Positivity: A Small-Time Coach with a Big-Time Message
From USA Today–Having no hands never “held” Mark Speckman back:
SALEM, Ore. — Like everybody, Mark Speckman multitasks. He talks on the cellphone while he drives. He surfs the Web while he fills out paperwork. Simple things, really.
Like fewer people, however, he was an outstanding high school athlete.
Like fewer still, he rose to a position of authority and became a great leader.
Like very few, his story was once in the tabloids, next to the sightings of aliens and Elvis.
Yet, these days, he labors in relative obscurity in central Oregon’s quiet Willamette Valley, seeking achievement, not attention, making a difference, not headlines.
One of the most wonderful and refreshing things in this life is the remarkable man who insists it isn’t so. And so it is with 50-year-old Mark Speckman.
The Willamette University football team is in good hands, even though Speckman, its coach, was born without them.
Inspiring? Listen to Tim Alton, a 21-year-old senior free safety on the Division III Bearcats and an aspiring doctor. “At the beginning of the season, we’re worried about two-a-day practices,” Alton says. “We’re tired. We’re dragging. Then we look over at our coach, and he has no hands. It’s pretty hard to feel sorry for yourself.”
This is the story of a man and a team that most people know nothing about. But they should.
There was a time when Speckman avoided reaching out to tell people about his handicap and his experiences. He just wanted to be like everybody else. He didn’t want to be noticed.
But he eventually learned that people want to be lifted up, and he had an ability to do that.
He made a pact with God, he says, to talk to anyone who approached him and wanted to know how he could be so satisfied with a life with no hands. “I guess it’s a good story,” he says. “It took me a while to realize that.”
These days, he’s in demand in Oregon and across the country as a motivational speaker, noted for his moving personal testimony as well as his wry sense of humor.
….. He became a college football player, a trombone player (ah, an instrument with no fingering), a college graduate, a high school teacher and coach and, eventually, in 1995, he was hired by then-Willamette head coach Dan Hawkins to be his offensive line coach and offensive coordinator. In 1998, Hawkins was hired as an assistant coach at Boise State, and Speckman was promoted to replace him.
Speckman has also become a husband and father. His son, Tim, 25, played wide receiver for the Bearcats and now is a part-time assistant coach for his father.
Speckman proudly says his son had the best hands on the team.
“Yeah,” Tim says, chuckling. “We say it skipped a generation.”
Speckman has taken the Bearcats to the NCAA Division III playoffs twice, in 1999 and again last year. Overall, his teams have posted a 43-33 record.
Willamette is 2-3 heading into Saturday’s home game against Southern Oregon. But the won-loss record, while important, is the not the sole measurement of a football coach at a place like Willamette.
“Coaches and players want to win,” Willamette President M. Lee Pelton says. “But more important than winning is making sure students are prepared to compete and to make sure they have a good athletic experience and also an experience that will test their limits.
“We look for coaches who can achieve those ends, and Mark absolutely fits.”
