It is 2005, and Girls Soccer Program Head Richard Simms is standing on the Harvard-Westlake track for the first time. Anxiously awaiting his interview with former athletic department head and former Head of School Ardius Barzdukas, he gazes across the large turf field in front of him. State-of-the-art facilities and top notch-coaches, Simms said, drew him to the the school’s Athletic Department, but the relationships he has formed with his teams are what have made him stay for 20 years. Simms said his first year at the school was crucial in changing the status quo around the girls’ soccer team.

“My first year, we had made playoffs and that really established me right away because it gave me some credibility and early success,” Simms said. “It was fun to win those games and go down to Orange County where the teams seemed so much better than us. They weren’t better, we were just a little bit fearful of them. I am proud to say, 20 years later, we are the team that people are afraid to play. That took a lot of work, and we didn’t start there.”

Simms said his coaching methods have evolved over the years, focusing more on forming connections with the members of his team and athletic community.

“I’m still very competitive, but that used to be the driving force behind why I coached,” Simms said. “I loved the games and the constant competitive feedback. But as I’ve evolved, it has become much more about human development for me and wanting to develop myself. Soccer has become very much secondary to just helping with human development, whether it is parents, myself, our staff, athletes, training staff or our sports performance.”

Simms said in his time at the school, he has better understood the importance of diversity within his team and the larger community.

“Over the last 10 years, my program has become so much richer and more satisfying to work with because of our diversity,” Simms said. “I started to really learn about all different kinds of diversity that I had never considered and what that can bring into a team environment. You have academic, socioeconomic, racial and geographic diversity. It’s made me a better person, a better educator and our school a much more enriched place.”

Athletic Director Darlene Bible has been working at the school for 43 years. She spent 30 years coaching swimming, girls golf and a season of girls soccer. For the last 13 years, she has served as an Athletic Director, overseeing operations for the school’s teams and programs.

Bible was a teacher and coach at the Westlake school prior to the merger. When the school became co-ed, Bible said, there was a lot of planning to prepare a new, combined athletic department. Bible said she remembers the reorganization that created the modern physical education courses.

“The year before the planned physical merger, the entire full-time athletic department members from Harvard and Westlake got together and had a number of meetings,” Bible said. “We decided who would teach Physical Education at each campus because there were a number of PE classes at the high school, so some people who were at Harvard originally moved to the Westlake campus and vice versa.”

Bible said coaching at the school and watching the athletic program evolve has been a rewarding experience for her.

“Working with young people to help them become more skilled in their sport, to instill leadership skills, good work habits and teamwork, is something I will always cherish,” Bible said. “We have strived for excellence in the athletic department from the day of the merger, but [we] have ramped up our programs and improved our facilities over the years to be the amazing department we are today.”

Cross Country and Track and Field Program Head Coach Jonas Koolsbergen ’83 has been apart of the school for 44 years. He started as a student and athlete in 1977, and since then has been a teacher, assistant coach and head coach. Koolsbergen said attending Harvard School for Boys played a big role in him working at the school.

“I obviously had a history here, a fondness and a terrific experience,” Koolsbergen said. “I was originally hired by the coach that was my high school coach, and so it was just a good and natural fit.”

Koolsbergen began coaching immediately after high school while he was attending UCLA. He worked as a part-time assistant coach for the track and field team and continued serving as an assistant coach even after graduating. Koolsbergen said that his transition from student to coach was smooth but unique.

“I was coaching the kids who I had been teammates with the year before,” Koolsbergen said. “The lead guy on the team was a junior when I was a senior and he really set the tone, because we had a good rapport and even a friendship. He also had a ton of respect for me and the idea that I could be the coach made sense to him.”

Koolsbergen said the biggest shift in the track program since he was a student has been expectations for the team’s success.

“The biggest change in the program over time is just the scope of what we are trying to achieve,” Koolsbergen said. “When I was in high school, we did well, and we did our best, but really the highest goal was to win League. Now our scope is so much larger than that. CIF success, state success, running in the best races was just not stuff we did back then.”

Koolsbergen said as a coach he learned that there are many different ways to reach goals without being fixed on one approach.

“What I have learned over time as a coach here is to separate the vital from the nonvital,” Koolsbergen said. “There are certain things you have to get done but in learning that there are certain other things you can get done on another day, or get done in a different way, you start to realize that there are multiple paths to get to where you want to go. You don’t have to be so locked into one version of it.”

Boys Golf Program Head Scott Wood ’88 has been a member of the school’s athletic department for over 20 years, holding multiple positions coaching golf, football and basketball. Beyond that, Wood attended Harvard Boys School and participated on each of those teams as a player. Wood said attending Harvard School has allowed him to have a more meaningful connection with the students on his team.

“Luckily for me, I know what it is like to deal with the school and I know what sports means to different types of people,” Wood said. “I am very fortunate to have been pretty close with all my teams, all the kids, all the parents. [Having been a student here], there is something kind of soothing and therapeutic about being back and kind of helping some of the guys I coach get through stuff that was hard for me, or is just hard for your age in general.”

Wood said his experience coaching multiple sports has allowed him to use a variety of teaching methods.

“Coaching three different sports has been a highlight because they are all different,” Wood said. “In football, the kids get physically tired and drained and you kind of have to coach them to overcome that. Same with basketball. In golf, it is a technical sport, and it is not the physicality or speed, it is the mental preparation and game, which I love. Those are highlights for me, seeing kids that are always fighting to get better.”

Wood said a large part of being a coach is instilling self-assurance in his team and being a figure they can trust.

“I always try to give kids confidence in themselves, but not take credit for it,” Wood said. “You have to be able to present opportunities, let them choose to take them or not, and then it is theirs when it happens. It is really rewarding to see growth in the athletes and to deal with players that have had personal things that they confide in you for. As a coach, you get to kind of pay it forward and, if you do a decent job, you will always have a group of people that went through the experience with you. It is a lifetime of shared experiences.”