CONRAD — On June 25 in Rapid City, S.D., longtime Conrad high school head track and field coach Jim Carroll was awarded the national girls coach of the year award by the National High School Athletics Coaches Association.
"I was honored, you don't get to this point with some of these awards without having spent a lot of time doing what you do," Carroll said at Conrad high school Thursday. "I've been at this for many decades, but I think the most important part of that is I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of very good student athletes and a lot of very good coaches through the years."
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Carroll is about to enter his 45th year as a coach and teacher, and has been a finalist for this award three times.
With both aforementioned bits in mind, Carroll said those two pieces were big in winning it this year.
"Because you have to build up that tenure," Carroll said. "You have to build up the status of the awards that you might be getting with the success that you've had. So I knew I was in the running certainly, I knew that I had just as good an opportunity as anybody else."
Carroll said that this award sort of encompassed his life's work — but not exactly.
"I got in to education for a reason and that was to work with student-athletes," Carroll said. "Work with just teaching students how to be better learners and better athletes. And this is what I do, it's what I've always wanted to do, it's what I enjoy doing. I think I'm reasonably good at it, and it's something that I enjoy enough to where I want to keep going with things."
He was among a group of 10 coaches from Montana that were finalists for national coach of the year awards in other respective sports.
The other finalists were: Billings Central football coach Jim Stanton and boys basketball coach Jim Stergar, Havre girls basketball coach Dustin Kraske, Scobey boys track and field coach Larry Henderson, Helena High soccer coach Carl Straub, Helena Capital softball coach Mike Miller, Butte High swimming coach Lynn Shrader, Corvallis track assistant Garrett Middleton and Hardin assistant volleyball coach Bernice Cook.
"We have a lot of very good coaches in Montana," Carroll said. "Every year when we go to the national conference, Montana usually brings a pretty good contingent. One of the people in my group, they kept hearing the name Montana, Montana, and they said, 'Did every one of your coaches make it?' And I said, 'We have a lot of good coaches in Montana.'"
At the end of the day, this award is not something that Carroll said will change the way he is as a coach or an educator.
"With or without an award, that's not why I do it," Carroll said. "I do it because of the love that I have for the sport and the passion that I have for working with student athletes."
On top of it all, Carroll said he takes pride in being an educator first and a coach second. On Monday, he's going to be honored in Billings for a national award of teacher excellence in traffic education.
