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Once More To The Old Barn - Inside Christian Brothers Academy's Iconic Training Facility

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DyeStat.com   Feb 5th 2020, 9:55pm
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Once More to the Old Barn

 

A DyeStat story by Dave Devine

Photos by John Nepolitan | Full Gallery 

______________

 

Long after the horses were gone, a boy named Mike Mazzaccaro stepped into the barn. 

Newly arrived as a freshman at Christian Brothers Academy (CBA) in Lincroft, N.J., he was joining the school’s storied distance running program. 

Even then, more than a decade ago, he could tell the building had seen better days. 

The dirt floor lining the oval tunnel was packed and rutted in places, loose and precarious in others. Windows were drafty and cracked, or absent altogether. Rain-bloated doors hung slack and askew. The rafters were punctuated with defunct lighting fixtures and wilted cobwebs.  

A moist, loamy smell clung to everything — beams and breath alike. 

Every shaft of light danced with dust. 

And this was where Mazzaccaro and his teammates were meant to train. 

The Round Barn. 

On mild afternoons, when the weather encouraged outdoor running, they might merely warm up inside, then head to a nearby park or the far reaches of campus for the serious running. But on other days, when slashing rain, driving snow or arctic temperatures necessitated an indoor workout, the boys would crash through claustrophobic intervals in the narrow, musty enclosure. 

Mostly, Mazzaccaro remembers battling to stay vertical. 

“You were always getting bumped around,” he says. “I remember just trying to stay on my feet.” 

A preponderance of gopher holes didn’t help. 

“I’ll never forget freshman year, my foot just blowing through the ground and then tumbling over.” 

Like so many runners that preceded him, Mazzaccaro learned to tuck, roll and spring back up before the next stampede of runners came through. 

Eventually, he learned to anticipate and avoid the holes altogether. 

But he couldn’t have known — not in those nascent days — the ways in which the Barn would eventually shape and form his running. Carve out a hollow in his memory. Help deliver him and his teammates to podiums and record books. 

That learning would come later. 

Just as it has for generations of CBA runners.  

oldbarn

 

“Twenty Grand, owned by Mrs. Payne Whitney, and the outstanding favorite in a field of 12 contestants, came home with a smashing burst of speed...and shattered the Derby as well as the track record for the mile and a quarter.” 

- Alan Gould, Associated Press report, 1931 Kentucky Derby

 

For the entirety of its existence, the Round Barn has been home to winning colts. 

The sprawling 157 acres upon which CBA currently sits was originally a vegetable farm, then purchased in 1914 by the Whitney family of New York for the purpose of breeding and training thoroughbred race horses. 

The Whitneys already owned a network of equine facilities that extended from Saratoga, N.Y., to Lexington, Kentucky, but the New Jersey site, christened the Greentree Stable, soon became a hub for some of the finest horses on the East Coast. 

In 1926, the family constructed an enclosed oval track, or galloping shed, to ensure their stable of thoroughbreds could train effectively through the brutal Northeast winters. 

The benefits of this “round barn” were almost immediate. 

In 1931, Greentree’s celebrated bay colt, Twenty Grand, just missed securing the Triple Crown, finishing second in the Preakness while roaring to victory at the Belmont Stakes and the Kentucky Derby.  

Named Horse of the Year for his feats, Twenty Grand was eventually inducted in the National Thoroughbred Hall of Fame. 

Three more Belmont winners followed in the 1940s and 1950s. 

But the era of four-legged colts thundering through the Round Barn ended in 1958, when a small group of laymen — including renowned cardiologist and running author Dr. George Sheehan — envisioned an all-boys Catholic high school in Monmouth County and raised the necessary funds to purchase the Whitney farm. 

The Brothers of the Christian Schools agreed to staff the school and finance construction of a new main building. 

Several existing structures, including the Barn, were repurposed and incorporated into the fledgling campus, utilized for everything from maintenance to athletics. 

In the fall of 1959, with an initial enrollment of 150 students, Christian Brothers Academy opened its doors. 

In a nod to history, the school’s athletic teams assumed the moniker of their equine predecessors: the Colts. 

barn2

 

“It will not always be summer: build barns.”

- Hesiod, Greek poet

 

Karl Torchia vividly recalls his first impression of the building in which he’s coached for nearly two decades. 

“I remember walking into the Barn with an overwhelming sense that it was cool,” he says. “You could tell horses ran here before people.” 

