Forty seemed like a good round number for former Cabot High School track coach Leon White.
White, 63, retired at the end of the 2017-18 school year after 40 years in education, including the past 18 years at Cabot
“It’s not that I don’t enjoy it. … I do,” White said. “I love teaching and coaching. I always enjoyed the relationships with the kids, building relationships with the athletes. So it wasn’t that I didn’t want to coach. I feel healthy. I feel like I could keep coaching, but it was time simply because of needing to spend more time with my wife and family. I have five grandchildren and a new one on the way. It just felt like the right time.
“The number 40 makes me think, ‘This is enough.’”
White and his wife, Beth, will also have been married 40 years this September.
When he got started teaching, White said he thought he would teach and coach for 28 years, which is the minimum number for a teacher in Arkansas to get full retirement benefits. But when he found out his wife was pregnant with their third child, who would be seven years younger than their second one, White had a good response.
“I’ll never get to retire,” he said. “Those were my exact words.”
While be ended up coaching for 40 years, there was a time when his career nearly took off in another direction.
After graduating in 1978 from Harding University in Searcy, where he ran track for Ted Lloyd, White almost took a job working for Delta Airlines, where he had worked during the summers to earn money to pay for college. His father, Chesley White, was a longtime airline employee.
“I had told Beth that I’m just going to take a job with the airlines and work for Delta,” White said. “I already had a job lined up to go to Chicago. At the last minute, Coach Lloyd called me and said, ‘Leon, don’t take that job yet. I want you to drive down to Crossett. They are looking for a track coach.’”
White took Lloyd’s advice and went to south Arkansas and eventually took a job there.
“We got down there, and they were just so nice,” White said “They offered me the head eighth-grade football, basketball and track jobs. I looked at it real seriously. People took me around the town. They even found a house we could rent, all in the same day. By the end of the day, I was just so impressed that I took the job.”
That was the fall of 1978.
White eventually worked his way up the coaching ladder at Crossett.
“After we had been there two or three years, we were just happy,” White said. “We got roots in the town, church and community. We stayed down there 22 years and loved every minute of it.”
White eventually became head ninth-grade football and track coach. In 1985, he was promoted to assistant high school football and track coach, where he assisted legendary track coach Bobby Richardson for 10 years.
Richardson was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2009.
“I was the spring, relay and hurdles coach,” White said. “We just had a great time. Every day after practice, we’d go run together, a lot of bonding together. We had a lot of success.”
In 1995, Richardson decided to retire.
“I got moved up to be the head track and cross-country coach,” White said. “When that happened, I got out of football. We also started a girls cross-country team. The second year, we won the state title in boys cross country. We won several state championships.”
In 1999, White had an opportunity to leave Crossett for Cabot after receiving a call from Cabot track coach Milton Williams, who is now the head track coach at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
“He had an assistant job open, but I couldn’t [take it] right at that time,” White said. “I had promised the cross-country team that I’d be here. Maybe the job would come open again.”
It did.
White was hired as the the girls track and cross-country coach at Cabot, working with Williams, who was going to coach the boys team.
“The opportunity came at a great time,” White said. “My dad was getting sicker and having heart trouble. He lived in Sherwood. I told Beth that if I was ever going to get close to my parents, I needed to take this job, so I did.”
After a year at Cabot, White took over the entire track program at Cabot as Williams took a position as the strength and conditioning coach at UALR following the 2000-01 school year.
“It was a little different back then,” White said. “There were no full-time assistants. I had all the kids seventh period, then football coaches would help after school. Over the years, things have gotten better, and it’s gotten to where I think it’s a stable good program in our state.”
During White’s tenure at Cabot, he’s had four teams finish as Class 7A state runners-up. They are the boys cross-country team in 2010, the girls indoor track team in 2011, the girls indoor track team in 2015 and the girls outdoor track team in 2015.
White has also won numerous conference titles at Cabot and Crossett and coached some incredible athletes, including twin sisters Lexi Weeks Jacobus and Tori Weeks Hoggard, who will be senior pole vaulters at the University of Arkansas. Jacobus is also a 2016 Olympian.
“Those two, in my mind, I think of them as equals,” White said. “Lexi making it to the Olympics was definitely a highlight. She’s a great athlete. They both come from a great family.”
Another pole vaulter who White spoke highly of was Ariel Voskamp Lieghio, who also vaulted for the Razorbacks.
“She did like the twins did. … She did every event for me,” White said. “She ran hurdles. She did it all. She kind of opened the door for Arkansas to start looking at us. Ariel got the scholarship; then immediately, Arkansas coaches had the twins on their radar while Ariel was up there. She paved the way for the twins, which also paved the way for Micah Huckabee.”
Huckabee is a distance runner for the Razorbacks.
“One of the biggest highlights is having four girls that went up to the University of Arkansas,” White said. “That was a big deal.”
Lieghio said White was instrumental in her wanting to run track and pole-vault.
“I remember when he came up to me personally at the middle school track and field day and asked me to join the track team the following year,” she said. “The following years throughout junior high and high school, I tried nearly every field and running event. I never felt that Coach White ever had a doubt I could run or jump anything. He always believed in me, even when I wasn’t sure I could finish a race. His belief in me has helped to drive me.
“I would be exhausted at the end of a conference or state meet after doing five or six events, and Coach White would ask me to do the 1,600-meter relay. I would think at first, ‘How can I do this?. I’m so tired.’ But I knew how much he believed in me to help out the team, so I’d push through anything. Little did I know these moments would be lessons I’ve taken throughout my life.”
White was also complimentary of EmKay Myers, who was a distance runner and ran for the University of Nevada in Reno. He also said that Brendon Tucker, who was a distance runner for the Panthers and UALR was “one of the best distance runners to ever come through here.”
White said running track for Lloyd at Harding helped shaped him as a person.
“Coach Lloyd was a great man and a great coach,” White said. “A lot of his personality, I think, has become mine. He just had such a big impact on me, not so much with the running stuff but with what he did as a person.”
White said getting to coach his three children in track was special to him. His daughter, Lauren, graduated in 2002, son Matthew graduated in 2004, and son Zach graduated in 2011.
“All of my own kids got to be on my team,” White said. “They got to go with me and travel with me. That was pretty neat. That is a highlight for any parent who is coaching — that you get to coach your own kids.”
Zach is now a track and cross-country coach at Mount Dora Christian Academy in Mount Dora, Florida.
“All my kids are happy and have happy lives, but the fact that Zach is coaching, I’m kind of living through that a little bit,” White said. “But I’m enjoying watching him coach his kids down in Florida.”
White said he was recently speaking at the Cabot Church of Christ about the school district where he taught for 18 years.
“I realized how blessed I’ve been to be able to coach in Cabot, Arkansas, and be a part of this community,” he said. “I’ve also had numerous coaches and volunteers that have made my job easier. I’m thankful for that. I’ve also had some great athletic directors I’ve worked for in Johnny White, Steve Roberts and now Rob Coleman.”
White said the Cabot track program is in good hands with Chris Beavert, who was promoted from assistant to head coach.
“Chris has been here since 2012, and since he’s been my assistant, he’s done a great job,” White said. “I believe with all my heart that Chris, Reid Fisher and Chris Yielding will do a great job. I feel like Coach Beavert will work hard to take the program to the next level. And hopefully, somewhere in the next five years, Cabot will have its first state championship.”
Staff writer Mark Buffalo can be reached at (501) 399-3676 or mbuffalo@arkansasonline.com.