn't be doing. I was Captain Video. I'll never forgive coach for this. He made me film back to back 10Ks. Think about that, the 10K run. At the Kansas Relays back when the track was in that old stadium. Up on the top row, it's like 90 degrees, up there, men and women back to back. That was a good hour."

PM: When did you get your first paid coaching job?

BH: "The last thing Joe (Castiglione) did was hire me. At like ten thousand dollars or something. Oh man, benefits. I ended up getting a second Master's degree just to get health insurance. I wasn't a very good graduate student at that point. By that time, Don Dobson had departed and coach Maguire asked me if I wanted to coach and I'm like, 'Sure.' 'I want you to coach the throwers' and I'm like 'Man, I know the shot's heavy coach. I roll it back to those guys. And the discus looks like a UFO and the javelin looks like it hurts.' And the hammer was getting ready to be reintroduced to the NCAA and I have no idea what that is. For all I know it's a sledgehammer. He said, 'Well, they don't need a training partner, they need a coach, so go figure it out.' So really at that point, I was so invested in the biomechanics, physiology, the various technical schools that people were coming from to learn the four throwing events that I was a really lousy graduate student at that point."

PM: So what are you at that point, 25, 26?

BH: "Yeah. Right about that."

PM: So obviously at some point you learn quite a bit more. Are you learning from being around coach Maguire or studying on your own or what?

BH: "Coach Maguire was very well connected throughout track and field. He was sending me to schools all throughout the country. I went to a school down in Arkansas, spent a week at a USA educational school out at BYU and I just inserted myself into various thing. Then God's good grace I guess, I had some kids that just kind of landed at Missouri. (Christian) Cantwell being one of them, (Russ) Bell. And those guys were in that USA pipeline and through sort of elite development for them, I was exposed to a lot more. Then as things continued to progress with Christian, geez, for just his entire career I was just exposed to some of the world's best minds, whether it's biomechanics or physiology or whatever it is."

PM: Can you identify a point along there where you identified, hey, I can make a career out of this?

BH: "At that point, I'm kind of all in. Once I decided. Well, not making a lot of money, that was hard. I'd landed here in 93. Bell came on campus in 99, 2000. By 2002, 03, now I'm a decade in and I'm starting to wonder, I'm going bankrupt. Missouri, at that point, we just couldn't pay our assistant coaches. By that point, I knew I wanted to coach, but it was like how do I support myself doing this? So you try to figure how to support yourself. I really wasn't interested in leaving. One of the things when I was little, you knew baseball cards. You just knew your teams. Every year. I was a Royals fan living in Philly. So I'm in Philadelphia, Royals come to town, of course George Brett, we've got third base tickets, he's got hemorrhoids. So one of the things that I didn't want to be as a professional, I didn't want to be a notch in the belt. Because to me there was a purity to baseball back then before free agency. You just knew, you've got the farm system coming up and you've got these guys coming up, we're excited about this Saberhagen guy, the path that Brett took and all those types of things. And then it's just all the best teams money can buy. It's just not very interesting to me anymore. I mean getting the best of the best together the final game of the World Series, bases loaded, two outs, full count, that's really interesting to me, but the regular season's less interesting to me...So I didn't want to be that guy. So the last thing I wanted to do was to leave, just to say I coached this Cantwell guy, he's doing pretty good and I get a bigger pay raise somewhere else and I do the same thing. Next thing you know, ten years, I'm at ten different places and that's just not cool to me."

PM: Were there opportunities or did you not even listen?

BH: "I just shut it all down."

PM: I don't remember the exact timeline. When did coach Maguire retire?

BH: "2009, 2010."

PM: So you'd been here 17 years at that point. At some point, you know that's eventually going to happen, but did you have discussions along the way about taking over?

BH: "You know, it was getting really hard for me to stay here about 2004, but that was the year that Christian got hurt right before the Olympic trials and didn't make the squad. So I felt a personal responsibility to make sure that I was here with him through 2008 and by that time coach had begun discussions with Mike (Alden) about a retirement plan, a succession plan. And at that point, I'm like okay, I'll be staying here for a while."

