In the early decades of Sue Loeffler’s coaching career at Bigfork High School she would load the members of her track team onto a school bus and drive them into Kalispell to train at the Flathead High School track. Compared to Bigfork’s “pretty crappy” dirt track, getting to practice on the county’s only all-weather track was a treat for the athletes.
“It was especially good for relay teams to get our marks down for when we went to meets,” Loeffler recalled. “But I got good at measuring out exchange zones back at Bigfork. Hurdles too, I could measure out hurdle spacing with my feet almost exactly.”
It wasn’t until 2004 that Bigfork renovated their athletic facilities and got an all-weather surface to run and jump on.
“These kids now don’t have a clue what it was like to be a track athlete back then,” Loeffler said.
If anyone can speak to the evolution of track and field in Montana it’s Loeffler. Since her coaching tenure began in 1974, she’s been named National Coach of the Year and coached teams to multiple cross country and track and field state titles, but her involvement in Montana athletics begins even earlier, paralleling the sport’s statewide origins.
Loeffler attended Havre High School and joined a track team that predated the first Montana High School Association (MHSA) sanctioned season. In 1969, MHSA held the first state championship and Loeffler qualified. She did so again as a senior, and can recall racing against Kalispell, a team in the midst of a seven-season winning streak that began under coach Neil Eliason.
After graduating, Loeffler wanted to continue competing on the track and got in touch with Eliason — or “Mr. E,” as he was known — who had moved from Kalispell’s lone high school to Flathead Valley Community College to coach the Mountainettes track team, which was nationally ranked among two-year and four-year universities.
The two years Loeffler competed at FVCC were the program’s best — the team finished third and fourth at the national meet, beating out elite schools like UCLA, Oregon and Stanford. As a freshman, Loeffler was a member of the 440-yard relay team that won the 1971 National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) championships. She still has a video of the race, which was transferred from a reel to an eight-track to a CD over the years.
“It was just an amazing experience. It was all Montana girls and we showed we were the best of anyone,” Loeffler recalled. “To this day I instill in my relay kids the handoff techniques I learned from Mr. E. We didn’t have the fastest girls at that national meet, but our handoffs were the best.”
Eliason used to time his relay teams through their exchange zones, and Loeffler recalls not being allowed to leave the track until they hit the correct time five times in a row.
“It really helps teach the kids to run hard in and run hard out of an exchange. Otherwise, there’s always a tendency to slow down during a handoff,” she said.
At last year’s Class B state meet, the Valkyries swept both the 4x100m and 4x400m relays, and a 2015 4x400m relay team that included both Makena and Brynn Morley ran the existing Class B state record. Loeffler clearly inherited Mr. E’s ability to coax greatness out of athletes, even from something as seemingly trivial as a relay handoff.
“My love for coaching was really made stronger because of him,” Loeffler said. Later in Mr. E’s career, he joined Loeffler as her assistant coach at Bigfork for a few years before finally hanging up his stopwatch after five decades of coaching.
Loeffler, who will be inducted into the National High School Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame this summer, says she’ll make it at least to her own five-decade mark, too, before she begins to entertain a life away from the track.
“Mr. E did 50, so I’ve got one more to match him,” she said. “Then I figure I’ll keep this up as long as I’m healthy enough and enjoy it enough to still do it. Being a head coach can be pretty tiring, but the kids keep me going — they make me want to be here every day.”