Jacob Brown - Coach (2016)

GIRL'S CROSS COUNTRY 1974-2014, GIRL'S TRACK & FIELD 1972-2015 In 1971 Jacob Brown graduated from Penn State University with a Masters Degree in Exercise Physiology. The self-described "farm kid" from a little town 22 miles from Pittsburgh traveled to a job fair in Detroit looking for his first full-time job. And thanks to Dave Marsh, he found one in Ridgewood, New Jersey. He never left. "I knew nothing about Ridgewood and didn't even know where it was,'' Brown remembered nearly 45 years later. "I was going to teach and coach in high school for a few years and then go coach in college, where the "real" adventure was. What did I know?" Did anyone realize what a career was about to start? Hardly. How can you predict that when Brown retired in the spring of 2015 he would be generally considered one of the greatest coaches of any sport in Bergen County and New Jersey history with records unlikely to ever be approached, no less broken. Let's get those numbers out of the way right here. In cross-country, a dual meet record over 43 years of 243-15 including a 22-year (that's YEAR) unbeaten streak; 35 league titles, 29 Bergen County group titles, 28 Bergen Meet of Champions titles (in just 37 years), a state record 22 sectional titles, the 1992 and 1999 State Meet of Champions titles and 16 appearances in the State Meet of Champions. In outdoor track, 76 Bergen Meet of Champions winner and 15 state group champions, 16 Bergen group team titles, 15 league titles and 10 sectional crowns. And his 1988 Group 4 state champions placed in an astounding 11 of 14 events at the state championship and is considered one of the three best teams in New Jersey history. But Jacob Brown's story is much more than the numbers. Marsh, who had hired him as a teacher, knew he wanted to coach and after Brown coached freshman boys cross-country the first fall, with fellow Hall of Fame inductee and lifelong friend Larry Coyle, Marsh asked him to help out with Ridgewood's brand new girls track team, coached by a long-forgotten female teacher who didn't want the assignment. "I introduce myself to her and she hands me the clipboard (with the names of the 17 girls on the team) and walks away,'' said Brown with a laugh in a 1975 interview on the New Jersey Milesplit website. "It was now my team.'' So Brown was left to teach all the events to an inexperienced but eager group of girls and try and figure out a schedule. So he called around and found programs at the Wayne high schools, Englewood, Paramus Catholic and Saddle Brook and put together a schedule. The early years of girls track weren't always greeted sympathetically by entrenched boys coaches as Brown discovered one day at Montclair. "We were having a meet and the coach was running practice on the track while it was going on,'' Brown remembers. "We nearly came to blows but cooler heads prevailed. Of course later we became friends and he ended up coaching girls and telling me how much easier it was to coach them!" Along with Coyle, Brown was a pioneer in establishing and running meets, such as the Ridgewood Invitational, the first cross-country invitational open to girls in New Jersey which lasted from 1973 to 2011 and the Ridgewood Relays (now called the Pawlowski Relays) still a staple of the spring schedule. His first decade at Ridgewood saw Brown coaching all three seasons. But sensing a loss of enthusiasm with the year-round grind, he gave up winter track in 1982, which helped fan his enthusiasm for the other two seasons for the rest of his career. In 1983 his girls four mile team set a national high school record that lasted for 17 years. His 1975 4-x-880 team also held a national mark. He was named the Honorary High School Girls Referee at the Penn Relays in 2005 and was named the Mike Byrnes National Coach of the Year by the National Scholastic Sports Foundation in 2010. But perhaps his most outstanding qualification was his almost uncanny ability to keep cross-country runners on the team even with no chance of running varsity races in a sport whose slogan often is "Our Sport is Your Sport's Punishment." "Bonding is sometimes a hokey overused word but we worked on that,'' said Brown. "The kids became part of the gang and wanted to stay part of the gang." For more than 40 years Jacob Brown was the leader of the gang and what a gang it was.