Tim Hickey
Lately I've gotten into the habit of writing about people who have passed away. Today it will be about the living. The subject of this piece is Tim Hickey, former Ball State athlete, former US Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania, former teacher for over 30 years in Philadelphia Public Schools, and former Track coach at William Penn High School. As far as I know, Tim is still meet chairman for the high school events at the Penn Relays, even though the Relays have taken a pause due to the Covid pandemic.
You know how you realize that you may have almost crossed paths with people many years before and never knew it? In 1966 Tim and I were both Peace Corps Volunteers in Tanzania. We never met there, as we had trained with different groups of vols, but at one point we were both coaching runners at the Tanzania national track and field championships held in Dar Es Salaam. Tim had originally been assigned to be the national basketball coach for Tanzania, but he soon found that the athletes were better runners than basketball players and focused more on track. He was also the national track and field coach for the young country. So at that national meet he had all the stud horses in the country, and I had a little rag tag group of high school kids from the Kilimanjaro District. Needless to say we were overwhelmed by Tim's athletes. This was a few years before we started hearing about the likes of Bayi, Nyambui, Ikangaa, and Musyoki. Tim and I never met at that meet, probably never knew the other existed. It was only another thirty years when we first got together in Philadelpia or Washington, DC.
In the late 60's early 70's, the City of Brotherly Love was desperate to fill teaching posts and sought new teachers from the hordes of returning Peace Corps Volunteers. Many started jobs there but few stayed. There were two exceptions Tim Hickey and a good friend of mine William "Wild Bill" Gingrich who had been in my Peace Corps group Tan X as we were called. Tim was in a slightly earlier group. In communications over the years, Bill often mentioned his friend Tim in his accounts of teaching and coaching in the inner city. They would both stay in their posts as math teachers for over thirty years. Tim even chose to live in the inner city across the street from his school 'William Penn'. In his own specialty, Bill served as the chess coach.
Both men had incredible resiliency to stay on the job that long, and perhaps it was that early Peace Corps experience that toughened them and gave them the joy in the education process to stay with it. Neither of them were city boys. Bill was from rural Annville, Pennsylvania (pop. 4,000), and Tim was from rural Parker City, Indiana (pop. 1420) just east of the metropolis of Muncie between Selma and Farmland.
Tim Hickey, "Wild Bill" Gingrich, Charles Patterson, George Brose
at an ex-Peace Corps gathering in Washington, DC about 2010
In the early 70's Title IX was about to kick in and Tim found himself at an all girls' school William Penn, and he decided that it would be beneficial for both himself and the girls to start a track team. The school was locked into the inner city, and the only place to train was on the sidewalks around the school. Here is a description of running a workout in such an environment.
"Lots of hurdles in Tim's path that would have discouraged nearly everyone. He took on what would seem to be insurmountable problems and solved them. Tim changed lives and made a difference." Roy Mason
From an article by Ted Silary writing about the William Penn program.
This story about Penn's outrageous practice situation was written in 1987 . . .
By Ted Silary
The main practice facility used by William Penn's girls track team consists of a sidewalk approximately 200 metersin length.
The sidewalk thinks nothing of torturing runners' shins, and myriad people (students, neighborhood youth, women pushing baby carriages) think nothing of disrupting coach Tim Hickey's workouts by walking across it. Except that it's too hard, too short, too straight, too cluttered and too confining, the sidewalk is perfect.
Say you're Hickey, and you want the young ladies to simulate a 400-meter run. You make them start on the 13th Street sidewalk outside the school fence, run up to Master Street, make a left, continue for about 30 yards, make another left at the gate - hopefully, it's open - and head down the 200-meter straightaway.
Six hundred meters? Do not turn left at the gate, but instead continue on Master to Broad Street. Make a left on Broad, make another left on Thompson Street, run straight through the gate at the corner of Thompson and Park Avenue, and conclude by touching the flagpole just a shade removed from the 200-meter sidewalk.
A half-mile? Up 13th, over Master, down Broad, across Girard Avenue.
Crave a distance workout? Run to City Hall and back.
"The 600 - the Flagpole Run, we call it - and the half-mile are the worst," Hickey said yesterday, taking time out from Penn Relays preparations. ''The wind on Broad Street is a son of a gun and you never know who you're going to run into when you round the corner.
"The half-mile is worse. Down at that corner (13th and Girard), the girls have to contend with the winos. Up here a little further (on 13th), it's the guys playing cards under the trees. There is all sorts of verbal abuse."
