Sturgis XC 'Star' Takes Center Stage
September 8, 2015
By Wes Morgan
Special for Second Half
Daniel Steele became a star in the fifth grade when he played a star in his class’ Christmas production.
Ever since, he’s fed off that adrenaline rush each time the curtain has gone up.
He’s played Rooster in “Annie Jr.” and the White Rabbit in “Alice In Wonderland.” Steele greedily gobbled goodies as Augustus in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” He was cowman Slim in “Oklahoma” and eventually landed lead roles of Mr. McAfee in “Bye Bye Birdie” and Mr. Browning in “Leaving Iowa” before his most demanding performance as Seymour Krelborn in “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Steele said at an early age he was comfortable at the center of attention, which is where he first experienced the joy of putting in work for the payoff of a laugh – and where he learned the importance of precise delivery and timing.
“I feel like I’ve always been a lively person,” the Sturgis High School senior said. “Singing and music have always been a part of my life. It’s something I really love doing.”
One day Steele, who also knows his way around the guitar and clarinet when he’s not leading the Sturgis High School marching band as drum major, hopes to earn a living in entertainment. Most folks, however, know Steele for his rapid ascent in the world of Michigan high school distance running.
That is one of Steele’s talents that materialized his freshman year when he made a decision to be good rather than coast on natural ability.
Believe it or not, Steele said he’s far more nervous stepping up to the starting line at a big meet than delivering a monologue or singing a solo in front of a packed house.
Last season, Steele flirted with a sub-16-minute time for the first half of the season leading up to the Jackson Invitational. He was determined that would be the race where he’d finally break through. He ran a 15:59.5.
“That was one of the biggest things for me as a runner,” he said. “That had been such a big goal for such a long time. That was huge. Achieving something like that kind of opened my eyes like, ‘Hey, if I can do that, I can probably do more.’ It’s going to hurt, but I can do this.”
Steele, last year’s Wolverine Conference champion who is considering running cross country and track at Grand Valley State University, has set the highest of goals for his final season. He’s gone on record saying he will leave Sturgis as the school-record holder, and his aim is to go undefeated.
Keith Keyser, a big supporter of Sturgis athletics, holds the program’s fastest time of 15:36. Before Steele’s third-place finish at the Lower Peninsula Division 2 Finals last year, the best performance by a Sturgis runner at an MHSAA championship race was Keyser’s fifth-place performance in 1981.
“He will be working on his racing technique this year to attack those goals,” Sturgis coach Emerson Green said. “Time improvements are nice, but since cross country times are not linear due to weather, course, competition, etc., he will need to be able to adjust his race strategy based on what the competition yields.”
That’s something Steele learned the hard way this past March, when he disregarded his targeted first-lap split in the 800-meter MHSAA Final and dropped from first to eighth place on the second lap.
Pushing his body to the red line too early cost him. Though the experience taught him to implement more method rather than relying solely on guts, old habits are hard to break.
“I can’t feel too bad about it because I really did give it everything I had,” Steele said. “I learned my body is only capable of so much. I want to push myself to the limit, but running is tricky.
“It’s not always consistent and you can’t always go out and give it everything you have and have it work out. The last 200 meters of the race, it was kind of like muscle failure. Everything was falling apart and nothing was working. But I still remember pushing through all of that.”
Green, a chemistry teacher at Sturgis, hopes he can convince Steele that winning races isn’t always about who has the biggest heart.
Steele credits the guidance he’s received from Green, a former college runner at Alma and a 21-year head coach for the Trojans, for helping him grasp the importance of thinking his way through a race and through life.
“I have a lot of respect for Coach Green for how he carries himself as an adult and how he’s helped all of us on the team,” Steele said. “He’s an all-around great guy and really knows what he’s doing. Personally, he’s helped me a ton with his wisdom. Having the experience that he does … and that he’s very personable, it’s easy for me to listen to him and put to good use everything he has to say.”
Every leading man can benefit from a competent supporting actor, and Steele is now being truly pushed in race situations by classmate Shawn Bell, who was 14th at Michigan International Speedway last fall with a time of 16:11.4.
The two finished 1-2 at the St. Joseph Invitational late last month in their only race of the year so far. Steele clocked a 16:25, and Bell crossed the line in 16:29.
“Last year I was kind of training by myself,” Steele said. “I was out in front of the pack in workouts, and in most races I was the frontrunner. Even at the state meet I was pretty much by myself because it was so spread out.
“This year I feel like Shawn has really played a part in the sense that he’s a lot faster now than he was his junior year. He’s made a lot of good steps mentally. He’s a very talented kid; we’ve seen that since middle school. Now he’s really putting in the work and now he’s right up there with me. We’ve been pushing each other like crazy.”
