Coach Bob Ballantyne's "Spartan Sprints" Remembered as Character-Building Activity

Photo from Facebook

by Mike Strzelecki*

I was a member of Boyertown Senior High School’s 1979 boys soccer team. It was only the third year in the modern area that the school fielded a soccer team, and we were bad. We didn’t have youth programs in town to feed well-seasoned players into the senior high program. In fact, I, like many of my teammates, had never touched a soccer ball before my first practice. Since we could not survive on our skills, we had to rely on our athleticism and motivation.

Mikę Strzelecki (#28) leads his teammate in a run around the school’s property boundary--part of daily soccer practice drills.

And where did our motivation come from? This is where our coach, Bob Ballantyne, steps into the picture. Coach Bob was a biology and earth sciences teacher in the high school. But more importantly to us, he was a former Colonel in the US Marine Corps and helicopter pilot. He was the perfect fit for our team.

Photo from Boyertown High School Yearbook--Class of '65 

Coach Bob could not hide his Marine influence. He was tall with close-cropped hair. He carried himself with gravitas and confidence. He often tried to appear serious, but his stoicism was too often betrayed by his sense of humor. Coach Bob was perpetually laughing, and had the rare quality of being able to connect with a high school boy’s sense of humor. Simply put, Coach Bob brought the fun.

On our first day of practice, I am sure Coach Bob scanned our crowded locker room, peering out across our squad of inexperienced players, outcasts from other sports, and general misfits. He probably recognized quickly that we would not be able to compete with most other teams in the league on a skill level. Those teams in the Philadelphia suburbs fielded full squads of seasoned players honed by years of youth soccer, a privilege we did not have yet in our rural community. Coach Bob’s plan was devious: we would win by out-hustling our opponents and by taking conditioning and physicality to another level.

Our practices were long and arduous. They involved a mix of skill drills, intense conditioning, and scrimmages. We began with a 2-mile run around the school’s property boundary. We did sprinting drills down the field, dexterity training, change-of-direction drills.

But what Coach Bob was most known for were his Spartan Sprints.

Here is how Coach Bob’s Spartan Sprints worked. The entire team would lie down on the soccer field sideline in the prone position, in a line. We would lie about two feet apart from each other. On the whistle, the player at the end of the line would rise from his prone position in a burst and sprint in all-out fashion passing directly over his teammates, placing the foot down between each person during the sprint. When he passed the guy next to him, that player would rise and do the same. And so on. When the sprinters got to the end of the line, they would throw their bodies down in the prone position. This went on until the team snaked around the entire field and ended in their original position.

Fatigued legs have been known to misstep at times, and players lying down often experienced having their backs accidentally stepped on by cleated boots. Or perhaps on purpose, if you had a beef with someone.

Coach Bob called for Spartan Sprints during all practices across the two seasons I played for him. We did Spartan Sprints sometimes to just warm up. Or as a form of punishment if we were goofing off. Or if we were just having a bad practice and needed a total team reset.

We almost always did Spartan Sprints to end practice. Sometimes just one loop around the field, other times two or three loops. The purpose of the Spartan Sprints to end practice was clear. When we were totally spent, depleted of all energy, our legs overflowing with lactic acid - Coach Bob wanted us to know that we can still do more and taught us how to dig deeper to find those hidden reserves. We learned from the Spartan Sprints not just physical toughness, but mental toughness as well. We learned that when you think that you can no longer lift a fatigued leg…..you can. No other teams were doing Spartan Sprints - just us.

The Spartan Sprint was Coach Bob’s way of metaphorically planting a flag into the soccer pitch, saying that our team owns that pitch, and no one will outrun us and beat us physically. Other teams may have the skills, but we had the conditioning.

To this day, I have no idea how Coach Bob came up with the Spartan Sprint. Did he make them up? Did he find them in some obscure soccer coach’s manual? Were they a remnant of his military training? All we know is that the team feared them.

We only won a handful of games during my soccer tenure at Boyertown, and mostly against start-up teams like us. But because of our extreme level of fitness, we were a team that powerhouse teams feared. Other teams knew that we would run them silly. That they would have to work beyond their expectations for every goal. Some teams were intimidated by our physical play; we were not afraid of contact.

Over time, our soccer skills grew. We learned soccer strategies and our teamwork improved. Over my tenure, we became more competitive against the top-shelf teams. But wins remained elusive.

My most memorable game happened later in my soccer career. It was against the best team in the league - West Chester East. The expectation was that if we could hold them to less than five or so goals, it would be a moral victory. But this night was the best we ever played as a team. Our passing came together; our defensive wall was like a fortress. We out-hustled and outran them to the ball. But our shots were not finding the back of the net.

Late in the game, the score remained 0 to 0. I still remember the panicked look in the eyes of West Chester East players as they came to realize they may experience an embarrassing loss to a low-level rag-tag, start-up team. These were talented, skillful players who were raised participating in youth programs and probably all grew up with soccer nets in their backyards

In the end, it was not meant to be. A late goal gave West Chester East the win. We streamed into the locker room and our emotions flowed. We knew that this was the best we had ever played and it still resulted in a loss. There were no moral victories. Coach Bob later told us how moved he was to come into the locker room and see most of his team literally sobbing in tears. I imagine that that was the moment where Coach Bob understood that he did a great job training and leading our team. That he built a team with physicality and character.

Photo from Boyertown High School yearbook--Class of '81.

At the end of that season, after running my last Spartan Sprint at practice, I was happy to say good-bye to that form of torture forever.

Years later, in my early 20s, I became a competitive rower. Rowing is a notoriously exhausting sport as it activates and depletes every large muscle in the body. Sprint races were 2,000 meters long and utterly painful the entire stretch - like running a 100-yard dash for ten minutes. Near the end of my first sprint race, when my arms and legs could barely move and nausea swept across my body, I recalled Coach Bob’s Spartan Sprints. Coach Bob taught me to just put my head down, dig a bit deeper than you thought possible, and continue on. Our boat that year was undefeated in nine races.

Later, I got involved in trail ultramarathons, running races up to 80 miles long over technical mountain trails. Every race I ran featured stretches where quitting seemed to be the only reasonable outcome. All those Spartan Sprints taught me that I have the ability to keep moving to the finish. They gave me confidence. Not to let my mind pull a sleight-of-hand over my physical exhaustion.

In graduate school, during final exams, my brain would become mushy and murky with so many facts and equations and concepts. Sleep was the only relief. I recalled Coach Bob’s Spartan Sprints and kept studying. Or meeting ridiculously tight deadlines at work for writing legal documents. Or parenting. I learned to press on.

Coach Bob was one of the first figures in my life to instill in me that you can always do more than you think, go harder, run faster, accomplish more, compete at a higher level. It was his gift to me.

Way back, on my first day of soccer practice, at some point in the year 1979, when Coach Bob introduced to us the Spartan Sprint, I likely cursed him. But I have been metaphorically running Spartan Sprints across the entire span of my life. And for that, I whole-heartedly thank him.

*Mike Strzelecki is a freelance travel and outdoor writer, and 1981 graduate of Boyertown Area Senior High School. He writes from his house in Baltimore, Maryland. In his spare time, he joins his wife on adventures around the country observing and photographing birds.

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