When Dennis Shaver walks toward his office on the third floor of Athletic Administration Building, the LSU track coach travels by the colossal display of trophies the University’s Track and Field program has amassed in its 110-year history. The plaques sit neatly on white shelves that stretch from the floor to the ceiling – a wall of silver and bronze but predominantly gold. Forty trophies are from national top-three finishes including 30 national championships scattered among various prestigious awards. After LSU’s men and women’s teams each earned runner-up finishes in the 2007 NCAA Outdoor Championships this past June, Shaver added his second and third trophies to the wall in his third year as head coach. His first came earlier this year when the women’s indoor team finished second place in the NCAA championships. Track and field’s structure lends to four separate seasons: men’s indoor, women’s indoor, men’s outdoor and women’s outdoor. Although the Salina, Kan., native said he felt his teams did all they could to bring home the outdoor title, he said LSU’s previous success has raised team expectations. “We come home second, and quite honestly it’s like, ‘Oh well they didn’t win,'” Shaver said. “I am proud of our effort, but at LSU you are expected to win championships. That’s what I think, and that’s what our athletes think.” That championship standard was set by Shaver’s predecessor, former boss and the most decorated coach in track and field history – Pat Henry. Henry led LSU to 27 of its 30 NCAA team championships from 1988- 2004, including a legendary streak of 10-straight NCAA Outdoor championships for the Lady Tigers from 1988-1997. The Lady Tigers also captured the 1987 Outdoor title the year before Henry arrived to bring the overall streak to 11-straight. LSU created a women’s track dynasty between 1987-1997 with the Lady Tigers winning 19 of the possible 22 championships for Indoor and Outdoor track. Henry was in the driver’s seat building a track legacy, but Shaver, who joined the LSU coaching staff as an assistant coach in 1995, was the behind-the-scenes engineer in charge of the women’s sprints and hurdles events. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for coach Henry,” Shaver said. “He was almost the perfect boss. There wasn’t much difference on our way of thinking.” Shaver was on board for 11 of the women’s championships in nine years as an assistant coach. When Henry decided to leave LSU in 2004 to take the head coaching position at Texas A&M, Athletic Director Skip Bertman did not overlook Shaver’s contributions to Henry’s track dynasty. “[Henry’s] decision to leave was a surprise move in many people’s minds,” Shaver said. “Members of the staff did have some evidence that that possibility existed before anybody else picked up on it. We had a loyalty to coach Henry as assistants but had a stronger and deeper commitment to the LSU program. I think we were a big part of that 10-year run under Henry.” And Bertman knows what a legend looks like, considering he achieved god-like status among LSU faithful after winning five national championships as the Tigers’ baseball coach from 1984-2001. “[Shaver] was a big part of those [27 championships], particularly the women’s sprints which was really the biggest part of the championships,” Bertman said. “He did a great job as an assistant. [Shaver] was hired not for expedience just because he was already part of this program, but because he was the best candidate for the job.” But Shaver has had success on the field and on the sidelines before making Baton Rouge his home. He was a standout football, basketball and track athlete in high school and those achievements propelled him into a collegiate career in football and track. “[My high school] was a really small school, and I was the best male athlete in the school at the time,” Shaver said. “I loved to compete, and when the opportunity [was] there to compete, that’s what I did. It was a natural thing.” But while Shaver finished his senior football season at the University of Texas-Arlington, tragedy struck in his family. His father died unexpectedly just before Thanksgiving. Shaver said his father’s death still has an impact on him today. “I was still in school when it happened,” Shaver said. “[I] didn’t have a lot of time to spend with him in the last four years because I was away at college. It was hard.” Shaver said he had sporadic contact with his family while attending college. “My parents allowed me to call once a week because it was a long distance phone call,” Shaver said. “That was pretty much all I could do. They would discourage me even then unless it was something important. After graduating from college, the two-sport athlete returned to Kansas to Hutchinson Community College as an assistant track and football coach in 1981, eventually to become head track coach. “I have always been involved in athletics, football mainly,” Shaver said. “As the opportunities opened in coaching for me early after college, I had a chance to be a track coach and gave up football.” Shaver moved onto Barton Community College in Great Bend, Kan., where he crossed paths with Henry for the first time.
