Charger Chatter: Coach Towne

Home Sports Charger Chatter: Coach Towne

Andrew Towne is the head coach of men’s and women’s cross-country, indoor track and field, and outdoor track and field. An alumnus, he graduated from Hillsdale in 2004 as a math major. He lives in town with his wife and son.

How long have you been at Hillsdale and how did you get here?

I came to Hillsdale in the fall of ’99 as a student. I’m from just down the road in Pittsford, which is about 20 minutes from here. I had no intention of being here at all. My momma tricked me into a visit. My momma is a small but feisty Polish lady, so we went on the visit. Hillsdale was totally different than anything I had ever thought it was. You know from being around here, sometimes the town thinks differently about what’s actually going on here. Their perception can be different than what’s actually happening and I was no different. I loved it here. I was on the men’s track team for five years. I will say that I am probably not on the same level as a coach as I was as an athlete. I always joke with our kids, I don’t know that I should have been at the GLIAC meet at all just because I wasn’t that great of an athlete, but I loved my experience here. I went away for a year after graduation. I was engaged and my wife was working in Kalamazoo. So once we got married we went to live there for a year. But, I really wanted to be back and be involved. I was part time for a year and a half, which was awesome, and was really hard because I had to work another job to be able to do the things I wanted to track-wise. I ended up here for four years total. I had some really great things happen. I got an opportunity at Miami Ohio to be an assistant coach down there, and it was Division I and I was curious about that, so I made the really tough decision to go there. We were down there for two years. Some things went really well down there, so I had a lot of opportunities, one of which was Hillsdale. And it wasn’t one I expected at all. I had actually just come back from another interview at a Division I school for a head coaching position, and I got a call from Hillsdale. We figured we’d be forty, forty-five, years old before we got the chance to come back to Hillsdale, but we felt like this was what God had for us.

What’s a favorite moment with the current team?

The first couple that come to mind with current kids are what we did in Louisville with women’s cross-country and what we did this past weekend in Birmingham, just the collection of kids. I remember when I first started coaching we weren’t very good, and we were starting to get some kids to the NCAA championships, I remember looking at these other teams and they had this entourage of people, because so many kids qualified. The first year I went, I had my one 400 meter guy and the one 400 meter girl and that’s all we had as a program. So to go to cross-country as a full team, to go to the indoor national championships with athletes, and alternates, and coaches, we had 22 people, that was neat, to me, to be the kind of program that I thought we could be but we weren’t when I started, to experience that with those kids that was really neat.

What’s something about you that people wouldn’t expect, maybe a hobby?

With cross, indoor, and outdoor, track occupies a giant part of my life. The one I always throw out in recruiting sometimes and with our kids, they think they know me, I’ll always say to them, “If you had a guess at what was the first concert I went to, what would you say?” and I was a math guy here and I’m a numbers guy and they never have a guess and sometimes someone will try and be funny and they’ll throw out an ’80s band like I’m old, but probably my favorite group, of all time, even to this day, is Weezer. I don’t know that I’ve had a kid that wasn’t surprised to hear that. But, I don’t have a ton of hobbies. Track is kind of my hobby. I love to spend time with my son and my wife, we have a little boy about to be 6-year-old. He goes to the kindergarten at the Academy. To have a little son that is, to everyone who has ever met him, 90 to 95 percent exactly like his dad, it gives you a chance to watch your childhood from a different perspective. I like to spend a lot of time with him.