Runners Mourn St Louis Coach Mayer
January 12, 2016
By Dick Hoekstra
Reprinted from Gratiot County Herald
His former coach at St. Louis is one of the main reasons Dale Devine has been coaching cross country the past 25 years at Alma High School.
That coach, Jerry Mayer, passed away Dec. 8, at the age of 72 after battling Parkinson’s disease.
“Jerry and my friend Craig Higby got me interested in running,” Devine said. “One thing is Jerry always made it fun, although he also worked us very hard. Those times there was a lot of overtraining, but surprisingly none of us got injured. Maybe it’s because a lot of the kids ran around a lot more (than kids today).”
Higby was the individual MHSAA Finals champion on the Sharks’ 1979 team coached by Mayer, which edged Freeland 86-88 to win a Lower Peninsula Class C title at Clare.
Higby completed the three-mile course in 14:49, and was joined in the top 10 by three teammates. Armando Garza, who went on to run for Alma College, took fourth in 15:25; Paul Diaz, who later competed for Southwestern Michigan Community College, was sixth in 15:32; and Doug Border, whose son Brayden was an all-stater for the Sharks in 2007 and 2010, took 10th in 15:36.
But the Gratiot County Herald story that week said “the place that made the whole difference was Steve Crumbaugh in 65th with a time of 16:50. He gained several places near the end of the race which proved to be the winning margin over Freeland.”
Devine, who finished 83rd in 16:52, four places behind teammate Pete King in 16:51, said, “I remember personally I needed to do a lot of running the prior summer just battling to be in the top seven because we always did pretty well at the state level.”
Mayer was quoted as saying that the 1979 cross country MHSAA title was the first at St. Louis High since the boys basketball and track teams both earned one in 1953.
“I don’t remember a time, and there was never a course or a workout where I feel like we complained or made excuses about courses,” Devine said. “That had a lot to do with Jerry and his expectations. We did a lot of hills, especially at the old Edgewood Hills Golf Course in St. Louis (now Hidden Oaks Golf Course).”
When those expectations weren’t met, Mayer let his team know – sometimes by breaking clipboards.
“He was known for having a temper,” Devine said. “But he knew what potential his athletes had, and was frustrated when they decided to do things on their own instead of listening to his advice.”
Diaz still holds the 400, 800 and 1,600-meter records and Garza the 3,200 record listed on the track and field records board in the school’s gym. All were set during the 1980 season, a few months after the cross country championship.
Janell Best Vier still holds the 100, 200, 400 and 800 records in girls track and field for St. Louis and was part of an unofficial Michigan Interscholastic Track Coaches Association state championship in 1978 won at Potterville. (The Michigan High School Athletic Association began crowning champions in 1979.)
“Coach Mayer had a way of inspiring us to reach higher and dig deeper,” she said. “Many times the goals he set for us were much higher than we would have set for ourselves. After a while, we believed we could do what he told us we could do. Winning was always the goal. He assumed that we could achieve this, so we thought that we could always come in first.
“He cared about us individually and we wanted to make him proud, and not disappoint him. So we exerted maximum effort. Really, that was all he would ask or expect.”
She said Mayer’s sense of humor was dry and constant.
“There was laughter throughout our practices, meetings and even at our meets,” Best Vier said. “We were trading jabs constantly.”
Kathy Hutfilz coached the St. Louis girls track and field team from 1973 until she became athletic director in the mid-1980s at the same time Mayer coached boys track as well as boys and girls cross country.
“Jerry worked as hard as the kids worked at getting ready to compete in meets,” she said. “He cut (results) out of the paper, and we talked about where our best chances were to get points in meets.”
Hutfilz coached the 1981 St. Louis girls to a Class C title.
“He had a phenomenal knowledge of the sports,” said Rudy Godefroidt, who coached Breckenridge to a Class C title in cross country in 1976. “He was always prepared, and made the rest of us coaches better.”
