Topic: News: Roberts Led Palatka Lifters to Eighth Fl State Title

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Prep Coach of Spring: Roberts Led Palatka Lifters to Eighth Florida State Title
By Andy Hall

Gordon Roberts’ introduction to competitive weightlifting was the classic case of a failure to communicate.

It was the spring of 1994 and Roberts, recently hired as head football coach at Crescent City Junior-Senior High School, was told by the principal, Mike Pegg, that he’d make an additional $1,500 were he to take over weightlifting right away.

Fine by him, assuming this meant supervising the weight training of candidates for the football team.

“One week later,” said Roberts, “I’m in the weight room training benches and squats and the guys keep asking ‘When are we going to do the (clean and) jerk?’ and I said ‘Later, later.’ Then (former weightlifting coach) John McGovern asked me, ‘Coach, how does it look for next week’s meet?’ And I thought ‘Uh-oh.’

“I didn’t think (Pegg) meant weightlifting as a sport.”

Uh-oh, indeed.

At least Roberts — who had conducted weight training for football players in Jacksonville and Moore Haven but had no experience in competitive weightlifting — knew where to go for advice.

“I knew how to make guys stronger, but I had never taught someone techniques,” he said. “(Longtime Interlachen coach) Jack Williams, bless his soul, taught me technique.”

Roberts learned well. Come the spring of 1995, Crescent City was the class 3A weightlifting state champion — still the school’s only state title in any sport.

A dozen years later, Roberts was again at the top of the state with another program, leading Palatka to its eighth state championship, the first since 2000.

Moreover, the Panthers won the 2A title (now the state’s largest classification) in the Florida’s unquestioned hotbed of prep weightlifting, Volusia County, by a five-point margin over the last two champs, Spruce Creek and DeLand (Volusia schools both), at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach.

Often in a different classification than Spruce Creek — a 23-time state champ — Palatka had not previously won a state meet that included head-to-head competition with the Hawks.

“That makes it sweeter,” Roberts said.

It also makes him the Palatka Daily News Coach of the Spring.

“It makes you think about all the time you spend away from your family and the other sacrifices,” he said Monday, welcoming the recognition. “I just spoke to a young coach who asked, ‘How do you do it for so long?’ You have to have a passion for what you do and I’ve been fortunate enough to have a passion for what I do.”

To a large extent, certainly, high school weightlifting is still about helping the football team — Roberts is also the Panthers’ offensive line coach and he is quick the make the correlation between consistent playoff teams and schools with good weightlifting programs — but three of the four competitors who scored for Palatka at this year’s state meet didn’t play football last fall.

Nick Albert and Jonathan Garcia, the 119- and 129-pound individual champions, respectively, were never involved in varsity football, and Chris Luther, who placed second in the 199-pound class, didn’t play last fall (or lift the previous spring) because of a football injury suffered in 2005.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Roberts said. “You tell your kids (in football) you can go out and beat the bigger team — and sometimes we have — but in weightlifting, you’re not going to go up against someone who’s 20 pounds stronger because he’s 20 pounds heavier.

“Chris Luther realized he could still validate the fact that he was an athlete through weightlifting. He got cheated out of his senior year in football, but he worked and worked to be a weightlifting champion and almost made it. He finished second and helped us win state.”

The championship was gratifying to Roberts on two counts. First, he enhanced the tradition of a Palatka program that has won its championships over a 20-year span under four different coaches — Mike Milillo (1987), Randy Hedstrom (1991-95), Darrell Polite (2000) and now Roberts.

“This has been a program that has consistently demanded excellence,” he said.

Second, this title placed things in perspective, Roberts’ 1995 championship with Crescent City having come so quickly.

“Kids have injuries. Parents move. All kinds of things can happen that can change the demographic of your team no matter how hard you work and how hard the kids work,” Roberts said. “I think we can win it next year, but what if Nick (Albert, a junior this spring) gets hurt? What else might happen?”

Just the same, PHS seems to be out to a good start for 2008. Monday found a dozen Panthers working out, at least eight of the 10 weight classes represented.

“The football kids are going to lift anyway,” said Roberts, “but when you have the other kids lifting, too — not just Jonathan Garcia and Nick Albert — that’s when you can wear shirts that say, ‘State champs.’”