Is this any way to treat one of the nation's very best girls running programs?
Over the years Tim was coaching at William Penn, approximately 40 girls went on to college, because they learned they could run.
Here is another story about Tim and his athletes by Ted Silary again written in 1996.
Tim Hickey says junior Angel Patterson already ranks among the top runners he has coached in track at William Penn High.
"She has the ability to be No. 1,'' he said. "She doesn't quite have the dedication. She's a little lackadaisical. If she really worked, there's no telling how good she could be.
"Have I told her that? Maybe 100 times. Sometimes nicely, sometimes not so nicely . . . Like water off a duck.''
"He's right, I don't work hard enough,'' Patterson said, laughing. "I try to, but it doesn't always happen.'' Patterson was speaking yesterday after sparking the Lions to a whopping 207 points and their 18th Public League title in 21 years. Simon Gratz was second with 154 points.
The Girl Who Could Be Better was not exactly a stiff. All she did on La Salle University's track was break her own PL records in the 400 meters (54.72) and 400 intermediate hurdles (1:00.11) and run a 55.0 anchor split for the 4 x 400 relay team, which also snapped a record (3:51.01).
"Any time Angel feels like running, the ability is there,'' Hickey said.
"During the indoor season, I was working hard every practice,'' Patterson said. ``We had to do our best in every meet because the [areawide] competition was so tough. It's a little different outdoors when it's just the Public League. It seemed like I got a little lazy.
"Mr. Hickey would always be yelling at me and the other girls. `You'll never beat anybody if you run like that! Don't think you're going to beat Gratz! ' He'd make us mad, then we'd work harder.''
Penn's day was not without consternation. Hickey said senior Kim Stowe went flying out of school yesterday morning in search of yellow shoes to wear with her yellow prom dress.
"She dyed some shoes one shade of yellow,'' Hickey said, "but when she picked up her dress [Thursday] night, the yellows didn't match. So, of course, she had to go buy new shoes.
"She took so long, she didn't make it back in time to catch our team bus. We didn't know what to think. She was going to be on both our 4 x 100 and 4 x 200 relay teams. But first she had to run in the 100. This was a no-scratch meet. If she'd missed it, she would have been out of the relays. For some reason, the meet started 10 minutes late.
She made it 90 seconds before the 100 started.''
It hasn't all been easy these last years before retiring in 2003
"These last few years, it hasn't been as much fun. I have more trouble getting the girls motivated for practice. And myself. At the end of the day, I'm so tired. The teaching part is so difficult anymore. It's tough to maintain discipline in the hallways, and even in my own classroom."
With a laugh, he added, "I try not to let it get to me. My department head said she'll know it has when I use one of the 300-some sick days I have saved up."
Finally, this piece appeared in Chalkbeat Philadelphia August, 2020
Though Willam Penn High School experienced many changes during the last 30 years, one thing could always be counted on.
No matter what, the girls’ track team always ran fast.
Beginning in 1983, the Penn girls reeled off a 20-year regular-season unbeaten streak, winning 18 Public League championships and 18 Pennsylvania Coaches’ Association indoor state championships along the way.
Even more impressive, the team set five national scholastic records and reached the finals in at least one event at the Penn Relays for 20 straight years, winning twice during that stretch and three times overall.
Summing up the team’s greatness, The Inquirer called the Penn girls simply "the best, by far."
But now, with William Penn temporarily shuttered and the track program disbanded, their legacy is without a home. Beating the best
Memories of the Penn track team live mostly in the voluminous scrapbooks of legendary former coach Tim Hickey.
It takes a large bookcase, several tables, and nearly every wall of his home to hold the history Hickey has carefully preserved.
"Other people had families. I had my track girls," he says.
But the image that generates the biggest reaction is not of his girls at Penn. Instead, it’s of their archrivals from powerhouse Brooklyn Tech, crying in defeat following the dramatic finals of the 4 x 800 meter relay at the 1979 Penn Relays.
"Oh, we loved this photo," laughs Hickey. "It was not a friendly competition."
‘No such thing’ as girls’ track
For over a year, Hickey and his runners – Rosie Richardson, Pam Hughes, Valerie Fisher, and Cynthia Colquitt – had been chasing the national scholastic record in the 4 x 800.
In a preliminary heat at the Penn Relays – then, as now, the biggest track meet on the East Coast – Hickey’s girls finally broke the record.
