Update: In Eric Heins's final meet as head coach, the Northern Arizona University men won the 2016 NCAA Cross Country championships on November 19, in Terre Haute, Indiana. It is the university’s first national title in any sport.
Last April, Eric Heins told his boss he had great news to share. Lisa Campos, vice president of intercollegiate athletics at Northern Arizona University, had a feeling she knew what it was. Maybe, she thought, the Heins family was going to be welcoming another baby soon?
“I had no idea it would have anything to do with leaving NAU,” Campos said. “It was so unexpected. Of course a million emotions ran through me.”
Heins, 39, was in Campos’s office to tell her that his wife, Kaci Heins, an acclaimed middle school science teacher in Flagstaff, Arizona, had been offered the job of her dreams. The catch? The position as education supervisor at the Space Center Houston was located in Texas, and they had decided it was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
“On one hand I was just so happy he had come to that conclusion that it was the right thing to do for his family, to support Kaci in that way,” Campos said. “But I was also sad and disappointed that we were going to be losing not just a great coach and mentor, but a great family.”
While Kaci and their eight-year-old son, Chase, have already moved to Houston, Heins remains in Flagstaff until the end of November to see his teams through one last season, which very well could conclude with a national title for the men. He visits his family every 12 days when the team is not traveling to meets and arrives back on campus in time for Monday practices.
“The toughest part is that I usually take my son to the bus stop and go directly to the airport after that. He knows I’m leaving so he’s kind of sad, but he’s handled it really well,” Heins said.
It’s not often that a coach who is not yet 40 decides to step away from the profession, especially when his men’s team is currently ranked No. 1 in the country. Now in his 10th season as head coach, Heins has collected 26 Big Sky conference titles between men’s and women’s cross country and track and field, and the men have landed on the podium five times at the NCAA cross country championships—fourth in 2007, 2009, 2012, and 2014 and second in 2013. Four of his athletes—Lopez Lomong, Diego Estrada, David McNeill, and Jordan Chipangama—have gone on to compete at the Olympics.
But for all the accolades and success Heins has seen in the NCAA, Kaci has also skyrocketed, so to speak, in her career in education. During her time teaching sixth grade science at Northland Preparatory Academy, she was named STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) Teacher of the Year, Arizona Middle School Science Teacher of the Year, and received the 2016 PBS Digital Innovator award, among other grants and recognition. As she attended more professional development conferences geared toward space exploration, she found a great passion for it.
“She had supported me in the crazy coaching world for long enough,” Heins said, “so it was my turn, so she could follow something that she had fallen in love with.”
While Kaci said that the position is living up to her expectations, she is emotional and a little teary while talking about the “heart-to-heart conversations” they had last winter, when the prospect of relocating became more of a possibility.
“He is so good at his job and those kids really look up to him. He does have an impact on their lives,” she said. “You know, I supported him all these years and I love him and I’m so proud of him. For him to turn around and say that he’s going to support me really means a lot, because I really love my job…it’s everything I’ve ever wanted.”
It’s no secret that an NCAA Division I coaching career can put a strain on family life. The travel schedule is intense, the recruiting responsibilities are time consuming, the 24/7 access that student athletes have to their coaches via texting and email can be excessive. Campos, who has a two-year-old son, said she prefers to describe collegiate athletics as a lifestyle rather than a career choice.
“It’s hard because coaches just want to be there for their athletes,” Campos said. “I don’t think it’s about balance, but prioritization.”
Although it has always been challenging, Heins said he found a few strategies in the past 10 years that often helped ease the tug between family and the team. He picked a day or two to stay late at the office to make recruiting calls, ensuring that all the other evenings he’d be home right after practice ended. If he had to prepare for an upcoming home meet, he’d try to set up equipment between practices so he didn’t have to do it later at night.
Barring emergency, Heins often asked athletes to stop texting after 5:30 p.m.
“I think that’s something that can wear on coaches,” he said. “You’ve got maybe 90 athletes who always need you. You need to set boundaries there.”
For as helpful as Heins’s strategies were, the travel during the height of each season meant missing Cub Scouts, camping trips, and soccer games often. Taking a spontaneous weekend road trip with the family was rarely an option.
“From the outside perspective looking in, people think, ‘Man, he’s crazy for leaving that job, that position in Flagstaff.’ But in reality, every track season usually around Mt. Sac weekend when I was gone for four or five days, it was not a healthy relationship,” he said. “My wife and I would get in arguments over the phone and I’d say, ‘OK, this is my last year coaching, I’m done. I’m done. So done.’”
On Friday the NAU cross country teams will be in Moscow, Idaho, for the Big Sky championships, where both teams will compete for conference titles.
And the men are aspiring to give their coach a nice parting gift on November 19, in the form of the national championship in Terre Haute, Indiana. They recently won the Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational, which has been thought of in previous seasons as a good test and preview of who will contend at the big dance. Heins tempers the excitement—he has been around long enough to know that ending at the top of the podium is never a guarantee.
“Let’s be honest, to win a national title a lot of things have to go your way,” he said. “It helps to keep the expectations and pressure down, but at the same time we’re not hiding from it either.”
There’s a glimmer in his eye, though, as he recalls a practice earlier in the week. Heins watched eight of his athletes run eight miles together around Flagstaff’s Buffalo Park, a mostly flat two-mile gravel loop trail outside of town at 7,000 feet of altitude. They kept a 5:22 pace and nobody got dropped.
“They’re such a unit right now because nobody wants to be the weak link. They’re all doing it for each other,” he said. “They’re not stressed out about winning, they just want to do the best they can—and they’re doing that.”
NAU hired Michael Smith to be the new director of track and field and cross country. He started in August and has been shadowing Heins through this season. Smith left his job at Georgetown University as director of track and field and cross country to take the position.
Heins said he’s leaving the program in trustworthy hands. His wishes? That the new director can bring along the women’s team to the level of the men’s, that the coaching staff can expand to six full-time positions, including a head women’s coach, and maybe one day the university will build a separate basketball arena to allow increased access to the indoor track.
In the meantime, Heins isn’t sure where his career will go in Houston. He’s considering going back to school to get an MBA. Or maybe he could be an NAU recruiting officer in Texas? Perhaps there is an opening to work at the Houston Marathon?
Kaci is confident he will find a path that feeds his ambition, though she jokingly said she hopes not too much.
“He’s got a passion for running and athletics so I hope something along those lines is able to come up or he can be engaged in. That’s the hard part—being engaged,” she said, laughing. “I know what engaged looks like.”
Soon, it may look like an NCAA title, though Heins said he doesn’t need the fairy tale ending to move on.
“We’ve had a lot success here and we’ve had a lot of fun doing it,” Heins said. “I’m going to be perfectly content no matter what happens.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how many times the NAU men’s cross country team has finished in the top four at the national championships under Heins’s leadership. The team has earned podium honors five times since 2007.
