“Take it easy!”, “Give us a chance!”, these are just some of the amazing, and inspiring quotes used by my track coach, Mr. Schopp. He is the boy's varsity head coach, and he is well known in the team for having fun, and inspiring quotes and working smart. Mr. Schopp works smarter because he knows what it takes to do well in track and if people work harder, and not smarter, they can injure themselves. He has taught me how to do this and allowed me to start to excel in class and in track. He still believes in working hard, but he values working smarter more. For if people work smarter, and not harder all the time they allow themselves to build up strength.

Track has always been fun for me, but it started off as just something I wanted to do with my friends. I spent almost every practice messing around, and not working on my events. We had days where we worked hard, but, looking back at it now it was never really hard. We never went into the weight room to work on our strength. It was always what we wanted to do. We never had a schedule for our practices and this lead to a weak team as a whole. We had strong points, but as a team, we never scored very high. Our strong points; James Watson and Mason Grimes; attempted to carry our team to a win or at least not get last. He would allow for us to work on an event without helping us at all. I can say that this was not an enjoyable year for me. For my friends, it was a pretty good year for they were good at their events. This made track harder for me to enjoy my events because of the skill of my opponents and my peers.

Track is a sport about self-succeeding, and then it’s a team sport. People have to work on themselves, there isn’t anything they can do as a team if they don’t put themselves first. If they can succeed on their own they can lead their team to a victory and allow their team to succeed together. Track is an extremely fun activity to do, and it allows for healthy competition, but if they don’t work on allowing themselves to succeed by themselves we can’t win as a team. Mr. Schopp taught me this in only one year of being on the Varsity Track team. It allows me to know what to do when I want to do good at an event. The guy's varsity track team has done extremely well this season. I hope going into subsections that I will be able to succeed in my event and allow for my team to get points.

Mr. Schopp has made track an extremely enjoyable activity. He makes sure we get a good workout without forgetting the fun that track should have. He allows for jokes, messing around and overall fun to be incorporated in every practice. Mr. Schopp also knows the importance of working hard and smart. Mr. Schopp has specific things he wants to get done, and we complete them all in a practice. He has a new plan every day, and at track meets he allows us to do our races and doesn’t distract us when we are going to our event. He wants us to have fun and to stay loose before our race. Once we get into our race it's all serious, and we focus hard. We don’t allow anything to bother us at all even nervousness. It allows for us to run our race and to excel as a team.

Mr. Schopp has taught me so much, and I hope that I will continue doing track for the rest of high school that he teaches me more. Mr. Schopp has taught me the importance of “taking it easy”, and “giving our team a chance” at winning. There is a lot of hard work and dedication needed for the track, but if others have a track coach like Mr. Schopp they can find it to not seem very hard at all because Schopp knows how to make it fun, but still hard at the same time. I hope that I can teach what Schopp has taught to me, and pass it on to younger kids that do track. I hope that if we all do this we can succeed as a team, and possibly go to the state to possibly win it. It would really help the track team's confidence, but we can’t do it without Schopp’s spirit towards the team, and how he coaches all of us. Mr. Schopp could possibly be one of the best high school track coaches for his attitude to not succeeding as much as people want, and he doesn’t want them to get discouraged. I can speak from personal experience to what Mr. Schopp has done for me, and allowed for me to succeed on track in my own ways.