Tigerbelles Coach Ed Temple's lessons on life and sports can help you prepare for 2024

We made it. Many Tennesseans like the rest of America, have survived the terror of school shootings, natural catastrophe, mass car thefts, and the rising costs of everything, to finally reach the end of this very exhausting year.

Raise a glass! Let us toast to our survival. But after the sparkling cider and champagne is consumed, an urgent question remains. How can we prepare for a winning start in 2024?

I know two friends making career changes. They are planning the New Year with a life coach. But after several months researching and writing about the U.S. Olympics, I am charting my course in 2024, using a page from Coach Ed Temple’s playbook. Before his death in 2016, he was a legend in the city of Nashville.

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How Coach Ed Temple recruited world-class talent

As a Tennessee State University (TSU) track coach from 1950 to1994, and a member of the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, Temple’s winning strategy in athletics and life required students to embrace a vision, take initiative, and practice persistence. It was vision, initiative, and persistence that blazed trails of success for Temple’s women’s track team, the TSU Tigerbelles.

TSU as a Historical Black College and University (HBCU) has been chronically underfunded. And yet, on meager budgets and obsolete equipment, Coach Temple trained a host of 40 Tigerbelles, who ran in the Olympics during his career. Of his forty students to compete in the games, collectively they won 23 Olympic medals. And of those medals, 13 were gold.

With a crystallized vision to coach Black women athletes and help them compete globally, the tireless, Ed Temple, crisscrossed the nation in search of talent.

Gold medalist Mae Faggs came from Bayside, New York. Gold medalist Barbara Jones came from Chicago, Illinois. Gold medalist Madeline Manning came from Cleveland, Ohio. Gold medalist and the current TSU Tigerbelle coach, Chandra Cheeseborough, came from Jacksonville, Florida.

TSU brought to the world Wilma Rudolph, ‘Fastest Woman in the World’

Sometimes Coach Temple was not required to travel far. He recruited the great Wilma Rudolph, 50 miles from TSU in Clarksville, Tennessee. Under Temple’s guidance, Wilma pursued a vision that included world travel. She ramped-up her initiative, which was already extraordinary having exorcised her body from the ravages of polio. And in 1956, after winning a bronze medal in the Melbourne Summer Olympics, with conquering persistence she qualified for the Rome Olympics of 1960. In Rome, Wilma was the first American woman to win three gold medals in one Olympiad. Journalists appointed her, “The Fastest Woman in the World.”

Understand the champion’s mentality. Bronze did not quench Wilma’s thirst to win. Gold was her envisioned standard and with persistence, gold was her prize.

Ed Temple used coaching to build a winning foundation for each student’s holistic life. Pertaining to academics, Temple said, “After every quarter of school, I would bring [the Tigerbelles] all in and we would sit down together. I would have a legal pad and go over everybody’s grades.”

When asked about his strategy to discipline and develop a girl’s spirit to win, Coach Temple said, “In the summer, we practiced three times a day. Five in the morning, nine in the morning, and two in the afternoon.”

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How lessons from the Tigerbelles’ success can prepare anyone for 2024

Ed Temple was not a certified life coach. Training hundreds of Tigerbelles over 44 years, he was true-blue, a coach for life. Tigerbelles would arrive on campus, Black, female, and poor in material trappings. But upon graduation, draped in Olympic gold or not, they marched from Tennessee State University, rich with a personal vision for the future, initiative to tackle their dreams, and persistence to grapple any challenge, with a college diploma in their fists.

Here is the reality. Nobody can predict our course in the New Year. But life being life, there will be hurdles. So, don’t start 2024 without a plan.

See yourself shining. Like Wilma Rudolph, Coach Temple, and his legion of TSU Tigerbelles dispatched into the world as noble citizens, put on your running shoes. With vision, initiative, and persistence, get ready to win.

Alice Faye Duncan is the official biographer for U.S. Olympian and TSU Tigerbelle, Willye B. White. She is the author of “Coretta’s Journey,” “This Train is Bound for Glory,” and “Yellow Dog Blues”—a New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Book selection in 2022. Visit her at www.alicefayeduncan.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Life lessons: Coach Ed Temple's wisdom can help you prepare for 2024