Letter from the heart helps UCLA track athletes heal

In a week filled with endless pain and discomfort, it was the fear in his son’s voice that hurt most.

“Daddy, I’m not going. I’m scared. I’m black and I’m going to get killed.”

Right before Avery Anderson’s eyes, his 9-year-old son’s bubble had burst. The thought of attending a peaceful protest had become a life-threatening concept.

“That hit home,” Anderson said.

He and his wife, Bridget, consoled their son. If they ever went to a protest, they promised he’d be safe.

Whether it was his upbringing or experience of the LA Riots as a freshman student-athlete at UCLA or even now, being a father and a coach, during the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Anderson has lived this story over and over again.

It doesn’t get easier with time or repetition.

But it’s through his passion for helping young adults that Anderson, UCLA’s current Director of Track and Field and Cross Country, is able to pull back the band-aid covering years of built-up frustration, anger and pain, each and every time.

It’s why he allowed a private letter to his team to be made public. The goal is for his words to find the ears that need to hear them.

READ: Avery Anderson’s letter to the UCLA track team

These acts of selfless love not only make Anderson adored by his athletes and staff, but have helped him to rejuvenate a track program in a short period of time.

“As a person who knows I don’t have all the answers, I do know that I can at least have effort,” Anderson said. “My way forward is to just try to lend whatever I can while dealing with this myself. I speak up because I don’t want those that are alone to feel like they don’t have a light somewhere positive when there can be. I feel like maybe I can say something that can be that light.”

A life shaped by history

Anderson grew up hearing stories about his family’s history and their roots in America’s history of racial injustice.

His grandpa, born in 1907 in Louisiana, shared stories about the inhumane treatment of his dad, Anderson’s great-grandfather, who was born into slavery in 1865. He’d say how life was different back then and how far equality had come and yet how much farther it had to grow.

“I got what was going on around me because my understanding came from a lot deeper in the history of the country,” Anderson said. “A lot of people can read that now and it’s just history to them. It’s our reality.”

Born in Lynwood, but raised in Corona, Anderson was aware of the reason people treated him and his family differently. He understood why his parents repeatedly moved the family across South Central LA in search of safer neighborhoods and why he and his siblings played in the backyard instead of the front yard.

When the family permanently moved to Riverside, Anderson found comfort when his high school’s Black Student Union meetings filled the biggest room on campus. Back in Corona, he was one of five black kids in his elementary school.

In the spring of 1991, Anderson, 18, was deep into his senior season of track and field after being named the nation’s No. 1 high school high jumper.

On March 3, Rodney King was pulled over by police for speeding on a freeway in the San Fernando Valley. Four police officers kicked and struck King 56 times with their batons. The incident was caught on video by a bystander and broadcast all over the country.

Anderson was glued to the TV watching the news. His thoughts weren’t of shock or surprise, but of frustration and slight relief. For the first time police brutality had been caught on camera.

“That was what I’d seen and heard all my life growing up,” he said. “It happened and it was already happening and continued to happen. I was glad that there was a video like that for more people to see because, while I’d never want that to happen to Rodney King, it happened to him and if it’s going to happen when it did, it should be shown to the world instead of hidden as it had been so many times.”

Just a year prior, Anderson and his cousin had been pulled over because of racial profiling.

The two young men were forced to kneel down on the slope of a freeway’s off-ramp with their hands behind their heads and their backs toward incoming traffic. The cops eventually let them go, saying they no longer ‘fit the description’ of a green Buick that had robbed a store in Torrance just minutes before.

Anderson and his cousin were driving a blue Chevrolet in Compton.

Moments like this showed Anderson that not every cop was there to protect him. It was a reality he hadn’t quite gotten used to as both his dad and uncle were local police.

His dad had raised him and taught him right from wrong. His uncle, Dan, came to every one of Anderson’s sporting events. Even that basketball game in sixth grade when Anderson scored the one point of his team’s 49-1 loss.

On April 29, 1992, the four officers involved with beating Rodney King were acquitted. The city of LA erupted into six straight days of violent and destructive riots. Stores were looted, destroyed and burned. People were dragged out of cars and beaten.

“The powder keg that exploded then, just like now, was about being fed up,” Anderson said. “The officers all get off, like, how much more of a slap in the face? We didn’t always have the opportunity to see it and view it but when we did, see it and view it, they still got off.”

As a dual-sport freshman student-athlete at UCLA during the time, Anderson remembers having a meeting with the football team to talk about the riots as students led protests on campus.

He worked with a church nearby his grandmother’s house in South LA from spring through summer to help rebuild the broken community.

Learning to lead

Following his graduation from UCLA, Anderson played in the NFL for the Indianapolis Colts during the 1996-1997 season. A severe back injury during practice ended his professional career before it started. During his recovery, he realized his true passion for helping others.

“My perspective completely changed from one day I’m healthy, I’m strong, I’m an invincible football player to I can’t walk. I needed help doing everything,” he said. “You get injured like that and the things that are important come straight to the forefront of your mind.”

He volunteered at Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and The Boys & Girls Clubs of America in both Indianapolis and Los Angeles.

Anderson’s first experience with coaching came when he trained as a professional decathlete by CSUN’s Jeff McAuley in 1999. He balanced long days of event training with being a volunteer coach for CSUN’s track and field program.