Hired as CBA’s head track and field coach in 2001 by the Colts’ longtime mentor, Tom Heath, Torchia was already an established New Jersey high school coach and former collegiate decathlete at West Virginia University. 

He knew his way around training facilities. 

And despite the novelty of unleashing his charges on a track previously utilized by Derby-winning horses, he also acknowledged the Barn’s shortcomings. 

“You’re looking up at bare rafters,” Torchia says. “You can tell that the wood has been there a really long time.” 

There’s the visible dry rot, he says. The peeling paint, broken windows, rusting nails. And then he rattles off the building’s other limitations. 

“There’s no air conditioning…no heating…no lighting…it’s just walls and a roof to keep the rain off.” 

But it’s on that last point — protection from the elements — that the Barn has more than earned its place in the storied history of one of the nation’s most successful prep programs.  

The option of an on-campus, undercover training facility, especially in the 1970s and 80s when few indoor tracks were available to high school teams, proved an invaluable asset. 

It was an advantage that Heath, the man who hired Torchia, understood immediately. 

A 1965 graduate of CBA, Heath says that even in his school days, the Round Barn was already a gritty, dilapidated space. When he returned in 1970 to teach mathematics, and was asked to coach track and cross country, he embraced that grit and appropriated the shelter for his young harriers. 

“It gave us a place to train during the winter season,” he says. “And not everybody had that opportunity.” 

There would be no ripping through school hallways for the Colts in winter, no shoveling out lanes on a snow-buried track. 

“There would be 10 inches of snow outside,” Heath says, “and we could be in the Barn doing what we needed to do.” 

The coach spun that advantage, along with myriad other cultural ingredients, into an enduring athletic dynasty. 

When “Mr. Heath” finally hung up his stopwatch at the end of the 2015 cross country season, he’d led the Colts to dozens of New Jersey state and Meet of Champions titles; his CBA teams had stood atop the podium at Nike Cross Nationals, Penn Relays and numerous indoor and outdoor national track meets. 

Perhaps most memorably, the Colts cross country team had accumulated a national record dual meet winning streak, which stood at 343 at the time of Heath’s retirement, and has since grown to more than 370. Stretching from September 1974 to the present, it’s a mark that will likely never be beaten. 

Chris Bennett, a 1994 CBA graduate who contributed to that streak as both a runner and an assistant coach from 2007 to 2014, is another Colt who has carried Barn stories with him long after his campus days have passed. 

Like most, he appreciates the Barn’s benefits and winces at its blemishes. 

“The positive,” he says, “is that when there’s that roll call at the end of the day for all the CBA teams cancelling practice, indoor track is never cancelling practice. Outdoor track never has to cancel practice. We’re having thunderstorms? Fine, we can practice inside.” 

That sense of predictability, that ethic of inevitable work, is woven into the team’s mentality. 

“You’re part of a team that is always going to practice,” Bennett says. “There are exactly zero practices that are going to get cancelled.” 

On the flipside, he notes with a chuckle: “Running in the Barn is real experience.” 

Start with the temperature — it’s notoriously frigid, rarely warmer than what’s available outside. 

“On a really cold day,” says Sean McCafferty, a former assistant who succeeded Heath as head cross country coach in 2016, “it’s actually colder in the Barn. It never warms up throughout the day.” 

Mazzaccaro, who has returned as an assistant after running at Princeton, has a similar take. 

“The temperature in the Barn is whatever the temperature was outside two days ago. It holds that temperature; sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s bad.” 

According to Bennett, it was rarely good. 

“If it’s zero degrees outside and sleeting, you’re not getting the sleet, but guess what? It’s still zero degrees.” 

The former assistant, now based in Oregon as Global Head Coach for the Nike Run Club, recalls how those frigid temperatures somehow combined, in a sort of Round Barn alchemy, with the humidity and the dust and the sweat from contained adolescent bodies to form a substance which seemed to coat everything passing through the facility. 

“It was a faint, kind of grimy thing that caked your body. Just this odd sediment that stayed with you after you left.” 

And then there was the dirt itself, allegedly imported from Europe by the Whitney family for the benefit of their thoroughbreds. 

“It was supposed to be a special type of dirt that dried more quickly,” says Torchia, the head track coach. “Although I’d say most of that is gone, from all the feet pounding on it over the years.” 

Mazzaccaro has heard those stories, too. 

