Hello and welcome back to Let's Talk Choctaws with Meeby and Kienna.

This week we had the pleasure of sitting down with the head coach of the cross country team, Matthew Reneker. 

One quality about Coach Reneker that was readily apparent to us was his dedication to his faith, which impacts all areas of his life. It starts with the little things, like getting up at 4:30 am with a cup of coffee and a moment of mindfulness. He checks on his kids, and then heads out the door for cross country practice at 5:30. "I try to have as much fun as humanly possible, because I want a job that is fun to me," he smiled. After practice he spends time with the track athletes in the gym. He is then able to get some time alone to do a morning workout, listen to a podcast and read his Bible before getting back to work from 11:00 to 6:00. "I try to limit my workdays to about 10 or 12 hour days," he said.

Coach Reneker has been positive about this season. "You just have to make the best of whatever it is everyday," he said, "whatever's coming your direction: if it's raining, or if you have a test, or if it's a world pandemic, you just [do your best]. The goal is that the outcome is the same, even though the environment changes." He explained to us how the team holds its core values to be a loving group and to put Christ at the center of it.

Coach Reneker has been here for five years and says that the teams just keep getting better every year. "I've got great kids on both teams and we try to set goals for the current year and for the upcoming years," said Coach Reneker. "The teams keep pushing the goals going forward." The teams recently competed in a conference championship in Huntsville this past weekend, where the Lady Choctaws placed second overall. 

Coach Reneker hasn't always been a coach; he started his career as an educator. "I was going to go to school to be a nurse or doctor but I didn't want to wear white or be with sick people," he said. He later took an education class and loved it. "It was so fun seeing the positive impact that you can have," said Coach Reneker. He then coached for a while before getting his doctorate and becoming a college professor. In college, he taught gross anatomy and exercise physiology; and in high school, he taught AP biology and anatomy before he moved back to the coaching realm.

Coach Reneker was a high school coach for ten years, and then was a professional coach for a while. He said that as a professional coach, it was less coaching and more about being a travel agent and getting gear for the athletes. "Then, I decided I was going to give college coaching a try," he said. He started out as a volunteer, then he became an assistant coach. After that he secured a position at a D2 program, and then moved on to being the director of a D1 program. "I hated the Division One model of sport, it wasn't what I wanted it to be," Coach Reneker said, "and so my wife and I decided in our forties that we were going to move to Mississippi, and now I'm the head coach at a D2 school again." 

Coach Reneker is passionate about Mississippi College, and his love for the school shines through in all that he does. "I think MC is the total package of a school, and I'm allowed to have that opinion because I've been at four colleges," he said. He believes in the ancient Greek representation of education, where students are mentored and fed both intellectually and spiritually. "I think there are people here who truly want to educate the youth and pour into their lives," he said. "The community here is genuine, and it's palpable." He told us that once he is able to convince prospective students to come to campus, the recruiting process is easy after that. "Once they get here," he said, "the school sells itself."

The Choctaws Cross Country team has found a great amount of success over the past few years. Just this past weekend, Jazmin Hernandez and Evan del Rio broke school records. However, it has been a several year process to get to this level."Our sport is very objective," Coach Reneker said. "It's not like basketball or baseball, where [the coach] is interfering with your plans, there's an offense and a defense…  [in cross country], you run. There's a stopwatch. And either you're good, or you're not." he said. "To be good in Division 2 is incredibly challenging, and over the last ten years it's gotten even more challenging in the state of Mississippi." Coach Reneker compared developing a winning team to losing weight. If you're trying to lose a hundred pounds, it's going to take longer than a weekend. "To be a national championship winning team- that's an eight year process," he explained. "You might not even be a part of it. What I'm most proud of about this team is that there have been people that have agreed to be a part of the steps that form the foundation," he said. "They are the Genesis Project, and they have the maturity to understand that even if they don't get to [the national championships], they want the next kids to be able to get there." Coach Reneker explained that he feels indebted to the athletes who have bought into the idea of slow but steady growth, because now the next set of athletes coming in are contenders to be a nationally ranked team. He's excited that even though the goal he's set for this cross country team doesn't necessarily have a direct payoff, they still want to work to improve the program as a whole. 

One of Coach Reneker's favorite memories as a coach was when Mississippi College hosted the conference championships two years ago. "We talked about having a home-field advantage, and what that would mean for us, and we also did a lot of training on that course and developed a detailed plan," he said. "We almost won a conference title- they went from sixth place in the conference [the year before] to almost winning in one year. What I really liked is that they created the vision that it could be done, and they came up with a plan of how they were going to do it." Coach Reneker said that they did workouts week after week, and planned carefully for how they were going to be successful. "They went into PhD mode," he laughed, "and to see them go from 'we're just going to get it done,' to actively planning how they were going to win- that was quite fun." 

We usually like to ask our interviewees if there is a fun fact or little known fact that they'd like to share. At first, Coach Reneker insisted that he was incredibly boring, and that he was cranky and crotchety. However, he then revealed that he used to be the mascot for his high school, and he dressed up like a gigantic red bird every Friday night. Without any further prompting, he also shared that he proposed to his wife in that same costume. Unfortunately, we have no context for this information, but it seemed too important to leave out. 

On a more serious note, we were glad to have the opportunity to get to know Coach Reneker a little better. The cross country team  has been one of two sports to compete for Mississippi College this semester while so many other sports have been unfortunately postponed. "We're just thankful people are watching, and we just hope that we are being a good representation of the school through sport," Coach Reneker said. 

Thank you for reading, and be sure to check back next Monday.