PM: You're talking about coaching Christian well after he was done here. Can you kind of explain that? You're kind of doing two different jobs almost.

BH: "In track it's pretty normal. Karissa Schweizer's situation is very unique where Nike is supporting a training group on a campus, they've got a track on their campus, they have all the therapy, basically it's an Olympic training facility so they've got training pools, sports medicine, nutrition, all that stuff's there. So man, those training groups can get it going and that's what they're doing with that Bowerman group, it's really good. But all the other sports, especially the field events and then a tier down, throwing events, there's just not that opportunity. We have an Olympic training center, it's a beautiful setting in Chula Vista (California), but it's not really what Missouri has. Missouri's an Olympic training center. I mean the MATC, dining hall, sports medicine, chiro, massage, all your recovery, strength and conditioning, nutrition, sports psychology. It's an Olympic training facility academically and athletically. So a track and field athlete, Christian was always like, 'Why would I leave Missouri? It's better than my training center.' Because the European model is what we think of as professional model. Denmark will identify you as their top whatever, soccer player, and you'll be put into a sport high school where you'll do sport twice a day, classes in between and then you'll graduate, if you've excelled to the next level, you've identified to that, then you're into their national system where they're giving you an apartment, you're probably staying at some sport specific training center where you have what I just described all there and that's what you do. The government's paying you to be a professional athlete to represent the country and you've got an apartment, a car and life's grand. But the United States, there's that void between college and professional athletes. It just doesn't exist. Kirsten (Peeples) tried to do it for a while...She actually moved into my house for a couple years just to try to make ends meet so she could make it. It's tough. People don't sponsor track kids. If you're not mainstream, and let's face it, people that look like Christian and Kiersten aren't selling running shoes. You know what I'm saying? So there's a pretty small investment there. So what you do, there's NCAA rules that kind of frame all that stuff. But in his preseason prep he would just come out and train with the collegiate kids. At some point, I would have to find time to go coach him individually because he needed individual different level attention than the college kids. It's like putting your varsity kids with the junior high. At some point, you've got to separate and say all right."

PM: And you're doing that just kind of on your own time to help him out?

BH: "Yeah. A lot of Christmas days. Christmas mornings to do workouts. Because the professional calendar is different as well."

PM: So when you become the head coach, how much changed in your job?

BH: "Everything. It's a cliche, everybody says you think you're prepared but you never really are. It's very similar to people when I try to describe track and field in the SEC. They see it on paper, like oh yeah, it's really good. I say you just don't know until you're seeing it at the track and you're seeing how fast the human beings are. You don't get it until you're in the environment. And it's the same thing, you don't get it until you're sitting in the chair and how much information is passing through my desk daily. The five assistant coaches and all their stuff, the hundred kids and all their stuff, the administration. Everybody does the same thing.

One of the things that changed, the utopia that I believed was possible was that I could still coach the throws. The reality after a couple short years was that's a utopia that doesn't exist. So when Kirsten and Jill Rushin graduated, I was like, 'I've got to take myself out of this box because I'm not doing anybody any favors.' I'm not ruling the program like it needs to be ruled nor am I coaching the throwers at a world class level because to be a throws coach, you have to be available all day, every day. If I've got 30 kids, I'm running in my mind their movement patterns and what they need to do for every kid, last practice, where they need to go, getting ready for this, this kid needs this drill and this kid needs these exercises and this kid has a deficiency over here and you're just totally consumed with everything. Meanwhile our program, next thing I know, a year on the job, it was surreal, driving to it should have been my first Big 12 championship when I took over, 2010 we're driving to the Big 12s, I think it was the last one, it was just surreal, driving down 70, I get the call, 'We're going to the SEC.' We're in Manhattan and the next thing I know (Mike) Slive wants the track championships on our campus. A year from now, we're going to have these schools that we've only looked at in NCAA Championships, Florida and LSU and Arkansas, on our track. It's weird. And so quickly it was like the magnitude of the SEC and what it was gonna take for this program to try to achieve just at a conference level. We're talking about things, this conference is so far out there, basically we have to look at what we've done at a national level and understand that we haven't done much at a national level collectively, and if we're going to be competitive here? Because that's what the NCAA is. You watch the NCAA Championship, it looks like an SEC Championship. Watch the women's 4x4 at the end of the meet, top six teams, one through six, SEC."

