LJ track: Sundlun knew he had a "great talent"

By Ed Piper

When AAU track coach Tracy Sundlun first spied young Janice Wiser, a sprinter, he knew he saw something special.

"A guy in a mixed race tried to muscle her. She was running in a relay," recalled Sundlun in an interview Wed., July 2. "She just walloped him, and sent him into the infield."

The almost-as-young Tracy, only four years older than the 16-year-old Wiser, recognized her as unusual. "You didn't fall down like Mary Decker (a distance runner in the Olympics years later)," I told her later.

A chain of events was unleashed: The Washington, D.C. coach recruited Janice, a sophomore in high school in Maryland; successfully spoke to her parents about moving to the West Coast to run for an AAU  team in San Luis Obispo; and the move was made, followed a year later by a relocation to La Jolla, where Janice won both sprints in the CIF State Meet in Spring 1974.

Sundlun, many years later living in San Diego, says modestly of his young runner's accomplishments: "Great athletes make great coaches."

Janice Wiser Pope, now happily married for 49 years and living in Spring Valley with her husband Robert, remembers Tracy as a "great coach", but her recollection of that moment in that AAU relay 53 years ago, is quite different.

"Tracy uses colorful language," she said when told of Sundlun's description of the incident.

"I, honest to God, didn't do anything to be aggressive," she protested. "I was focused on staying in my lane and handing the baton off."

"We bumped each other, and he fell off the track."

She recalled, "I felt the contact, but I don't remember the contact (specifically)."

 "It was a girl-boy thing, you know," she said. Girl runners were not allowed to run in high school yet, and she was competing in AAU independent of any interscholastic competition. "My  coach at the time was generous and let me run in the relay."

After the move to the West Coast and her insertion in the CIF San Diego Section meet representing La Jolla High in Spring 1974, Wiser said she didn't have to deal with any of the noise that opposing coaches were making, that she was a "ringer" who didn't even compete with a girls track team at La Jolla High under Coach Chuck Boyer (Boyer had her practice with the boys).

"Coach Boyer and Tracy handled all of that (the noise)," she said.

On Sundlun talking to her parents and asking them to allow her to move 3,000 miles away before her junior year in high school without family, trusting him, Janice says now, "I was amazed that my parents said yes."

Also, "I was scared." This was a big change in her life, a big move, centered around running for an AAU club in San Luis Obispo.