When the cross country season is over, Steele will begin winter workouts for track. Sometimes he uses those hours running around Sturgis to recite lines for the winter musical.
If anyone sees him darting down a sidewalk apparently in mid-conversation, he wants people to know he’s not talking to himself; he’s simply working through a scene.
See below for a video piece on Steele by JoeInsider.com.
Wes Morgan has reported for the Kalamazoo Gazette, ESPN and ESPNChicago.com, 247Sports and Blue & Gold Illustrated over the last 12 years and is the publisher of JoeInsider.com. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Berrien, Cass, St. Joseph and Branch counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Sturgis' Daniel Steele surges past the crowd during his MHSAA Regional race last season. (Middle) Steele rounds the curve at Michigan International Speedway on the way to finishing third in the LP Division 2 Final. (Photos courtesy of the Steele family.)
Sleeman Charting 50th Season at Pioneer
By
Chip Mundy
Special for Second Half
October 20, 2017
By Chip Mundy
Special for Second Half
ANN ARBOR – It is fitting that Don Sleeman coaches high school students to excel at making long runs.
Sleeman’s run at Pioneer, however, has not been long as compared to a cross country course. It has been long in terms of a marathon.
This fall, the 79-year-old Sleeman is coaching his 50th boys cross country team at Pioneer, and fittingly, it is ranked No. 1 in Lower Peninsula Division 1 and a serious contender for the MHSAA title. He took over the program in 1968 – just a month before Al Kaline, Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich led the Detroit Tigers to the World Series title.
Those former Tigers are long retired. Sleeman still relishes everything about his coaching career. While running is his passion, the relationships he has formed with his athletes are the everlasting rewards.
“Recently, I just saw one of the guys from my first team,” Sleeman said. “My first team stands out; those guys will always be my first team, and they’re in their 60s now. When I see them, it’s like we’re old friends.
“There are a multitude of memorable teams. We won the state title in 1987, and it was the greatest thing that ever happened. We won it again in 1990, and every time it happens it’s the greatest thing that ever happened.”
Pioneer won Class A titles again in 1993 and 1994 and added a Division 1 title in 2008. If it can win a title this year, Sleeman and Pioneer would have MHSAA Finals titles in the top division in four consecutive decades. And Sleeman has the team that can do it.
Eight men deep
Sleeman has a pleasant problem with his 50th team.
“I’ve got a thing most people would be glad to have, but it is kind of a problem,” he said. “I can run seven, but I have eight kids who deserve it. One kid is on the sidelines every meet, and that is something I have fumbled with. I don’t want to leave anyone out.
“I just look at the total picture and try to be as fair as I can to everybody. One of the underlying thoughts is whoever has the last best performance gets the nod unless there are other extenuating circumstances. I try to focus on who has had the most recent success, so it’s sort of a challenge for them to match up to that.”
Pioneer has five seniors and three juniors, and all of them are capable of scoring. On Thursday, Pioneer had seven of the top 14 finishers as it won the third and final Southeastern Conference jamboree of the season.
Junior Nick Foster has been the top runner this season. Foster, who finished seventh in the Division 1 meet last year, set a course record Thursday at Hudson Mills in Dexter as he won in 15 minutes, 29.5 seconds.
“I think he can be top three in the state this year, but I’ve always thought he had that kind of capability,” Sleeman said of Foster, who might be the team leader but also has plenty of help.
Two other juniors, Ethan Mielock and Michael Shkolnik, finished 37th and 52nd, respectively, last year at the MHSAA Final. Seniors Jack Wallace (74th) and Aldo Pando Girard (75th) also placed last year. Junior John Florence, who did not place at the 2016 Final, was fourth Thursday in the SEC jamboree, while senior Philip Valtadoros was 10th.
“On other teams when we’ve won it, if any of my top five kids had faltered, we wouldn’t have won,” Sleeman said. “I had five and that was it. And on the occasion when we got second, I had five and that was it.
“We have a luxury this year in that we have great depth. Actually, from one through eight, all have struggled at times and all have done good.”
Sleeman said he has one other luxury this season.
“One of the greatest things that is going on right now is that I have incredibly supportive parents who are willing to do all sorts of things to help me and help the team,” he said. “They are very involved. In past years I’ve had very supportive parents in terms of having a positive outlook toward what I am doing but they didn’t necessarily get involved.
“This set of parents is very involved, and they are involved in a positive sort of way.”
Getting started
Sleeman is a graduate of Fenton High School, and around that time he fell in love with running.
“I always just loved running, going back to high school,” he said. “I was running back when nobody else was, and people thought I was nuts.
