A Q&A with Bullis School MD coach Joe Lee

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

Over the past few years, Joe Lee has helped turn the track program at an independent co-ed prep school north of Washington, D.C. into a national power. The school has just 750 students.

Two of the three national indoor high school records that fell last week at New Balance Nationals Indoor were set by his girls' relay teams in the shuttle hurdles and the 4x200. 

Lee, in his sixth year at Bullis, was honored with a Coach of the Year award by the National Scholastic Athletic Foundation at the meet. 

I caught up with him at the conclusion of the meet to ask him his thoughts on a few topics. 

Check out this story from 2017 about Lee and the Bullis program.

(edited for content and brevity)

What were your thoughts on the mixed gender relay?

Joe Lee: I loved it. The thing that made it nerve-wracking is you go through every variable: guy-girl-guy-girl, girl-guy-girl-guy, girl-girl-guy-guy, guy-guy-girl-girl, and it's just like, What do you do?

You just have to add them all up and at the end of the day it all works out. We had a lot of fun with it. I think it's something good for the sport. Something new that adds variety. Our kids loved it. Hats off to War (Nansemond River VA). They won it, fair and square.

You have a great team right now with wins coming in a variety of relays at nationals and a couple of national records. How sustainable is this level of success at Bullis?

Joe Lee: We're excited about where the program has developed and that attracts more people to (assess) our process and after a few years people begin to see you have credibility behind your program. We feel confident in the way people are showing interest in not just the program but the school, because Bullis is a top-notch academic school in the D.C. (Potomac, Maryland) area. You've got to come in there strong academically first, otherwise you're not running on anybody's track team or anything like that.

We're excited about the fact that there's some really good students, who are also good athletes, who are showing the school some interest. We feel like if we keep doing what we're doing from a training perspective and keep the team focused on bigger, long-term goals, people will see that we'll continue.

What can you reveal to us about the chemistry of your record-breaking girls?

Joe Lee: I say it all the time and I'll keep saying it. We're a family. I mean that. Family is not always having a blood connection. It's a connection to something significant that will last a lifetime. They'll remember this forever. 

I was telling them this past week that I saw a past track teammate of mine that I haven't seen in 25 years, when I graduated high school. We connected like it was yesterday. So I'm telling (my athletes) we're a family. You have ups and downs, highs and lows, but we work through those for the betterment of the relationships and for the betterment of whatever you're trying to achieve. 

We just saw coach Don Norford go into the National High School Track and Field Hall of Fame. You seem to say a lot of the same types of things that he did. Is his legacy at Long Beach Poly any kind of influence on you?

Joe Lee: First of all, even to have his name come up in conversation is one thing, because what Long Beach Poly has done over the years, to me, is legendary. I'm a track nerd. I study the sport. I've been like that since I was a teenager. We didn't have Youtube and the web back then so you kind of had to wait for the track meet to come on and figure it out, but Long Beach Poly has been a national standard for so many years and I love what he's done, and I've watched Shalonda Solomon, Jasmine Lee, Bryshon Nellum. The rich tradition and history that they brought along, we sometimes say we're trying to do some special things, but we're trying to keep that legacy of (schools like) Poly going on. We are running up against five teams, but we'll add a sixth in there because we're chasing Poly, too. In a good way. 

Bullis could become the team that Americans start to look to at Penn Relays to mix it up with the powerful Jamaican squads that come to Philadelphia every year, the way that Poly has. Do you welcome that?

Joe Lee: I'm not going to give you a generic answer. We're coming fully loaded. We're coming to represent Team USA, just like a lot of the other schools in our country will do. Western Branch. Nansemond River. Union Catholic. East Orange. We're going after it, not just representing Bullis School but the country, and we're going to bring everything we've got. We're looking forward to the challenge. We're not going to back away from it. That is absolutely on our mind.