Raunig going out on top as Grizzlies compete at regionals
5/29/2008 12:00:00 AM | Men's Track and Field, Outdoor Track, Women's Track and Field
He coaches six of Montana's 14 intercollegiate athletic teams and has the coaching staff's only terminal degree, yet he isn't the best paid nor most recognizable of the Grizzly coaches and has a tiny office that's a folding glass door short of being confused with a phone booth.
He has nearly as many student-athletes under his watch as football coach Bobby Hauck, yet has just two full-time assistant coaches to the football program's nine.
His cross country season begins the same month the Montana soccer program opens its season, yet when the soccer team is cleaning out its lockers in late October or early November he still has four sports and over seven months left in his coaching year.
He's Montana cross country and track & field coach Tom Raunig, and after 12 seasons he's nearing the end of his coaching career and a history with the Grizzlies that dates back more than 30 years to when he became an all-American distance runner for UM.
He toils away in relative obscurity, trying to draw people into the very sport that does all it can to push people away with confusing altitude adjustments, different qualifying standards for different sized indoor tracks and archaic events that people have a hard time relating to. No, lawn darts do not qualify as having an understanding of the javelin.
So why would anyone want to be a track and field coach?
"I think people just grow to love track and field from a young age like I did," Raunig says in his defense. "You just evolve into it after a career of competing and don't know any different.
"I think the key (to coming to terms with our sport's position within a department dominated by the more high-profile football and basketball programs) is focusing on competing against track and field programs that are in the same situation as you are and facing similar challenges. You can't compare yourself to other sports at your own school. You measure yourself against the other cross country and track & field programs in your conference because you're all in the same boat."
Raunig took over the Montana programs in 1996 and has brought improvements to both the men's and women's teams. In the decade prior to his arrival, the women's cross country, indoor track & field and outdoor track & field teams had an average conference finish of just better than sixth (5.8) place. In Raunig's 12 years, that has inched closer to fifth (5.1), which is a bigger and more impressive jump than it at first appears to be.
The improvement has been even greater on the men's side, where the move up has been by more than a place (6.20 to 5.16) for the three sports.
He has coached 35 Big Sky Conference women's cross country, indoor track & field and outdoor track & field champions, 44 more on the men's side, and accounted for more than a third of Montana's track and field all-Americans, but he's getting out of collegiate coaching in the days ahead to pursue a teaching career at the University of Great Falls.
His coaching career could end Saturday at the 2008 NCAA Midwest Region Championships at Ed Weir Stadium in Lincoln, Neb., or if one or more of his athletes qualifies, he could receive a stay and continue coaching through the NCAA Championships in mid June in Des Moines, Iowa.
In either case, he's a short-timer and he's got a lot of opinions as he heads out the door.
Q: Are you experiencing any "this is it" emotions heading to Nebraska?
TR: It hasn't really sunk in, and it probably won't. Track and field and distance running in particular is such a life-long sport that this is hardly an end for me. I'll just have more time for my own running, and no matter where I show up, there always seems to be people asking for advice.
I'll probably always be doing some sort of coaching, so I think it's a different dynamic than a football or basketball coach getting out of the business. I'm getting out of college coaching, but I'll just end up coaching people of all ages and abilities because this is a life-long sport for other people in addition to yourself.
What's ironic about this weekend is that we're flying to regionals and staying in a nice hotel with just a small group of nine athletes. When I picture our typical travel, I imagine loading up a van or bus in Ogden, Utah, at two in the afternoon and getting back to Missoula around midnight.
I guess I'm going out on top.
Q: The program is in better shape than when you arrived 12 years ago. What's been the key to making that happen?
TR: I think the big factor over the years has been getting good assistants that understand how to develop athletes, then making sure we get kids who will be a good fit at Montana. That means ones who are comfortable with our facilities and the weather.
We've done that by emphasizing Montana kids and trying to make them maybe 70 percent of our roster. It helps for a smooth transition and makes for fewer obstacles to overcome instead of bringing in athletes that have a lot more adjustments to make.
Q: Can Montana ever become a consistent threat to win Big Sky Conference championships?
