 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
LSU Track Coach Pat Henry carries a record of success like no other and a work-ethic to match Pat Henry is a dichotomy of sorts. If you’ve never met him and have only the descriptions offered by various sports wags to go on, he is a stone-faced, unyielding force that produces championship after championship with a no-nonsense attitude. And that’s partly true. His wife, Gail, does say he should smile more. Henry contends he’s smiling on the inside.
But if you get to meet him, you might hear about the time he was at the White House and gave President George W. Bush the business for wearing a burnt orange tie in a picture he posed for with the LSU track team. The tie might have gone unnoticed had the University of Texas baseball team, which just happens to boast the colors of burnt orange and white, not been standing out of camera shot, waiting for their picture with the commander in chief. That’s right, Henry not only messed with the president, he messed with Texas. Sometimes, Henry says, you have to know when to rest. Yet it’s the hardest thing he can seem to accomplish these days. “We took 24 (people) to nationals last year and we have
22 of them back. We’ve never had those kind of numbers before,”
Henry said. “Sometimes it’s those years where you have
to be really focused on what you have to do to be successful. Right
now, my time is spent more on the present. How do we educate ourselves
so that we can educate our young people on doing something different
to succeed for the next year?” The next year. Forget about the previous 17, there’s no time to rest on laurels. Maybe one day, Henry says, he’ll take the time to reflect on his team’s past accomplishments. But that’s not really what he’s about. Even though his office is literally covered with every award possible to win — there may even be an Oscar in there somewhere — he’ll be glad for the day when he can move them into a separate room within the track offices. In another life, he was a wrestler at Del Norte High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There he remembers a sign on the ceiling that read, “If you can read this, it’s too late.” Henry jokes now that he read that sign a lot, but one almost wonders if there isn’t a similar sign during the track season — one that Henry pushes himself and his teams to avoid looking at from flat on the mat. A long line of coaches ... Two of Henry’s four brothers are part of the family business. Matt coaches cross country and track at the University of New Mexico alongside brother Mark, who serves as associate head coach. ...plus one draftsman Henry has been the most successful of the coaching clan. He began his career in 1973 at Hobbs High School, where he led the Eagles to four state championships in 10 years. From there, he arrived at Blinn College, a junior college in Brenham, Texas, where he had no assistants. In his four years there, he won Indoor and Outdoor National Junior College Coach of the Year honors his final two years, along with a sweep of the 1987 NJCAA Indoor and Outdoor Championships. Following that season, he packed his bags for LSU. “I’m glad my dad wasn’t a bricklayer,"
Henry joked, "although I was really interested at one time
in being a draftsman. When you come from a family of doctors or
lawyers, when you come from that kind of environment, it’s
hard to break away from it.” Mr. Consistency So how does he do it? How does Pat Henry produce not only nationally-competitive teams every year, but national-championship teams? “There are a few contributing factors,” Henry said. “When I coached high school, we won a state title. Then I coached at a junior college and thought, ‘well maybe this will be a little different.’ Then I get here and it’s really no different. The key is the people you have with you and that they know you’re going to be consistent. One other aspect is that I have surrounded myself with good assistants who are of like philosophy, good recruiters, teachers, and dedicated to hard work. “It’s amazing how things kind of happen. It’s
like the snowball, once it gets started rolling, people get stuck
to the ball, and sometimes you hit a bump. But if you do things
right, you get rolling again.” Since 1988, Henry has swept the Women’s SEC and NCAA Indoor and Outdoor titles three times. The Lady Tigers have also come close to bettering that mark on several occasions, finishing with three firsts and one second in 1995, two firsts and two seconds in 1994 and 1997, and in 1988 they finished with three firsts and a sixth at the NCAA Indoor meet. The men came close to championship sweeps of their own in 1989 and 1990, but came up short with ties for sixth and fifth place respectively at the NCAA Indoor meet. By the end of the 2003 season, Henry’s championship tally at LSU stood at 21 national women’s titles, four national men’s titles, 14 women’s SEC titles, and five men’s SEC titles. During that span, his teams have never finished worse than sixth in men’s SEC competition and never worse than fourth on the women’s side. But perhaps most impressive of all, were the 10 straight Women’s NCAA Outdoor championships from 1988 to 1997. It’s a feat not even Henry, the humblest of the humble, thinks will be duplicated. “But our goal is for the athletes to do their best. If a championship comes about as a result, then that’s icing on the cake.” Those words can be tough to swallow from a man driven so hard by a will to succeed that he once described recruiting as being willing to go to the moon if there was a guy there who could jump. Sometimes though, you have to know when to rest. Other times, by the time you’ve read the handwriting on the ceiling, it’s too late. Don’t expect Pat Henry to be looking up anytime soon. Written by Josh Duplechain | LSU Office of University Relations
Related Links LSU
Track and Field/XC NCAA Track and Field Men’s
Cross Country |
Twenty-five
national titles and 19 Southeastern Conference championships in
his 17 years at LSU have done nothing to quell his competitive juices.
Nor does his schedule allow it. The recruiting process, he says,
is non-stop and the seasons seemingly run into each other. After
completing a sweep of the 2003 NCAA women’s indoor and outdoor
titles in late June, Henry and company go back to work Sept. 5 for
the start of cross-country season.
“After
the eighth, sixth, or even the fourth, I definitely wasn’t
thinking we’d go for 10,” Henry said. “Actually,
if we had done some things differently we could have won another
title. There were years where there were better teams but they were
focused on trying to beat us rather than do what they had to do.
