The Long Green Line documents the York Duke's 2005 Cross Country season as the runners seek their record 25th state title in 50 years. In the sport of Cross Country only the top 5 athletes per team score points and only seven are included in competition. The York team has 221 athletes participating under the tutelage of Coach Newton. Though 214 boys know they will have no influence on the season's scores, they are moved to participate just to be in the presence of Coach Newton. Such a large team is a blessing and curse. Newton is able to spread his influence further but life lessons can go unheard when they have to trickle to so many ears. In the middle of the season, two of the star athletes are expelled from school after committing over $1 million in arson damage. The York team is forced to rebuild -- to face a true test of what they have learned both physically and mentally. The team is colorfully decorated with characters like the All-American winners the Dettman Twins, Sophomore John Fisher, a high functioning autistic with a heart of gold, out of shape former football players who reside on the lowest rung of the team and Freshman Connor Chadwick who has cerebral palsy but is able to run without leg braces for the first time in his life.
Jane Dwyre Garton
The Huffington Post October 13, 2008
Photos from the Huffington Post
Trophies, medals and headlines seem to come naturally to the York Community High School
boys cross country team each year. But to listen to their coach, Joe
Newton, is to be reminded that the structure is built from the slowest
runner on up.
Newton has been at the Elmhurst school almost 50 years and you can
bet men who ran for him decades ago can still hear his voice in their
heads. He hopes they are good citizens and hopes cross country helped
them learn life lessons.
York teams have 26 state cross country titles and several Top Ten finishes in the Nike Team National Meet . In 1988, he was the first high school coach named to the men's Olympic staff .
The 79-year-old coach says the team goals for 2008 are another state
championship and capturing first place at the Nike Nationals.
Newton, who retired from teaching in 2000, insists running is not
just about winning. A new documentary about the 2005 York season tells
the story of how he challenges every runner at every practice in order
to earn the reputation that comes only with a lot of work.
On race days in Elmhurst, a western suburb of Chicago, the York
Community High School boys team is fondly known as The Long Green Line.
A new documentary film borrows that name. Its audiences will never be able to think of the sport in the same way again.
The film is about the boys that become part of that line and about
Newton who has been coaching the York Dukes since 30 years before this
year's seniors were born. It is also about motivation, values, and
growing up in a sport.
Filmmakers Matthew Arnold and Brady Hallongren are
1995 York graduates who chose to tell the story of a single season.
They brought their ideas and equipment from California in August 2005.
Hallongren was a middle of the pack runner on York's Illinois
championship teams in 1991-94. Arnold was a physical education student
of Newton's.
Both young men have been involved with media and cinema and both are
producers of the film. It is not a coincidence that they also have
taken lessons from Newton and worked with youth: Hallongren has taught
summer film courses for middle school students. He is now in graduate
school at the American Film Institute . Arnold teaches journalism and multimedia art at Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, CA, and coaches middle school cross country.
Arnold and Hallongren realized the legendary Newton was a natural
for a film not because of the record number of victories but because of
his approach to life, values and ideals.
Newton's strategy is to recruit widely, coach personally, encourage generously, and do some targeted grumbling.
"The movie shows what really goes on," Newton said. It's about the "guy who comes out and does his best."
A school usually sends seven runners into a race. The combined finish
numbers of the top five become the team score. Early season races often
welcome all competitors. In 2005, York's runners were 221-strong
starting out.
In the 1960s, a sportswriter described the amazing participation of
runners Newton brought to races as a long green line of York uniforms
crossing the finish line.
"It's pretty intimidating to other teams to see such a huge number of runners on a team," Arnold said.
Hallongren believes it holds added significance: "The long green
line shows unity in the team and shows that everyone is part of that
line no matter where you are. If it's the first or the last guy in the
line, everyone is equal and treated the same."