TR: I don't think we're that far off, because I view us as a threat right now year in and year out. You just have to be consistently good from season to season and year to year and then have some breaks come your way. Then once in a while the stars will align, everyone will be healthy and the travel schedule and host site will allow you to be able to compete well at the Big Sky Conference meet.
It would be a lot easier if there was an indoor track and higher funding, but even so, we've come awfully close as it is. We've had some second-place finishes and a number of third- and fourth-place finishes in meets that have been very tight at the top.
For the women, we've only had two years at the full-funding level of 18 scholarships, which is huge and will pay off down the road. If you don't have full funding, you're just giving points away (at Big Sky meets to teams that are fully funded).
Q: Who's an example of an under-the-radar story that's a special memory for you?
TR: Chris Tobiason would certainly fit that mold. He had to beg just to walk on. He just barely met our walk-on standard for the 3,200 meters coming out of Livingston High School, and even then we had to give him an altitude-adjustment.
But he got an opportunity, became a four-time winner of the President's Award and an Academic All-American and worked himself up to where he was the fourth or fifth runner on the team, all while keeping a 4.0 GPA through four years of undergraduate and an additional couple of years of pharmacy school.
He always found a way to make it to practice even though he had a much more rigorous academic schedule than other athletes who were finding ways to not be at practice.
Q: What's makes team and individual performances the most memorable?
TR: The best experiences are when you don't expect to do well but you come through with a really nice performance. The women's second-place cross country finishes in 2000 and 2006 were memorable because we really didn't expect them to have that high of finish.
When you watch those races and start focusing on just your runners, you kind of lose sight of how the other teams are doing around you. Both of those teams were real pleasant surprises because we hung out after the race and didn't know until 20 or 30 minutes later how the results came out.
Individually Dan Bingham winning the steeplechase two years ago was a nice surprise. There were a lot of years where people just gave up on the steeplechase for men completely and let Weber State take the top four or five places every year because they dominated that event so much. To see Dan break through and win was really enjoyable.
Q: What individual performance on a big stage sticks out in your mind?
TR: Probably Sabrina Monro's second-place finish to Kara Goucher at the NCAA cross country meet in 2000. Goucher (then Grgas-Wheeler when she ran for Colorado) is still competing at a world-class level and was recently on the cover of a running magazine, so for Sabrina to run right behind her at regionals then duplicate that at nationals a week later was a tremendous job. As a coach that was extremely satisfying.
Sabrina was a kid from Jefferson County High School in Montana who was able to step up her performance when she got to college. She did well in high school - she still holds the Class B records in the 1,600 and 3,200 meters - but she was able to step it up at the national level even more than anyone probably could have expected.
Q: What will you do to stay involved in running and track and field?
TR: I will probably never be uninvolved. I'm speaking at a coaching clinic in August, and I'm sure there will be people in Great Falls looking for advice on running. It's just the nature of the sport. I'll probably get drawn in by some local runners or post-collegiate runner. If you have the time to help people out or coach them, you'll always find people wanting advice, so I don't think I'll ever be completely out of it.
Q: What are the similarities between coaching and teaching?
TR: I think they are very similar. In my position at Montana I've always pictured myself more as teaching the athletes every day than just coaching them. Jumbo Elliot, the legendary coach at Villanova who coached a number of great milers like Marty Liquori, felt like he got his athletes in a position when they got older where they could basically coach themselves. That's what I've attempted to do as well.
Through daily coaching and our weekly individual meetings, I've tried to give them the information they need to make good decisions in their own running and take some ownership of their performances. In college, you're still not there four months of the year between summer and Christmas breaks, so you have to educate them to be able to do things on their own and help themselves.
Q: What advice would you have for your replacement?
TR: The job takes a lot of work. You are never not the track coach at the University of Montana. You're the coach 24 hours a day, but that pretty much comes with the territory when you get into coaching anything at the collegiate level, even more so now in the age of cell phones and e-mail.
Q: What's been your message to the athletes who'll be returning next year to train and compete for a new coach?
