Natalia Brown chuckles. The mental image will always bring a smile to her face.
For 27 years she worked beside Andy Capellan at New Rochelle High.
Capellan, the head girls track and field coach, built like a brick wall, 6-foot-2, a former collegiate offensive tackle, hips swinging side to side - and he demonstrated the hows of racewalking.
Brown was the throwing coach and was grateful Capellan largely let her run her own show. Brown would have her throwers pause from the training to take in the sight of "Cap" racewalking. He was right in the mix, both telling kids how things should be done and showing them how things should be done.
Capellan has coached over a half-century ‒ 44 of those years spent as New Rochelle's girls track coach and the past 31 also as the school's girls cross-country coach. He's a leader who turns 76 in a couple of weeks and decided to end a track and cross country career he never anticipated having.
It was a career that landed him in the New York State Public High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame, the Armory Coaches Hall of Fame, the City of New Rochelle Hall of Fame and in the hearts of decades of kids. He hasn't calculated the exact number, but thousands.
"To this day, all the discipline in my life is due to Cap. I was the child of immigrants. I didn't have guidance in school. He was the person who helped me," said 2019 New Rochelle grad Solenny Rodriguez, 23. A former pole vaulter and cross-country runner, Rodriguez recently graduated from Pace University and will soon enter law school.
Rodriguez doesn't see any of that happening without Capellan, who recalls suspending Rodriguez for "bad grades and a bad attitude" multiple times from his team when she was a freshman before she finished that year as an honors student.
But that was Capellan: a disciplinarian, yes, but one who cared and wrote no one off.
"I remember him always believing in us," Rodriguez said.
That belief extended to everyone, but Rodriguez, who was born in the Dominican Republic, the country from which Capellan's family also came, pointed to its significant impact on athletes from low-income and/or immigrant families.
"You can be the first in your family ... " he'd often begin his words of encouragement, said Rodriguez, the first in her family to obtain a college degree.
Andy Capellan's legacy goes beyond results sheets
Those words were mostly delivered behind-the-scenes, of course ‒ largely out of sight and earshot from those who saw Capellan only at meets and knew of him mostly because of his team's success.
He drew the appreciation of many opposing coaches, including 35-year rival Jan Mitchell, who started the Ursuline girls track team and turned the program into one of Section 1's best.
Mitchell cites Capellan's "tremendous dedication ... to developing his young athletes" as what he most admired about him.
Capellan's departure coincides with that of Brown, although the two hadn't planned a joint exit. But neither one is completely leaving the sport.
Brown plans to do private coaching. And in August, Capellan will take an exam to become a track official.
Capellan noted Anna, his wife of 53 years, knowing his love for his sport and his team, encouraged him to keep coaching. But he said, "It's time," explaining in part that walking from event to event has become difficult.
He'd thought about retiring in 2020 but COVID-19 changed that. Sports weren't the same at many schools post-COVID-19 and New Rochelle's girls track program lost both numbers and a lot of luster in the wake of the pandemic, which cancelled the spring 2020 outdoor season and greatly limited fall cross-country and then the 2020-21 winter indoor season.
The Huguenots were always among the elite.
Capellan's indoor winter girls track teams would ultimately win 34 indoor league team championships, 28 indoor Westcchester County team championships and 20 indoor Section 1 class team championships with him at the helm.
Seventeen times, his squads won all three winter titles in one year, or the so-called Triple Crown.
The numbers for spring outdoor track were just as impressive: 32 league titles, 29 county titles, 21 section class titles and 18 Triple Crowns.
But the first couple of post-COVID years were rough.
"The program died," Capellan said, simply. "We were never worse than second in the counties and in Section 1, then COVID killed us."
Capellan accomplished rebuilding a struggling team to a second-place team in part with strong recruiting, including bringing up key middle-school students.
He's turning over a program on the rise, most likely, pending district approval, to former New Rochelle runner George Greene (Class of 1999), who has been assistant boys and girls track coach since 2014 and has also been the modified cross-country coach.
How the early years shaped him
Capellan is a Class of 1967 football and basketball player who stayed in shape by playing spring track. If you asked him decades ago whether he'd be a Hall of Fame track coach still coaching in his 70s, he probably would have laughed.
Capellan played football at Parsons College in Iowa before graduating from NYU and was, in his heart, a football coach.
After college, he taught at East Harlem High School and coached junior varsity football at George Washington High, also in Manhattan. He became an assistant varsity football coach at Stuyvesant High School in 1975. But that's where his life took a permanent turn. He was asked to start a girls track program, tried to decline, then was essentially told he was the girls track coach. This was part of the school's response to Title IX equal opportunity directives.
Even when he took the top varsity football coaching spot at James Monroe in the Bronx in 1977, he remained as Stuyvesant's girls track coach.
Capellan and his wife, who moved to New Rochelle in 1978, raised two sons there, Eric, now a 51-year-old property manager, who lives in Valley Cottage, and Adam, a 44-year-old New Rochelle High teacher, who coaches New Rochelle tennis and bowling and also lives in Valley Cottage.
Capellan, who'd become a dean, ultimately overseeing dropout prevention at East Harlem, accepted the house principal post at New Rochelle High in 1998, 18 years after he started coaching at New Rochelle. His coaching, at various points, included assistant football slots at New Rochelle and Iona College in addition to his cross-country and track jobs at New Rochelle.
