After 35 years of teaching, coaching and directing, Hagerty’s Jay Getty crosses the finish line – Part 3

This is Part 3 of our 3-part series on Coach Jay Getty, the struggle of being a coach and a parent, and the fear that comes with leaving a life behind. Read part 1 here. Read part 2 here. Read a brief explainer for how this article came to be here.

“A coach raises other people’s children”

Talking about their own lives and careers, Coach Jay Getty’s mentors, the coaches with more than a century of experience between them, mostly said the same thing, tinged with the same understanding mixed with restrained emotion about a trade they know they’ve made. 

For Getty, those 4 or 5 a.m. wakeups, after the pre-dawn moments on the back patio or the balcony by the waves, the streak of runs in twilight, always ended the same way for five, six or seven days a week. Frequently before his three kids were awake, he’d get in his truck filled with a job to do in the back, fire it up and drive away. Be back sometime tonight. 

They understood, he said. 

“I think so.” 

Kelley Getty, who works from home in healthcare administration these days, said she did, before most of it even started. 

“When we got engaged, I knew I was marrying a coach,” she said. 

Their first child, Caleb, was born during the winter soccer season when Getty was head coach of Oviedo’s varsity girls team. The due date was Christmas Day, almost a lucky number; there were no soccer games on Christmas. But fate had other plans. Kelley went into labor Dec. 21 at Florida Hospital Altamonte, just before a soccer game in Lake Mary. 

“He kept looking at his watch,” she said. “Eventually Caleb was born, I think it was 6:07 p.m. he was doing well, and now I know Jay’s looking at his watch. I know he’s wondering ‘Is it warmups now?’ So we get in our room, we get settled, the baby’s fine, and I say ‘Leave. Go. Go coach.’ It was time for him to go, because he was driving me crazy.”

“People say ‘Don’t you get mad at him?’ No. I knew I married a coach. He was there for me all three of my births. He was in the room for all three of our babies. He was always there for me, and so I’m very lucky. Wouldn’t you know it, after the game he comes back, and maybe half the team is there to see Caleb and I. It was awesome.” 

He raised all three of his own kids to be runners while dabbling in other sports. And they’re all eager to tell stories about camping at the beach or along the Wekiva River with their mom and dad growing up, even on Thanksgiving. Growing up a Getty wasn’t so much about gifts as experiences and memories, they said.

But Getty admits that over the years, as his kids grew, the commitment of the job made him miss big moments. He missed the last baseball game Noah ever pitched in a Hagerty uniform.

That comes with the territory, Brauman said. Now 79, he’s well past his children graduating, but he still remembers. 

“A lot of things are understood when you’re talking about your own children,” Brauman said. “I know that I missed high school graduations because I was at the state track meet. Those are things that come up. You can’t schedule when graduation is going to be and you can’t schedule when the state track meet is going to be. You have a responsibility to your own children. You have a responsibility to the track kids. You make those decisions not because you want to, but because you have to sometimes. There’s an old saying in coaching, and I’m big on old sayings, that a high school coach spends their career raising other people’s children, and to a certain extent that’s very true. You have a ton of kids out there that you have helped raise.”

But there are moments when Getty’s dedication to his other kids found itself paid back in odd ways. Like that time he heard a commotion just after 4 a.m. from the people who’d come in the cover of darkness.

“One day I woke up on a Sunday morning and I’m like ‘What on Earth is going on outside,’ because there’s a bunch of noise outside my house,” Getty said. “So I go to the window and I look out, and the entire girls [cross country] team is camped out in my front yard.” 

They’d arrived overnight at some point, after Getty and his wife had gone to bed. 

“They made their own shirts, it said “Camp Getty” that year. It was a great team bonding thing for them. I didn’t know anything about it until I walked out, and there they are. They’d pitched a bunch of tents, right there in the front yard.”

At practice one day early this track season, a few minutes after Getty, testing the audio system at Hagerty’s stadium, blasted Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”, Ava Howell, his middle distance jack of all trades, trades a back-and-forth with him and as she starts to jog away, says, “See ya Coach Git.” Or maybe it’s Jit, Getty says. He never asked for the spelling of a nickname he’s only ever heard out loud. 

The first time she said it, he told her “as long as it’s not bad, it’s fine.” Later they looked up the “git” spelling, just in case. Whoops. “Well, that’s not what I expected when I looked it up, but I’m using it in a positive way,” Getty said. “So it kind of stuck.” 

Over the years there have been a few nicknames, he said, including from him. At one point the team decided that if somebody was running past so fast that Getty couldn’t recognize them in time, he could just yell “good job, Audrey,” no matter who it was. The team agreed. It happens when you coach a few thousand people, he said. 

An imperfect circle

There are just over 3,200 meters in two miles. Before an issue with staffing led Getty to have to coach the school lacrosse team for the past two years, that’s exactly how many athletes he calculates that he’s coached in 35 years; 3,200. Tack on the two bonus years of lacrosse, and it bumps up to 3,280. Close enough. 

