After our cross country and track seasons ended last year, we were satisfied with the level of competition we achieved and the work we did. We didn’t have any reason to expect something different, in terms of the lessons we learned and the attention we each received – until we encountered it, this year, when former South coach Jeff Hess came out of retirement to coach our cross country and distance teams. 

Hess is returning after stepping away from coaching in 2017 and from teaching AP English in 2020. Though I could write many pages about Hess’s accomplishments while running at South, the University of Arizona, and even professionally, I believe the even more imperative focus should be on his attitude of curiosity, competitiveness and drive to teach and improve, when looking at the impact it has had on the entire South community.

Hess first realized he wanted to become a coach in high school. During this time, he competed under Harry Johnson, the coach who initiated a six-year streak of the South boys’ team winning the cross country and track state championships, starting in 1971. As a runner in middle school, Hess trained sometimes with the runners at South carrying out this feat and observed their discipline, feeling ready to become a part of it. When he broke the district record for the mile in ninth grade, he recalled feeling “some responsibility to continue this thing.”

He credits the team culture, spearheaded by his older teammates Bill McChesney and Dirk Lakeman, for introducing him to the hardworking nature of the team his first year. “There was just such a strong sense of the team and the program,” he said. “This is something that we were all doing together, that had been the best for a long time, and it was our job to keep it there.” 

Hess’s junior year, Harry Johnson left to coach Athletics West, the first professional running team sponsored by Nike. John Gillespie, another one of Johnson’s former athletes, took over as South’s coach. Hess would go on to co-coach the team with Gillespie 22 years later.

Now being the top runner on the boys’ side, Hess only felt more responsibility. He remembers thinking, “Okay, I’m the guy now who were the seniors when I was a sophomore, and I need to set the example for everybody else. I took that really seriously. I have a responsibility to show other people how this is done, and to be the person that Dirk and Bill had been for me.”

The team suffered a hardship when they lost their streak of winning the track state championship that year. “It was really tough,” Hess said. However, it helped build an important pillar of his mindset around distance running. One of the main values he wants to hand down to runners now is that “Hard things are worthwhile. It’s not a simple linear process, it’s something that happens on a roller coaster. We learn through these setbacks.”

His senior year, Hess broke the national record in the steeplechase with a time of 8:50.10, a mark that stood for 35 years. He went on to become All-American at the University of Arizona and qualify for the Olympic Trials in the steeplechase.

Hess emphasized that “There’s not very much you can learn from the glorious moments, except that they feel really good. It’s everything that you did to get to that point that’s giving you the valuable experience.” 

When he finished college, Hess became a teacher and a coach, experiencing success with coaching over 25 state champions at Glendale High School and many team state titles when he returned to South. Along the way, he considered what he had learned from coaches all his life.

“My high school coaches were both able to deliver to a broad range of abilities, speeds, and levels of maturity. When I began coaching, I saw everything that my prior coaches did. Harry was this incredibly hardworking coach, who didn’t sleep very much because he had so much to do. For a long time, I felt inadequate because I didn’t do it that way, but then it came to the point where I realized I did things in a way that worked for me, and it was effective. It took me a very long time to realize there are more than one ways to do this job, and not to compare yourself to another person.”

He was able to adapt and fine-tune his training through deep research and careful record-keeping, which he does today with our team. Hess records every split of every rep for every athlete during any important workout. This allows him to modify workouts in real time, as well as watch for trends throughout the season. If he needs to pull back on an athlete doing too much volume, he can easily do so.

For the interpersonal side of coaching, Hess found that one of a coach’s most important roles is simply to believe in the athlete’s ability to do what they’ve never done before, with a vision of what is possible. 

“The coach has influence besides just writing the workouts,” Hess said. “There’s a range of personal characteristics a coach can have that can be effective, and it doesn’t have to be one way. Over the years, I’ve learned the most important thing for creating the coach-athlete relationship is just authenticity.”

Along with his coaching accomplishments, Hess also set into motion several other important changes in the community. During his coaching stint at South that began in 1999, he started the IOP program and built the rock climbing room, working with a group of students and materials mostly donated from the community. These changes all feed into this theme of having a vision of what is possible and executing it, even if it’s a thing previously unheard of.

This year at South, Hess has made an immediate impact on our team. The girls’ team placed second at state in cross country, and this track season, he led junior Yosuke Shibata to break the 1500m school record that he himself set.

No longer simultaneously being a teacher and a coach, Hess finds he has much more time and energy to take on the job emotionally.

At the end of the teaching day during his last coaching stint, he didn’t have the capacity to cater to all of the needs and questions after school. “There would be a line of IOP students out the door, and then there’d be distance runners coming in, asking questions before practice. I don’t miss it,” he laughed. “When I decided to take the job, the decision was preceded by oh, if I take this, it gives me a chance to relearn the new things I didn’t have time to learn ten years ago. I spent the four months before we started practicing just learning new things.”

One of the most important abilities Hess wants his athletes to gain is applying the process they’re executing in running to their life. “You’re in this because you understand that rewards come slowly. This process of working hard consistently for years on end can be applied to everything. Jobs, relationships, certainly academics. Be consistent. Do the best you can through difficulties, and realize the successes are wonderful, but they’re also fleeting. They don’t define you, the process defines you.”

Article by Alaya Drummond