After 34 years as a social studies teacher in Sachem, Alex Young has officially retired.
Young, who graduated from Sachem in 1977, began teaching n 1983 and aside from six years early in his tenure that he spent at Sachem South – now called Samoset – he spent the other 28 at Sachem High School North.
A highly respected and now legendary track and field coach, Young began coaching in 1990 and spent 27 years coaching at least two seasons, and the last 17 years coaching all three seasons in fall, winter and spring.
We sat down with him to talk about his career, Sachem and his legacy.
It’s been a long and successful run at a place you have called home your entire life, are you ready to retire? Are you happy with how it all played out?
AY: “I’m at a good place. I couldn’t have imagined some of the things that happened to me from the start. As I leave Sachem, I’m leaving it with great memories and a lot of great opportunities that came my way that I was able to do good things with.”
Of course, you’ll always be a social studies teacher and you left your mark with thousands of students inside the classroom over parts of three decades, but many know your undying passion for track and field and the title of coach will always be synonymous with Alex Young.
AY: “It wasn’t a goal of mine to be a coach. An opportunity came my way. Pete McNeill spoke to me. He needed assistants. He knew I had an interest in the sport. He spoke to me and that’s the door that opened up that I wasn’t looking for. It’s been a great part of my career. It’s 28 years in coaching. I couldn’t have imagined having that experience behind me.”
A loaded question for you, do you have one top sporting memory? I’ll assume no since you’ve coached for so long, but what really stands out?
AY: “I don’t have that one great moment over the course of a better part of three decades. We’ve seen a program grow. I give Pete McNeill a lot of credit in starting some of the things that I came into. We took it places where we couldn’t have imagined going with it. We’ve had county, state and national champions along the way and each one is their own story. We’ve had athletes achieve things they couldn’t have imagined achieving, so some of the real great memories I have are memories for athletes who didn’t really show up in any trophy cases or championship rosters, but on the other hand the team championships we’ve had along the way have been great. Team championships are always the best thing. The county championships that we’ve won are among the best memories that I have.”
Coach McNeill, also a Sachem alum, of course, has been coaching long after his retirement from teaching. He has helped the programs grow at Sachem East and has a great relationship with the coaches and student-athletes there. Do you plan on doing the same in some capacity moving forward at Sachem North?
AY: “I will continue coaching here in the fall. Coaching life is going to continue. Beyond that I have some community and family goals. That part of my life will come to me. I will be a cross country assistant coach, the head coach in winter girls track and field and there may be some coaching changes with girls and boys for spring, so we’ll see where that goes.”
Let’s go back to the beginning and talk about how Sachem helped shape and define you to the point where you dedicated your professional life to this district. What was your experience like as a student?
AY: “The Class of ‘77 is one of the two unique classes in Sachem that we bonded in a way that other classes can’t; seventh graders were at Seneca, eighth graders only at Sagamore and ninth grade only at Samoset. We got real close with our class. When there is only one grade in a building, that’s it. That’s your social life. It was a fantastic experience. I had good teachers along the way. I loved my student experience at Sachem. I loved history, which is something I was so lucky to teach the last 34 years. I went to college with the goal of maybe being a teacher or maybe working in politics, which is what I did for two years after getting out of college.
Politics? Just when you think we knew everything about Alex Young!
AY: “I worked down in D.C. for a national campaign committee before going back to college and finishing teaching certification and landing back here at Sachem. The committee now is called Free Congress Foundation. As a non-partisan campaign committee, it’s goal is to help people get elected. They had campaign signs down about as well as any group in the country and they were responsible for some pretty good election wins during the early 1980s when I was there. I think their real focus still continues to be campaign education for candidates and campaign organizations in a non-partisan way. For me that was a lot of fun, but my love still continued to be history and maybe I got the D.C. life out of my system.”
Were you a passionate runner and student-athlete in Sachem?