PM: I think everybody knows what the SEC is in football, baseball, probably women's basketball. But is it even better in track?

BH: "I would say it's even better. It's absolutely insane. Really, look at it. When we're at the conference championships, you get tired of talking about national leaders because that's just assumed. That's the world leader, that's the top ten all time, that's a collegiate record. That's just what it is. It's the best of the best. In the Big Eight, Big 12--I'll probably be a trivia question because my first conference champion was in the Big Eight--so the Big Eight, Big 12, I mean, man you just focused on the conference and if you got NCAA stuff you were excited. Your approach was a little different. And with that, the cast of recruiting. Look at it like this. If we were to take, in football, if we didn't run offensive plays and defensive plays in football and we only took the ratings that you guys come up with, these five-star kids, and line all the kids up. Alabama shows up and Missouri shows up, we don't play offense, defense; we do battery tests on stopwatch and tape measures. How's that look? See what I'm saying. So like all of a sudden, we don't get to tackle lane four. We don't get to intercept the javelin. Our only offense is the kids ability and our ability to coach that kid up to the next level. And I can be the best coach in the world, but if I take a mule and take really good care of it and coach it up to the best of my ability and I mean, I'm a great coach, and I take it and line it up against this abused thoroughbred, who's going to win? You see what I'm saying? So all of a sudden, our lot in life changed. Our population wise, we're about middle of the union and statistically we're going to produce about that many world class athletes that can compete in this league. And then you go out to the Midwest. So then the next question is, do we have access to all those kids? Well if you get a kid that's really that good, we got a battle trying to keep them in house. If a sprinter wants to stay in our climate, they want to see facilities. See what I'm saying? It's pretty tough. Or I could be down in Gainesville or Baton Rouge training year round outside and it's no big deal. So then we've got to have access. So statistically you've got X number of kids that are available to you that can compete in this league. Then you have to have access to them, then you've got to secure them. So our net's got to be that much broader. Just kind of gave you what we're doing recruiting wise, but it's inside out. We start with the state of Missouri and we just keep going out till we go around the globe. And it doesn't matter where the kid comes from, it just matters that they have the capacity to do what I just described."

PM: So have you had to adjust your definition of what's successful since you joined the SEC?

BH: "Oh yeah. Oh yeah."

PM: Is that a hard thing to do as a coach?

BH: "You're a competitor man. I want to see our team with a trophy at the top. For example, our women's team, I feel like someone should give us a trophy. We were seventh. I feel like they should give us a trophy. For what we're up against, you know? They did great."

PM: And does everybody in the SEC have track?

BH: "Vandy's got only women so it's 14 and 13. And everybody's invested, everybody's going hard and everybody's got a big jump start on us. I don't know what everybody else's opinion is, but I feel like the SEC's got about a 25-year head start on our institution collectively as an athletic department. They've secured their core business in football. You've been to all these venues now. You just walk in and say this is a cash cow. South Carolina's operation with the cabooses and the RV stuff on the other end? Holy cow, man. I'm just counting the numbers like, they probably make more in a football weekend than we can generate in a season. For catching up, I respect what we're trying to do, what Mike (Alden) started and what Jim (Sterk) is carrying through on. We've got to catch up. Some of the football facilities, my gosh. We do at SEC Championships, we're on campus for a week so the coaches, a lot of our meetings are in football venues. Whether it's the football stadiums or the luxury boxes or the weight room or the offices, wow. So the whole thing collectively. That's what I was saying, for us to move the program, I needed to isolate what I'm doing and coach the whole team. Now I just coach the javelin and coach (Ross) Richardson works with the other kids. He's done a remarkable job. Then I can focus on all the event areas, focus on the team and focus on our needs. And our needs are indoor track, outdoor track, working with the city to get the cross country course done. That's going to be fantastic and the long term goal is to bring the NCAA Championships to Columbia. That's a good start on that."

