BROCKTON — Cliff Canavan abandoned his cross country career as a senior in high school. The three-year runner, instead, worked three part-time jobs at 18 years old to help his parents foot the mortgage and car payments.
Canavan picked up shifts at RadioShack, delivered pizza and worked at the Brockton Dialysis Center. The savings covered three of four lingering car payments, but not quite enough to avert repossession of the family Ford Ranger on his 18th birthday. In hindsight, he said, “I always regretted not being able to finish (cross country).”
But when the 50-year-old Canavan pivots around his office nowadays, he sees a time capsule-like collage of framed photos showcasing former Brockton runners with handwritten send-off letters in the margins of nearly every one. He jokes that he’s running out of real estate on the wall.
The 20 years Canavan spent as a coach within the Brockton High cross country program “scratched that itch,” he said, of not punctuating his own high school career the way he wanted. Canavan, the head coach of the girls’ team for 18 years, announced his retirement from coaching at the beginning of the season. Now, he’s just days away from the final farewell.
“It’s not about how many championships you have. It’s not about whether you win every race,” Canavan said. “I wanted to make sure the girls have developed into better people from the beginning of the season to the end.”
In his tenure, the Boxers won 15 league titles as a team with 13 individual league champs, 87 league All-Stars and over 40 Enterprise All-Scholastics at the forefront. Canavan, a 1991 Brockton High alum, departs the program tied with Bill Jennings as the track/cross country program’s second-longest tenured coach, behind Harry Allen.
Canavan is stepping away to pursue a job in school administration. A math and computer science teacher at Brockton High for 22 years, seven of those were spent as an assistant for the spring track team and two as head coach for the winter track team.
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His replacement hasn’t been officially named yet, but Canavan’s vote goes to multilingual 23-year-old assistant coach Angela Girodier (she also speaks Haitian Creole), one of his former runners and current Brockton High biotechnology and anatomy teacher. She spent five years as a volunteer assistant while commuting to college classes at Emmanuel College.
“Working with him, I not only get to see the same kind character, all the respect and the same things I’ve seen with him as an athlete, but now I see how much effort he puts in to be a coach for his athletes. How much he cares, how much he’s willing to take away from his schedule to be there,” Girodier said. “That’s something I’ve admired, and something I respect every single day.”
Girodier, a 2018 Brockton High grad, ran cross country all four years of high school. Her mother suffered a stroke late in Girodier’s middle school days and her father worked multiple jobs. Often in a transportation crunch, Canavan would drive Girodier, and a few teammates, home from practice her freshman and sophomore years. It was a routine later outlawed by the MIAA her senior year.
Girodier opted against taking the BAT (Brockton Area Transit) bus, and she was too young to have a driver’s license.
“Having him there for me, I remember going home and saying, ‘Canavan is like my second father.’ There were moments beyond just being an athlete,” Girodier said. “I was moving and my dad needed help with the fridge, (Canavan) was there to help. Always there whenever you need him. That goes beyond being a coach. Like, that’s literally family.”
“I never had an issue doing that because I knew that she was worth it,” Canavan said. “She was a great kid who was dealt a tough spot with life. If I could make that better, and ease that, by helping her feel a sense of family and community here, I’ve done my job. … Athletes like Angela are why I love what I do because I can have a positive impact on their lives in ways that go well beyond just the running.”
During Girodier’s career, Canavan would drive the nearby streets to track the runners on their routes past the Brockton V.A.
He was stocked with supplies such as runners’ prescription inhalers, and, like he would carry around at meets, a camera so each runner received a stack of printed-out action shots at the end of every season. Years removed, Girodier still knows where her collection is. Canavan is still working on finding additional room in his office to display his.
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“When someone thinks back on their top five memories from high school, I want at least two or three of those to be from the time they spent on the cross country team,” Canavan said. “And, in most cases, not only is that true, but the other two times they think about are with people they met because of cross country. I refer to it as my cross country family.”
A coach best known for wearing his notorious tan safari-like hat to some, Caravan is a mainstay of lessons to remember for others. Girodier, especially.
She cited the most impactful one she picked up: “Never doubt someone’s potential just because they’re not the best athlete when they start.”
“He showed me that every athlete matters,” she said. “No matter how you come running or what your background is, everyone is doing this for one reason. We all want to be here for each other. No matter how fast or slow you are, you deserve the same attention.”
