August 16, 1979 (Thursday) thru August 19, 1979 (Sunday)

From running log:
No entries for these dates, did not run.

30 years later:
Following Wednesday's run, I decided to take 4 days off, give my knee the remainder of that week to heal. I was icing it periodically, but not stretching or doing any intense physical activity. I was determined to enter the season in the best health I could muster, so with official practice beginning on August 20, I just shut it down until then. In my fog-shrouded memory, I seem to recall that the knee started feeling better right away, within a day or two, so I knew it was the right thing to do.

At some point during this very short hiatus, it was announced that a new teacher named Frank Briscoe would take on the task of coaching boys cross country. We didn't know anything about him, and I think he would have admitted that not only did he not know anything about us, he also knew very little about cross country running! However, he ended up being a decent coach for the time and place of this story. We had a team made up mostly of seniors, a group with experience and determination. We had been assuming that we'd be coaching ourselves, basically, for the 1979 season. Coach Briscoe noticed this immediately, and to his credit understood that his role would be to supervise, deal mostly with the youngsters on the team, and make sure we were organized. The training sessions would be more-or-less managed by me and the other senior leaders on the team. It was a good fit for this team, and we made it work to near perfection. Stay tuned for more on how this would unfold, and for Coach Briscoe's brilliant motivational speaking techniques, as the season opens and the story starts to fill out with races, more old newspaper clippings, and words of encouragement from the legend Harry Haslanger himself. I'll be back posting again on August 20, 2009.

In the meantime, I've fixed and/or added more clips and photos from the Old Fashion Day race I wrote about on this post:
http://1979bhscc.blogspot.com/2009/08/august-8-1979-wednesday.html

And, finally, Frank Briscoe, if you are out there, let us hear from you.