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PM: When you were growing up, what was your involvement in sports?

MB: "Everything. I've been a sports nut since I was little. My dad is athletic. He was always an athlete so always every sport around the house, watching it. I think when you're young and your family is sports oriented, you're watching games on TV and going to games. I grew up in the Chicago area so we'd go to Cubs games and White Sox games and just sports in general. Then when I got old enough to play, I started playing baseball and basketball and flag football. I was never big enough for tackle football. They never quite let me play tackle, I was too small. So, yeah, just anything I could get my hands on. Out in the yard, playing by myself, throwing a ball against the garage, shooting hoops against the garage, neighbors come over playing tennis ball against the garage. All year. A little hoop in the basement. I had an old mattress that we put in our basement and I made a high jump bar and we'd jump over it. I was never a real high jumper, but back then I was. Everything I read growing up was sports. I don't know how many books I've read. I think John Grisham's the only three or four books I've read outside of sports oriented books. Just 24/7 sports for me growing up, watching whatever season. Then slowly, my dad actually ran here for a year, he went to school here, ran here for coach (Tom) Botts. So everything, other than soccer, soccer wasn't very big yet when I was little. Baseball, basketball, flag football and then slowly you start seeing field days at school. 'Hey, we need somebody to run' and you run and you beat everybody and you're like, 'Maybe I could be a pretty good runner.' So then when I got to middle school that's when I started running and I was basically down to running and basketball at that point. And then just kind of took off from there because that's what I was best at was running. Basketball faded away sophomore year of high school and it was all running from there."

PM: How long did you do that and where did running take you?

MB: "I ran through high school, had some great coaches in middle school and high school, I ran at Loyola University in Chicago. I was an all-American twice there 4x800 one year and 3K one year indoors. Had aspirations to run beyond, but I made some really dumb mistakes. I played basketball literally one season between indoor and outdoor and I tore my patellar tendon and I just never quite got back to where I had gotten. It was right after I was all-American in the 3K, ran 7:58 and it was just one day. It was just bad luck."

PM: Was that after your senior year?

MB: "That was during my fourth year. And then I came back my fifth year and I ran okay but I never ran quite to that level again. Back then when you graduated, there was no insurance. You're off, you had to get a job. So I got a job. I went to work and I started my career selling candy for Russell Stover Candies, like a sales rep. Calling on Walgreen's and those kind of stores. That was in Chicago and I just kind of dove into that and I was just running on the side. I got promoted once in Chicago, then I got promoted to be a district manager in Memphis, Tennessee so then I had four states and seven reps that I was in charge of. Then I got promoted to go manage a region for Russell Stover and I was living in Cleveland. I had 12 states and 20 reps and three district managers underneath me. And then I got to the point, it was 1995, I got to the point where it was either move to Kansas City to be in the corporate office or do something else. I always knew I wanted to come back to Chicago and I started to see what the corporate world was like a little bit. They made a bunch of cuts, a bunch of people got fired below me and I just was like, 'Man, I don't know if I want to do this the rest of my life.' So I moved back to Chicago and started running again just because Olympic trials were coming up in '96 and I had done just enough to kind of keep into it and I always wanted to walk away knowing I didn't regret stuff. So I had some teammates, ran with them. I didn't make it, those two guys did, two of my teammates did, which was great. Then I moved on.

Then I actually got sucked back into the candy world. The guy who hired me at Russell Stover hired me at Fannie May candies, which was another big candy company in Chicago, for seven months. Then finally, my college coach--I had become really good friends with him over the years and I kept saying, 'Man, this is my passion. I want to coach.' So his long time assistant finally left for another job. So '96 he hired me to coach the women's distance runners at Loyola, at my alma mater and then I've been coaching ever since."

PM: So how old are you at that point?

MB: "28"

PM: Okay, so you'd been at it about six years in the real world?

MB: "Yeah, about six years in the real world and never looked back. Took a 50% pay cut to get into coaching and never looked back."

PM: Did you know when you were in college you wanted to coach or was it something you kind of figured out once you had been out in the business world?

MB: "I knew I always wanted to coach. Through college, I was the guy reading, back when we actually read Track & Field News and it wasn't online; well, there was no online then. But you actually get the Track & Field News and you're actually looking at results because you don't know the results because you can't find them anywhere so you're reading about them at a meet that happened three weeks ago like 'No way!' So, yeah, I always knew that I wanted to do something and I wanted to coach and be a part of it. But like I said, back then when you graduated, I didn't really have an interest to go to grad school at that time so, like, I had to do something. And it's really hard to get into. I'm really grateful that my college coach brought me in the way he did. It was a pay cut, but it was a full time job, benefits. I didn't make much money, but I didn't need anything. I was still single, I didn't have any debt. I didn't need much."