That math comes in his head, by the way. Probed by the sudden subject change, he calculates it all with an arresting accuracy on the spot, as if some part of his brain had kept that tally perpetually live in some shadowy corner of his cerebral RAM. 

That’s 36 seasons of track and 35 of cross country, 16 years of soccer, and 2 seasons of lacrosse, while helping run the athletic departments of Oviedo and Hagerty High School for most of those years. Not both at the same time, of course. The switch to Oviedo came as Seminole County Public Schools was spinning up the operating machinery of an entirely new high school in the summer and fall of 2005. 

Oviedo’s small population that had in the 1990s traveled dusty one or two-lane roads between farms and scrub forests had exploded to more than 30,000 by the mid-aughts. The school district wanted Getty to help build the program from the ground up, working with Tibbets-Bryce, who was the first to extend him the offer.

“Switching schools was a super tough decision to make,” he said. “You’re in a town that already had a school. The community really didn’t buy in at first. It was not a ‘Great, we’re building another high school!’ It was a ‘oh, we’re building another high school.’” 

He also had to wrestle with the fact that, if he left the school he’d taught, coached and led for 14 years, he might be taking important parts of the OHS athletic department with him. 

Janson said that at the time he was disappointed Getty was leaving Oviedo.

“We’d become pretty good friends at that point,” Janson said. “So I thought, ‘What the heck.’” 

So Janson went with him. But that was just one lieutenant in an army of coaches.

“This was an opportunity to build a staff; it really could be a big cutthroat decision,” Getty said. “I was already entrenched in the other school. One of my best friends said “Hey, anybody can be successful at one place. Nobody gets to start on square one. You’re always taking over for somebody else.”

The irony of that line may not be lost on him. Getty’s always looking for the next group coming up, hoping that one day one of his students might come back, the circle completing, and take his place. 

“I’ve told Denis that before: our relationship that still exists today after I graduated in 1986 is what helps drive me here with these guys, hoping that one of them is going to materialize into the same thing,” Getty said. “Someone who’s going to care about them and get them to the goals they need to meet.” 

The first few runners at Hagerty are among the ones Getty remembers best, recalling them instantly by name 21 years later. When Getty started his first Hagerty cross country team from scratch in 2005, it was only three runners; one boy, two girls. 

“The five of us could get in his truck and go to a meet,” Janson said. “He and I in the front, the three kids in the back, and that was it.” 

Janson retired after 2021, after 30 years as Getty’s assistant. He swears he won’t be back. “I miss the kids sometimes,” he says. But when Getty’s Huskies once again qualified for the state championship last fall, just a few months after announcing he was retiring this school year, he lured Janson back out of retirement for one last cross country meet, in Tallahassee.

That invitation is when Janson said he knew Getty was serious. This was the last year. 

They didn’t win the championship – girls or boys – but on the long drive back to Oviedo Getty and Janson talked about years past, about the future. Maybe Getty un-retires one day, he said. But whatever he does next, Janson pleaded with Getty not to make that daily drive from Ponce Inlet to Seminole County and back again, with one caveat.

“See you next Friday,” Janson said.

A few months later, Getty was in the bleachers watching the last game he would ever be the school’s top coach for. The Hagerty softball team had a wild run through the FHSAA playoffs, punching their ticket to the state title game. When they took the field on May 20, win or lose, this would be it.

In a dramatic final inning, as pitcher Bella Ortiz struck out the last batter to win the championsip, Getty jumped out of the bleachers, still unflappably stoic, as tears welled behind dark sunglasses. 

The peril of standing still

On a late Wednesday afternoon earlier this spring he leads the way out of his office, takes a turn or two, opens a set of doors and then he’s down a towering hallway lined with athletic accomplishments, doing his best not to show pride in it all. He’s got more work to do before the day is done. There’s a wrestling tournament echoing in the gymnasium just a few dozen steps away, filled with far more banners. There are more to be hung from this final season, the only time in his career his daughter said she’s seen him stop to take it all in.

“The last football game, last home game, we were talking, and he was getting teary eyed,” she said. “And I’ve never seen him cry, ever. At our last glow-in-the-dark pep rally, I think it was last October, he was getting choked up, and I was like ‘Oh my gosh, you have emotions.’” 

Getty’s fear, though he doesn’t say it directly, is that he might be forgotten, that his final footsteps on dusty athletic fields may resolve into unbroken ground the moment he’s gone. One of his close friends, longtime champion football coach Phil Ziglar, died in early February after gradually easing away from coaching for nearly a decade.   

“What do people remember about you?” Getty wondered aloud. “How long do they remember that about you?” 

Ziglar’s first retirement wasn’t his only retirement. By the time he departed coaching forever he was on his second retirement job at his third school in a decade. Getty intimates that he knows himself too well to have any illusions of not coming back somehow.

