By Luke Hernandez
Covid affected all of us differently. Some people may have missed out on a graduation. Others may have missed out on a birthday. For Matt Field he missed out on his senior collegiate track season.
Matt finished his collegiate running career and still had more left in him. He wasn’t done yet. 
Matt volunteers to be an assistant coach for the cross country and track team under the head coach, Coach Spotts. He originally came for just a year and to fill a gap because there weren’t yet enough assistant coaches. Matt goes on to say how he fell in love with coaching after this year.
“I really found that I liked helping other people. I learned so much about track throughout my career, and learned all the ins and outs of training and all the scientific aspects of track. So it sort of felt useless to just move on and not do anything with it. So when I got to help out, everything just clicked and I was like yeah I need to be doing this, I want to come back a second year and just been going on ever since and now I’m the head coach”.
Matt had some big shoes to fill, as Spotts had brought multiple teams to state for both cross country and track.
This year was Fields first year as head coach, and he had a very successful season. Spotts’ and Field’s coaching styles were on opposite ends of the spectrum. Field takes more of a scientific approach. Spotts is more high volume with older training methods.
Field, on the other hand, takes a higher intensity stance with lower volume.
Field also went into detail about the mental side of coaching. This is what he had to say: “More on like the mental side of coaching, Coach Spotts was this great leader of men that I’m not naturally as good at. So there’s a bit of a drop off there where he spent his whole life being a teacher and youth group leader, and I haven’t done any of that, so that sort of where I’m trying to learn and be as good as Spotts was.”
As an athlete under Matt, the difference between Field and Spotts is night and day, and Matt has been a great coach. Even being able to coach Abatu Dysktra to break his own 800-meter record.
Matt will continue his coaching career next year and is now gearing up for the upcoming cross country season with a full rebuild on the boys’ team, as most of the 24-25 team has graduated. Matt coaching career has been bright and will continue to for the years to come.