Then & Now: Dick Olsen

Dick Olsen was a high school junior, maybe, “back in the black-and-white television days,” when he bowed his head, deep in thought.

Raising his head was the first step in becoming one of the best hurdlers in Spokane history.

It’s an exercise that is still part of Olsen’s life today, although in a somewhat different vein.

The former Rogers star, Class of ‘67, is 59 and has been a minister at Upland Bible Church in Las Vegas for 31 years.

“It is rare (to serve one parish so long). I guess it’s because I have more than five sermons,” Olsen joked. “A lot of times ministers are told to move on, congregations get tired of them. We have a wonderful group of people who have put up with me and my stories, over and over. A lot of them have track illustrations.”

Before he got the call to serve, Olsen was best known for his accomplishments on the track and football field.

The defining moment came when the Rogers dean of students called the straight-arrow Olsen down to his office.

“If you got called to see the dean, you were in trouble,” Olsen said. “I’d never been in trouble. But (track coach) Tracy Walters was the boys dean. He told me he was asked to take some kids to Seattle for an indoor meet. He said, ‘I can bring a hurdler. I’ll take you but I won’t take you unless you think you can win this.’

“I think I was a junior. I put my head down and did some serious soul searching. It probably took me 5 minutes. I said, ‘Yes sir, I think I can win it.’ He said, ‘OK, we start training today.’ I won it and set a record.”

Walters was just one of several mentors Olsen recalls fondly.

He fell in love with track in junior high because of Don Hughes, the coach at Shaw Junior High.

The crowning moment for Olsen was the state meet his senior year, when he won the 120-yard high hurdles, the 180-yard low hurdles (on a curve) and, for good measure, the long jump with a leap of 23 feet, 9 ¼ inches – which would be the state leader today.

Through conversions used to modernize old records, Olsen still has the Greater Spokane League record for a league meet (14.1 seconds) and Rogers record (13.9) for the 110-meter hurdles. The only faster hurdler from Spokane was Central Valley’s Dan Vickery, who ran 13.8 in 1979, the fastest hand-time in state history.

Olsen parlayed his marks into the first, he thought, full-ride track scholarship from Jack Mooberry at Washington State, picking track over football, including an offer from Washington.

“I didn’t want to go to UW,” he said. “I couldn’t be Husky. You had to be Cougar growing up in Spokane.”

Olsen, a Cougars captain in 1971, is still on the top 10 list for the indoor 60-meter hurdles (7.86 seconds) and outdoor 400 hurdles (50.6).

While in Pullman, he majored in English and education and then went to graduate school at the Dallas Theological Seminary, majoring in Hebrew and minoring in Greek.

“I was going to teach the Bible,” he said. “The original is in Hebrew and Aramaic; the new testaments are in Greek. When I teach, I study from the Greek and Hebrew then explain what people have in their English translation.”

Olsen added Mooberry and former Spokesman-Review sportswriter and track aficionado Bob Payne to his list of mentors.

And then there was his dad, Bill, a construction worker who wanted his son to play baseball.

“He didn’t come to all of my sports early, but he said if I was still doing it in high school he’d never miss,” Olsen said. “He was one of the hardest workers I ever knew but to do that he had to work 10-hour days.”

And he was always there.

“I wasn’t ready to run the race until I saw my dad,” Olsen said, fondly remembering the man with the silver hard hat, pipe in his mouth and stopwatch in his hand. “Sometimes he wouldn’t get there until I was behind blocks, but I wasn’t ready to run until he was there.”

Olsen seemed to have a real fear of failure, which he said came from his father but was not a negative memory in any way.

“He just said if you’re going to do something, do it in such a way when you look back you have no regrets, you left everything out there, you couldn’t have done any more,” Olsen said.

Generally the Olsens – wife Deb, sons Derek and David – visited Spokane about once a year, but his family gave him more opportunities to come back. Deb began coaching the girls track team at Indian Springs while the boys attended the small school on the outskirts of Las Vegas. It didn’t take long to lure the ex-hurdler into action and the Olsens would bring their best athletes to the WSU summer camp.

The boys were pretty good in track but made their mark in football. Both played at Nevada-Las Vegas, Derek from 2000-03, David, originally a walk-on, from 2002-05.

Deb Olsen has quit coaching, Dick is shepherding one last Indian Springs hurdler. Then he’ll retire from coaching, but not working.

“I expect I’ll be here until the Lord calls me home,” he said. “As long as they want the Bible taught, God put me here to teach it.”