Early inspiration keeps Fossil Ridge High School teacher Dan Brown and senior Jake Toshcoff on the track field every spring.

Brown continues to coach track because of his great experiences with his own high school football coaches.  

“I’ve had a lot of good coaches while growing up, and especially my football coaches in high school that really helped me push me and made me want to go into coaching to continue having an impact on people’s lives in a positive way,” Brown said. 

Toshcoff’s childhood experiences also inspired him to do track.

“When I was little, I wanted to get faster for football and that was the main reason I wanted to do it,” Toshcoff said.

Brown loves seeing his students achieve personal goals and having a fun time at track meets.

Usually depending on the week they have a warm up every track meet on Saturdays.

“We have track meets every Saturday in the spring, and then cross country meets we usually have every Saturday as well during August to October,” Brown said.

“It’s usually a bit harder at the beginning of the season to get you in shape for the end of the season. Every practice we do a warm up, a workout, cool down, some sort of stretching, rolling some abs, then they’re free to go,” Brown said. It gave Brown and his student athletes a great impact by mainly doing healthy and physical distractions to reduce their anxiety levels.

Brown has been coaching for seven years and shows how much he appreciates and loves working for track and field. His inspiration pushes him to further success and positivity.

In his high school years, Brown used to run a lot and got involved in competitions in his high school years. His favorite part about track are the competitions.

“It’s fun to see kids compete and try to do well, and then seeing them meet their goals or run a personal best, or break a record to see kids succeed which is really cool,” Brown said.

Toshcoff also has a favorite event.

 “I love the shot put and the long jump and I think those two events are a lot of fun,” Toshcoff said.

After being a track coach for many years, Brown knows why it attracts so many good athletes.

“People would want to do track, because we have a good team with a super fun environment, we try to make running fun and I think our coaching staff does a really good job of getting a good group of people out there and engaging as many kids as possible,” Brown said. 

Toshcoff enjoys the social benefits of track.

“I think it is a good opportunity to socialize a lot more in track than other sports and it gives you a friend group doing the same things as you are,” Toshcoff said.