Mr. Steve Fitzner

The Cross-Country page of the 1989 Lamar Track Guide.

‘My senior year in high school I was running track cross-country and a couple of weeks after my last track-meet I got a letter listing a few colleges if I wanted to consider them and Lamar was one of them. At some point the assistant track coach called me at my house to see if I would like a partial scholarship for cross country. I didn’t even think. I said, yes sir. That’s how I got started. I wanted run track in college and I jumped at the opportunity.’

‘I had never been on a championship team before. So, that was very exciting. I made some great friends and we are friends to this day. The four guys from my cross-country team are still some of my best friends. The next semester a student from Sweden came in and we had friends from all over the world. It was very exciting.

At some point I became more involved with my studies because track doesn’t last forever. I changed my major to psychology because that was one of my most interesting classes and I started making As and Bs and even straight As. At my senior year, the first I had an injury. So, I wasn’t going to run track in the spring. I went to the coach and he was very understanding. When it was time for grad school, I got accepted to quite a few of them. The best program was Lamar’s and so I stayed here for grad school. A lot of hard work and a lot of fun.

‘Every now and then I come back to Lamar to talk to the students. I deal with autism and ADD. We currently have a social work major as an intern who is working with me on a case. She is going to do a case study.’

‘The best time I had was running cross country. All my teammates lived in the dorms, but I lived at home. So, we had a tradition, right before we went for a championship, my mom, who is from Germany liked seeing all the guys from all over the world as it reminded her of Europe, so she  invited all to our house for dinner. The students felt like they had a chance to be home. It was not just the cross-country team, but the entire track team at one point. There were about 30 students in our house. She spent two days cooking. There were a couple of guys from Germany. So, she liked talking to them. We had students from Germany, Ireland, Sweden, and a lot of students from the U.S. I am still in touch with them, the magic of Facebook. We went to Crazy Jose’s to hang out. Now I see the present cross-country team hang out at Starbucks right before a game. The tradition goes on.’