Dayton running pioneer, founder of Kettering Striders, dies at 78

A lifetime in running started in high school when he competed for Tippecanoe and then Lemon Monroe and continued at Miami University. Then in 1966, when he was a physical education teacher at Rolling Fields Elementary School in Kettering, he founded the Striders, which as his obituary explained provided “opportunities for girls and women to enjoy track and field at a time when school teams did not exist.”

The Ohio High School Athletic Association did not sponsor a state track championship for girls until 1975, while there wasn’t a state cross country meet for girls until 1978. Price helped lay the foundation for those championships. His work even preceded the running boom in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.

“He was a pioneer,” said Bill Schnier, a friend of Price who coached track and field for 33 years at the University of Cincinnati. “Now, keep in mind, no one’s a pioneer in running because when did it start? When the first caveman ran from the first saber-toothed tiger. No one’s going to get credit for anything, and they shouldn’t. But what he did is he gave children an opportunity to train, and he was so charismatic that he got hundreds of kids — I’d say at one time there were probably 300 kids on the Kettering Striders.”

One of the first mention of the Striders in a local newspaper came in the Dayton Journal Herald in 1969. It referenced six girls running in cut-off Levis and sloppy-looking sneakers two years earlier at a meet in Cleveland.

By 1969, the club had gone big league with 50 members competing in blue uniforms with red trimming. They even spent $5,800 that year to send 27 runners to Inglewood, Calif., to compete in the AAU national cross country championships. Price wrote about that experience in a history of the Striders he wrote for the Dayton Distance Running Hall of Fame’s website.

“For the first time, a race for girls 9 and under was offered, and our little ones won the National Championship team title for their age group,” Price wrote. “As I look back, Iʼm not sure the kids knew what they had done because all they could think about was going to Disneyland after their race.”

The club kept expanding, adding a boys program and raising money through apple sales, car washes, paper drives, and donations.

“The club had become a family affair and by the late 1970ʼs there were 150 families with at least one family member who competed for the club,” Price wrote. “A men’s program was added, plus a race-walking team. We now felt our club was complete as we offered something for everyone. Other than the Lincoln Track Club in Nebraska, we probably were the largest track club in the country. There were weekends when we had various teams competing in four different states.”

Price ran the club until the early 1980s by which point his coaching career had taken off. He coached Dayton Flyers cross country from 1966 to 1983. He coached the Kingdom of Bahrain’s men’s national cross country team in 1983 and 1984. In 1989, he was hired as the head women’s track and cross country coach at Bowling Green. He was named Mid-American Conference Coach of the Year in 1995.

Then from 2005-15, Price coached at the University of Findlay. Price was already fighting throat cancer when he was hired at Findlay and was fed through a tube in his stomach for the last 11 years of his life, his brother Greg said.

Radiation treatment also damaged Steve’s vocal cords, Greg said, preventing him from yelling. Throughout his years at Findlay, he gravitated to coaching the events where he could be closer to the athletes.

“The one thing a track coach needs is to be able to scream at a kid that’s on the backstretch,” Greg said.

Schnier praised the resiliency of Price, who was inducted into the Ohio Association of Track and Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame in 2015, and his ability to continue coaching for years after being first diagnosed with cancer.

“I think most people would have thought that it was probably only a matter of time, that he would die, and this was 25-30 years ago, but it never happened,” Schnier said. “The attitude he took towards running at Miami and as a coach at different places was the same attitude he took towards his illness. He had a dickens of a time but maintained an incredibly positive attitude. He couldn’t help the physical things, but he was not going to allow this to disable him emotionally.”

Price is survived by: his wife of 32 years, Christine (Jacomet) Price; his daughters, Chelsi (Trevor) Stover, Lindsey (Bubba) Stover, and Britney (Brad) Ratermann; 11 grandchildren, Cade, Gabby, Halle, Reece, Garrett, Olivia, Tatum, Clint, Addie, Grant, and Hank; siblings Linda LaFever, Greg (Linda) Price, Rachel (Ludwig) Kreitz, Faith (Gregg) Gugenheim, and Lisa (David) O’Dowd.

A Memorial Mass will be held at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at St. Mary Catholic Church in Piqua. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to Ohio’s Hospice of Miami County, Inc., P.O. Box 502, Troy OH 45373, or to the Steve Price Scholarship for track and cross country runners in care of Sara Schlegel, 805 Gallant Fox Lane, Cranberry Twp., PA 16066.