Coach's Corner: Steve Bartold

Bartold, who has coached the men's track team since 1980, did not always have such a jocular relationship with his runners. He describes his style in the past as "fire and brimstone," but his attitude has changed over the years. "I've become much more calm and quiet," he said. "It used to be `get up and go.'" He said that this has become unnecessary because of the nature of Yale's current crop of runners, who he said have the best attitude of any team he's coached at Yale.

Part of Bartold's previous, more aggressive, approach came from his previous job as head coach of the St. John's (NY) men's track team for 19 years, where he found the attitude of the scholarship runners a bit different than that of Yale track-and-field athletes. "Sometimes you had to make them move their butt a bit," he said.

That is precisely what Bartold did. When he moved into the college ranks after coaching high school track in Long Island for four years, Bartold built the St. John's team from one that highlighted stars in certain events but was "not a team that had good diversity of events and people" into a national top-10 finisher in 1979-80, his last year as St. John's coach.

Bartold said that many people ask him why he left such a successful program to take over a Yale team that he said was "virtually nonexistent." He did not see this as a drawback to the job. "I figured it was a great opportunity to rebuild a program," he said.

The rebuilding began immediately. Bar-told took largely the same group of cross country runners who had finished last at Heptagonals the year before and led them to a fourth-place finish in his first year. He does not attribute the team's success entirely to his arrival, however. "Track is a sport that over the years runs in cycles," he said.

Indeed, since that first year the men's track team at Yale has had its rough patches, including the last few years. But Bartold thinks that the team is now nearing a peak. "There were a few years when we weren't doing too much except for a few individuals, and now we seem to have an excellent group of young kids," he said. He predicts that in two years, when the Class of 2001 are seniors, the team will finally have a shot at the Ivy championship--as long as recruits can fill the team's holes at the high jump, pole vaulting, and sprinting events. "I'll be disappointed if this isn't eventually the best team we've had since we've been here," he said.

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