Remembering Hodge

I can hear his gravelly, New Jersey-accented voice in my head, as if it were yesterday: “Pee-da! How are the Running Red Foxes doin’?”

The passionate, in-your-face coach, almost always wearing a shirt-and-tie in the Armory, is someone that Phil and I knew well from his Robert Morris days and then more recently and more memorably during his days as Rider’s head coach.

When he was at Robert Morris, Bill Hodge was an amazing coach and a bit abrasive at the same time. When he moved to Rider at about the same time we joined the MAAC, Hodge was still quite amazing – his teams always seemed to peak for the MAAC Championship meets in all seasons – but we began to see a softer, more human side to him. Through the years we always respected Hodge; at Rider, we grew to really like him to the point where he was a true friend in the coaching ranks.

The news came to me this week that Bill Hodge, now at Belmont Abbey in North Carolina, died suddenly of a heart attack while coaching his teams at their conference championships. He was just a week or so shy of his 60th birthday, and he leaves behind a wife and 4 kids. Of course, this is sad, sad news.

It hits home in this regard, too: As coaches, we spend so much time away from home. We are with our teams on the endless days and nights, and that forges a closeness. But we are also with our fellow coaches, many of whom we see week after week, year after year, at these meets. In season, it is not a stretch to think that we spend as much time in the presence of our teams and other teams and coaches, as we do with our own families. So you cannot help but build connections with these people.

Hodge left Rider a few years ago. As I said, we became fond of him in a way that was not the case in the mid-1990s, when the thought of getting on a Northeast Conference coaches conference call was not pleasant at all. Hodge had had some health issues toward the end of his tenure at Rider, but we had heard that he was doing well down South – first at Mount Olive and now at Belmont Abbey.

In many ways, Hodge (and he was one of those guys you always referred to by his last name, for some reason) reminded me of Steve Lurie, my eccentric old college coach. He was a coaching lifer, fully dedicated to his teams, bopping from one school to the next, achieving success at every stop.

What I’ll remember about Hodge was that he was an intense coach. He was passionate, with a capital P. He parlayed that intensity to the teams he coached. They were ALWAYS ready for Conference Championship meets. Always. The collegiate track coaching ranks lost a good coach, and a good man.