Long-time track coach McGimpsey retires from Freedom

After spending most of the last half-century involved in some capacity with the sport of track and field, Robert McGimpsey retired as a teacher and coach at Freedom High School following the 2026 spring semester.

McGimpsey, 68, had served as the Patriots boys head coach in cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track for the last decade-plus. The Freedom running programs held a celebration of McGimpsey’s career in early July on campus.

“(Coach) McGimpsey was a staple of all of Freedom High School’s running programs,” FHS girls track and XC head coach Samantha Martin said. Martin is also an FHS alum and former runner.

“Coach McGimpsey coached state champions in all three sports,” Martin added, “but more importantly, he displayed for years what it means to run with heart and grit.”

McGimpsey said he was touched by the tribute.

“What I didn’t realize until Samantha and all the other ones started saying congratulations, thank you for coaching, and all this stuff, was how many people appreciated it,” McGimpsey said. “Because to me, when you find something that you truly love, you’re not working. And I just wanted kids to have the opportunities that I did back in the day.”

McGimpsey is a Burke County native who attended Oak Hill School until his 10th-grade year, after which Freedom opened.

He then attended FHS as a junior and senior, participating in track and field on the school’s first two boys-only teams, specializing in the triple jump event, before graduating in 1975.

“I was gonna run at Oak Hill when I was a sophomore, but I broke my foot playing basketball,” McGimpsey said. “I wasn’t the fastest guy, and we had three long jumpers (at Freedom) who I couldn’t touch. I was in 11th grade and weighed about 130 pounds. So, I had seen the triple jump on TV at the ’72 U.S. Olympic trials, read about it some, it was still a fairly new high school event at that time. I tried it and enjoyed it, just making sure I didn’t fall down at first.

“I ended up getting OK at it and digging my own jump pit. My dad had a big pile of sawdust in the yard, and I asked him if I could put some boards down in the yard and practice jumping in it. So, I dug up the ground and put long jump and triple jump boards down and practiced up there, measured everything out with a tape measure.”

McGimpsey then entered the workforce after graduating from FHS but served as a volunteer assistant coach at both Oak Hill Junior High and later at Freedom in the 1970s and into the 1980s.

“My sister was there (at Oak Hill), and I got off work and my dad told me to go pick her up from track practice,” McGimpsey recalls. “I get there, and there’s about 70 boys and girls and one coach, Garry Dillingham. I knew Garry, and after going over there a few days, I asked him if he wanted some help with the jumpers and hurdlers. I’m 19 or 20 years old. He said, ‘Sure,’ and so I got to work.”

McGimpsey eventually went to college to earn his four-year degree from Western Carolina University, serving as an assistant track coach with the Catamounts while also attending classes full-time in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

He briefly taught and got his first gig as a head coach, doing so in all three running sports at Asheville High in the mid-’90s, leading the Cougars boys team to qualifying for the 4A and 3A state cross country meets.

He then left the education field but was an assistant track coach at East Burke High during part of that time before returning to teaching in 2003 at Liberty Middle, serving as track head coach there, then teaching at the alternative school (which moved around various locations during that span, eventually landing at Hallyburton in Drexel) before returning to Freedom.

He was lured away to Patton for a few years in the late 2000s and early 2010s to serve as an assistant coach in track and football there before spending the last dozen years at his alma mater.

In addition to coaching track at various schools, McGimpsey has worn plenty of other hats in the sport.

He founded the Dynamic Speed Kinetix youth summer track squad in the early 2010s to coach local youths in the offseason after having coached AAU track for about three decades for several other organizations prior to that.

Though he no longer coaches the sport in the summer, McGimpsey said he wants to get back as early as 2027, admitting, “I really miss it.”

McGimpsey has also coached and helped run events with the Burke County Recreation Department’s youth track program for the last three years each spring. He also participates in the men’s shot put event at Lenoir-Rhyne University’s annual Summer Track Series meets.

“That’s me trying to compete and in old age trying to stay active,” McGimpsey said. “It’s just fun. It’s a fun sport. It’s like playing golf, as you age you may not play as good as you used to, but you still play because you love it.

“With the shot, another advantage of learning it is you can translate that into teaching kids to do it too.”

McGimpsey often wrote stories from meets to send to local media outlets in order for his athletes to receive the recognition he felt they deserved. He is also a local track historian, personally compiling the complete list of Burke County boys and girls indoor and outdoor individual event records.

“That’s what track and field is, the records and stuff,” he said. “They’ve kept the Olympic records, they keep World Championship records, they do it all over the world.

“A lot of it, I was there when the kids did it, whether it was at Freedom or East Burke. It’s just part of being a track coach, you write stuff down.”

McGimpsey said seeing an athlete do something they didn’t think was possible was the driving force that kept him coaching the sport for all of these years.

“You first go into it thinking, ‘This is what I am going to do,’” he said. “And then pretty quickly you realize it’s about what I can get the kids to believe they can do. Because most kids don’t realize how good they can be.

“If you can paint them a picture of what you see their full potential being, get them to realize they’re just starting out and it’s going to take some work to get there, and then watch them realize that dream for themselves and achieve those things, that’s why you coach right there.”