“We grew up on the lore of it being this special dirt that they brought in from England or Ireland,” he says. “It was great for the horses, it packed down well, but at the same time it had some give and you could kick it up.” 

He and his teammates would joke that practicing in the Barn was like training in another country.  

“Like going on vacation to the British Isles, because of all the fancy dirt.” 

But Heath, the man who spent more time in that barn than anyone else, claims ignorance to the dirt’s provenance. 

“Imported soil?” he says, somewhat incredulously. “I don’t really think so. I think that’s just the dirt that was already there. It’s a nice legend though.” 

While it’s difficult to know if the retired coach is being candid or cagey, there’s one dirt-related item upon which everyone agrees: It’s not the ideal “soft-surface” training some might assume. 

“It’s never really soft,” says McCafferty. “By the end of winter, it gets packed pretty hard.” 

Except where the gophers have dug. 

“That’s true,” Torchia confirms. “Once in a while they cave in, and we have to put cones in them or a hurdle in front. And then we call maintenance, and they’ll eventually come out, fill in the hole and rake it over.” 

The windows on the backstretch offer another challenge. 

“The sun during practice comes right through those backstretch windows,” Bennett says. “You have a window, and then some wood. Window, and then wood. Which means: bright sunshine…darkness. Bright sunshine…darkness. It’s a nightmare.” 

Mazzaccaro concurs. 

“Just a blinding light,” he says. “If you’re going at the wrong angle and running fast enough, it’s almost like a saw blade hitting you in the face.” 

Almost as problematic, he points out, is the sudden, enveloping darkness when the sun sets. 

“It gets as dark as the day is outside.” 

Overhead lighting once illuminated the tunnel, but that electricity was long ago disconnected. 

“At 4:30,” Heath says, “everything gets dark. You can’t do a blessed thing in there.” 

He pauses on that memory — countless vain attempts to cram in one more interval before the light faded. 

“It was always like that,” he says. “One more…one more.”  

barn3

 

“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”

- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer



There are equations on the walls. 

A series of computations, appropriate for the math teacher who oversaw this barn for so many years. 

1880 yds (3 laps + 3 yds)

2 Miles (12 laps + 12 yds)

 

Handy for athletes circling a track with a length no one can quite agree upon. 

“It’s basically a round tunnel, 298 yards long,” Heath says, “so six laps to a mile. A little bit off, but fairly close.” 

“Right around 300 yards,” McCafferty offers. “Whatever it is. It might be a little longer — but not much — a yard or two longer.” 

“We just found out a week ago that it’s not 306 yards,” Mazzaccaro laughs. “It’s like I’ve been living a lie half my life. But I know the straightaways are about 20 meters. Give or take…” 

Whatever the precise distance, the building has its own calculus. 

Workouts are based on laps, not distance. 

One-lappers. Two-lappers. A 10-lap tempo. 

“You’d just say, ‘I did six two-lappers.’” Mazzaccaro clarifies. “You would never say, ‘I did six-times-612 yards.’ It’s all laps.” 

Familiar pace references are meaningless. 

“We know the paces based on each lap,” McCafferty says. “So, we know that five-minute mile pace is generally 50 seconds a lap, things like that.” 

Younger runners eventually develop a feel for the pace, just as they learn to safely navigate the landscape. 

On some days, as many as 100 athletes are circling the loop or lingering at the edges. Everyone angling for space. 

The heavy traffic requires clear communication. 

“I always picture Tom (Heath) 20 meters down the dirt from me,” Torchia says, “and us always checking on each other, back and forth, to see when our groups are ready to go. It eventually became —” 

He hesitates a moment, grasping for an appropriate metaphor. 

“It became a waltz of chaos.” 

It’s a word that comes up often when describing practices inside the Barn: Chaos. 

“I definitely remember it being chaotic as a freshman,” Mazzaccaro says. 

“But an organized chaos,” Torchia says. 

“When you look back on it,” Bennett says, “there’s magic in the chaos.” 

And in that chaos, it’s clear that time bends differently for the Colts. 

Numbers take on a narrow, provincial meaning. 

“I’ll say we’re running a 38-second one-lapper,” Torchia points out, “and it means nothing to anyone else. But to us, we all know what that is — it’s like a 26-second 200 if you’re outdoors.” 

Over time, conversions like that have become a sort of metric shorthand. 

A code that only CBA understands. 

