Francie Kraker Goodridge

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from April 1993.)

ANOTHER FRANCIE. A remarkable trio of American women ran 1500 meters at the Munich Olympics. None made the final in this first race of its type, but they all rate a second look for what they’ve done since. More than 20 years later none of them is just an historic figure or footnote.

You know two of these women, Doris Brown (now Heritage) and Francie Larrieu (now Smith). Brown was nearing the end of her racing career in 1972, while Larrieu was just starting hers.

Doris had already won five World Cross-Country titles in a row. She’d qualified in the 1968 Olympics when the 800 was the longest women’s event, and in 1972 when the limit bumped up to the 1500 that was still too short for her.

At age 50 she’s now the longtime coach at Seattle Pacific University… and a longtime AAU/TAC/USATF official… and a member of the USOC… and an emissary to the IAAF. For all that she has done and still does, Doris Brown Heritage claims a spot in the Hall of Fame.

Francie Larrieu Smith will too, once she meets the requirement of being retired. She has qualified for four more Olympic teams since Munich. And, at age 40, she might not be through yet.

But what of the third member of this team? She’s as much a pioneer as the others, though not as famously so.

She’s the other Francie. Her last name was Kraker when she ran with Doris Brown in the Mexico City 800. It was Johnson when she made the Munich 1500 team.

Now it’s Goodridge. She and John Goodridge are soon to celebrate their 20^th anniversary as both married partners and fellow coaches.

The Goodridges first coached together at Michigan State, with Francie serving as John’s assistant with the women’s team. Then they briefly were rivals when Francie took over as Michigan’s coach.

Since 1984 they’ve been equals. John coaches the men at Wake Forest, and Francie has charge of the women. Both of their cross-country teams ran in the NCAA Championships last fall.

Francie’s biggest surprise, at age 46, isn’t that she’s a Division I head coach but that there aren’t more women like her. “I thought the opportunities would expand more than they have,” she says.

“Look at all that has happened in women’s sports since I started coaching [first at a high school] almost 20 years ago. The opportunities for women runners are enormously greater now, but the prospects for women coaches haven’t kept pace.”

Title IX has decreed that colleges and high school support female track and cross-country. But this legislation doesn’t say these teams must be led by women.

Very few of them hold top jobs at the biggest schools. 1988 Olympic coach Terry Crawford produced national championship teams at Texas before moving recently to Cal Poly/San Luis Obispo. Another woman, Bev Kearney, succeeded Crawford at Texas.

Women head only a handful of Division I women’s teams. “I’d love to see more,” says Francie Goodridge, “but I don’t see many more coming along.”

Legislative and economic forces work against it. NCAA rules now limit colleges to one full-time and one part-time assistant, thereby reducing the apprenticeship opportunities for coaches of both sexes.

Money concerns also have forced many colleges to combine their men’s and women’s programs under one coaching staff. The top job almost invariably goes to a man.

This bleak market makes Francie Goodridge all the more remarkable. She has survived as a head coach for more than 10 years, giving young women more help than she had at their age.

UPDATE. Francie and John Goodridge later hosted my visit to Wake Forest University. Soon afterward they moved back to her native state, where John took the Eastern Michigan University coaching job and Francie went to work in the University of Michigan’s admissions office.

All three women’s 1500-meter Olympians from 1972 enjoyed careers as college coaches. Francie Larrieu Smith was the last to start hers (at Southwestern University in Texas) and is the only one still coaching fulltime. She was voted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1998.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]