BY JESSE LEMOND
Clarkston News Student Writer
“The more you put in to it, the more you get out of it.”
That’s good advice for life in general, but the boys on the Holly High School Cross Country team have run with it. Many of them have achieved state qualification, and if you ask, they’ll tell you their coach, Rich Brinker of Clarkston, has been key to their success.
Brinker, seven-year boys cross country coach, is a four-time representative of the United States on a world team and three-time All-American runner.
During his running career, he learned about hard work and pushing yourself to the limit. He pushes his runners very hard, too, but reassures them he will never push them past their capabilities.
“I’ll never ask them to do something I’ve never done,” he said.
Brinker said he’s living his dream. Just like his high school coach, Wayne Roberts, he is a Physical Education teacher at Davisburg Elementary in Springfield Township and Rose Pioneer, as well as high school cross country coach.
“I thought my coach had the coolest job in the world,” he said. “He just comes and gets to hang out in the gym all day.”
When Brinker was in eighth grade, his PE teacher was constantly on him about running in high school, but Brinker wanted to be a basketball player.
“Being a whopping 4 feet, 6 inches, and weighing about 55-65 pounds, I was going to be a football player,” he said.
His gym teacher, and future coach, didn’t take Brinker’s football dream too seriously, and when his freshman year rolled around, Roberts had convinced Brinker to run for him, “just to get in shape for basketball,” he said.
Like almost every other runner, he started out with lots of room for improvement. In his very first meet, he ran a 23:30 in a 5K.
“I’m glad I didn’t run against any girls because a lot of them would have murdered me,” he said.
Though Brinker had a long season of hard work ahead of him, he was suddenly excited to get better, and his competitive nature drove him to work hard at practice especially after a fellow teammate said that he would never, ever beat him.
“To this day, I’ve never lost to him again,” he said, with an underlying tone of pride shining through his modest persona.
Brinker ran throughout his high school career, and by the time he was a senior, he had taken more than seven minutes off of his starting 5K time and went on to Central Michigan University to run, with dreams to become an Olympian.
But running in college was just like starting out in high school again. Once more, Brinker found himself in the middle of the pack with lots of room to improve—a freshman.
He admitted when he started college, all he cared about was running, and though he didn’t cut classes, he said he definitely didn’t study as hard as he should have in the beginning. He was grateful to his coach for reminding him to focus on his life after running.
Brinker realized how easy it was to forget the journey once you’ve reached success.
As a result, he developed an alumni program for his team so Holly Cross Country graduates could stay connected to the team and see the journey through different eyes.
Welcoming Holly graduates to team practices also allows them to have people to train with, even when they’re away from their college team or running group.
Brinker knows first-hand how hard it is to motivate yourself when you’re running alone and said running with a team helped him a lot, even though it takes a lot of internal strength to run well.
“It’s a daily grind,” he said. “You’re going to hurt at some point in time. It’s really easy to back off, but that one time you pushed a little harder and saw how much faster you could run is how you get better.”
Rich Brinker lives in Clarkston with his wife, Molly, and almost one year old boy, Finn.
“It takes a village to raise a child,” the coach said. “Being a father makes me value the time with the guys even more, knowing that while they are at practice or camp, parents are trusting me to take care of their kid.”
Seeing Brinker with Finn, it is clear he is loving being a father, too, and they plan to stay in Clarkston for a long time.
“We liked it was in a small town, but we still had easy access to everything. We knew we were buying a house that would stand the test of time,” Molly said.