After the Banners Came Down

I didn't take a single photograph.

 
That shocked me when I realized it, somewhere on the drive home. Two days at the state track meet, one of the most visually rich environments I walk into all year, and I didn't take one frame. Not a start line, not the long shadows cutting across the infield in late afternoon, not the abstract geometry of a hurdle stack leaning against the fence. Nothing.

 
I am a person who photographs everything. Habitual, compulsive, gratuitous everything. The pattern of morning light across a concrete step. Steam from a coffee cup. Any interesting ceiling I have ever stood under. On any trip, any journey of any kind, the phone is in my hand inside an hour. I shoot whatever catches my eye, odd textures, strange marks, things that end up layered into paintings down the road. I can't help it. It's just what I do.

 
At state track, the camera bag stayed in the car and the phone stayed in my pocket. To understand why, you have to go back to Thursday morning. The last day of school ended the way it always does. In the morning the whole school gathered in the gym for Mass, students spilling into their seats, the building getting loud the way it does when a few hundred people are respectfully trying to be quiet. I came in early enough to find my spot and watch it fill. 

When I looked across the room, one wall caught my attention. The seniors' banners had been taken down, presumably before graduation so they could carry them home, and what was left was one side of the Velcro that had held them up, black rectangles in a pattern across the painted cinder block, each one marking exactly where something had been and wasn't anymore. They had not been peeled off yet. They were just there. I stood looking at them longer than I needed to, and then I had a thought I wasn't expecting. I'm leaving hooks too. Not on that wall, maybe, but somewhere. Fourteen years of showing up to the school and leaving marks I can't quite see yet. The seniors at least know which banner was theirs. I'm still figuring out what mine looked like.

 
Love. Hope. The particular sorrow that isn't really sorrow. One thing fully complete and the next thing not yet started. A few hours later, after cleaning the building and a farewell meal with the faculty, I drove four hours east for State Track. My last state track meet as a coach, my last one as a teacher, fourteen years of both finished that same morning. I made that drive Thursday thinking about the morning, something nagging me under the surface.

The meet itself had everything in it. The smell of concession hamburger and pizza and warm rubber and sunscreen and a cloudy Nebraska sky stretched wide over the infield. Long throws sending a shot across the sector line. Spikes clicking on the runway before a jump. Handshakes with rival coaches I've respected for years. Faces I hadn't seen since last fall that I needed to look at directly, not through a screen or viewfinder. Every time I might have reached for the phone, something real was happening right in front of me and I couldn't pull away from it. That's how it was for those two days.

 
Track is honest in some ways and dishonest in others. The times are accurate. When a girl wins the 400 meters, she won it. But the scoreboard records one champion per event and puts everyone else in the dark, and in doing that it hides some of the most important things about the day. I have talked and written about this at length. (Read blogs below. "Threads of a Season" (October 2025, the last XC state meet) and "The State Medalist Portrait Series" (February 2026)

The kid who tripped the fourth hurdle and lost his rhythm and still ran the back stretch with everything he had. The girl who didn't hydrate right the days before and ran through a headache that would have sent most people to the trainer's room before the gun. The boy who had been in the top three at every meet all season, made one small strategy miscalculation about how to run that particular race, and watched the race change shape in front of him while he was already committed to the wrong move. None of that shows up anywhere. The scoreboard says they didn't win that day and says nothing else even though each competitor is every bit the champion. I am not talking about participation trophies here. I don't believe in that.

 
I have sometimes thought about coaching as a kind of archaeology. The champion is already there. God placed it inside the athlete before you ever met them. Your job is not to install anything but to unearth it, carefully, the way an archaeologist brushes dust off something buried and fragile. A gentle word here, a brutal workout there. Every failed race, every loss that makes a kid want to quit and the next practice they show up for anyway, all of it removes a little more of the surface material. Exposing what was already there. You don't get to rush it. You don't get to skip the hard layers. The champion of life slowly revealed by the harsh elements of hard work, just like the elements that carved the Grand Canyon, the Badlands, or Arches National Park. It is the same for the awesome kids who have no athletic ability but show up anyway working just as hard, maybe harder than those that may have the benefit of better genetics. They win too. After all athletic ability is but ONE type of intelligence and, even though celebrated at the highest levels in America, not any more important than any of the other six, I would even say it sits at the bottom. Kids need to know that.

Coltan Ham on the third lap on the way to a State Championship in the mile. Image by Megan Anderson shooting with Prep Running Nerds

After a bad race I say almost nothing. A hand on the shoulder. I love watching you compete. Great job today. Not because the race was great, both of us know it wasn't, but because there is nothing useful to be explained in the first ten minutes after a gut punch. What they need is not a breakdown of what went wrong. They need to know someone saw them, and that none of this changes anything important. Give them space. Let the thing breathe. Help them to recognize that love and life is not based on the perception or realization of a win or a loss, especially this one, this moment.

 
Failures are the star of the show. Society doesn't see it that way, but I do. You can't get to the singular win of the day without hundreds of incremental failures on the way. We had new school records at this meet. New personal bests. Some results well below what the athletes hoped for. All of it real. All of it part of the work. On the drive home I thought about the wall again. The black rectangles. The hook and loop Velcro that held the banners for that year's seniors and were left behind when the banners came down. Everything those hooks had seen. Everything they still retained in the empty space where something used to be. I still don't fully understand why I didn't take a single photograph. But I think it had something to do with not wanting to start the process of putting it behind glass. Some things you need to leave unframed for a while. Some things are for keeping. Not for showing.

 
Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Tio

Coltan Ham finishing as a State Championship in the mile. Image by Megan Anderson shooting with Prep Running Nerds