2024 All-Area Boys' Track and Field Coach of the Year: Tuscola's Ryan Hornaday

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Congratulations to Tuscola's Ryan Hornaday:

Why he’s Coach of the Year

Tuscola’s boys’ track and field team placed second in the Class 1A state meet thanks to individual state titles from Will Foltz (3,200-meter run) and Josiah Hortin (800 run) and a fourth-place effort from Jackson Barrett in the 1,600 run. Ryan Hornaday and his wife, Tracy, stopped by The News-Gazette’s newsroom in Champaign to talk about all things related to the Warriors’ success with N-G staff writer Joey Wright:

What are your thoughts on the 2024 season?

Ryan: We had incredibly high expectations. We thought we were one of the best teams in the state last year and had some crazy point things happen. You know, in 2014, I thought we had a state trophy wrapped up and had some crazy point things happen, too. And maybe if some things go different this year in terms of points, we’re state champs there, too. But yeah, we had high expectations this year, loads of talent. We’re super blessed. I think we did everything we could to maximize a lot of good genetics. Take kids’ potential and get them at the highest level possible. So every year we want to be great in May, and we looked at last year hard, that we were pretty dang good early in May and sort of plateaued at the end of May. So we trained through and really pretty hard through the first part of May this year, and it played out pretty well that we were at our best at the end of May.

Tracy, you have a big role in the success of Tuscola’s track programs. What do you think the key to success is?

I think more than anything, we really love our staff. Our staff spends a lot of time together. We coach as a whole group, so it’s definitely very much a family mentality. So I fill in a lot of loose ends sometimes, whether it’s with Drew having conversations with the girls that he maybe doesn’t want to have — but he always does a great job with that — or just sometimes as more of a mom figure to some kids that need a mom, or sometimes I’m the person that manages if a kid’s grades (need help), just a lot of those little things behind the details that take things off their plate.

Ryan, do you have anything to add to that?

We do everything collaboratively. And I don’t take that for granted, because I know not every school is that way. From our standpoint, it’s the most efficient way to operate. Our kids benefit from it. You know, the boys and the girls that throw work with (Stan) Wienke, he doesn’t just work with one gender or the other. The one thing that she’s selling short is nobody promotes our kids to the level that she does, and she’s a track mind. You know, everybody thinks they know basketball and football but not many people really know track. And Tracy was wildly successful herself, and she knows track. She knows how we want to do things. So not everybody has an assistant that we can say, ‘Hey, take this group of kids and achieve these things with them on any given day,’ and she’s able to just run with it.

What’s your pitch to prospective track and field athletes?

Ryan: We cast a broad net. For the longest time, when my kids were younger, I’d take them to the pool and as soon as I’d see kids doing backflips off the high dive, I’d say, ‘Hey, you know anything about pole vault?’ Kam Sweetnam, we recruited him because we just watched him jump out of the gym all winter in basketball and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come jump?’ The other side of that, unfortunately, happens every couple of years, we’ll get a kid that we’ve been saying, ‘Hey, you need to come out. Why don’t you come out?’ And they always kind of pump the brakes on us, and eventually, as a junior or senior, they come out and they say, ‘Oh, I wished I would have done that.’ Ninety-nine times out of 100, it’s a mutually beneficial deal. Some of our kids will come out almost begrudgingly, because maybe it helps them for football or a different sport, and then in the end, they’re better for it, and we are, too.

Tracy: I think our own kids are our best advocates at times. Ryan’s very good at looking at class rosters, you know, like who are all the incoming freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, but a lot of times, if he has approached a kid and maybe not gotten the answer he wanted, he would put one of our team leaders, as we would call them, (to ask them), and we have three or four kids that are very good at recruiting for us. And also, you don’t have to be a Josiah Horton, a Jackson Barrett or Will Foltz, we love those kids, but come out because it makes you better at this. We have had a lot of military kids that were going to go to boot camp that we talked into coming out and then they loved it. So just trying different angles.

Ryan, how do you manage being Tuscola’s track and field coach with your other responsibilities at the high school, like being the athletic director?

Ryan: Once we hit Christmas, I know that a mad dash is getting ready to start. I know there’s a lot of track programs that won’t start until March 1, maybe, and we utilize the IHSA calendar. We start in mid-January every year. So I’m double-dipping, triple-dipping sometimes. I’ve decided to start refereeing basketball games — as if I wasn’t busy enough, right? It’s a little bit crazy. I borderline jokingly say that I hate my life every April. April’s like the pinnacle of it all. And then things start slowing down a little bit. But between hosting, rescheduling, practicing, driving buses, just whatever it takes, I think you have to do that to be successful in a small town in a small-school setting. Having a spouse on board with it all, and not just in agreement with it, but actually doing things supportive in nature is huge. And like anything, the longer you’ve done it, the simpler it gets. We’re not retraining new people constantly. We’ve got programs established. We’ve done the hard work of getting the ball pushed up the hill, and now, we just keep it rolling.

How do you manage your family during the busy season?

Ryan: Oddly enough, the biggest logistical hurdle is our dog. We may leave at 2:30 in the afternoon on a random Thursday and not get back to the house till 11 o’clock at night. My folks live in town, they’ll get Rigby out, feed him and play with him. It’s been really cool that whether our daughter, Hannah is home from Carbondale, or our middle kid, Benjamin, is home from Greenville, which he’s running there, had a good first year of college track, their priority is to come and find their little brother. Our son, David, who’s a junior and had he had a really solid year. It really blesses us to see the older kids support our current teams and their sibling on the boys side of things. You know, they could come home and do a whole bunch of other things, but they’re coming to the Tuscola Open or showing up at the St. Teresa Invite because school literally got out that day, and they got in a car and drove to Decatur as soon as they got home.

Tracy: I think for me, a full circle moment was David this last year when he qualified in hurdles for 300 lows. But beyond that, they’ve always been at the track with Ryan, so like preschool, high school, they’re at track practice with Ryan. Whether they had been at Eastbury and walked over, or at North Ward and I dropped them off at practice before I was officially helping. So Austin (Sexson) was on Ryan’s roster, and David was literally a preschooler looking up to Austin saying, ‘Oh, I want to be Austin Sexson’. And Austin was a 300 hurdler for us back in the day, and now to have Austin coach David, it’s just like a genuine love. Our kids have been around it. And state track meet always falls on Benjamin’s birthday. So he always knew we would celebrate his birthday after the meet every year and he didn’t resent that. And when the kids come home, Hannah goes to the finish line because they know how Ryan wants things a certain way. Because, you know, we all know the track meets that run on forever become unenjoyable. So they’re very good stewards of our program, as well.