Haggerty: Covert Mile honors a special coach and special athlete

4/6/16, 1:26 PM

Haggerty: Covert Mile honors a special coach and special

athlete
Nancy Haggerty, nhaggerty@lohud.com

6:24 p.m. EDT April 5, 2016

The mile once captured the countrys, if not the worlds, attention and imagination.
So many became legends running it.
Roger Bannister. Jim Ryun. Kip Keino. Sebastian Coe.
Buy
Photo

John Covert also ran it.

(Photo: Mark Vergari/The

Journal News)

Even though he preferred longer distances -- he didnt even begin running track until his senior year of high
school -- Covert clocked four minutes, six seconds running the mile in the Marine Corps after college. At that

point, that was only six seconds slower than the top time ever run in the world.
The 1948 North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow) High School graduate is in the Westchester County Sports Hall of Fame. His name graces Ossinings
track complex at Anne M. Dorner Middle School and hes in the schools Hall of Fame as well.
But those honors have nothing to do with Coverts athletic prowess. Nothing to do with him playing high school baseball, basketball, football (at least
briefly, until his mom said no after he got hurt) and finally running cross-country and track when North Tarrytown began offering those sports his senior
year.
They also have nothing to do with him transforming from struggler in high school running to three-time Niagara District cross-country champion for
Buffalo State, where hes also enshrined in the Athletic Hall of Fame.
And the honors also arent even for that 4:06 mile. He clocked that at Californias Camp Pendleton after two years of non-running while largely at sea,
awaiting possible deployment to the war in Korea.
Covert logged that 4:06 when two-time Olympic decathlon gold medalist Bob Mathias and Wes Santee, one of the worlds best milers, were his
teammates on the Pendleton team that battled the likes of UCLA, San Diego State and non-college teams, including the Los Angeles Athletic Club and
San Francisco Olympic Club.
But for all of that, it is not Covert, the athlete, who has been honored locally, but Covert, the coach.
Covert, whose initial coaching job saw him start Camp Pendletons cross-country team and immediately lead it to the Pacific Coast AAU title, said other
squads coaches offered new and better training schemes.
(But) they were not ahead of us in desire. Thats probably the number one ingredient for distance runners, he explained.
Desire wasnt lacking in Ossining, whose running program was down when Covert arrived cross-country not having a winning season in a decade.
Covert, now 86, went to Ossining in 1957 after North Tarrytown rejected him as a history teacher and coach because it wanted new ideas, not someone
local.
Hed leave in 1967 to coach cross-country and track and field at Lehigh University, where, in 25 years, he amassed 380 wins.
But, locally, nearly half a century after he left, hes remembered not just for winning titles but for changing lives.
Those titles include six New York State and 10 Section 1 cross-country championships and eight Section 1 track and field championships. Twice his
cross-country team was named the nations best.

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Haggerty: Covert Mile honors a special coach and special athlete

4/6/16, 1:26 PM

He looks at cross-country athletes, lost to view and on their own, as having to work hard, fend for themselves and yet, give something to the team.
Track athletes must learn not just technique but the nuances of competition to beat good opponents.
I think all are things that apply to later battles in life, Covert said.
Many of the kids Covert recruited by roaming Ossinings hallways and scouring the gym were already battle-scarred.
Id say they did not have a whole lot of success in anything theyd done the classroom, social life, he said. They were a bunch of people searching.
They really wanted to belong to something. They didnt know that but they did.
Hed go up to a kid and ask, Are you part of a team? If the answer was no, hed respond, Now you are.
The kids, he said, liked being approached and invited.
While Ossining mirrored the country with racial tension, according to Ossining runner Vince Stayter (1957-60), the invitation was extended equally.
Coverts runners were his runners. He had such a place in the community, the police called one night to help diffuse an escalating downtown racial
confrontation. Seeing the coach, hearing the coach simply ask whether everyone adults and kids wanted to be doing this, people left.
He gave many of us a path to a future that we could be proud of. John Covert, among all of us, was truly colorblind, Stayter writes on a website he and
others have devoted to Covert a website full of testimonials from past athletes about how Covert helped build their lives.

(http://pt21na.com/click?
As he has for the past six years or so, Covert will travel from his Pennsylvania home to this Saturdays Ossining Relays. Theyve become a reunion site,
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with his former athletes some from different class years who never crossed paths as students --- taking in the races, then going to lunch with Covert.
TvZGajIM-T_vtzDcgYs2Jahk9M7XGAFy84Zl5PCr8TtQZ1YBeUuB_IpXPCANkB-0oOqiYou watch them together, gathering. Theyre teammates. No question about it. It boggles the mind. I coached them in the 1960s and they say I was
k3kM0zZUobrMpWtgPrcacIp9Ep9H_xJ5JVHBG1reQe2kLZlAjIaPDgBhyxKyPbiKz4plmkodXMt-r18BbirdbcLan important cog in their life. Its a very rewarding experience, said Covert.
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k9BNYKUjute85xfuYFxuZF00wd-7wldtj0qt0yw0-ztrYHrZtFn7JunxWG4cT7qCXpl6YMgTXSBl5WyoRxG_9n87VBut maybe this year and in the years going forward, the relays will be even just a tad more special for him.
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Last year, Journal News reporter Jorge Fitz-Gibbon and his son, Alex, then a senior captain on Ossinings track team and, like his dad, a track history
RO0mYzdiCsqbKC9zWJZVAu2cjyZnqzRP1neU41S63LoHo8k&subid=g-87844306-5109859d775d40498dacf05fcaa0ad04buff, talked about how cool it would be if the mile -- a race with so much history but which isnt run that often anymore -- were incorporated into the
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Ossining Relays. Ossining coach Randy Hill liked the idea and said the race should be called The Covert Mile.
The Journal News will provide trophies to the boys and girls mile winners.
Winners will also meet Covert meet the man who helped launch discus, triple jump, steeplechase, javelin, the two-mile run and high and intermediate
hurdles into local and state events.
Meet the man who, during his last year at Ossining, watched the foundation be laid for the track that now carries his name.
And yes, theyll meet the man who more than 50 years ago ran a 4:06 mile, even though he really wasnt a miler.
The Covert Mile is named for for an athlete to be admired and a coach who made a difference.
Twitter: @HaggertyNancy (https://twitter.com/HaggertyNancy)
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