Mayer coached Godefroidt’s daughter, Lorenda, a four-time all-stater in track and field and three time all-stater in cross country.
“Jerry had the ability to bring athletes along to perform at that level,” Godefroidt said. “As a parent and co-coach, I always appreciated the way he treated athletes, brought them along and made sure they were prepared for their competition.”
Mayer taught eighth grade science classes at St. Louis for 30 years. He was voted the Michigan Coach of the Year for Class C Cross Country by MITCA after winning the 1979 title. After his retirement, he served as an assistant coach at Hemlock.
Devine says he tries to emulate in his coaching each year the light, fun and family atmosphere along with high expectations he experienced with Mayer.
Mayer was at Hemlock when Devine started as Alma’s coach.
“He told me after a while I could call him Jerry,” said Devine, who echoed Best Vier’s noting of Mayer’s humor. “One of the nicknames we had for him was Sunshine, although we didn’t tell him to his face. I had him for an eighth grade science teacher, and one of his famous statements was ‘it’s another beautiful day in the thriving metropolis of St. Louis’.”
Although serious in big track and field meets, if Mayer knew the opponent for a certain meet was weaker, he would allow middle distance and distance runners to try some different events – including sprints.
St. Louis was in the Mid-Michigan B league in the 1970s, and the boys and girls track teams often ran meets on separate days of the week. Once they joined the Central Michigan League in the early 1980s, they began competing in meets together as track teams do nearly all of the time today.
“The kids ran similar workouts, guys and girls, and they all got along really well,” Hutfilz said. “They were friends out in public and on the track. We were like a big family. The end-of-year awards were always a cookout at someone’s house, and we did that together.”
PHOTOS: The St. Louis boys cross country team, coached by Jerry Mayer, won the MHSAA's Lower Peninsula Class C championship in 1979. (Photos courtesy of Gratiot County Herald.)
Performance: Brimley's Austin Plotkin
October 25, 2019
Austin Plotkin
Brimley senior – Cross Country
Plotkin finished an accomplishment Saturday that has been achieved in Michigan high school boys cross country only once before. By winning the Upper Peninsula Division 3 Final championship for the fourth time, Plotkin joined Central Lake legend Ryan Shay as the only other four-time boys champion (LP Class D 1993-96), earning the MHSAA “Performance of the Week.”
Plotkin’s time of 17:20.7 was nearly 11 seconds ahead of the field at Gentz’s Golf Course in Marquette and capped an undefeated season that included for the first time a championship as well at the Mackinaw City Invitational on Sept. 26. Plotkin entered this fall with a personal record (PR) of 16:50 and lowered it to 16:32. This season’s Finals winning time actually was just the third-fastest of his four, further backing up Brimley athletic director Hugh Clarke, who called Plotkin arguably the school’s most dominant athlete over the course of a four-year high school career. Plotkin also owns an Upper Peninsula Division 3 Finals track championship in the 3,200 from 2017 and will run that race plus the 800 and 1,600 in the spring. He holds all of his school’s cross country records and is part of two record-holding track relays. Plotkin also plans to play basketball this winter for the first time since freshman year.
Also worth applauding: After an admittedly disappointing freshman year academically, Plotkin has raised his grade-point average a full point over the last two years and is considering a number of options athletically and academically at the college level. He’s planning to study business administration and finance.
Coach Wilson Hester said: “When I first saw him as an eighth grader, I could tell right away he had ability, but he didn’t know pacing or how to run. He would just go out and run fast or slow with not a lot of pacing involved. Once we got him doing proper training and technique work, and he was learning how to pace, he flourished. … He’s brought lots of recognition to the school. He’s been leading the track and cross country teams for the past four years, and everybody in the region and Upper Peninsula knows who he is. … He’s just scratching the surface of what he can do. He has some tremendous potential. I think at the next level, with more mileage, more of a training season – our seasons are so short up here, it’s difficult to get them to where their absolute potential can be – I have no doubt (he’ll continue to improve).”