Fifteen years ago, a feature in Sports Illustrated profiled Newton:
"I'll find the scrawniest guy in each gym class and
I'll yell, 'Shorty!' Everybody jumps! And I'll say, 'You come with me
and four years from now I'll make you an all-state runner. So I'll get
Shorty, and then other guys are thinking, 'Well, if he can make Shorty
an all-state runner, what can he do with me?' So then I get a couple
more. Then I'm grabbing guys by the shirts - my goal every year is to
get 50 freshmen."
Of those 50, he'll try to keep 25 around as sophomores and then
15-20 of them as juniors and seniors. Winning at cross country is
almost that easy, he said in 1993.
The 2005 season saw the top seven runners shift and change as the
season progressed. Losses of individual runners were for unexpected and
non-athletic reasons as the team tried to earn its 25th state
championship.
The co-producers had an idea of where the team would be in state
rankings at the end of the season but they had no idea about the
dramatic back story that pushed the boys toward a victory celebration
wearing tuxedos. A local tux shop donates the tuxes to the team if they
finish first, second or third at state. The top seven runners, coaches,
a few managers and alternates get to wear them.
Hallongren calls the tuxes "a big deal" and describes post-state
celebrations and pep rallies in Elmhurst as "real motivation for
everyone in the community."
Newton has been generous with coaching advice in four books: The Long Green Line (1969); Motivation, The Name of the Game (1975); Running to the Top of the Mountain (1989); and Coaching Cross County Successfully (2001).
Now the documentary has become a motivational tool, too.
Its Elmhurst premiere was at the York Theater in late August. Newton and his wife arrived in a white limousine. The coach has seen The Long Green Line three times and he admits it moves him every time.
It was the opening night film at the Running Film Festival which took place during the U.S. Olympic Trials. It won the Best Feature Documentary at the Lake Forest Film Festival last April.
Other coaches use
The Long Green Line with their teams by organizing screenings through a website called
Brave New Theaters .
Presales of DVD of the documentary are underway. Shipments begin Oct. 14. The producers are also working out details with
Netflix ,
Amazon and at specialty running stores around the country.
Coach Joe English, Portland Oregon, USA
Managing Editor, Running Advice and News
www.running-advice.com
I have to admit that I didn’t run out to see the new documentary
The Long Green Line.
Direct Mathew Arnold sent me a copy to review right in the midst of the
peak of marathon season, so the film sat on my desk for a few weeks.
Now I wish I had seen it sooner.
The Long Green Line presents
a season with the cross country running team from York High School in
Elmhurst, Illinois. The school, located outside of Chicago, is a
typically suburban high school in most respects, but its cross country
team is nothing short of extraordinary. The film chronicles a season
with the boys team as they try for their 25th Illinois state title in
45 years. The team is the most winning sports team of any high school,
in any sport, in the United States.
At the heart of the cross country program’s success is the coaching
of Joe Newton and his assistants. The film, while following the team
through the season, is more of a portrait of the coaching styles of
Newton and his approach at reaching the boys in his program. He
emphasizes discipline, character, and respect in his training. “It’s
nice to be great, but far greater to be nice,” he says.
Perhaps what sets Newton apart from coaches of today’s age is that
he seems to be able to not only instill a desire to win and excel on
the field of sport, but he is able to get these kids to want to be good
people at the same time. ‘We make them into good people first, then
good runners,’ is an ideal that he espouses in the film.
To say that all running coaches should see this film is to sell the
film short. Truly everyone that works with high-school aged boys should
see this film. You can watch before your eyes how a true master gets
his message through and makes a profound influence on the lives of
these young men.
What film-director Arnold does so effectively is to capture Joe
Newton connecting with these boys. Arnold is not afraid to let the
camera linger on the faces of the boys as they listen to Newton speak.
You can see on their faces that they are thinking, processing,
absorbing the information — albeit slowly at times as is often the case
with boys. Newton is able to combine just the right amount of love and
compassion with discipline and incentive.
At separate points in the film, Newton tells us that he aims to give
his students the love and care that they won’t find anywhere else in
school and then later he tells us that he knows which boys that he can
pick-on and joke with — and which ones need a more caring hand. These
ideas show that Newton is careful and strategic in delivering his
message and this is what makes it so effective with the wide range of
boys with whom he works.