Henry coached at Blinn Community College in Brenham, Texas, and competed against Barton in national competitions. Both won several Junior College championships, and Shaver became the first coach at the junior college level to accomplish the “Triple Crown” by winning cross country, indoor and outdoor championships in the same season in 1990-91. After competing against Henry for four years as an assistant coach at Auburn University while Henry was at LSU, Shaver joined Henry on the LSU sidelines in 1995. When he climbed to the head coaching position in 2004 after Henry departed for Texas A&M, Shaver said having experienced assistant coaches on his staff made his transition to head coach easier. “I wasn’t certain what was going to happen at that point,” Shaver said. “None of us wanted to see wholesale changes in the end result that was being produced.” Shaver had 21 years of combined coaching experience at LSU in assistants Mark Elliott and Boo Schexnayder to help smooth over any problems. Elliot, who attended Blinn Community College under the tutelage of Henry, specializes in distance running like the 800-meter dash while Schexnayder is an expert in jumping events like the long jump. Schexnayder said Shaver and Henry have many similarities, but said Shaver did make subtle changes in the program. “I have been around a lot of good coaches and I know there is a lot of ways to do it well,” Schexnayder said. “A lot of things we were doing well before, we were still doing well afterwards.” Schexnayder resigned his assistant position effective July 1 to serve as a trainer at CAP Elite, a performance training center in Baton Rouge. Shaver said his main obstacle was adjusting from coaching one or two events to overseeing an entire track program. “As a head coach you don’t have quite as much time to spend with them other than at practice because of the administrative demands of the position,” Shaver said. “My most challenging thing is being able to make our sport entertaining so people will want to see the good product that we put out.” Distance runner Joseph Simuchimba, who arrived at LSU in January from Zambia, said Shaver still finds time to relate to the athletes. “He is a good coach and has a lot of patience,” Simuchimba said. “He understands the pressures of being an international student and an athlete.” After adding to the trophy collection in his third year at the helm, Shaver acknowledged that awards and honors are not the most important aspect of coaching – it’s about athletes believing in themselves and spreading the lessons learned in sports to other areas of their lives. “Coaches can present a challenge to a student-athlete, and they have to learn to accept that challenge and achieve it,” he said. “It helps them to open their minds to realize that the mind is a very powerful thing, and it’s a very limiting factor in our sport.” Shaver used LSU sprinter Sherry Fletcher as an example of this concept. The senior had never won a finals race at any competition up until she squatted in Lane 9 for the 100-meter final at the Outdoor Championships this past June. But the St. David, Grenada, native ran a personal-best of 11.20 seconds to take home an NCAA title. “In some cases there are some superhuman efforts,” Shaver said. “When [Fletcher] won the 100-meter, that was the only final race in her two-year career that she won. Ultimately, she did it because she believed in herself and believed in [the coaches]. She opened up her mind and didn’t let it restrict her from accomplishing something that nobody else thought she could do. That was her last race.” Fletcher’s performance secured the Lady Tigers’ second-place finish and secured a special place of honor with Shaver and her teammates. Shaver said those feelings and memories mean more than trophies and championships. “That is what I dream about for them,” Shaver said. “You couldn’t give her any amount of money for that feeling that she had and I had when she finished that race. It is a memory that will be with me until I go to my grave.” Shaver said lessons like Fletcher’s will have a far greater reach than beyond the world of sports. “It’s not just a lesson about that 100 meter race that Sherry ran,” Shaver said. “It’s like ‘Sherry, you should never doubt what you can achieve.’ The same is going to hold true for her, and she can teach that lesson to her children and grandchildren. It’s a better world because of those experiences.”
—Contact Matt Vines at [email protected]