PM: So when you make that move, are your parents or your friends or anybody saying, do you know what you're doing?

MB: "No, I mean everybody was really supportive because they knew how much I wanted to do it and how passionate I was about it. A lot of them were like, 'Thank God you finally figured it out and got out of the corporate world and did this.' I never looked back. It's been great. It's been great ever since."

PM: A lot of the Olympic sports you can coach a team or there's a lot of private coaching. What are the differences and how do you know which path you want to go?

MB: "For us, like what I do, on specifically the distance coaching side, there's not a lot out there. It's not like soccer and volleyball. There's so many options out there for those guys like clubs and camps. I mean, heck, some of those guys can make double their income in camps with soccer and volleyball. I don't know, there's a ton of opportunities in some of those other sports. For us, it's more like, this is it. Now when Karissa (Schweizer) was looking, when she was graduating, if I really, really wanted to and if I really pushed it, I probably could have started coaching a post-collegiate group and gotten out of college. But I didn't want to get out of college coaching. I love Mizzou, I love being here, I love working with the kids, getting them as freshmen and watching them grow and that kind of stuff. That's fun to me. That's the exciting part of coaching. So that would be the only other way to go is at some point if you have someone like Karissa. It doesn't happen if you don't have someone like Karissa, similar to her, where you can say 'I'll keep coaching you' and then she goes and signs a contract and they say 'Hey, this is my coach' and then they pay you and you coach. To me, it never got serious because I knew for her to go to the next level, she needed; I'm a big believer, 'Hey I got you from here to here. Let's find you the right person to get you from here to here and the right situation where you're training with people." And that's how she ended up with the Bowerman group in Oregon. She's with the best training group in the world. I'm like, 'That's where you need to be.' Sometimes from an ego standpoint, you've got to put your ego aside and take a step back and go 'What's the best thing for this person to win a medal at the Olympic Games?' For that, this is the group she needed to be in. So it was just a matter of making sure it was the best fit for her. And she loved it. She loved it and she loves it. Long story short, that would be the other option from here, but, you know."

PM: You're at Loyola as an assistant. So what's the next step?

MB: "My college coach was in charge of the program and then he brought me in to coach the women, which was nice. I had a lot of autonomy, I learned a lot. For my first coaching, it was brilliant on his part. It would have been a lot easier to coach men right away, obvious reasons. Then to dive in and coach the women I learned a lot. I learned a lot of what to do, what not to do, made a lot of mistakes. Grew a lot and figured stuff out. Then three years in, he left and went to DePaul and I took over both genders and became the head coach at that point. I owe a lot to my college coach. He paved the way. And in some ways, I feel like he took that job to let me grow. He was making more money doing it, but he and I have been really close over the years. He never said that, but part of me feels like maybe he did that to give me a chance to grow. I don't know.'

PM: Coaching men versus women, how big a difference is it? And you said you learned a lot. What specifically did you learn?

MB: "A lot about how to just coach women. It is different. You look at the men's side, typical men, they thrive on pecking order. They thrive on who's the top seven? 'Where am I? I'm number three? I want to be number two."' You know what I mean? So you kind of feed that when you're coaching. You're obviously not pitting people against each other, but you're feeding that testosterone based mentality of I'm better than you, I can be better than him. Same thing against other teams. So you can challenge them in a different way. n the women's side, that's not the most important thing on the women's side from a coaching standpoint. It's more about how do we get this group to move this way, as opposed to breaking it up and moving it? I've learned that there's different, obviously, types of female athletes. And there are some women that I've coached that thrive on that, but it's few and far between. It's more about the group, it's more about, a lot of times a guy just wants to hear what they've got to do. What do you need me to do? Where as on the women's side, you've got to take some more time. The relationship's a little bit different. You build a relationship and then once you gain a female athlete's trust, then you've got it. But it takes longer to gain that trust if that makes sense. On the guys side, you know guys, if guys fight in practice, they may punch each other and then walk out and be best friends an hour later. On the women's side, you've got a whole other piece to work with if things aren't going right. It's just different nuances. It's awesome. I love coaching women. It's so fun to coach women. And I love coaching guys, but it's different. You have to coach them differently to have the kind of success. And one's not better than the other or anything like that. It's just different and it's fine and it's fun."

PM: So you take over at Loyola around 1999. Was it there to Missouri or were there some other stops?