Following his athletic career, he wasn’t sure if he loved coaching enough to do it full time, but saw it as a way to help young people. Despite some initial hesitation, he accepted an offer to take over the track and field program at CSUN from former long-time head coach, Don Strametz.

Through 2011-2017, Anderson led CSUN to 13 Big West Conference Championships and coached two individual NCAA Champions and 21 NCAA All-Americans.

When the same position opened at UCLA following the 2017 season, Anderson had to go for it.

“I knew that for as many job offers I got from other schools along the way, both as an assistant and a head coach, I would only leave for UCLA,” he said.

A letter from the heart

On May 26, Anderson saw the alert on social media. A black man killed by the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis. He was in the middle of helping homeschool his kids and told himself he’d watch the video later.

Before bed he pulled up the video on his computer. He wanted to see it raw. No news channel narration or commentary.

“I almost already couldn’t breathe because I’m choking back all this anger and frustration and trying to not let it be hate and then I gotta watch a man die on TV and it’s happened so many times, over and over and over again,” Anderson said.

Just like that he was back to being 18 watching the video of Rodney King on his family’s TV in Riverside. Pain. Anger. Frustration. It all spewed into a knot, preventing him from sleep.

“It’s all a part of the same bag of crap,” Anderson said. “I have a bag of crap that keeps getting more and more full. You think it’s full and it’s bursting at the seams and you just keep putting more crap in it. … The similarities are just feelings of despair and getting justice. It’s like, ‘Man, here we go again.’”

As the video of George Floyd went viral, protests all across America began to take place demanding change.

Just like with his son, Anderson knew this was the first time some of his athletes were experiencing racial injustice on such a large scale. He had individual conversations with some, but knew he wanted to reach his whole team. Other athletic programs and coaches began to put out short statements on social media, but he knew he needed to say more.

“If I wrote a statement or had someone else write a statement on behalf of our program, that would have been so much less than what I can do,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to say, ‘Yeah, I”m doing all I can do.’ because it wouldn’t have been all I could do.”

He decided to write a private letter to his team.

“As rough as this past week was, like other rough patches in life I’ve found it easier to unshackle myself from hate and walk forward with love,” Anderson wrote. “As much as the death of George Floyd still stings, I’m going to convert that anguish and positively go out and make the change happen that I want to see.”

When UCLA Track and Field Director of Operations, Olympia Jewett first read the letter, she cried: “I felt the words as he was writing them.”

For sophomore sprinter Kenroy Higgins II, he found comfort in Anderson’s vulnerability.

“When I read Avery’s message, I was like, ‘This is a man who is actually hurt by the situation and was trying to overcome the situation.’” he said. “He’s not just following a trend, and that’s one thing that makes me appreciate Coach Avery more.”

Junior sprinter Shae Anderson, not related to Avery, was moved by the way her coach called for positivity during such unrest.

“Him saying that he wants to not show hatred, but show more love to make the changes that he wants, I think that’s a great message for everybody to hear because that’s our best answer for how we would make a change” she said. “The fact that he made that just for our team, it wasn’t really for anybody else but just for our team, I really respected that.”

When Anderson was asked if he would be comfortable making the letter public, he hesitated. He intended what he said to be just between him and his team. Not every huddle was for sharing.

Bridget, a UCLA track and field volunteer coach, convinced her husband to see how making the letter public could help more people. With his fear of negative feedback at bay and his motivation to help at the forefront, Avery agreed to publicize the letter.

He received immediate positive reactions from his team, his UCLA staff, UCLA athletes from different sports and coaches from different programs and universities.

“When he dropped that message, it reaped language from an African American male,” Higgins said. “It gave me a good feeling because Avery is not a coach who loves the spotlight, … I think it was good for our program especially with him being the only African American [head] coach, I feel like with us also just getting an African American AD, I felt like it was very important for him to make that statement public.”

No one was surprised by the meaning and heart Anderson poured into his letter. It’s this devotion which has allowed Anderson to excel as a coach and most recently turn around the UCLA track and field team.

A program turnaround

This season, six school records were broken while three individuals and two relay teams qualified for the NCAA Indoor Championships. The women’s team was ranked No. 15 nationally, the program’s highest ranking since 2015, heading into NCAAs.

In 2019, he was named Pac-12 Coach of the Year as the Bruin men finished second at the Pac-12 Championships for their highest finish since 2005. And in 2018, his first year with the program, Jessie Maduka won the triple jump at the Pac-12 Championships for the women’s team’s first victory in the event since 2004.

But it’s not the records, times or titles which makes him successful, it’s the way he leads his team with an endless sense of compassion.

If it wasn’t for Anderson allowing Higgins to walk onto the track team as a freshman and give him a scholarship the following summer, Higgins wouldn’t have stayed at UCLA.

“Avery was the first person that I’ve ever seen actually take a gamble on me when other people didn’t believe in me,” Higgins said. “When I had low confidence, he brought that confidence back up.”

And during Jewett’s junior year at CSUN, where she competed as a hepthathlete for Anderson from 2010-2015, Anderson convinced her not to drop out of school after her older brother passed away. Avery helped her start therapy, while Bridget drove her to appointments.

“That man was like a father to me,” she said. “You don’t find coaches like that anywhere. The way that he impacts every single athlete on his team, I don’t know how he has the time or how he manages it, but he did it to me and does it for others.”