“There are certain barriers,” Bennett says. “If you could get under 40 in the Barn, you had some wheels. If you could say I did 30-anything in the Barn, you were a badass.” 

And like any team with a long history of success, CBA passes down, from one class to the next, stories about their most memorable badasses. 

The kids who dropped epic, untouchable workouts.  

And some of those stories take place in the Barn. 

Among the thousands he’s coached, Heath mentions a pair of all-timers — Matt Mitchell ’88 and John Coyle ’89 — as among the most impressive he’s even seen. He rates a crew from the late 2000s, which included current assistant Mazzaccaro, a close second. Both groups, the former coach notes, “could do 2-lappers (about 600 yards) really fast and really efficiently.” 

Torchia can recite, without hesitating, the fastest that anyone has ever covered a single lap. 

“Thirty-three seconds,” he says. “Two guys I can think of — Mike Zupko and Zack McDermott.” 

McCafferty has poured through file cabinets filled with handwritten records that his predecessor, Heath, left behind. 

“There’s a workout I’ve looked at that Tom Rooney and Mike McClemens did. It was 16 one-lappers with 45 seconds of rest, and they were doing them in about 42 seconds, which is — well, that’s absurd.” 

A short time later, both boys ran on the 4x1 Mile relay that set a national record of 17:07.17 at the 2014 New Balance Nationals Indoor. 

Mazzaccaro has heard of a similar workout, conveyed with less precision and more impressive splits. 

“Some of the kids were running one-lappers the other day,” he says, “and they were asking, ‘Is it true Blaise Ferro and Mike McClemens ran like 20 of these in 39?’” 

Mazzaccaro admits he’s uncertain whether they did or not, but it doesn’t matter. 

He told the kids it happened. 

“It’s almost better if it becomes a tall tale.” 

Which is part of the culture at CBA, too. 

Stories are handed down, and some of them are true. Some never happened, but they’re also true. 

And you could never check anyway. 

The Round Barn is like that, an analog kind of place. 

There are names painted on the walls that can’t be researched on-line, because the runners attached to those names raced long before the Internet existed. 

There are initials inscribed next to rusty nails where Colts from the 1970s or 1980s once draped their sweatshirts. And now, the current team uses those nails to hang their gear. 

Each day, they run past the carved names. 

“I used to tell our guys,” Bennett says, “the reason why we’re really good, year in and year out, is because people suffered through practices in here. So, look at those names on the wall — the broken-down wooden wall, right underneath the broken window — you’re one of them now.”  

barrnnames

 

“Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn, a sun-lit pasture field...

And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away.”

-  Walt Whitman, “A Farm Picture,” Leaves of Grass

 

The old Barn can’t last forever. 

Even with its rich history and deep connection to team culture, there comes a time when the negatives begin to outweigh the positives.  

When bone-chilling workouts and sprained ankles, broken windows and rotting wood are difficult to justify on an otherwise modern campus. 

Last October, Christian Brothers Academy launched a $12 million capital campaign, with $7 million tagged for campus upgrades. 

Among the most prominent proposals: A completely renovated Round Barn. 

The plans call for the existing structure to be demolished, perhaps as soon as this summer, with a new facility constructed on the same footprint and with an exterior replicating the current Barn. 

Fittingly, the building will be renamed the Tom Heath Round Barn, and is set to include a synthetic track surface, modern lighting, radiant heat and roof ventilation, and a partially covered, multi-purpose infield. 

There are also plans for a turf lacrosse and soccer field to be added at the location of the current outdoor track, which means a new all-weather track would be constructed behind the school’s baseball fields. 

But it’s the Barn demolition that has drawn the most attention. 

“Obviously,” McCafferty says, “we are tremendously excited for this new facility. It is going to help the team, help the school — everything is good about it. But you can’t help but feel nostalgic.” 

He notes that cross country and track and field alums are leading the fundraising charge, but those same graduates also acknowledge the history that future generations will miss once the new facility is erected. 

He’s reassured by plans to duplicate the footprint — “some of the mystique will still be there” — but he also knows it won’t be the same. 

“But here’s the thing,” he says. “I don’t think anybody is going to be upset when we walk in that building the first time. And when I’m coaching and my hands aren’t freezing, it’ll feel great.” 

Mazzaccaro shares a similar sentiment. 

“Sometimes, newer can be better,” he allows. “I’m not afraid to say that. It would be nice to not be blinded when you’re running as fast as you can around a curve.” 

