Noel Breger is the best coach I have ever had. He was my coach for Cross Country. He is more than a coach to me; he is a mentor.

Coach Breger always put the team and the kids first. He can be serious and fun; you don’t want to make him mad on a race day. He always did what we did at practice; actually he also did it before we did to make sure it was an effective training strategy. Coach never expected anything of us that he wouldn’t expect of himself. Whether you were a good athlete or the beginner, he spent the same amount of time training and educating you about the sport.

Coach doesn’t teach at DMA, but did offer help with proofreading our papers or any questions we have about history. He always seems to know when sophomore project were coming up or senior papers were due and would ask about them. He seemed concerned about our academics just as much as our running; I was always impressed by that. During our first meeting with him at DMA he mentioned that we would be wearing pink warm-ups that had the Greek root word AGON for Agony. I wasn’t so sure on wearing a pink shirt, but to this day it’s one of my favorites because of what it stands for.

It’s not often that a coach who is not physically located in your school has other students on the lookout and reporting back to him. I love all the junk food that they have at lunch (candy, tacos, chick-fil-a) and I can’t stop myself from eating it. Just as I thought I had gotten away with it, Coach would wait until the very end of practice when we do our finishing exercises and then he would announce that someone ate something they shouldn’t have. Coach takes diet and training very seriously. Coach named a push up after me. The Sweet and Sour because I was seen eating Sour Patch Kids. Someone told on me, and the whole team had to do these push-ups because of me.

I hope you can see how special coach Breger is to me, and how good of a guy he is. I can’t wait to run for him next year. I couldn’t have asked for a better coach, and I’m honored to nominate him for the Educator of the Year contest.