They were teammates who led Ellsworth High School to its first state indoor track and field championship, and now Mike Viani and Alan Norris are together again.
Viani and Norris, who guided the Eagles to the 1985 Class B state championship, are leading today’s generation of high school track athletes in coaching the teams at Central High School in Corinth.
While the outdoor program has been around since 1997, the Red Devils came onto the Eastern Maine Indoor Track League’s scene for the 2007-08 season, and have made quite a splash.
That has also helped the outdoor program, as Viani and Norris are fielding 38 athletes this season.
Erin Hartley, a 2001 Central grad who is Norris’ niece, recruited her uncle to help out Viani, who was coaching solo at the time.
“As the team grew it became a little harder for me to be in [multiple] places at one time,” Viani said. “I had absolutely no idea [of getting another coach] and of course I was surprised and glad.”
Norris came on board in the spring of 2002.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” said Norris, who served in the Army for 13 years and did a tour of duty during Desert Storm.
Ironically, one of Norris’ other nieces is Stephanie Dickey, a former thrower at Brewer High who also participated in USA Track and Field events when she was younger.
Viani was a standout sprinter for Ellsworth and coaches the Devils’ sprinters and distance runners while Norris, a former regional champion in the discus, takes the throwers.
They are able to utilize what they learned in high school and pass down that knowledge to what Norris says is an extremely coachable group of kids.
“I’ve been very fortunate of that, [we’ve had a] great group of kids through the years,” he said. “They’re very quick in picking things up.”
Norris works with two of Eastern Maine’s top throwers in Joe Brown, the defending Penobscot Valley Conference Class C champion in the shot put, and Rodney Bubar, the reigning PVC champ in the discus.
In addition to those two, the Devils also field one of Eastern Maine’s top sprinters and long jumpers in Tyler Duncan, whom Viani can get fairly competitive with in practice.
“I run against Tyler to try to beat me and he runs even harder to have me not beat him. Sometimes I have to cheat to beat him,” said Viani.
With the high school program taking off, Viani and Norris are starting a local youth program through USATF for kids 14 and under, joining such programs in Brewer, Orono, Old Town and Hampden.
Like a lot of the state’s small-school programs, Central does not have a track to practice on, but Norris found some open fields behind the school which now have discus and shot put circles and a javelin area, away from the baseball and softball fields.
“It’s in the back, away from them, which we kind of like, less hazard that way of someone getting hurt,” said Norris.
But Norris and Viani didn’t have a track to train on either when they were at Ellsworth, as that school’s track wasn’t ready for use until the 1986 season, the year after the two coaches graduated.
