At Haverford, Tom Donnelly has built a legendary coaching career

For years, Tom Donnelly has had this fantasy. He presents it as a novel he'd like to write: The Olympics are in Philadelphia, the track and field competition at Franklin Field. The top 1,500-meter runner in the world, a Philly kid, has a coach, but he's never met the guy. This anonymous mentor delivers instructions through a series of cryptic messages.

"I guess now you'd go through e-mail," Donnelly said.

The Philly kid wins a gold medal.

"He comes back on the [Market Street] El," Donnelly said, and here Donnelly assumed the role of the shadowy coach. "I see him on the El. I know who he is. He doesn't know who I am. Like around 56th Street, something like that, I just go by. I sort of whisper something like, 'You should have started kicking with 200 to go.' I walk out. The guy looks at me. That's the end of the thing. I go walking out with the crowd."

The head track and field and cross-country coach at Haverford College conjured up this tale more than a decade ago, but it remains in his head. Donnelly said the fantasy doesn't match up to the way he actually coaches. His whole approach is to be present and observant, to be available. But the point of the tale seems obvious: The perfect coaching job would be invisible even to the participant. Removing a coach's ego can only help the athlete.

In reality, Donnelly did once coach the best 1,500-meter runner in the world. He refused to take a dime for his years mentoring Marcus O'Sullivan, once ranked No. 1 in the world, now head track coach at Villanova. The same for Donnelly's close work with another miler legend, Sydney Maree. That was a quarter century ago. At that time, and ever since, for 31/2 decades now, Donnelly has been Haverford's coach, turning an academic oasis into a distance runner's enclave, home to more than 120 all-Americans and 25 individual national champions.

All this culminated last fall when the Goats, as Haverford runners have long called themselves, won a Division III national cross-country championship, the school's first, led by the national individual champion and five all-Americans.

How much credit does Donnelly claim for such achievements?

"As a coach, you influence them by 1 percent - maybe," Donnelly said.