TR: Show up every day and do your job so you keep improving. That's the basic nature of track and field. If they do that, they make their coach's job much easier, which makes recruiting that much easier. The better the athletes do at meets and the better job they do in the classroom, the easier it is for everyone involved to promote the program and the University. That helps the coach be in a position to attract good athletes and continue to make the program stronger and stronger, which benefits everyone.
He has nearly as many student-athletes under his watch as football coach Bobby Hauck, yet has just two full-time assistant coaches to the football program's nine.
His cross country season begins the same month the Montana soccer program opens its season, yet when the soccer team is cleaning out its lockers in late October or early November he still has four sports and over seven months left in his coaching year.
He's Montana cross country and track & field coach Tom Raunig, and after 12 seasons he's nearing the end of his coaching career and a history with the Grizzlies that dates back more than 30 years to when he became an all-American distance runner for UM.
He toils away in relative obscurity, trying to draw people into the very sport that does all it can to push people away with confusing altitude adjustments, different qualifying standards for different sized indoor tracks and archaic events that people have a hard time relating to. No, lawn darts do not qualify as having an understanding of the javelin.
So why would anyone want to be a track and field coach?
"I think people just grow to love track and field from a young age like I did," Raunig says in his defense. "You just evolve into it after a career of competing and don't know any different.
"I think the key (to coming to terms with our sport's position within a department dominated by the more high-profile football and basketball programs) is focusing on competing against track and field programs that are in the same situation as you are and facing similar challenges. You can't compare yourself to other sports at your own school. You measure yourself against the other cross country and track & field programs in your conference because you're all in the same boat."
Raunig took over the Montana programs in 1996 and has brought improvements to both the men's and women's teams. In the decade prior to his arrival, the women's cross country, indoor track & field and outdoor track & field teams had an average conference finish of just better than sixth (5.8) place. In Raunig's 12 years, that has inched closer to fifth (5.1), which is a bigger and more impressive jump than it at first appears to be.
The improvement has been even greater on the men's side, where the move up has been by more than a place (6.20 to 5.16) for the three sports.
He has coached 35 Big Sky Conference women's cross country, indoor track & field and outdoor track & field champions, 44 more on the men's side, and accounted for more than a third of Montana's track and field all-Americans, but he's getting out of collegiate coaching in the days ahead to pursue a teaching career at the University of Great Falls.
His coaching career could end Saturday at the 2008 NCAA Midwest Region Championships at Ed Weir Stadium in Lincoln, Neb., or if one or more of his athletes qualifies, he could receive a stay and continue coaching through the NCAA Championships in mid June in Des Moines, Iowa.
In either case, he's a short-timer and he's got a lot of opinions as he heads out the door.
Q: Are you experiencing any "this is it" emotions heading to Nebraska?
TR: It hasn't really sunk in, and it probably won't. Track and field and distance running in particular is such a life-long sport that this is hardly an end for me. I'll just have more time for my own running, and no matter where I show up, there always seems to be people asking for advice.
I'll probably always be doing some sort of coaching, so I think it's a different dynamic than a football or basketball coach getting out of the business. I'm getting out of college coaching, but I'll just end up coaching people of all ages and abilities because this is a life-long sport for other people in addition to yourself.
What's ironic about this weekend is that we're flying to regionals and staying in a nice hotel with just a small group of nine athletes. When I picture our typical travel, I imagine loading up a van or bus in Ogden, Utah, at two in the afternoon and getting back to Missoula around midnight.
I guess I'm going out on top.
Q: The program is in better shape than when you arrived 12 years ago. What's been the key to making that happen?
TR: I think the big factor over the years has been getting good assistants that understand how to develop athletes, then making sure we get kids who will be a good fit at Montana. That means ones who are comfortable with our facilities and the weather.
We've done that by emphasizing Montana kids and trying to make them maybe 70 percent of our roster. It helps for a smooth transition and makes for fewer obstacles to overcome instead of bringing in athletes that have a lot more adjustments to make.
Q: Can Montana ever become a consistent threat to win Big Sky Conference championships?
TR: I don't think we're that far off, because I view us as a threat right now year in and year out. You just have to be consistently good from season to season and year to year and then have some breaks come your way. Then once in a while the stars will align, everyone will be healthy and the travel schedule and host site will allow you to be able to compete well at the Big Sky Conference meet.