PM: So those are all the challenges of this job specifically. But just in general, what is the biggest challenge of being a coach?

BH: "I think for every coach, you build a connection, a relationship with the kid. It's just like the kid's your own kid. You want that kid to be successful. It's painful. You feel every kid's setback. And that probably becomes the greatest challenge. I could take three kids to a championship and inevitably, one's going to be a rock star, one's going to be average and one's going to have a hard day. You want to celebrate with the great one and say you did pretty good and then you've got to hug (the others). It's just a constant emotional roller coaster. It ends up being in my opinion probably the hardest thing because you really do care about all the kids and you want them all to be successful. Trying to help them understand, yes, we want to win everything. No doubt about it. I want our kids on the top of the podium. But also the realization that the outcome's not what we're seeking. It's the journey we're on that we're trying to enjoy and it's never a one-stop destination. That is the greatest challenge in my opinion."

PM: The other side: What's the most rewarding part of what you do?

BH: "Seeing kids grow up. Watching kids grow up. Watching them invest and fail. Every recruit that sits in this office listens to me say 'Hey, you come to Missouri, you're going to fail.' And they about fall off the couch. Like 'you're supposed to tell me I'm going to be an Olympian.' Well you're going to fail a lot before you get there so you're going to have to accept that. Where we're at? Best people on the planet. Do you know the name Grant Holloway? He set the collegiate record in the hurdles, he's from Florida. He's unbelievable. Looks like he's Superman. And at the team meeting at the SEC Championship, I said, 'Just a reminder, even a guy like Grant Holloway, looks like Superman, is beatable in this meet. Everybody's beatable.' And sure enough he got smoked. He got beat. So watching them grow not just in their passion of track, but watching them grow as people. And watching them leave, maybe when they graduate, just this little segment of their personal journey that they've grown and they've learned through this passion, this sport that we do, the lessons that are embedded in it and taken it with them for the rest of their lives. It's fun to see to watch kids grow up like that.

The most extreme would be, I just said this yesterday to a recruit, out in that case, Cantwell's first championship medal is out there. And he was so into that message that I just described that he came back from that championship, we were in the middle of winter in the Hearnes Center and training was closed, he needed some tape. He dumps out his book bag, just this nasty, sweaty, gross stuff and this metal thing falls out. I'm like, 'What's that?' He's like, 'That's what they gave me over in Moscow.' I'm like, 'You mean your world championship medal?' He was like, 'Yeah, I was going to throw it out. Do you want it?' But he was honest. He was so less concerned about what he was going to get if he won. He just wanted to see if he could be the very best in the world in what he did, which at that time was track. His identity wasn't in track. If you tried to talk to him about track, he would change the subject and talk to you about fishing. See what I'm saying? Because it's not who he is. It's something I do, I love to do it, I want to see how good I can be, I want to play against the best of the best and see if I can beat them. If I don't, great, I've got to go get better. If I do, yeah, let's get back to work and do it again. And so that is gratifying. To get some reality to sport. Because I think that society has lost perspective on sport. We just get too...we're feeding it to little kids. We over celebrate sport at times and the real lessons in sport are lost. I think there's a reality. I'm from a military family, too. My brother's still active. A colonel, a Blackhawk pilot, the distinguished flying cross for special operations where he got shot to hell. They had to blow it up when they got back to Baghram. So for me, it's like there's always a reminder that yeah, we had a bad track meet, but we get to wake up and do it again. You have a bad day down range, you ain't getting up. So there's a different reality. Those are the kind of messages that I want our kids to be able to walk away with. Hey, life's tough, and I've learned how to adapt, overcome, fail, fail better next time, get up and keep going and in the end I'm successful. To me, to get back to one of your earlier questions, that's a really great measure to define success. Ultimately, that's the measure of success. Are you willing to get up and keep going and achieve your goal?"

PM: When you're done coaching, what would you hope that people that had you as a coach would say?

BH: "Obviously that I cared about them and treated them right. Helped them in some capacity in their life and left a mark. Something that they'll say they're taking with them. That one thing. Just that one thing that they're taking with them and they're sharing with their kids. That would be pretty cool."