Longtime Rootstown coach Larry Bailey has coached 100 state qualifiers, 33 All-Ohioans, four state champions, eight state runners-up, 210 boys track dual-meet wins, 478 dual-meet cross country wins. Those all have their place in the spotlight, but when you coach for as long as Bailey has, the numbers are not what the career was ever about. “It’s always about the kids,” Bailey says with sincerity.
Tom Nader/Portage Sports

By Tom Nader

Publisher and Editor

God’s plan for Larry Bailey was to fish and play baseball.

Or, at least, that is what he once thought.

Turns out he has always loved those things, but Bailey’s impact has extended far beyond those two hobbies.

He has reached thousands of students and athletes in a 40-year career that has seen him enter as the rookie coach and ascended to one of the most iconic running coaches in Ohio high school history.

And that is if you only want to look at numbers like Bailey’s 100 state qualifiers, 33 All-Ohioans, four state champions, eight state runners-up, 210 boys track dual-meet wins, 478 dual-meet cross country wins.

Those all have their place in the spotlight, but when you coach for as long as Bailey has, the numbers are not what the career was ever about.

“It’s always about the kids,” Bailey says with sincerity.

And you know he means it.

It is why he was strongly against the school’s new all-weather track being named in his honor.

But make no mistake, Rootstown is as much Larry Bailey as Larry Bailey is Rootstown.

At 66 years old, he is still a machine.

He is approaching 53,000 career miles run and adds to the total almost daily as he still runs with his cross country team just like he did when he was hired in 1982.

He enjoys the competition, the coaching and the kids just as much now as he ever has.

Coaching is where he likes to be, but he admits to a simple thought.

“If it wasn’t for my mother, who knows where I would be.”

CHILDHOOD AND ROOTSTOWN

Bailey was born in 1956 in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

He spent his formative years living in Harrisville, West Virginia.

It is a small town and during his youth, it had one main dirt road that lead in and out of town.

Cars were around, but not in abundance and it was a four-mile walk into town and a four-mile walk back out.

A trek Bailey made frequently with his family as a 4-year-old.

“It is just the way it was. I didn’t know any different,” he said.

Bailey moved with his family to Rootstown when he was 5. His mother, Evelyn Jean Bailey, raised him and his two siblings by herself while also working 12 to 14 hour days at her beauty shop called Valley Beauty.

She eventually became a real-estate agent and became one of the top sellers in Ohio multiple times.

“I have an incredible mom. She did everything for us, and I owe everything to her. She loved us and worked hard to give us what we needed,” said Bailey. “I remember she would go to work all day, stop working to come watch us play sports, then go back to work. She always made time for us.”

Bailey’s childhood is when he, unknowingly at the time, began his love for Rootstown.

Like many children his age, playing outside was the place to be and Bailey would spend his doing a little bit of everything, but usually gravitating back to baseball and basketball.

The basketball hoop in his home’s large driveway attracted other kids and games would go on for hours. The driveway became such a social connection that it became the bus stop because all the kids would congregate there.

The neighboring families all looked after the children.

“That is why I love Rootstown so much. My mom is special, that will never change, but Rootstown raised me too. My teachers, my coaches, they all helped make me who I am.”

HIGH SCHOOL

As a kid, baseball was Bailey’s favorite sport. He bat lead-off and played middle infield.

He fell in love with basketball when he walked into a friend’s house and the Philadelphia 76ers were playing the Boston Celtics on television.

Wilt Chamberlain vs. Bill Russell.

That was his introduction to the sport and it made an impact on him. He never stopped playing baseball, but it now had a competitor in basketball.

He became his team’s captain in eighth grade as a “5-foot-7 skinny guard.”

“Beetle” as his friends would call him, a nickname inspired by the Beetle Bailey comic strip, attended basketball open gyms during the summer heading into his freshman year. He was constantly overlooked and picked over by the coaching staff and it eventually led him to move on from basketball.

Bailey stopped playing baseball just before high school when he showed up for a practice and the coach was an hour-and-a-half late.

He decided to focus on track and cross country.

Bailey was not particularly fast and not strong enough for field events so the coach tried to convince him to run distance.

“I will never run distance,” Bailey remembers saying.

That changed during gym classes his freshman year when the class was asked to run for time and Bailey’s time consistently was the best in the class.

He soon became one of the better runners in the county with the fastest times before graduating from Rootstown in 1974 alongside 128 classmates.

He started school in 1st grade since it was not a requirement to attend Kindergarten at the time, so he spent four years in each of the buildings on the Rootstown campus. First through fifth grade in the elementary building, sixth through ninth in the middle school building and sophomore through senior years at the high school building.

Bailey remembers being an elementary student when the district was building on the wing of the building that would become the field house.

COLLEGE

Bailey was the first in his family to go to college, and he attended Malone University and ran cross country for legendary coach Jack Hazen, who coached two Olympians and served on the track and field competition management team for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

When Bailey arrived, the team was ranked third in the nation and had five All-Americans.

His times were competitive with his teammates and he placed well, but Bailey eventually transferred to Hiram and lettered in cross country.

He took out a $2,000 loan to enroll in classes.

“That was a mistake, because I couldn’t afford it at the time,” Bailey said. “I realized I couldn’t stay at Hiram, because I ran out of money. But that is where I learned to work hard and it is where I learned that you treat all kids the same no matter what their talent level is or what their situation is.”

Bailey’s third college stop was at the University of Akron, where he pursued an accounting degree.

“I realized, though, that the idea of spending my career in a cubicle and counting numbers was not going to be a good fit for me,” Bailey said.

And his career path to become an educator began.

WELCOME BACK HOME

Once he graduated, he admits that the plane was not necessarily to return to Rootstown.