MB: "No, two stops. I coached through the fall of 2006. 2004 I get married, we have our first kid and you're in Chicago and you're looking around going 'where are we want to live?' If you want to buy a house you're going to have to move out in the burbs to be able to afford a house. So we started thinking about what are we gonna do? And so one of my high school teammates who now coaches at Texas A&M, he was at Kent State at the time in Ohio and I was talking to him. I said, 'Look, we really are looking, I think I want to make a change. I want to get somewhere just a new challenge and something that's good for the family.' So he's like, 'You're not going to believe this. I was just at Wichita State,' visiting his mentor who hired him at Kent State. Kind of a similar thing and then he left and he took over the head job at Kent State, similar to what I did, and his distance coach just took the Alabama job and he's looking for a distance coach. He goes, 'I'm staying at Kent State right now. I'm happy there.' I'm like, 'tell him I'd love to talk to him.' That was it. He called me, we went out there and we visited and got the job and fall of 2006, late, we took the Wichita State cross country job. Similar to my role here, head cross country coach, but assistant track coach and we're out there for four years, had two more kids, great experience, won four Missouri Valley women's cross country titles. But quickly figured out there was a ceiling there of how much money I could make with the head track coach, he wasn't going to go anywhere. He's a great guy, he's still there. But there was a ceiling there of what was going to be and I just kind of got back to the point where I wanted to be the head of a program again.

So then after four years at Wichita State, I got a call from Bradley. They were looking to hire a head track and field and cross country coach. They were putting a bunch of money into the program and trying to make it kind of more of a distance oriented program. Putting a lot of money into it and adding an assistant coach and some scholarships and stuff and really felt like it could be a good spot for the next stop. It was a step up in pay. There were some challenges. We didn't have men's track at the time, trying to fight the administration--not fight, but trying to work with the administration to get men's track added back in. So we ended up going there and that was moving back closer to home too because my wife's from right around there, about an hour and a half from there, so that made a lot of sense. So we were there four years, we got men's track added and it was kind of a renaissance in distance running there and then the year after I left they won three conference championships and they just qualified for nationals. So we got it going and then they hired the next right person to take it and I'm really proud of that. Really proud that that program is going the way it's going.

Then after year four there, we got men's track going again, things are going well, wasn't looking really to leave. Actually we were looking to buy some land and build a house out there. Same coach, same guy, my buddy who was at Kent State that helped me get the Wichita State job, when this position opened up, he called Brett (Halter), my name got to Brett, Brett contacted me. We started talking and I hadn't really thought about leaving, but come on, it's the University of Missouri, my dad went here, I grew up a Missouri Tiger fan and just the potential here was ridiculous in every sport. So we made the move."

PM: No hesitation going from being in charge of everything back to now being head coach of one and the assistant in the other?

MB: "Absolutely. That was a big piece was just getting to know Brett throughout the process. I really quickly connected with him and realized that we shared a lot of the same philosophies as far as team and now to run a program and caring about people. I would never go to work for somebody who was a complete jerk. I just couldn't do it. We just lined up. We lined up on all fronts. It felt comfortable and easy and it's been great. It's been five years and I think we've added some amazing staff. The staff has changed since I've been here, but I think we've brought in amazing coaches. As a matter of fact, the staff's completely changed since I got here. So the other four positions have changed over since I got here. And I feel like we've got some just amazing, we've got some great coaches in place and we're doing some amazing things right now."

PM: You're coaching what is at its core an individual sport but in a team setting. What are the challenges of that?

MB: "Oh man. I think the biggest challenge for us is creating team. Because everybody views us as an individual sport. I look at it the other way and say no, we're a team sport. We're a hundred strong is what we always say. We're a hundred strong. And when Karissa was the last one on the podium at the NCAA meet and Gabi (Jacobs) is at the NCAA meet, they're a hundred strong. They know that the reason that they're there is because of the team, the culture that has been created here that helped them get to where they are. Not just the team, but the staff, and the support staff. I happen to be the one that coached Karissa. I'm not the reason she was up there. Everyone is the reason. Gabi Jacobs, Ross (Richardson) coaches her, Brett coached her in the offseason, then Ross coached her. When she does well in Austin, it's not going to be just one, it's everybody that plays a part in that process. From the coaching staff to the academic advisors to all those people. Building that network is, to me, a big challenge. Then finding the kids that fit into the philosophy that you're creating. Recruiting the type of kids that are going to thrive in that environment. If you recruit a kid that is all about themselves, they don't care about the team. They're just going to be about 'what am I going to get out of this?' You've got to find the right kids that will buy into that team oriented philosophy that will thrive in that environment, which Karissa, Gabi, Roberto, all those guys do, and trying to mesh those two worlds together in an individual sport. To me, that's the big challenge.

