Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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WHERE HAVE YOU GONE? ting the finishing touches on a career that began at the tail end of the Great Depression. Piane knew about the record, but that wasn't enough to waylay his re- tirement plans for another three years. He said it was simply time to step away. With his wife retiring from her job as a schoolteacher and their son on his way off to college, he decided it was time to change everything all at once. "I've been thinking about it prob- ably for a couple of years," he said. "My wife had been thinking about it a lot longer. It seemed like the right thing to do." Along with the extra time on the golf course, Piane said he plans to spend his post-coaching life traveling as much as possible and chipping away at the honey-do list he's been putting off for a few decades. When he's done with that, he says, maybe he'll have the time to reflect on the legacy he left behind while turning Notre Dame's track program into one of the best in the nation. Piane won 26 conference champion- ships and finished in the top 10 na- tionally 11 times during his career. He coached 189 All-Americans and was a two-time National Cross Country Coach of the Year. He had opportu- nities to leave and head to warmer weather campuses throughout his time at Notre Dame, but none was ever appealing enough to pull him away from where he started building more or less from scratch. It was in Peru, while trying to put his business degree to work by manag- ing agricultural co-ops for the Peace Corps, that Piane realized he wanted to coach collegiate runners. He ran dis- tance events at Loras, a small college in Dubuque, Iowa, and missed it as soon as he was gone. The Peace Corps transferred him to northern Africa the following year and he got his start tu- toring the Moroccan national team. Several of those runners went on to race in the 1972 Olympics in Munich while Piane was making a brief stop at Western Illinois on his way to Notre Dame. Athletics director Moose Krause hired Piane to take over the Irish pro- gram in 1975 and gave him the bud- get to hire one assistant coach. Piane chose Ed Kelly, who was coaching at nearby Niles High School. Their first job was to set some new standards of discipline. "We had to let guys know that there are parameters and we wanted to be as good as we could be," said Kelly, who stayed with the program for a decade. Kelly said that was a struggle in their first year. He remembers one trip that season when he and Piane discov- ered several of the athletes were smug- gling alcohol on to the bus for the trip home. They had stashed beers in the long sheaths used to transport the pole vaulters' poles and were crack- ing them open on the back of the bus. Piane's fondest memories came on the track. There are a handful of races and events he can still see unfolding in his mind whenever he wants. There was the time Godwin Mbagwu cleared the entire pit in the triple jump to win the 2003 Big East championship on the