Coach reflects on key lessons from the track

When Track North coach Dick Moss watches club prodigies like Andrew Ellerton and Ross Proudfoot circling the track with awe-inspiring speed, he does so knowing exactly what it feels like to be in their shoes.

Granted, that was more than three decades ago. But victories in events such as Olympic Trials and NCAA finals tend to stay with a person a good, long while.

Born in Sudbury and raised in various outposts across the region, the elder of two boys in the family recalled a time when “organized sport” was not a prerequisite to remaining active.

“As a kid, it was a different time then,” Moss said. “We didn’t have video games, so we played sports all the time. We played pickup baseball, we played pickup football — we would go back in the bush and spend the whole day playing cowboys and indians.”

Sure, it may not have been the base of cross-training that might work its way into modern times coaching manuals – but it sure was effective. After brief attempts at baseball and hockey, Moss was enrolled with the Sudbury Track and Field Club, under the guidance of head coach Errol Gibson.

At the tender age of 11, Moss received track lessons that would last a lifetime. “Errol Gibson was way, way ahead of his time,” Moss said. “If you look at the long-term athlete development model that is being used now, Errol was doing that back in the 1970’s.”

A year later, it was off to Lively District Secondary, where Moss crossed paths with Bill Bell, head of physical education at the school and coach to all things athletic in the land of the Hawks.

“He coached everything and for some reason, he took a shine to me,” Moss said.

While his high school career involved stints in football, badminton and basketball, it was clear, early on, that track was the sport for Dick Moss.

“I knew I was fast in the school yard. You would organize a race to the end of the pavement and I would be the guy who would get there first.”

While this kind of talent might lead the current-day coach Moss to expose a young athlete to countless meets, that wasn’t the landscape of track back then.

“Errol Gibson’s focus was never OFSAA,” Moss explained. “I only ran in one OFSAA and that was my final year. He felt that was too early in the year to really race fast, so his focus for us was on the summer OTFA season.”

The strategy didn’t seem to harm Moss, posting times of 48.3 in the 400-m, 21.8 in the 200-m and 10.8 in the 100-m, though he considered himself more of a long sprinter.

“I could basically get into a zone for almost a full 400 metres where I didn’t hear anything,” Moss said. “I was just totally focused on the sport.”

Narrowing his post-secondary choices between a pair of Big Ten schools, Moss by-passed Ohio State in favour of Wisconsin, teaming with legendary track coach Dan McClimon.

“I remember finding a group of people who were very much in sync in terms of thinking, in terms of sense of humour – and they were not track people,” Moss said. “I very much grew up in university. When I went down there, I was 17 years old, very shy, very quiet, and I came out of there much more confident.”

And a much different runner, having gradually shifted to the 600-m race on the indoor tracks — the distance at which Moss claims he excelled — and eventually the 800-m outdoors.

“I ran a 1:53 in a twilight meet 800-m race here in Sudbury in the summer, and the word got back to my coach in Wisconsin,” Moss said. By the time he returned to school in September, his spot on the 4 X 800-m relay team had already been penciled in. A good thing too, as that crew went on to claim a national championship for the Badgers.

While the school year, at that stage, involved donning the Wisconsin colours, summers allowed Moss to wear the maple leaf proudly on his singlet, competing for a couple of years with the Canadian national team.

Despite winning the Olympic Trials in 1976, Moss fell just short of making the qualifying standard, posting a time of 1:47.80 when 1:47.40 was needed to compete in Montreal.

Still, la Belle Province did provide one of his more memorable races, streaking by one of Europe’s best 800-m runners in lifting Canada past Italy in a televised dual meet finale. By the time he left Wisconsin, health issues had become a concern, prompting a slightly different path.

“I started coaching track as a way to stay involved until my health returned and I could start running again,” Moss said.

By the time that window opened once more, it was five years later and Moss was well on his way to establishing a highly successful local track program — one that would certainly do justice to one of the best track athletes that Sudbury has ever produced.