Capellan retired as house principal in 2004. He then served as an associate professor at the College of Westcheseter (2008-18). He sometimes used his house principal job as a recruiting tool, since girls would be sent to him after getting into trouble..
Some kids who he came to know this way made life U-turns after joining the team.
One, he noted, became a state champion and competed for Penn State.
Of course, many also came to his program already having the drive to succeed at track and beyond.
Included was Ayo Atterberry, a 1990 New Rochelle grad, who now lives in Maryland and is chief of culture for the League of Women Voters U.S.
Atterberry was a national indoor 55 hurdles champion, twice won state titles in that event ,and also won a state indoor long jump and a 100-meter hurdles state outdoor title. She said a teammate once told her track helped keep her out of trouble by giving her a place to be and things for which to strive.
"He had expectations for you. He celebrated everybody. He always had the biggest heart," she said.
Atterberry said it was during her time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that she came to realize how much "time effort and care Cap put into the team."
"In college, it's a business. He was really dedicated. He taught us discipline. He helped us find success in different ways. Everybody can work hard and achieve," she said, also praising Capellan as a student of track, who was always up on the latest training methods and innovations, once giving her a new kind of jumping shoe to try.
Capellan, whose dedication was such that he'd sometimes oversee Atterberry's jumps at outdoor practice in the dark after the runners had wrapped up their work, cites Atterbury's achievements as among the things of which he's most proud.
He also picks in his top three New Rochelle's 2014 4x200-meter relay championship at New Balance Indoor Nationals and the remarkable high school career of future University of Maryland and University of Georgia athlete Shenae Dawkins.
During her high school career, Dawkins, the Gatorade state girls athlete of the year in 2000, was a national indoor long jump champion, indoor state long jump and 55-meter hurdles champion and outdoor state 100- and 400-meter hurdles, triple jump and 4x100 meters state champion.
Why he stayed coaching
The competitor in Capellan surely was a reason for his longevity and success — that success really taking hold in 1982, when New Rochelle "turned the corner" by winning its first indoor sectional title.
But probably just as important was his approach and what he saw kids get out of his program.
Capellan, who noted his wife quickly saw what sports could mean to girls while at Stuyvesant.
More than 70 girls went out for that first team and Capellan followed his-then athletic director's advice and treated them like he treated boys.
Capellan laughed that in today's world he'd face allegations of being verbally abusive, "bringing in my football mentality."
But the Stuyvesant girls clearly weren't cowed and if they considered Capellan a bullying tyrant they didn't indicate it.
"They loved it. I didn't baby them," he said. "They were hungry for sports."
His New Rochelle kids weren't initially as accepting of Capellan's approach.
Only seven survived "hell week" in the spring of 1981.
But those kids stayed on the team and became members of that first Section 1 championship squad.
Asked what he'll miss most about coaching, Capellan said, "The development of working with each of the kids to get them to reach goals. That was satisfying."
"To get someone with no idea of what they can do and get them fairly refined and a finished product and to do things to the best of their ability, reaching a certain level of competence, that's my pride and joy, and creating a team that's competitive in all events."
Hence, Capellan demonstrating the racewalk because there are always points to be won if someone on your team is a good racewalker.
Capellan reveled in seeing kids suddenly realize, "I can be pretty good at this."
Greene, who laughed at how Capellan's "verbiage" toned down from his own days on the New Rochelle team, said he'd enjoyed seeing him in action and "learning from his knowledge of sports," including how to treat athletes.
Capellan knew one-size-fits-all doesn't always work and Greene said Capellan excelled at adjusting to different athletes with different personalities, who needed different things.
Capellan recalled a Haitian girl, who came to the high school knowing little English. She wasn't a good runner, so he made her a racewalker and she scored points for New Rochelle at both the league and the county meets.
She wasn't a superstar but was a contributor and felt part of something.
And when a former athlete of Capellan's — -star or no star — has gone on to do good things outside track, that's a bigger victory.
He points to athletes like Rodriguez and says, "Those success stories make my career rewarding."
His coaching, he said, wasn't just about winning titles but was about creating kids who would become "productive members of society."
"I had kids who became doctors, lawyers. A couple went to the service academies," said Capellan, who also had scores of athletes compete for college teams and two qualify for the Olympic Trials.
He credits the "lessons learned in track" for a good part of their overall success, saying track carries "intrinsic motivation to reach goals."
"In track, you're working mentally and physically to reach achievements — distances, times. This translates to setting goals. Setting small, short-term goals and long-term goals translates to being better students. You've got to do X, Y, Z," he said, also crediting "positive peer pressure," saying the focus and drive of some kids can sometimes rub off on kids who are a "little rough around the edges."
He never told a kid to "get lost" but said he did tell many they had to "conform."
"I enforce the karma of the sport," Capellan said.
A track legend: New Rochelle's Andy Capellan, state Hall of Famer, IS 'Everything you want in a coach'
Rodriguez described herself as sad over his retirement.
The only thing giving her some comfort, she indicated, is the fact her sister, Naila, was one of Capellan's talented eighth-grade recruits his final year at New Rochelle.
"I'm very glad my sister was coached by Cap, at least for a year," she said.
Capellan, she noted, often said he was "preparing us for the real world."
That he did.
Nancy Haggerty covers cross-country, track &field, field hockey, skiing, girls basketball, girls lacrosse and other sporting events for The Journal News/lohud. Follow her on Twitter at both @HaggertyNancy and at @LoHudHockey.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: New Rochelle NY track coach Andy Capellan retires after 44 years
