“At the end of the day,” David Halliday says, “I’m an educator, and my vehicle that I’m able to use educating is through coaching and sport. So I’ve just been fortunate and blessed that that is the case. When it comes down to it, all I’ve ever wanted to do is help people know how great they are and be better people. And I’m able to use sport to do that.”
He loves running, loves coaching track and field, as he has for two decades at Flagler Palm Coast High School, loves the events, loves to see his student-athletes win, like Colby Cronk, the Flagler Palm Coast High School who just won the state championship in shot put, “but for me it’s just a chance to to let kids know how great they can be.”
It’s the sort of outlook–the sort of coaching and teaching–that’s made Halliday one of FPC’s most successful, if not its most successful coach over the years, with five track regional championships, the latest in 2023 (and surely more to come) and state championships in 2007 and 2009, and getting inducted in the Florida Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2015
It’s also what’s led him to be short-listed, for the second time in his career, for this year’s National Coach of the Year in Track and Field award by the National High School Athletic Coaches Association. He’s one of eight finalists. He was nominated by the Florida Athletic Coaches Association, an organization he previously chaired for seven years. He’ll be heading to Bismarck, N.D., for the June 26 banquet where the winner will be announced.
“I don’t think I don’t think I’m going to win this time,” Halliday said. “There’s a guy that I know from Minnesota that’s kind of a mentor, good, longtime friend. He just retired. So I would be very surprised if he didn’t win it.” He was referring to Scott Christensen of Stillwater High School. “It’s always nice to be acknowledged for what you’ve done. But it’s so much more than just me. The kids, the coaches.” (He also credits his family–daughters Darien and PJ “but especially my wife Kim who has made me a better person and stood by my side these last 30 years.” Kim Halliday is Flagler County schools’ director of Exceptional Student Education.)
He is briefly overcome when told that the mother of Alex Giorgianni, one of his assistant coaches and a history teacher at FPC, credits him for redirecting and centering her son’s life. “Now I have three people that I coached that are coaching and teaching with me, which is just very special,” he said, referring also to Hayden Ore, whose wife Cianna teaches at Indian Trails Middle.
“Coach Dave Halliday has been the heart and soul of Flagler Palm Coast High School’s track and field program for the past 20 years,” Giorgianni said. “His passion for the sport and dedication to his athletes are truly inspiring. First getting to run for him, and now coaching alongside him, I’ve seen firsthand how he connects with students and brings out the best in them. He’s not just a coach; he’s a mentor and a friend. He truly is Hall of Fame.”
Halliday’s coaching philosophy is grounded in a blend of realism and excellence without brawn, though sometimes his student athletes’ own intensity outruns the ethic he’s trying to instill in them. He’s been surrounded by super-smart kids for much of his career, who he says take their performance on the field so seriously that “sometimes they crumble.”
“I try to tell them: hey, we’re not curing cancer. There’s not a nuclear war coming if you run bad today,” he says. “Nobody’s in the hospital. These are like small quizzes. These are tests for something that you’ve practiced for months and months and months. Go do what you do best and enjoy yourself. And whatever happens, happens. If you win, you win. If you’re second, you’re second. If you’re fifth, you’re fifth. Give your best and walk away knowing you’ve given your best. If you didn’t give your best, then let’s learn from that and see what we can do better the next time.”
It all starts with showing up, then hard work, then commitment. It pays off. Notably, nowhere does Halliday mention innate talent or some mysterious intangible. It’s about the work. That philosophy may have something to do with the 51 year old’s own personal evolution.
He’s as native as they come: He was born at Halifax hospital, the son of Ohio parents who’d moved to Florida a few years before he was born. His road to Flagler Palm Coast High School was a circuit of Florida: He graduated Seabreeze High School at 17 and the University of Florida at 21, when he started teaching and coaching at Atlantic High School–the first year the school opened–where he taught two years. He described himself as a “pup” at the time.
He coached track and field from the start. His mother claims he’d written an essay in high school pledging to teach social studies and coach track and field. “I don’t remember that business,” he said. He thought he was going to be an administrator for a pro team, “something fast and famous like that.”
A summer internship during his senior year in high school with a man called Jimmy Carnes, the former track coach at UF who was running the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, changed everything. (Carnes who would have coached the American track team in Moscow in 1980 had the United States not boycotted that Olympiad over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).
Carnes was one of those rare characters, a sort of catalyst to one’s life one can, with luck, chance to meet. “He’s just one of those guys. He was always an ideas guy,” Halliday said of Carnes, who kept bugging Halliday to get into coaching and teaching. Halliday likes to recall how he and Carnes, a millionaire businessman on the side, every Friday would go to Checkers to take advantage of Checkers’s buy-one-get-one-free deal, a story of frugality that stuck with him.
Carnes was a good teacher and a good coach. He’d written a book on coaching–Halliday still has his signed copy–and the experience with him changed Halliday’s life trajectory the way Halliday would end up changing the trajectory of some of his own student-athletes’ lives.
After Atlantic High School he taught in Putnam County two years, four years in Lake City in Columbia County, where he coached a team to his first state championship in track and state runner-up in cross-country, then two years in Tallahassee, where he got his master’s in sports management while his wife Kim got her doctorate.
He’s always taught humanities rather than science–history, civics–and for the last eight years, he’s been the graduation coach at FPC, working with the guidance department, the deans and the administration.
“I’m kind of like the Statue of Liberty. I’ll take your poor, your troubled, your huddled masses and all that sort of good stuff,” he says. “We know kids come from diverse backgrounds and lots of life and problems happen. At the end of the day or in the middle of high school I try to help make sure that they see it all the way through.”