It would be a lot easier if there was an indoor track and higher funding, but even so, we've come awfully close as it is. We've had some second-place finishes and a number of third- and fourth-place finishes in meets that have been very tight at the top.
For the women, we've only had two years at the full-funding level of 18 scholarships, which is huge and will pay off down the road. If you don't have full funding, you're just giving points away (at Big Sky meets to teams that are fully funded).
Q: Who's an example of an under-the-radar story that's a special memory for you?
TR: Chris Tobiason would certainly fit that mold. He had to beg just to walk on. He just barely met our walk-on standard for the 3,200 meters coming out of Livingston High School, and even then we had to give him an altitude-adjustment.
But he got an opportunity, became a four-time winner of the President's Award and an Academic All-American and worked himself up to where he was the fourth or fifth runner on the team, all while keeping a 4.0 GPA through four years of undergraduate and an additional couple of years of pharmacy school.
He always found a way to make it to practice even though he had a much more rigorous academic schedule than other athletes who were finding ways to not be at practice.
Q: What's makes team and individual performances the most memorable?
TR: The best experiences are when you don't expect to do well but you come through with a really nice performance. The women's second-place cross country finishes in 2000 and 2006 were memorable because we really didn't expect them to have that high of finish.
When you watch those races and start focusing on just your runners, you kind of lose sight of how the other teams are doing around you. Both of those teams were real pleasant surprises because we hung out after the race and didn't know until 20 or 30 minutes later how the results came out.
Individually Dan Bingham winning the steeplechase two years ago was a nice surprise. There were a lot of years where people just gave up on the steeplechase for men completely and let Weber State take the top four or five places every year because they dominated that event so much. To see Dan break through and win was really enjoyable.
Q: What individual performance on a big stage sticks out in your mind?
TR: Probably Sabrina Monro's second-place finish to Kara Goucher at the NCAA cross country meet in 2000. Goucher (then Grgas-Wheeler when she ran for Colorado) is still competing at a world-class level and was recently on the cover of a running magazine, so for Sabrina to run right behind her at regionals then duplicate that at nationals a week later was a tremendous job. As a coach that was extremely satisfying.
Sabrina was a kid from Jefferson County High School in Montana who was able to step up her performance when she got to college. She did well in high school - she still holds the Class B records in the 1,600 and 3,200 meters - but she was able to step it up at the national level even more than anyone probably could have expected.
Q: What will you do to stay involved in running and track and field?
TR: I will probably never be uninvolved. I'm speaking at a coaching clinic in August, and I'm sure there will be people in Great Falls looking for advice on running. It's just the nature of the sport. I'll probably get drawn in by some local runners or post-collegiate runner. If you have the time to help people out or coach them, you'll always find people wanting advice, so I don't think I'll ever be completely out of it.
Q: What are the similarities between coaching and teaching?
TR: I think they are very similar. In my position at Montana I've always pictured myself more as teaching the athletes every day than just coaching them. Jumbo Elliot, the legendary coach at Villanova who coached a number of great milers like Marty Liquori, felt like he got his athletes in a position when they got older where they could basically coach themselves. That's what I've attempted to do as well.
Through daily coaching and our weekly individual meetings, I've tried to give them the information they need to make good decisions in their own running and take some ownership of their performances. In college, you're still not there four months of the year between summer and Christmas breaks, so you have to educate them to be able to do things on their own and help themselves.
Q: What advice would you have for your replacement?
TR: The job takes a lot of work. You are never not the track coach at the University of Montana. You're the coach 24 hours a day, but that pretty much comes with the territory when you get into coaching anything at the collegiate level, even more so now in the age of cell phones and e-mail.
Q: What's been your message to the athletes who'll be returning next year to train and compete for a new coach?
TR: Show up every day and do your job so you keep improving. That's the basic nature of track and field. If they do that, they make their coach's job much easier, which makes recruiting that much easier. The better the athletes do at meets and the better job they do in the classroom, the easier it is for everyone involved to promote the program and the University. That helps the coach be in a position to attract good athletes and continue to make the program stronger and stronger, which benefits everyone.
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