Voss brings 30 years as an NBC track coach to close

by Nathan Arneal
Published 6/6/06

After 30 years of coaching in the NBC track and field program, Jeff Voss is stepping down.

He has served as the head coach of both the boys and girls teams for the last 10 years and head girls coach five years before that. Prior to that he was an assistant for Dan Watts’ girls teams for 15 years, starting with the 1996 season.

Jeff Voss encourages one of his distance runners, who here happens to be his son Jonah, at the district meet May 15.

Voss will continue to farm with his 83-year old father, who picks up the slack when Jeff had to be at practice every day in the spring.

“It’s just getting to be more for all of us,” Voss said. “It’s been that way for a few years. It’s just kind of time. It comes down to time. I still enjoy coaching, but it’s just been hard the last few years.”

Winning conference championships was a favorite of Voss’s. He took over Watts’s girls program in 2011, inheriting a winning streak of seven straight conference titles and eight consecutive district championships. Under Voss, the district winning streak would extend to 12 straight years. He took over the boys team when coach Rick Watson stepped down in 2015.

“They left us with some good teams,” Voss said. “I said when I took over, I just wanted to keep going what those guys did because they were so good.”

When Watson left, the coaching staff underwent an paradigm shift.

What had been separate girls and boys staffs were combined so each event coach mentored both the boys and girls in their events, while one head coach oversaw the whole program.

“That was a complete overhaul to how we’d done things, which I resisted,” Voss said. “I really didn’t want to do that, and I’m still not sure its the way to go. Personally, I think the other way was a little more productive because there’s more attention. That was a big change, but we’ve made it work, I think.”

Voss’s coaching specialties were the high jump and distance races. So it’s no surprises that one of his favorite career highlights were Kristin Lux and Ally Pojar going 1-2 in the state high jump in 2018 and then Pojar winning it the next year.

The near misses also stick in his mind. The conference runners-up by a few points. The gold medals that were missed by fractions of a second.
That includes an entire missed season by what he speculates may have been his best team, the 2020 squad that had its season canceled by COVID.

“I still feel bad for those seniors,” Voss said, “ because they were so excited about it that year.”

Voss said he owes a lot to Watts, who taught him how to be a head coach. He also thanked activities director Tony Allgood, who handed him the keys to the program.

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