You can see that the Newton is constantly coaching. Constantly
thinking about how to make an impression on each of the kids and
constantly willing to make the investment in each of them. A great
example is his tradition of shaking every boys hand at the end of
practice, every day. With as many as 200 boys that takes time, but the
investment of his time is paid back in the personal connections that he
makes with these kids.
The Long Green Line is also a film that does a great job of
following a season of cross-country running. This doesn’t get lost
behind the backdrop of Newton’s incredible coaching. Arnold does a nice
job using graphics that help us see how the team is organized and how
scoring is calculated in the sport. There are also many great sequences
of the runners themselves, training and racing in their practices and
meets.
If you are a running coach, you may be struck by the fact that not
much is said about training methods in the film. This is not a film
that reveals Joe Newton’s training strategies. But that’s just fine.
There are dozens of great books that teach how to train runners. What
we get from the Long Green Line is something far much important: a
portrait of how to connect with boys on a deeply personal level.
Director Mathew Arnold deserves our thanks for capturing Joe Newton
on film so that we can learn from him and that a bit of his coaching is
preserved for posterity.
The Long Green Line is available now on DVD. You can purchase it by clicking here.
To put it simply, Joe Newton is a legend.
J. "'Long Green Line' movie debut sells out."
The Doings - Elmhurst (IL). 2008. Retrieved November 16, 2009 from HighBeam Research:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1N1-1228734D95A0CDE0.htmlAt 79, he
has coached the York High School cross country team to 26 state titles
in five decades. Being a part of his team isn't just about running,
it's about life lessons.
It was this combination of achievement
and inspiration that compelled filmmakers and former York students
Matthew Arnold and Brady Hallongren to make Newton and his runners the
subject of their latest film, "The Long Green Line," a documentary
about the York High School cross country team's 2005 season. Since they
completed the film last winter, they've shown it at several film
industry screenings, as well as at the Olympics trials in Oregon.
Screenings
at the York Theatre in Elmhurst Aug. 16 and 17 are already sold out,
and theater operators are considering adding additional showtimes
around Labor Day.
The directors are are anticipating a strong turnout of current and former York students.
"We're really excited to bring the movie home," Arnold said.
The
two friends graduated in 1995. Hallongren was a member of the cross
country team,and Arnold knew Newton from gym classes. After studying
film in college, they found themselves in Los Angeles, working on
movies in various capacities.
They had just finished a film on HIV and were looking for a more uplifting subject for their next film.
"We realized Joe Newton was at our doorstep our whole lives," Arnold said.
The
filmmakers came back to Elmhurst in time for the beginning of the cross
country season and anticipated making a small-scale picture based on
interviews with runners and possibly footage from a film about Newton
another filmmaker started years earlier but never finished.
They found their method wasn't doing the story justice.
"It became clear we'd actually have to follow the team for a year to get the story right," Arnold said.
The
idea was to show the impact Newton had on every one of the 221 runners.
Arnold and Hallongren went to practices, meets and eventually the state
competition, becoming as much a fixture around the team as Newton
himself.
"What we ended up with was not what we thought we'd end
up with. We chose not to focus on the top runner but on the common
runner," Arnold said.
But in the middle of the season, two top
runners, Brian Marchese and Justin Jones, were expelled after they were
arrested for setting fire to a school bus and house under construction.
The
incident threatened to tarnish the image of the team and the school,
and it put friendships among the teammates at risk. Arnold and
Hallongren had to find a way to work the events into the story.
It
was a small but effective part of the film. Newton has always said that
a person cannot get back a lost opportunity; he has to accept the
situation and move on. That is exactly what the team -- and the
offenders -- had to do.
The team brought home its 25th state
title, making for a triumphant ending to the film. At a time when the
country is faced with an unpopular war and a poor economy, Arnold
thinks a good, old fashioned, uplifting movie like "The Long Green
Line" is exactly what people are looking for.
"Momentum's really been growing for (the film), and I think it's due to the state of the nation right now," Arnold said.