Finke retired from coaching only to find himself starting a business, un-retiring from coaching at Lyman and, improbably, becoming a world-class poker player at the same time. Brauman has retired, moved to Italy in 2022 and still finds himself returning to coach at Seminole during track season, where he once again helped lead some of his athletes to state championships this year. 

“When [Getty] told me he was going to retire, I told him ‘You’ve got to find something now, because you’re going to go crazy,’” Finke said. 

Getty’s already wondering how quickly he’ll get tired of it, when the mornings on the balcony, serenaded to consciousness by the ever-churning sea, will tire more than they invigorate. But he sees it coming. There’s a moment, he imagines, listening to those palm trees sway in a gentle breeze in darkness before the sunrise, and it’s perfect, but still he’ll see himself somewhere else, feeling at home again, surrounded by the wonders of a circular existence on short-cropped infield grass, blissfully unaware of the digits ticking away behind him. 

“Do you just retire for it to be gone in a heartbeat?” he mused out loud, knowing full well the coaches he’s known who were gone at a young age. Gibson, the Lake Mary cross country and track coach Getty credits for taking him under his wing early in his career, died at 67. 

“In our profession there are so many who retired and were gone in a year,” Getty said. 

He knows that Hagerty’s championship-winning athletic programs will continue on, of course. The fields are there, the coaches remain, always a new cohort of athletes to replace those who’ve moved onward or upward. But with that relentless churn comes a fear: that the architect is forgotten the moment he leaves, simply ceasing to be. 

Every cross country season, the Seabreeze High School beach run takes off south toward a Daytona Beach pier that’s agonizingly far away. The finish line is always right ahead, but seems invisible until it comes rushing up in the last half mile, the pier suddenly, rapidly filling runners’ field of vision. Every step takes a bit more effort in the wet sand. And every evidence of effort is instantly washed away into the sea. But the runners carry on, the finish line beckoning ever more urgently toward tired legs, lungs and hearts. 

For Getty, who’s almost certain he’s done at Hagerty, the solace against that fear comes in knowing what’s already been started in thousands of lives, echoing in thousands more.  

“I’m happy for what I’ve accomplished with the kids,” he said. “And I’m happy for what they’ve accomplished for themselves.” 

In that long corridor toward the gym, his daughter Leah is part of one of those banners, hanging high above him, for dance. “National Champions.” He tries not to smile while talking about it, his feet moving him closer to the cavernous room where his history is already enshrined, but the future is forever in doubt. Cue The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.” 

“I know he probably thought he worked too hard and thought he missed out on a lot, but to us he was always there for us,” said Noah Getty, echoing similar words from his older brother and younger sister. “I’ve seen him pull up in his work uniform lots of times. He’ll pull up from that meet, to our practice, then back to his meet. He always found a way.”

With every step here he unwillingly casts himself a participant in an impromptu parade back through time cheering on his own life, ending with a big finale in the gym. In this hall, painted blue, black and white, Getty walks alone, the district, regional, state and national title banners lit the brightest by the corridor lights. 

The cheers are already long gone from those winning moments, authored by the successes of thousands of students over decades. But the ink remains on Hagerty’s walls, just as it does at Oviedo High School, repeating that same word over and over again, “champions,” ushering Getty down to a room where the heavy double doors open, the crowd roars for another point scored, and everyone in the room knows his name. 

“He’s just such a great model of a person who has just given their life to their work,” Simpson said. “His work has been to launch young people into the world as more confident, better-equipped young people. And he’s done it for 35 years.”

On the Friday ahead of Memorial Day weekend, he was early to school again. He tried, against the pleading of his coworkers, to help set up his own retirement party, in a room that soon filled with coaches, staff, his parents, kids, friends and former students, laughing at video clips and photos on the big screen of the media center.

Simpson flew down from her new job at the headquarters of the running outfitter company Fleet Feet in North Carolina, as its first “Chief Running Officer.” Schneider made the long jaunt from Ohio. They ate buffet food and cupcakes. And then Principal Robert Frasca led Getty outside to see the sign unveiled naming the school’s sprawling sports facilities “The Jay Getty Athletic Complex,” with both of his parents watching. Wearing sunglasses, he may have choked up a little. 

By then Getty was already almost done clearing out his office of everything personal, everything with the words “Coach Getty” on them, the room rendered a blank slate for incoming athletic director Jacob Colquhoun, who’s been a coach of multiple sports since 2017 and then, among a few subjects at Hagerty, teaching history. Getty called him “by far one of the most genuine people I’ve met.”

“I’m very excited,” Colquhoun told the Hagerty High School Blueprint in March. “But I also know there are big shoes to fill.” 

He’s not just speaking for himself. One of Getty’s final decisions on the job, when going over staffing for the next school year, came with the welcome stroke of a pen. One of the school’s newest assistant coaches had just finished her first year on the job, helping the dance team to a regional championship. So Hagerty’s athletic director decided the school should renew the contract for Leah Getty or, as the dancers call her, “Coach.” 

Words and photos, unless otherwise noted, by Isaac Benjamin Babcock