Unfortunately, they also finished 3.2 seconds behind Brooklyn Tech.
But in the finals the next day, running in a steady rain, the Penn team broke the new record and beat Brooklyn Tech by more than seven seconds.
"We’d been together so long, and we’d been pointing for the [record] the whole year," Hickey says. "To have it come off like that was just fantastic."
Just five years before that record-breaking 1979 relay, girls’ track did not exist in the District.
"They didn’t think girls could run 100 meters," Hickey remembers. "It was crazy."
He knew better.
During a three-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer, Hickey had coached the Tanzanian women’s national track team.
And not long after he arrived in Philadelphia to become a math teacher at Vaux Middle School, he met 14-year old Pat Helms, who would go on to run with the U.S. women’s national team while still in junior high.
Hickey wanted to coach at Vaux but was rebuffed.
"I asked about girls’ track, and they said there was no such thing," he said. "If you were a girl at that time, the only way you could compete was at the club level."
So Hickey started his own club team, Klub Keystone, which quickly began competing all over the country.
In 1972, Hickey followed Helms and some of his other young standouts from Vaux to William Penn, at the time still an all-girls school serving grades 10-12 in the building on North 15th Street that is now Franklin Learning Center.
It wasn’t until 1975, after the federal government enacted Title IX, which bars schools from excluding students from educational programs of any kind on the basis of their sex, that there was a real citywide championship and Public League schedule of meets.
"That was when girls’ sports really exploded on the school level," Hickey says.
"We had some really good club kids, but the [first] really good William Penn bunch … was the group in ’79 that broke the national record."
The best years
It wasn’t long until Hickey had his next standout runners.
In 1982, Shawn Nix (nee Moore) started as a freshman at William Penn.
Eventually, Nix would go on to anchor a winning Penn Relays 4 x 400 team in 1985, as well as compete for the U. S. Junior World Team as a hurdler. During Nix’s sophomore year, Penn would win the first of what would become 20 consecutive Public League titles.
But first, she had to learn her way around William Penn’s new facility at Broad and Master Streets, which had opened in 1975.
"It was a huge, contemporary building – a unique school," remembers Nix. "I knew how to get to one class, nowhere else."
There were other problems to navigate.
Since the move, William Penn had begun admitting boys, added a 9th grade, and became a true neighborhood school – all of which contributed to rising disciplinary issues, Hickey says.
There were also significant issues with the new building.
"When you went behind the walls, it was a complete shambles from the very beginning," remembers Hickey, citing faulty heating, air-conditioning, and electrical systems.
"It was this big modern thing with 24 doors that could not be locked, which turned out to be a disaster," he continues. "You’d have guys who didn’t even go to the school run in, beat somebody up, run back out."
For Nix, there were two saving graces at William Penn: the track team and a self-contained Communications magnet program, where Hickey taught.
"We stuck together like a family in that magnet program," Nix says. "And once track practice started, I was comfortable."
The team didn’t have a practice facility but made the most of their surroundings, running sprints on the nearby 15th Street sidewalks. And despite a lack of outside financial support, Hickey always came up with the money to travel to meets and get adequate gear.
As it turned out, a skeptical principal and a fence erected around the school building presented Hickey and his girls with their biggest challenge.
"I had a principal who actually told me I was a failure as a coach because I hadn’t taught my girls how to lose!" Hickey says.
"She wouldn’t OK us leaving to go anywhere, and the only way out [of school grounds] was to climb over the fence. So for 15 years, [we were] sneaking out and climbing over the fence to go to the Penn Relays."
Hickey retired from teaching in 2003, but he still volunteers as an assistant coach, now with the standout Swenson girls’ track team, and he stays in regular contact with many of his runners.
The girls – now women, with careers and families of their own – say it was all worth it.
Rose Richardson, who ran the lead leg on the record-breaking 1979 relay team, briefly attended Delaware State University on a track scholarship and now works as a custodian at a North Philadelphia elementary school.
"Hickey brought out a lot in all of us," she says.
"I was always nervous, but when I ran, I was all right."
And Shawn Nix, now a physical education teacher and real estate agent in Atlanta, went on to the University of Tennessee, where she won a national championship in the 4 x 800 relay and earned her degree in criminal justice.
She said although she got to travel the world because of track, William Penn will always be home.
"It shaped who I am today," Nix says.
"If there was a place I could go back to in my life, it would be running high school track."
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