By Jonathan Heeter
TELEGRAPH STAFF WRITER
Source
- First Presbyterian Day track and field coach Chad McDaniel couldn't help but laugh when he saw the car his pole vault team would take to April's state meet.
Pole vault coach Steve Noe's Mercedes hardly even resembled an automobile after poles were attached to the sides. It looked more like a medieval tank.
"I'm looking out of our (vehicle) and laughing uncontrollably," McDaniel said. "It looked like he was going to joust someone off the road."
Tucked inside the car was Noe and his four pole vaulters, who were watching a DVD on vaulting. The vaulters watch the video religiously and wanted to get some late viewing before the state meet.
"We call them the vaulting cult," McDaniel said. "They are always together. They watch the video all the time. It's almost like a little family."
Noe, The Telegraph's Sam Burke Award for Service to High School Sports honoree, has created a insatiable hunger for vaulting among his pupils in five years as a volunteer coach at FPD and the four years before at Stratford. He does it while balancing a career as an emergency room doctor at The Medical Center of Central Georgia.
"I don't know if I have ever seen the dedication in a coach like I do with him," McDaniel said. "He is an inspiration for me. He drives me to work harder because I see him balancing coaching and being an ER doctor."
Noe, 55, said he had a rather unspectacular career as a collegiate decathlete at Illinois.
"Sometimes, people are just better equipped to coach," he said. "I just wasn't very good at it."
Noe decided to get into coaching when his two children, Amanda and Greg, started high school.
"As his kids got older and became interested in the sport, he did everything he could to help them succeed," McDaniel said.
Amanda won a state championship in 2000 at Stratford. Greg was primed to have one of the best years in GISA history in 2006 before he was injured in the first meet of the season. He ran a 10.6 second 100-yard dash despite tearing his hamstring at the end of the race, and had vaulted close to 15 feet.
"It was a chance to spend more time with my children and I really enjoy doing it," Noe said.
Noe helped Greg improve in the sport by taking him to Athens on Sundays after church to a vaulting club with Georgia coach Aaron Jones. They both went to Bulldogs' Elite Vault Camp.
It paid off for Greg, who won the 2004 GISA title, competed in the National Pole Vault Summit in Reno, Nev. and will walk on at Georgia.
"I think spending the time to go up to Georgia really benefited Greg's development," Noe said. "I also benefited a lot from watching Jones up close and also by attending clinics."
Noe shifted his jumbled schedule to work more shifts in the fall and night shifts in the spring to spend time with his vaulters. His dedication has allowed him to make nearly every practice as a coach at FPD.
"I honestly believe he has missed about five practices in his time here," McDaniel said. "That is amazing considering he has a job that requires the time his does."
Noe's dedication has rubbed off on many of his students. McDaniel said the vaulters are out practicing right after school lets out, before the other athletes have even warmed up. They are often still vaulting at 6:30 p.m. when practice is over.
"He has made us just fall in love with the sport," said FPD eighth-grader Ashley Cope, who attended the UGA Elite Vault Camp with her teammates this week.
Greg isn't the only successful vaulter tutored by Noe.
After Greg went down with the hamstring tear, freshmen Daniel Shurley and Buddy Long stepped up to fill the void and were going higher than 12 feet in the first year in the sport. Long finished second in the state with a 12-foot vault.
Noe's best female pupil is Cope, who also finished second in the state. Cope broke the school record in nearly every meet this season and became one of just two female vaulters in GISA history to clear 10 feet.
"I have been blessed with great athletes," Noe said. "They deserve a lot of credit."
Cope said she wouldn't be near the level she is at without Noe's instruction.
"He's just an amazing coach," she said.
Even though both of his children have graduated high school, Noe may still have an incentive to continue his relentless work at FPD.
"It's like he has taken a bunch of more children on with as much time as those kids spend with him," McDaniel said.
Contact Heeter at 744-4208 or jheeter@macontel.com
