THE FRONT ROW WITH BRUCE BOURQUIN: Friday, November 21, 2014

For 48-year-old Lewis Watkins, the former North Idaho College track and field and cross country coach from 1998 to 2002, and more recently track and field and cross country at the Coeur d'Alene Charter Academy, the sports will always be a part of him.

He will continue to mentor and be a part of a club team he is trying to start at NIC next fall.

IN 2002, Watkins had to watch as NIC went through budget cuts and had to cut men's and women's track and field, men's and women's cross country and baseball. The men's track and field program had been around since 1964 and the women's track and field program since 1974.

From 1991 to 2011, Watkins was an academic advisor at NIC and since 2010, he teaches speech and college transition courses at the college.

Watkins said some of the same issues of recent months, as far as NIC switching from the Scenic West Athletic Conference to the Northwest Athletic Conference, were happening back in 2002.

"It was budget cuts," Watkins said. "At the time, it was 'Can we switch leagues?' You know how we switched leagues (this year)? It came back in 2002, where we were facing the exact same budget cuts. But in the wake of that, we lost five sports. A year later, we were getting threatened to lose (men's and women's) soccer, so we would've ended up losing seven sports if we weren't careful. The way we always looked at it is, if you can afford to drive a Mercedes, drive a Mercedes. If you can't afford that price tag, you have to get a Toyota and it's still going to get you places, in this case your student-athletes to where they need to be. But so many of us thought, instead of having four programs, why not have 12 to 15, because we've got opportunity, but we lost them due to budget cuts, nothing more than that."

Watkins talked about looking to help NIC field a club track and field team, possibly as early as next fall.

"Of course we were disappointed when the programs at NIC went away and for me, I've been there 24 years now," Watkins said. "I was a student there as well, so I've got a big investment in the college. I believe in what we do, I love it now more than I ever have, and so the idea of bringing back a program that was 32 years rich full of history, it's just a matter of timing and hoping we have the opportunity to bring it back for all the local kids."

Watkins said he has talked with NIC athletic director Al Williams about getting the track ball rolling, so to speak, next fall.

"The time to bring it back really hasn't happened until with the idea of switching to the NWAC," Watkins said. "Right now our outdoor sports are there (like softball), the possibility of our indoor sports being there in the next couple of years, so we'll wait and see. The idea of bringing it back and hoping we have an opportunity to bring it back and if I can be involved, that'd be great. Al's talking about (possibly) bringing baseball back and, then to make sure that we're Title IX compliant, women's cross country. I think our goal is to bring back the programs back that were lost. I had a conversation with the NIC President (Joe Dunlap) last spring. His goal is to make our athletic program as robust as the Community Colleges of Spokane and have baseball, track and field and even cross country, so we can bring revenue into the college."

Watkins' success was high after taking over for Mike Bundy, who coached NIC from 1972 to 1998, and is now in the NIC Athletics Hall of Fame.

In 2001, at the NJCAA cross country championships, Watkins' Cardinal men finished fourth, one of five top-seven finishes at nationals. The fourth-place finish in '01 tied the team record for the highest finish in history.

In the NJCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships and NJCAA Indoor national meets, Watkins' teams combined for eight top-seven finishes. His men's teams finished fourth in indoor and seventh in outdoor, and his women's teams were third in the indoor meet and sixth in the outdoor meet, all in 2001.

During that time span, Christine Amertil of the Bahamas, who later became an Olympic finalist in 2004 and finished seventh in the 400-meter run and was a three-time Olympian, competed for Watkins. She was second in the 400 at the NCAA national track championships while competing for Southeast Louisiana.

Crystal Smith-Johnson, another NIC Hall of Famer, was a two-time national champion in track and field and held the NJCAA national record in the weight throw.

"An instrumental part of our teams were the coaching of (throws coach) Bud Rasmussen and (volunteer throws coach) Bart Templeton," Watkins said. "Both are geniuses in their field. We didn't have a complete coaching staff. Most teams had around six or seven coaches, we had three. It had so much to do with those coaches. We focused on having a strong throws core, a strong distance core and a strong hurdling core. We just didn't have the facilities (NIC does not have a track), so we focused on our strengths."

Charlie Miller, who until July served as the executive director of the North Idaho Centennial Trail Foundation, ran for Watkins at Lake City until 1999 and from 1999-2001 at NIC. He competed in the distance medley race at the NJCAA indoor championships in Lansing, Mich., in 2000. The day before the meet, Miller was struck by a pickup while he was running across the street, but came back and competed the next day.

"Lewis is always an amazing person who can find potential and bring out the best in anybody," Miller said. "He'll get people who are overlooked and develop them into a successful athlete, identify what they're the best at."

IN 2005, Watkins took advantage of an opportunity to coach at Coeur d'Alene Charter Academy, where he coached track and field until 2012 and cross country until this past fall. He said he resigned to spend more time with his sons, Connor Watkins, a 15-year-old sophomore football player and track and field athlete at Lake City, and Canyon Watkins, 13, who attends Woodland Middle School.

"(In 2005), one of our former (NIC) student-athletes, (then-Coeur d'Alene Charter track coach) Chris Sears asked me, 'Would you like to help me out in starting programs at the Charter Academy? I said, 'Sure, I'll come and help and try to get the kids excited. What he admitted later was it wasn't necessarily for the kids as it was for me. He saw me without this sense of purpose and he wanted to get me back into coaching, even if it was volunteering."

Watkins' 2005 girls cross country team was 10th at the state 3A meet. His 2008 boys and girls track and field teams won state 1A championships, the 2009 girls track and field team finished second in 2A and the boys team was second in 2010.

In cross country, last year's boys team was the runner-up in the state 3A meet, plus the Panthers were third in both 2007 and 2011. The girls team was third in 2007.

"So that started my tenure at Charter, because it was a challenge to take a school that's academically oriented and introduce these programs and to make them successful. Chris and I worked well together."

GROWING UP, the Michigan-born Watkins moved from across the country, from Florida to Kodiak, Alaska, after his father, Dave Watkins, served in the U.S. Marines and later the U.S. Coast Guard. He ran track and field and cross country at Kodiak, a 45-minute plane ride from Anchorage, then ran at NIC. He transferred to Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, Ore. - now Southern Oregon University - and played volleyball and went into mountain biking.

So keep an eye out on Watkins and his efforts to try and bring track and field and cross country back to NIC, in one form or another.

Bruce Bourquin is a sports writer at The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2013, via Twitter @bourq25 or via e-mail at [email protected]