Performance Point: “In the last probably quarter mile of the race, I definitely thought back to what everyone had said to me when I won freshman year,” Plotkin recalled of Saturday. “They said, 'Oh my goodness, you have so much potential. You could probably do this four years.' And I remember I was scoffing, thinking no, there will be another up-and-comer, somebody who can beat me. And looking back I remember Mr. Clarke told me if I win four years in a row, as soon as possible I'll be in the Brimley Hall of Fame. And just one of the things that came to me in that quarter mile, I was just thinking, one, how wrong I was – I thought that I couldn't do it, and here I was doing it. And plus, also, I was just super-excited to have done it, because it was such a feat – only one other person has done it.”
No shot at putting: “Eighth grade track was my first time running. I actually wanted to do shot put because my summer job the summer before was moving split wood for my grandpa. And then my coach Justin Carrick asked me, he said ‘Hey, we've got nobody doing (the 3,200). You're scrawny. You can do it. We just need someone to run the 2-mile. I don't care what you get – you've just got to run it.’ In middle school it's the first event, and I won it. I ran like an 11:20 that day, which is really bad for eighth grade. He took me out of shot put and put me in the mile and 800, and I went undefeated all the way until the last two meets, which coincidentally were the only two meets we got medals for and Jimmy Storey from Pickford beat me in the 800 both of those meets. So I lost two races and by the end of the season I was down to 10:55 for my 2-mile time. … I fell in love with winning. Once I had a little bit of something to do it for really; now that I had a shoebox of medals, I was like yeah, I can do this. And then I got a text from my friend over the (eighth-grade summer) that was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you come do cross country? It’s like track in the woods.’”
Just getting started: “Coming into it as a freshman, I didn't know that I would have the potential to win. My coach told me first race, do top 20. And I won. From that point, there weren't too many races that I lost. And the ones I did, basically the meet that I lost consistently every year was the Mack(inaw) City Invitational where we ran against Harbor Springs, Petoskey and Gaylord St. Mary. And even at those meets I got second or third. And this year was my first year that I won it. … It came to me naturally as a freshman, and as the years went on I realized I had to do a lot more offseason work and I had to do a lot more in-season work not only to keep my speed, but to go faster. This was my first summer that I actually ran consistently all summer, so this season I came out and broke my PR first meet and then consistently stayed within the mid 16:30s.”
Bays on a run: “When I came in as a freshman, our cross country program was a club. Cross country was out of the picture for a lot of students, and a lot of people didn't want to participate. And track, the year that I was in eighth grade, high school track I think had 11 participants. So it's amazing to see not only how I, but how the entire cross country team has progressed. This season we had about 15 consistent runners for cross country, and last track season … I think by the end we had 25 participants, which is pretty impressive considering we had just 11 four years ago.”
Numbers games: “I think I want to run a business, or, I really like numbers; I’m in accounting right now, and I love balancing journals. So one thing I could do is be a financial officer at a bank, which is a pretty cool deal. … I definitely love in physics, when we have equations, just trying to figure out the mystery behind it and when you can’t make something add up.”
– Geoff Kimmerly, Second Half editor
Past honorees
Oct. 17: Jack Spamer, Brighton cross country - Report
Oct. 10: Kaylee Maat, Hudsonville volleyball - Report
Oct. 3: Emily Paupore, Negaunee cross country - Report
Sept. 26: Josh Mason, South Lyon soccer - Report
Sept. 19: Ariel Chang, Utica Eisenhower golf - Report
Sept. 12: Jordyn Shipps, DeWitt swimming - Report
PHOTOS: (Top) Brimley's Austin Plotkin pushes toward the finish at Saturday's Upper Peninsula Division 3 Final. (Middle) Plotkin runs with a pack earlier in the race. (Photos by Cara Kamps.)