Saturday’s March 28 ceremony dedicating the running track and field at Charleston High School to a former longtime local coach, Craig Walker, was very fitting and richly deserved.
For many years, Walker was the physical education teacher and track and football coach at Charleston Middle School, but he may be most widely known as the founder, fundraiser, driver and coach of a summer youth track and field program that captured the attention of people far from Tallahatchie County and Mississippi.
It all began in the summer of 1982, when a then thirtysomething Walker coached four talented girls from his junior high track team to the Hershey Invitational meet in Memphis, where they placed second in the 400-meter relay finals.
“After they did so well, I decided we’d start a full track team,” Walker said in a July 1983 interview.
It was in that year that Walker formed a unit comprised of about 40 young athletes — 30 of them hailing from Tallahatchie County and the rest from Grenada and Marshall counties.
Walker named the troupe the Northeast Mississippi Youth Track Club, and the group attended five meets that year, from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, all the way to Dayton, Ohio, racking up some 260 trophies, medals and ribbons and setting 15 track records in multiple events along the way.
In 1983, the club became the Charleston Tracksters, then the Charleston Road Runners.
Finally, in 1984, the entity was incorporated as the Mississippi Road Runners Track Club Inc., and over ensuing decades the Road Runners traveled far and wide to venues on the Southern and Amateur Athletic Union circuits, including multiple trips to national and Junior Olympics contests where gifted Mississippi athletes more than held their own against competitors from all across the United States.
As much as Walker loved his summer program and the young people he tutored, coached and mentored, it was not an easy row to hoe, especially financially. By design, his summer youth organization was not a school-sponsored entity, so Walker called on local parents, grandparents, businesses and industries to help with the considerable expenses. He and his wife, Linda, sometimes invested personal resources to help cover the costs of entry fees, transportation, lodging, food and more.
The Sun-Sentinel had a long working relationship with Coach Walker through covering the many accolades earned by the members of his summer track teams. When he stopped by the newspaper office to report on the medals won and the records set at the Road Runners' last meet, he would be beaming with pride and joy.
But Walker was never one to seek publicity for himself. He always, very politely, refused to answer any questions even suggesting that his own coaching prowess or motivational skills had played any role in the success of the team. He would simply smile and say, “It's not about me. It’s all about the kids.”
At Saturday's dedication of The Craig Walker Track Field, numerous former young athletes spoke about how Walker, the man, had been a father figure to them or had guided them onto a straight and narrow path to future achievement and personal fulfillment.
One speaker said of him, "Coach Walker did not stop at his success. He wanted everybody in Charleston to be successful, and there are so many people that he inspired to be whatever they are. ... He sacrificed a lot of himself to make sure that you people in Charleston were successful in life."
In 1983, the coach described his organization as a vehicle to “pull [kids] off the streets and give them something else to do.”
Walker, now 81, did that, for sure, but he also gave them so very much more — lifelong gifts that could never be measured by a stopwatch or a length of tape.
Congratulations, Coach Walker. Now it’s your turn in the spotlight, and rightly so. You earned it.
