On a fall afternoon at his high school in Birmingham, Ala., 15-year-old Golden Coachman walked up to the starting line with the school’s best track star. As the whistle blew to start the race, Coachman gained a sizeable advantage and blazed across the track to finish as the winner.
Not bad for a sophomore who only tried out for the track team at the urging of his older sister.
“She just told me I needed to go out there and try,” Coachman said. “She was a good runner, and she knew that I could be too.”
That race instantly secured Coachman a spot on the track team and was a sign of things to come.
He spent his remaining high school years on the track team and also joined the soccer team, which helped to further his conditioning.
Following high school, Coachman accepted an offer from Wallace State Community College in Hanceville, Ala., to run on their track team for the first two years of his college career.
Between those two years of college at Wallace State, Coachman made a decision that affected his progress in track meets. In fact, his decision made track seem insignificant. He chose to enlist in the military.
“I signed up for the military in October 2003,” Coachman said. “I was deployed to Iraq in the spring of 2004.”
While in Iraq, Coachman mainly served as an armored truck driver.
His primary mission was to transport supplies such as food and ammunition to different stations in Iraq, which proved to be a dangerous job.
“I was like a moving target to them when I was driving that truck,” Coachman said. “They planted IEDs (improvised explosive devices) at different spots on the road to try to stop us.”
Though there was a constant threat while he was in Iraq, Coachman stayed calm and even improved in some areas of his life while overseas.
“One day I was sitting on the back of a trailer and decided that I was going to make a list of goals,” Coachman said.
The goals ranged from doing better in events on the track to trying to stay in touch with his infant daughter, and they helped to keep him in line while he was overseas, and he accomplished almost all of the goals he wrote down on that piece of paper.
Coachman remained in Iraq for one year. Upon his arrival to the United States, Mississippi State track and field coach Steve Dudley contacted him almost immediately.
“Coach Dudley was so enthusiastic about recruiting me the whole time,” Coachman said. “No other school was as enthusiastic as Mississippi State.”
Coachman arrived at MSU last fall and began running track during that season. His specialty quickly became the 800-meter race. He broke the MSU record in that event on two separate occasions.
The first time he broke it was at the Southeastern Conference Championships with a time of 1:47.40, which bested the previous mark by 22-hundredths of a second.
That record-breaking run allowed him his next opportunity to break his own record. He did just that at the USA Track and Field Championships in Indianapolis, Ind. There, he set his new record of 1:46:79.
As a result of his spectacular showing in Indianapolis, he was offered a spot on the national team as they traveled to El Salvador last July.
“It felt great to get the opportunity to represent the U.S. in El Salvador,” Coachman said.
While in El Salvador, he competed in the 800-meter race against six representatives from other countries including Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. He won the event and led the United States team to victory.
After winning the 800-meter race in El Salvador, Coachman actually overachieved the goals that he set while stationed in Iraq.
That hasn’t stopped his desire to get better. He said he plans to make another list of goals soon.
“In my next set of goals, I want to get an endorsement from Adidas,” he said. “That is one of the only goals that I didn’t do last time.