Written by Tim Hofstetter
There has been a lot of change in athletics this year including a new athletic director. In one of Curtis Campbell’s first hires, he brought in Derek Workman as the Director Cross Country and Track & Field. He is a distance coach and has been working with the Cross-Country athletes since the summer preseason. His resume is very extensive and quite frankly speaks for itself. He has coached multiple nationally qualifying individuals and teams at his previous college. He established a winning culture at Washington and Jefferson college and is working on establishing the same culture of winning here.
Coach Workman also competed at Thiel College in Pennsylvania. Thiel is much like Roanoke where it is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Thiel is also a small Division 3 school. He competed in mid-distance events where his best event was the 800 where he ran 2 minutes exactly.
While he did not run cross country at Thiel, he did start coaching cross country immediately, starting at the high school level in Hope Mills, North Carolina. He had success at this level right away as he was named his conference’s coach of the year in his first year! His establishment of winning culture did not start at the collegiate level but will continue here at Roanoke as we are running in the most competitive conference in the region.
During a meeting with all student athletes, athletic director Campbell stated — any team to win a conference championship will receive rings. With this in mind, I am sure Coach Workman will be working to the goal of getting as many rings for Roanoke as possible. He will do this by recruiting hard and implementing the best training program he has. He has already started recruiting in his first month here. Along with recruiting, he hired the new sprints coach for the team, Coach Javon Graham. All of these actions being made lets us know he is very serious about the success of this program at Roanoke.
Along with how much he is doing and planning to do, Coach Workman is very personable and hands-on. He is ensuring that his team is doing the little things correctly to ensure the best chance at being competitive. On an unprofessional, sidenote he is also super funny and great to be around. Additionally, he is very honest and will tell you what you need to hear and not what you want to hear!
Please help us wish Coach Workman the best of luck in his first year of coaching at Roanoke College!!
