Meet The New York City 5th Grade Teacher Who Also Is The Coach Of An Olympic Medallist
By LetsRun.com
February 28, 2013
One of the great things about track and field is you don’t need a degree to coach it and you don’t have to be Nick Saban to coach the world’s best. If you know what you are doing and have talent to work with, you could soon be coaching an Olympian.
Along that light, we wanted to introduce you to a fabulous piece that a LetsRun.com visitor emailed us earlier this week. It’s a piece about New York City 5th-grade teacher Trevor Green that appeared on a site we’d never heard of – trackledger.com.
Why are we introducing you to a 5th-grade New York City teacher? Because he’s a guy who started his own track and field club – Zenith Velocity – and is the coach of 2012 Olympic 400 bronze medallist Lalonde Gordon.
Gordon was born in Tobago and moved to the US at age 7, but gave up track and field as a teenager. While in community college, he started up again and now under Green’s guidance, the rest is history. But the piece is great as it celebrates the accomplishments of Green. Track and field wouldn’t be able to exist without the hundreds if not thousands of similar unsung coaches like him. So take 3 minutes and read it:
Trevor Green, the man behind the rise of Lalonde Gordon
We loved this excerpt on how Green felt when Gordon medalled:
Green reflected, “when Lalonde came down the final straight-away in the 400m finals, I could not hold back the tears any longer… because over the years I always wanted to coach an Olympian.”
As for Gordon, he ran a 20.60 indoor 200 and a 32.48 300 earlier this year but has struggled a bit in Europe in his only two 400s – running 46.73 in Birmingham and 47.19 in Stockholm (last year he ran 20.58 and 46.43 indoors).