AY: “I was not an athlete in high school. My family owned a business and there was a commitment from the family children to work in the business and school sports were out. It didn’t mean we weren’t involved in sports, and I had a love of running. At a very young age I knew it was something I was good at and something I liked. It was during a peak period of time where running was enjoying a great resurgence because of people like Steve Prefontaine and some other great Olympians – Frank Shorter and Steven Ovett and some other really cool guys who were coming out at the time. It’s something I did on my own in high school and college. After college, I began running competitively for the first time in my life as an individual. About the time I started coaching I was becoming the most serious I had ever been as a track athlete. I was training with other athletes and joining some local clubs and ended up running with some good racing teams, including the Pioneer Racing team in New York City and out here with the Second Wind team. I wound up going to some meets like Millrose Games and Penn Relays. I got serious as an athlete about the same time I was being drawn towards coaching.”
Talk about that family business. What did your dad do and how did that shape you?
AY: “My dad owned a deli in Amityville for most of my childhood. We all worked there. By the time I was in high school I was putting in full time hours, but so were my siblings. It was part of what we were all doing in the family, making a commitment to something that gave my dad a life he hoped to have for his kids. We were able to live in Sachem, he was able to buy a house and handle the mortgage and stop working two or three jobs, which is what he was used to doing most of his adult life before buying a business. It helped pay the bills. For us it was my dad’s own slice of the American dream and it’s something he passed down to his kids, which was that you can succeed and you can do better than I did. One small bit of my childhood is my parents pushing us to be successful in whatever area we went in.”
Let’s get back to the Sachem experience. What made you want to become a teacher?
AY: “I had great teachers. The teachers I had were outstanding, especially in social studies. I had teachers who pushed not just me, but all students to be as successful as we could. Sachem was a growing district at the time. There were opportunities for individuals coming in to teach and they realized there were opportunities for students and we just pushed hard. There was a culture in Sachem of pushing students to being the very best they could be. It wasn’t something we resisted. Most of the people I knew embraced this goal of ourselves to see how hard we could push ourselves.”
Any regrets?
AY: “I don’t have any great regrets. The opportunities presented to me, in some cases, have been unexpected. Coaching is one of them. Some of the advisory roles I’ve had, in student government especially back in the ‘90s and most of the early 2000s, have been wonderful. I haven’t been told no with a lot of questions I’ve asked with some of the things I’ve wanted to do in the classroom, with a club or with a team. I’m very lucky to have that too. No great regrets.”
You had the good fortune to coach an Olympian in Maria Michta – Sachem’s only alum to compete in the Olympics. She’s a once-in-a-lifetime athlete that has represented Sachem, Long Island and America proudly. What was it like seeing her develop?
AY: “I was probably lucky to coach long enough so that when someone like Maria came along I would be more helpful and more useful towards her development. In my first year coaching, I had a single individual league champion racewalker. It happened to be a senior. Her name was Erin Ingram. I was not her principal coach. I didn’t develop her. I just happened to be there coaching when she won the league title. From the beginning, racewalking has been a part of my coaching life and from Erin I was already learning things about coaching racewalking and by the time Maria joined the team we had some other all-county and high caliber race walkers come through.
Maria came here with her own mindset that she wanted to be the best at something. She was a soccer player who did not make a soccer team in the fall, so she joined cross country because she saw herself as a varsity athlete. She loved the event. She was a natural, as much as someone can be a natural at an event they never heard of before.
By the end of her freshman year we knew we had a really good athlete on our hands and by the end of her sophomore year we knew we had an all-state contender. She went to states and nationals then. Maria kept a journal, which I always encourage athletes to keep, especially high achieving athletes. Maria wrote down, ‘I want to go to the Olympics’. And then she started taking the steps needed to become better and better. She pushed herself and we pushed her pretty hard. She let herself be coached because of the athlete she was. Maria was a lot of fun because she was dynamic, outgoing and while she had personal goals she was a team player all the way.”
Finally, what do you want your legacy to be?
AY: “In the classroom, I hope students who had me remember that I challenged them to think. Textbooks don’t have all the answers. One of the lessons I teach early in the year is that all history is biased. We talk about that so it’s the goal and a job of any teacher to challenge students to think. Social students and history, given how current issues are an extension to the courses we teach, it’s easy to challenge the students to teach.
On the track, the challenge is to be the best you can be. One of our mantras in the program is that we want students to give the best they could for the two hours we have them every day, and to challenge themselves to try new things. We want them to challenge their teammates to be the best they can be with the team experience being one of their goals. At the end of the day, I hope that athletes look at their team experience is one in which they took on challenges, and achieved their goals or created new ones for themselves.”
-As told to Chris R. Vaccaro