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T-M’s Henry in a rush to get there in a hurry

Jim Noelker Trootwood High School runner, William Henry, picks-up his stuff after coming in second at the 400 relay Saturday at Welcome Stadium.

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By Tom Archdeacon, Staff writer Updated 12:35 AM Sunday, May 3, 2009

Will Henry always has been in a rush to get somewhere.

“He wasn’t supposed to be born until June, but in January already I went into premature labor while I was at work,” Lynette Henry was saying of her son. “I didn’t realize what was happening until they got me into the hospital and told me that I’d lost my mucus plug. I had dilated and pretty much he was on the way out. He was coming.

“They were afraid I was going to lose him. Right away, I was put on bed rest at home — a tilted bed — and given a lot of medication while they tried to keep him off my cervix. And the whole month of April, I was hospitalized again until they finally took him with a C-section on May 5. He weighed 5 pounds, 9 ounces, but the (umbilical) cord was wrapped around his neck four times when he was born.

“Considering all that, we know we are very blessed.”

Turns out, Lynette and her husband William still are. Their only child — who will be 17 in a couple of days — is healthy and gifted and, most of all, he’s still in a huge rush to get places.

The quiet, well-grounded Trotwood Madison High School track star is already considered one of the best quarter-milers ever to come out of the Miami Valley. And he’s only a junior.

“I’d say he’s one of the top seven or eight,” Rams’ track coach Randy Waggoner was saying during the Don Mitchell Roosevelt Memorial Track Meet, Saturday, May 2, at Welcome Stadium.

Waggoner should know. He’s been a high school track coach for 41 years, a head coach for many of them at Dunbar High, where in the early 1980s he mentored Benny Hollis and Laron Brown, both state champions in the 400. Then came Chris Nelloms, who won the state crown in the 400 four straight years — from 1987 through 1990 — was the 1990 national high school track athlete of the year, then won four NCAA titles at Ohio State and was named the Buckeyes Athlete of the Year.

“Nelloms is in a category by himself,” Waggoner said, “but I’d put Will right in there with the others — Hollis and Brown, Earl Richardson (Dunbar), Bedford Clay (Patterson) Andrew Pierce (Yellow Springs) and Brandon Saine (Piqua).”

This track season, Henry has the 10th best time in the nation in the 400, running 47.38 seconds at the Volunteer Classic in Tennessee two weeks ago. That puts him 1.36 seconds behind the nation’s best time — 46.02 by Quincy McDuffie, an Edgewater, Fla., senior.

Friday night at the rain-soaked Roosevelt, Henry anchored Trotwood’s winning 800-meter relay team. He convincingly won the 400 Saturday afternoon, running 48-flat into a strong headwind.

With a bit of a problem out of the blocks and on the turn, he finished third in the 200 at 22.66 seconds as Northmont’s Mark Mays capped a marquee day, winning the 200 to go with his 100-meter victory.

To close the meet, Henry anchored the 1,600-meter relay team that had the fastest time in Ohio this season. Saturday, though, the Rams were edged out by Glenville, which had a huge advantage before Henry ever got the baton.

Although he had erased a 40-yard deficit to the Tarblooders at the Akron Indoor Championships in late March — the stunning feat is a YouTube hit titled “The Come Back!!” — he couldn’t do it this time.

While his effort did help Trotwood win the Roosevelt team title, Henry was momentarily down after the final relay and finished his leg with a solitary walk to the far side of the track at Welcome.

“It wasn’t our best day,” he said a few minutes later. “But everybody came out of it healthy, and we did have some good moments, so you can’t get too down. After today, we all know there’s still some work to do.”

And Waggoner knows Henry will do it:

“The thing Will has going for him, he’s the hardest working kid I’ve ever had in all my years of coaching. This kid does everything I ask him to do ... and more.”

It’s the same in the classroom, where he had a 3.5 grade-point average last quarter.

“Since he was little, his school work has always come first,” Lynette said. “The school has one set of standards — I think it’s a 1.83 grade-point average to be eligible — but we have our own requirements. In our minds, he’s capable of getting the 3.5s and 3.8s he’s been bringing home.”

When you couple Henry’s speed with his studies, you see why he’s drawing recruiting interest from some of the nation’s best track programs.

“Tennessee wants him in the worst way,” Waggoner said. “We ran there two weeks ago and their coaches were all over me. I couldn’t turn around without them wanting to talk about him.”

Henry said he’s narrowed his list of prospective schools to five or six, including Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Louisville and Baylor.

“For everything he put us through back when he was being born, it’s just the opposite now,” Lynette said. “He doesn’t give us any problems. He does the things he’s supposed to do. ...”

William was packing up his video camera in the Welcome Stadium stands when he heard that and he started to chuckle:

“Well, not quite. He doesn’t take out the trash.”

That got Lynette laughing and she chimed in: “Or clean his room. He could do a lot better with that.”

Like their son had said just a few minutes earlier down there on the track:

“There’s still some work to do.”

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