“I liked the feel of it. I remember the first long run I did. We were all out at the local lake called Silver Lake. It wasn’t terribly far from town, but everybody else got a ride back. I ran back, and everybody thought I was nuts. I’ve been running literally ever since.”
Sleeman’s path to Pioneer was not a direct one. He enrolled in the Air Force. He went to college. He even did a stint in the Peace Corps. But all the time, Sleeman continued to run.
However, one thing eluded him: A steady job.
“Prior to being 30, I tried my best not to have a regular job,” Sleeman said. “I didn’t want to be tied down; I wanted to experience things. All of a sudden after I got my master’s degree, I kind of looked around and thought that I needed to get a job.”
Sleeman landed at Pioneer, where he taught for 27 years. After he retired from teaching, Sleeman stayed busy with a job in admissions at the University of Michigan. And he continued to coach Pioneer.
It was a different time in 1968. Running wasn’t very popular, and nobody had a portable phone or any type of electronic device that could cause a lapse in concentration.
Sleeman had to adjust his ways throughout the years to stay current with his student-athletes. But the running has stayed the same.
“The only difference is we have better stopwatches and GPS, and everything is online,” he said. “We have automatic timing at the finish line.
“The one thing that has changed is that I get a lot of kids who have had very little physical activity before I get them. That has changed. You get a lot of kids like that, and it takes those kids a while to adapt to cross country. It’s all about development and being able to run more, not less.”
Sleeman said sometimes he has to recruit the classes and halls at Pioneer for runners. Other times, the program recruits itself.
“Some kids come to you interested, and some kids you just pass in the hallway and you just kind of blind side them a little bit and start talking about it,” he said. “A lot of them look at you like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Then you get the ones who follow through. I’ve got kids on the team now that I didn’t know who they were when they showed up.
“It’s always been a mixture, not one way or the other. They just show up on their own. I got an e-mail this week from a kid who said, ‘I might get cut from the basketball team. If I do, I want to run. What do I have to do?’ OK, sounds good to me, and I don’t even know who he is. When you get something like that, you hope it’s because he has heard something good about the program.”
Setting an example
Many years ago, Sleeman thought it might be getting close to the time to retire.
“Just throwing a number out, it could have been 20, 25 years ago when things weren’t going well, and it was kind of a me generation at that time,” Sleeman said. “I’m thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I worked my way through it, and I realized that it was just a momentary thing, and I had to do like my athletes. I had to make something out of it myself. I can’t rely on others to make it better for me.”
It wasn’t the only time he thought about retiring.
“I remember being in my late 60s and I thought to myself – I didn’t say it to anybody – but I thought, ‘I don’t need to be coaching past 70.’ Then I got past 70, and now I’m 79 and I’m still going.”
Sleeman offers no hint at his future plans, but he sounds like he still enjoys coaching and staying active.
“I don’t know how people retire and go chase a ball around a hole and hang out at the 19th hole,” he said. “I don’t know how they keep going.
“One of the things that has been beneficial to me is that I’m in pretty good health. I have some aches and pains, and in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been able to be more active. I don’t know what happened. I’m just glad that it is happening. I’ve been able to go around at the meets from Point A to Point B better. I ride my bike from Point A to Point B to see what they’re doing.”
It would seem like, at age 79 and still so active, Sleeman is setting a perfect example for his student-athletes. But his mind is working as fast – if not faster – in an effort to help.
“My personality is don’t mess with me,” he said. “I try to teach the kids what is happening and why it’s happening. I try to make everything as clear as I can in an education sort of way, but as I do that, inevitably it comes down to them listening. I tell them to look at me when I’m talking to them.
“I am a disciplinarian, and one of the things that goes with that is a certain amount of negativity about it. I don’t like that. I don’t like being a cop. I don’t like being an authority figure, but you find yourself in that position, and I’m not going to shy away from it.”
Chip Mundy served as sports editor at the Brooklyn Exponent and Albion Recorder from 1980-86, and then as a reporter and later copy editor at the Jackson Citizen-Patriot from 1986-2011. He also co-authored Michigan Sports Trivia. E-mail him at [email protected] with story ideas for Jackson, Washtenaw, Hillsdale, Lenawee and Monroe counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Ann Arbor Pioneer boys cross country coach Don Sleeman has been guiding runners on the course for 50 years. (Top middle) Sleeman yells to Angad Sidhu as Sidhu passes him during a race. (Bottom middle) Sleeman signals to approaching Nick Foster. (Below) Sleeman has led Pioneer to five MHSAA titles and could have a sixth champion on the way this fall. (Photos by Peter Draugalis.)