And then you've got a lot of other challenges outside of that just with each kid. Think about any coach right now trying to get the best out of their kids. Think about how many outside influences are being pounded on them on a daily basis. Good and bad. Academics, athletics, leadership stuff; we've got all these great programs in our athletic department that are awesome, but it takes time...It's all great stuff. They're things that you have to consider as you're preparing someone to compete at this level with all these other things to do. Karissa right now is a pro. She just runs. Now she does a lot. She can't run all day so she's lifting, but a lot of recovery, but then she's able to relax. She doesn't have to worry about a test here and a paper here, meeting with this group and going to this leadership thing. She may have a couple speaking engagements here and there. Very different. You can do a whole different myriad of things with this person from a training standpoint and still allow them to stay healthy and get recovered from workout to workout and race to race than we can. So we have to factor that into the training piece. You have to. Then you've got the social factors. God, there's a million things. There's a million things. Nutrition. Are they paying attention to what they should be doing in the dining hall or are they just eating to eat? What are they doing in recovery? What are they doing when they're going home? Are they getting in the training room and doing the ice baths and the cryotherapy chamber or the Normatech or all those other things? That's the other biggest challenge is trying to help these kids manage their lifestyle now. Because when I was in college, like, we had practice at three. I went to three classes before that and I had practice at three. That was all I did. That was it. So you had a lot more time to nap. These kids, I know they get naps in here and there, but a lot of these kids are at the MATC from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. That wasn't my college experience as a runner. As a student and an athlete, it was way different back then. It was so much simpler. Now, I think we're doing a much better job of developing these kids, like as people. There's so much more growth for them now than when I was in school, but it was different. As a coach, you have to factor in all those things. Because if you just try to coach them like there's none of that going on, they're going to break down. They're going to get tired, they're going to get sick, whatever. Flu costs you two weeks of training, done. Especially if it happens in February, late January when you're trying to get ready for the indoor meet, or late September and you've got the conference meet at the end of October in cross country and you miss two weeks, you're done. Man. You can't do it all for them, but you've got to guide them. You've got to help them figure it out and it's tough.

PM: Those are a lot of the challenges, but what's the best part about coaching for you?

MB: "The relationships for sure. Having a young freshman, recruiting a senior in high school or junior in high school now and watching them come in here and just seeing how much they grow over those four or five years, athletically, academically, as a person. That to me is the coolest part of what we do because everybody changes so much. One of the challenges is not to have favorites, but there's always kids that you're gonna be drawn to because of their work ethic or their mentality or you know, you see something in them that reminds you of you. So you just connect. You try to find a way to connect with each kid and every kid's a little different. You connect differently with some kids because of things like that, but you've got to find a way to connect with every kid somehow. And that's challenging. But that's really the art of coaching is when you connect with a kid and you get them to buy into what you're doing and you get them to trust what you're doing, that's when they start performing. I use Karissa as an example because she's an easy one. She would have done anything. She was bought in. Bought into the whole program. And that's what allowed her, and she took really good care of herself and she did all the little things right. Kieran Wood breaking four minutes in the mile this year. Like he came in, very easy. It's hard when you bring in a grad student from England. A lot of times it takes a little longer for them to buy in. But he bought in right away and just trusted the process. Had a great cross country season, had a great indoor season and then we caught an injury early in the outdoor season and it derailed his whole outdoor season. But the connections. Ultimately it's that feeling, when you have someone, that was one of the greatest moments, first sub-four minute mile I've ever coached. So that was amazing. What a great feeling. That's just the end of the journey. That's here. From here to here, you better enjoy this as a coach or you're going to be miserable because this is just icing on the cake. Watching Karissa win any one of her national championships was amazing and certainly would go down as some of the most exciting moments of a coaching career, but it's really where you go from here to here that makes the difference that you live in every day. That's the part you've got to love. If you're a coach and you love that, you're probably going to be a pretty good coach."

PM: Whether it's five years or 25 years down the road, when you're done, what would you want the people you coached to remember about you?

MB: "Hopefully that they know it was about more than just track and that I cared about them as people. And I cared about them once they left. I hope. It's hard because you don't see all those people very often, but I'm hoping they can learn something about in their life as a mom or a dad or in their career or something that they look back and they go, 'Now I got it. We figured that out in our program.' Teaching them to grow as people and be more prepared for life outside of here. There's only a couple of people that run professionally. It's such a small percentage. Percentage wise, I think football and basketball are probably similar, but there's just not as many people that are going to go on and run professionally. It has to be about more than we're going to wring you out, get everything we can out of you and just send you on your way. It's not about that. It's about giving them the tools they're going to need to be successful afterwards in life. Get the most out of them here because that's our job and they want to be good. They're coming here to be good. They're coming here to be a better runner. So we're going to do that. But as we do that, I hope that they remember that we as a staff care about them and are teaching them some things that they're going to take with them the rest of their life."

PM: You ever miss selling candy?

MB: "No. No. It was fun. In a different way. It was challenging in a different way, but no, I don't miss that world. It's a different world. And it's been 22 years since I've been in that corporate world. I can imagine it's only gotten crazier. And our world gets crazier here too as people change and kids change, it gets crazier. There's different things that we've got to worry about and it happens in the corporate world as well, but yeah, no. I don't miss it. I wouldn't give up this life for anything."