Like any good coach, he’s always seeking the best opportunity to help the young people in his care develop into the best versions of themselves. He sees the new Round Barn as a positive step in that direction. 

“As long as the culture inside stays the same, I’m not sure it matters what the building looks like.”  

barnnew

 

“No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you.” 

- Bruce Springsteen, New Jersey songwriter

 

On certain summer days, if he’s back in New Jersey for a visit, Bennett will drive out to his old high school and stop by a broken-down barn. 

If he’s feeling rushed, he might simply park for a few minutes, engine running, and offer a symbolic tip of the cap. 

More often, he steps from the car and slips inside the Barn.  

Squints into the available light, takes a moment to gather back his bearings. Drags a hand along the boards. Inhales the pungent summer heat. 

And then sets off on a lap. 

It’s not always easy to articulate why. 

“You run a couple laps because — well, because it’s the Barn,” he says. “And the entire time you’re in there, you’re rewinding. And suddenly the movie starts playing again. And you start remembering…” 

The years roll off, and he’s 16 again, watching Mr. Heath with his stopwatch, releasing teammates in quick, staccato succession for the final repeat of the day — Go. Go. Go. Waiting his turn, knowing he’ll be sent off last, with the expectation that he catch as many guys as possible. 

Jogging alone on those summer days, he smiles at the memory of those animalistic efforts in the dying December light. The way they laid waste to each other on the backstretch. 

He remembers running in long johns, pants so loose at the waist he was constantly hiking them up, because he refused to wear tights. 

He recalls 14-degree days and sub-zero days and a sophomore named Eric Savoth who broke one of his toes during a workout, and how they all swore it was the cold that broke Eric’s metatarsal. 

A day so cold it broke bones. 

While it’s hard to imagine memories like that returning on a sweltering day, Bennett swears they comes back.  

It’s another piece of the Barn magic — how it functions like a time machine. 

And he’s not the only graduate who comes back to visit. 

alumsAbout 15 years ago, Torchia started gathering alums on the day before Christmas for an informal event that has — perhaps unsurprisingly — become a CBA tradition. 

Now dubbed Christmas Eve Speed, it’s an opportunity for alums young and old to return to campus and run that most basic of Round Barn measurements. 

“One lap in the Barn,” McCafferty says. “That’s it. None of them warm up, they don’t stretch, they just go for it.”  

The first year featured a single heat, perhaps six or seven runners assembled at the old starting line and sent off in a frenetic, elbowing mass. 

Last December, more than 70 alums returned. 

Every year, Torchia has had to stage additional heats.  

“Sprinters…distance guys…they all race each other,” he says. “It’s just haywire, they’re all screaming for who they want to win.” 

He mentions a 30-something financial advisor at his job in New York City, informing co-workers that he’s heading back to his old high school over Christmas, hoping to break 40 for a “one-lapper.” 

“Nobody else in the country knows what that means,” Torchia says, “but everybody that ran in the Round Barn knows exactly what that means.” 

If there is one thing that might be lost in the imminent demolition, it’s that specificity of place. 

The emotion attached to running a single, dusty lap. 

“I could list a thousand things that help create the culture here,” McCafferty says, “but the Barn is one of those quintessential things.” 

For Bennett, it will live on as long as the storytelling continues. 

“You can always gather a group of kids, dressed in gloves and hats and sweatshirts, and you can say, ‘Let me tell you a story real quick about John Coyle. About the team in 1998 that won indoor nationals. About Eric Savoth’s toe. About how it was rare to see someone go under 40 in there, but I saw someone go under 40 when it was zero degrees.’” 

He marvels at the expansiveness of those stories, the potential to help future generations of Colts realize they are part of something much bigger. 

But in the end, he still circles back to the minutia. 

The granular. 

The grime that he so vividly remembers caking every runner after practice. 

“The odd sediment,” as he calls it, “that was forever leaving with you.” 

He can almost close his eyes and feel it now. 

If memory has a shape, maybe it’s shaped like the Round Barn. 

Circular.  

Turning back on itself, curving around, making another pass. 

Loose long johns and broken toes. Blinding light and names carved into boards. 

The echo of horses, long gone. 

Bennett knows how that all sounds. Acknowledges it might be a bit too wistful, perhaps overly poetic, but there it is — unavoidable. 

“Every time you left the Barn, a little of the Barn left with you.”



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