Circumstances, though, seemed to have him aligned with his hometown.

He married his wife of 42 years, Debbie, in June and then was hired by Storybook Daycare in Ravenna in 1980.

“I was the first male hire they ever made. I loved it there and the kids loved me,” said Bailey, who remembers that it paid $2.30 per hour and that his wife’s income was less than that.

Two months later, in August, Bailey was still without a teaching job until Rootstown called him to offer him an opportunity to join the staff as a part-time tutor. Soon after, they needed him to be a full-day tutor and he was hired for an annual contract of $8,000.

“There were nights I would go fishing for our dinner,” Bailey said, admitting it was a struggle. “I remember collecting $2 by picking up change off the sidewalk to fix a flat tire on my car, so I rode my bike to school while I waited for that.”

Bailey spent three years as a tutor at Rootstown and was hired by Superintendent Don Crewse in 1984 to become a fifth-grade teacher. His salary jumped to $17,000 a year.

“I thought I had hit the lottery. It helped us buy our first house,” Bailey said.

Bailey spent 25 years as a fifth-grade teacher. First, he taught all subjects, but eventually was assigned science.

Life inside Bailey’s classroom was always full of excitement and an enthusiasm for learning.

Teachers would confide in Bailey that it was tough for them to keep their students focused in their classroom because they would talk about how excited they were to get to Bailey’s next science project.

Hands-on projects that included props, messes, loud noises, laughter.

They would throw things around the room to show inertia, build things to show mechanical advantages.

The Rootstown High School boys and girls cross country teams from the fall 2017 season, which was Bailey’s 35th at the school.

It is not what textbooks said learning should look like, but Bailey knew what he was doing.

He was determined to make learning fun.

“I would have them from the get go,” said Bailey, whose last few years before retirement were as an elementary Physical Education teacher. “They would enter the classroom every day so excited to learn something new. They were excited to see what was next. They absolutely loved it. Here is the thing, though, so did I.”

That fun, unplanned by Bailey, was also destined for the basketball gym.

“When Don Crewse hired me, he said, ‘Oh yea, by the way, you’re also the freshman boys basketball coach’,” Bailey said with a laugh. “I told him I would do whatever he said. If he wanted me to drive the bus, be the janitor, didn’t matter.”

His coaching career had officially begun.

COACH BAILEY

Bailey’s career as a basketball coach at Rootstown would span 35 years and include multiple age groups, as well as coaching boys and girls.

His career as a cross country and track coach officially began as a volunteer assistant and helped introduce ideas that pushed the program to successes they had never experienced before.

The head coach at the time witnessed Bailey’s ability to inspire the runners and implement plans to maximize their potential and recommended he become the new head coach.

By 1985, Bailey helped guide the Rovers to their first trip to the state championship.

“I think it was the first time that anyone had believed in them to do something like that,” Bailey said.

It was not long after that Rootstown had its first state champion in Ronnie Nipuelio in 1990 in the 400 meters. Josh Morgan was the next state champion in 1996 in the 3,200 meters, then David Paliscak joined the group in 2013 in the shot put.

Bailey has coached eight state runners-up, including 1992’s 4×400 relay team of Lewis Gibson, Bruce Rowe, Evan Waligura and Eric Ferren, that lost by a hundredth of a second. The group still holds the school record at 3:22.25.

In cross country, Bailey’s 1985 Rovers became the first school in Ohio history to have both the boys and girls teams qualify for the state championships in the same season. A feat they repeated again in 1987, then followed by the boys qualifying in 1995 after Josh Morgan and Bob Elder took first and second place, respectively, at the regional-qualifying race.

Naturally, all the heights of success have led to job offers from elsewhere for Bailey, but time and time again he has politely declined them because Rootstown is where his heart is.

STILL RUNNING AND FARMING

Bailey’s age is the only thing that has changed.

In many ways, he is still the same kid that filled his summer days with sports and fishing.

He still runs and trains with the teams that he coaches just as he did the year he was hired, and his groups revel in the idea that he still does it.

When he was younger, his runners loved the challenge of trying to beat their coach. Now, some of that competition still exists, but Bailey admits he is not as fast as he once was.

Regardless, his continued training goes beyond the competition. It is a mindset and a lifestyle.

“I believe that as long as I am alive, I want to be the best version of me I can be,” said Bailey, who still holds one of his career achievements as being chosen, at age 46, by Antoio Gates to play on his team in a pick-up basketball game at Kent State. “I just love to run. I love the workouts. I enjoy them. I hate recovery days. I understand why they are important and why we do them, but I look forward to the workouts.

“So many teams and runners have said that they think the best thing I do is run with them. They love that. If it is pouring rain, I am running with them. If it is cold and snowing, I am running with them. If it is 90 degrees, I am running with them.”

And he is still a farmer.

As a child in West Virginia, both his grandfather Bailey and Walton owned 160-acre farms filled with cattle, sheep, chickens and more.

“We lived off the land, and I remember there was a rule that you don’t come home until your buckets were full, so we had to walk the hills and pick the berries.

“Growing up as a kid, I just thought everybody had a smoke house in their back yard or that they had to pump to get their water. I didn’t know anything else.”

Bailey owns 5 acres in Rootstown on Tallmadge Road and has long filled it with cows, pigs and chickens.

They harvest hickory nuts, walnuts, pears, apples, peaches and berries.

They have approximately 500,000 bees.

“I was mowing the other day and when I mowed around the hives, you could smell the honey. Some people bowl, some people golf or whatever their hobby is. My hobby is farming.”

Just another part of his plan that thousands of Rovers can feel blessed has forever included Rootstown.